Post by thrasyllu on Jun 3, 2011 2:45:12 GMT
My wife left me and our kids last summer. I’ll not discomfort anyone with all the personal details surrounding that, but let it be understood that I unexpectedly found myself as the primary caregiver and only breadwinner for two kids under the age of 3. I’m a middle school math teacher by profession, and if anyone else here has ever tried to teach 12 year olds to add fractions with different denominators, I’m fairly certain they’d be willing to back up the assertion that it’s neither the easiest nor the least stressful of jobs. Anyway, I pretty quickly reached a balance where every free second I had after work was spent taking care of my children, and once the children were asleep I would spend a couple of hours each night planning lessons and trying to figure out ways to inspire my students to do their best at math.
One day in early October I knew I was going to be absent and I was working on preparing a lesson for the substitute to “teach”. Those quotation marks are unfortunately necessary, since I had not been able to get one of the more reliable subs and I had long since learned that that often meant I would end up with not much more than a babysitter who would just stare at the students from behind my desk (hopefully not spilling their coffee on my papers). I was done with most of my lessons, but I needed something for the gifted students to work on for a few minutes in case they finished early.
On a whim, I printed out the Zakhan’s Riddle from book 7 (the sons and daughters one) including all of the surrounding flavor text. When I was back in school the next day the students immediately demanded to know what would happen after they got the right answer. I used my screen projector, navigated to Project Aon, and spent just a couple of minutes showing them the section they had read and solved, and then showing them what happened after getting the answer correct. They were entranced.
I gave out Project Aon’s web address, and thereafter about once a week I would give the kids a new Lone Wolf riddle (Count Conundrum from book 8, the gambling farmers from book 9, that multiply by ½ one from book 13, etc.) The kids kept pestering me to see more Lone Wolf, and I kept pointing them to the website, saying they could easily play and read all they wanted for free.
Now, I’m a pretty popular teacher, and on mornings before school when I wasn’t on duty monitoring students or tutoring kids, my room would typically be packed full of kids just hanging out while I got ready for the day. A bunch of the kids starting asking me why we couldn’t just play Lone Wolf in my room in the morning. I responded with the stock line about how school rules don’t permit me to do anything like that without approval in triplicate from the principals (which is true). That got me thinking, however: kids who would almost vomit when I gave them simple, two step algebra problems had hung on my every word when I had demonstrated how to use algebra to solve the Zakhan’s riddle. I sat down, and wrote an I-don’t-know-how-many-pages-long proposal to the principal to allow me to start up a Lone Wolf club, including specific examples of how reading/playing the Lone Wolf books addressed and taught various math objectives. (For bonus points, you can review Texas educational law yourself at ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter111/ch111b.html and see how many of these you can teach with Lone Wolf!)
After a lot of badgering on my part, the principal in charge of curriculum approved the before school club. I had to cart in an old computer of mine since the district IT department never responded to my technology request to be allowed to use the school’s computer, but I loaded Seventh Sense and we started having weekly Lone Wolf sessions. I figured I’d get about a dozen kids each time… the nerdy boys, right? (and I can say that as a 30 year old nerdy boy myself) As it turned out, I usually had between 30 and 40 (I didn’t even have that many chairs!), and slightly more than half of them were girls. The gender balance caused an interesting dynamic, never more so than when they voted on which disciplines to choose: a strong female vote ensured we took “the one that lets us talk to animals” rather than “the one that makes us really good with weapons” - I freely admit I kind of rubbed that in the boys’ faces when they made it through Tarnalin alive.
Our rules were simple: I projected the Seventh Sense interface up on the wall (probably about 6 ft x 4.5 ft) and narrated. I had the mouse and keyboard, but I would make no decisions and offer no input. When the time came to make a decision, I would let the students talk it out, occasionally clarifying something if they didn’t understand. When they were done discussing, I would call on a random student, and that person got to make the decision about what we did next. No one was allowed to bash the decisions made by another, no matter what happened (they were actually really good sports about it and didn’t need to be reminded too often). I let them play with a “19/29” style uber-kai, which probably contributed to the fact that we only died twice over the course of the year – once trying to help Rhygar and his men against the Helghasts in book 2, and later by not choosing to look over the balcony at the end of book 4. A lot of the kids were going home and playing through the books on their own (I had to remind them not to give stuff away to those who hadn’t), but many more liked the communal style playing and agreed to not read ahead on their own. By the end of the year we had made it about halfway through book 6 (that’s playing once a week for about 30 minutes at a stretch – and remember this is the books being read aloud, and then options discussed).
I share this story with everyone for two reasons: first, it was incredibly gratifying for me to see all these kids enraptured with something that I was completely into when I was their age. The second reason is a bit more selfish and personal. I was a long time coming to grips with the change in my family situation, and although my children are and always will be the greatest joys of my life, the three of us alone would also remind me of the complete family that I had lost. As I’ve said, my life now consists pretty much of my children and my work – I can’t afford sitters for the kids and my family and friends mostly live in another city. For the past school year, that small, 30 minute segment of basically DMing a Lone Wolf campaign each week was the only joy I had that wasn’t also tied up in the pain I felt. I’m pretty certain Joe Dever didn’t have anything remotely like that in mind when he wrote the books, but I’m forever indebted to him and to Project Aon for giving it to me.
