Spiro’s Sight

On the Prairie Path in Wheaton and Unincorporated DuPage County.

Perhaps the text from this screenshot is difficult to make out. However, that's not really the point. What's remarkable about this blog excerpt is that it was created by one of our students from last year, who is currently a senior. What's even more striking about it is that the person commenting on the post is one of our students from a previous year, who didn't share a classroom with the author, and is currently a college student, a freshman at Iowa State!

Hopefully this will serve as an example of what Mr. O'Connor expressed during the first week of school: we as your teachers want to become "useless" in the best possible sense. Long after you leave our class, we hope you will be "continuing the conversation."

Although I try to re-examine what I teach every year, I always begin the school year in the same way in my history courses. To briefly summarize, I fake my own death (with a wink and a nod), in order to introduce the students to the discipline of history. The students are asked to write a biography of their "dead" teacher, using personal artifacts, interviews, and other sources. As our district focuses specifically on inquiry this year, I am reminded of Ron Ritchhart's Intellectual Character, and his chapter entitled, "First Days, First Steps: Initiating a Culture of Thinking". Here he asks these critical questions:

"What messages [do] teachers convey when they plunge students right in to a big subject matter issue?" (62)

How do the "first days of school...establish norms of interaction between students and teachers?" (69-70)

Below is a VoiceThread (narrated presentation) describing the specifics of the activity:

How do you begin the school year with your students? To see another perspective, check out this radio piece by English teacher John S. O'Connor.

Written by John O'Connor — English Teacher, New Trier High School.
John O'Connor reflects on what teachers face on the first day of school. O’Connor is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom (National Council of Teachers of English, 2004). Originally aired on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

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