I received this book from a
a blogging friend of mine with instructions to pass it on to a fellow teacher when done with it.
*Glary face* By the way, blogging friend of mine... how come you don't do the edu carnivals anymore? That was my favorite feature of your blog. It really helped me (from the book) "search the internet more effectively." Let’s go Clix. Get on the ball. : )
[Book: Ten Cheap Lessons] is a great, quick read for teachers. It's by a teacher, for teachers. The best/ well one good feature of the book is that it's used under Creative Commons instead of Copyright which means anybody can steal this stuff as long as they give DeRosa credit.
DeRosa,
who keeps his own blog - teach forever wrote this because after teaching Math and Social Studies he was tired of SS having all the fun activities and math getting all the crappy, boring, often pointless worksheets. How could we transfer the plethora of great SS stuff into a Math setting? (At least, that's how I'm interpreting the introduction...)
Being a Social Studies teacher myself, I already have a ton of kinesthetic, hands on, engaging activities for kids... plus a lot of boring lecture as well... So why would I/did I read this book? Everything in here can be easily adapted from the sample Math layout he gives to whatever content area you teach.
Granted, a lot of the ideas in here are ideas I already use – and many of you probably do too. But many of them have extra thoughts and ideas for tweaking – and that is the crux of what teachers do: invent and tweak.
Take “Idea #1 The Mini-Poster,” for instance. If you walk through most middle school hallways there’s a chance you’ll come across some version of these somewhere. But showing how these could be adapted to a Math environment was definitely insightful and made me think of other ways to be cross-curricular in general.
I tweaked his idea for “Using a Word Wall in the Secondary Classroom” to fit my own thoughts. I’m not using a word wall for my words. Instead I borrowed the 3 vocabulary books that our LA teacher uses to make a word wall every week on my white board with the Language Arts words. By being more attune to the words he is giving in his class I can use them in mine with little or no extra effort, and of course the more often students see the words and hear them, the more readily they’ll become part of their every day speech.
I liked the newspaper ideas and the “finding jobs in the real world” activity. I’ve been using songs and music in my class since I started teaching, but he gave me some more points to ponder here as well.
Look, most all teachers are strapped (as in for cash... not as in packing heat) but we’re all (at least all the good ones) working with what we have. DeRossa gives some good ideas on how to accomplish this without trying to con you out of your money or making you sift through piles of meaningless worksheets and crap. In the words of the illustrious Tupac Shakur the book is, “real.”