One day in early October I knew I was going to be absent and I was working on preparing a lesson for the substitute to “teach”. Those quotation marks are unfortunately necessary, since I had not been able to get one of the more reliable subs and I had long since learned that that often meant I would end up with not much more than a babysitter who would just stare at the students from behind my desk (hopefully not spilling their coffee on my papers). I was done with most of my lessons, but I needed something for the gifted students to work on for a few minutes in case they finished early.
On a whim, I printed out the Zakhan’s Riddle from book 7 (the sons and daughters one) including all of the surrounding flavor text. When I was back in school the next day the students immediately demanded to know what would happen after they got the right answer. I used my screen projector, navigated to Project Aon, and spent just a couple of minutes showing them the section they had read and solved, and then showing them what happened after getting the answer correct. They were entranced.
I gave out Project Aon’s web address, and thereafter about once a week I would give the kids a new Lone Wolf riddle (Count Conundrum from book 8, the gambling farmers from book 9, that multiply by ½ one from book 13, etc.) The kids kept pestering me to see more Lone Wolf, and I kept pointing them to the website, saying they could easily play and read all they wanted for free.
Now, I’m a pretty popular teacher, and on mornings before school when I wasn’t on duty monitoring students or tutoring kids, my room would typically be packed full of kids just hanging out while I got ready for the day. A bunch of the kids starting asking me why we couldn’t just play Lone Wolf in my room in the morning. I responded with the stock line about how school rules don’t permit me to do anything like that without approval in triplicate from the principals (which is true). That got me thinking, however: kids who would almost vomit when I gave them simple, two step algebra problems had hung on my every word when I had demonstrated how to use algebra to solve the Zakhan’s riddle. I sat down, and wrote an I-don’t-know-how-many-pages-long proposal to the principal to allow me to start up a Lone Wolf club, including specific examples of how reading/playing the Lone Wolf books addressed and taught various math objectives. (For bonus points, you can review Texas educational law yourself at ritter.tea.state.tx.us/rules/tac/chapter111/ch111b.html and see how many of these you can teach with Lone Wolf!)
After a lot of badgering on my part, the principal in charge of curriculum approved the before school club. I had to cart in an old computer of mine since the district IT department never responded to my technology request to be allowed to use the school’s computer, but I loaded Seventh Sense and we started having weekly Lone Wolf sessions. I figured I’d get about a dozen kids each time… the nerdy boys, right? (and I can say that as a 30 year old nerdy boy myself) As it turned out, I usually had between 30 and 40 (I didn’t even have that many chairs!), and slightly more than half of them were girls. The gender balance caused an interesting dynamic, never more so than when they voted on which disciplines to choose: a strong female vote ensured we took “the one that lets us talk to animals” rather than “the one that makes us really good with weapons” - I freely admit I kind of rubbed that in the boys’ faces when they made it through Tarnalin alive.
Our rules were simple: I projected the Seventh Sense interface up on the wall (probably about 6 ft x 4.5 ft) and narrated. I had the mouse and keyboard, but I would make no decisions and offer no input. When the time came to make a decision, I would let the students talk it out, occasionally clarifying something if they didn’t understand. When they were done discussing, I would call on a random student, and that person got to make the decision about what we did next. No one was allowed to bash the decisions made by another, no matter what happened (they were actually really good sports about it and didn’t need to be reminded too often). I let them play with a “19/29” style uber-kai, which probably contributed to the fact that we only died twice over the course of the year – once trying to help Rhygar and his men against the Helghasts in book 2, and later by not choosing to look over the balcony at the end of book 4. A lot of the kids were going home and playing through the books on their own (I had to remind them not to give stuff away to those who hadn’t), but many more liked the communal style playing and agreed to not read ahead on their own. By the end of the year we had made it about halfway through book 6 (that’s playing once a week for about 30 minutes at a stretch – and remember this is the books being read aloud, and then options discussed).
I share this story with everyone for two reasons: first, it was incredibly gratifying for me to see all these kids enraptured with something that I was completely into when I was their age. The second reason is a bit more selfish and personal. I was a long time coming to grips with the change in my family situation, and although my children are and always will be the greatest joys of my life, the three of us alone would also remind me of the complete family that I had lost. As I’ve said, my life now consists pretty much of my children and my work – I can’t afford sitters for the kids and my family and friends mostly live in another city. For the past school year, that small, 30 minute segment of basically DMing a Lone Wolf campaign each week was the only joy I had that wasn’t also tied up in the pain I felt. I’m pretty certain Joe Dever didn’t have anything remotely like that in mind when he wrote the books, but I’m forever indebted to him and to Project Aon for giving it to me.