Coupla Things wk10 (10/22/17)

Post date: Oct 21, 2017 8:37:17 PM

Happy Sunday!

Friday's Professional Development Day for us teachers was spent outdoors doing various nature-awareness lessons run by Debby Perry and the Falcon Campus principal. It was thoroughly enjoyable to be outside in the foothills, especially after the great little rain storm of Thursday night. I hope that all of you had a great weekend and that the Fall Festival was a well attended success. My wife and I did stuff to celebrate her birthday on Saturday, including going to San Francisco, Sausalito, and the Marin Headlands.

This coming week and the first two days of next week are a "Week of Wednesdays" (no afternoon core or selectives) to make room for the Fall conferences. This should be a great time for us to strengthen the parent-student-teacher triangle. Parents, there are three students without a spot and I'm assuming that is intentional. Kids, it is my experience that if you take the lead and choose the agenda items, you'll have a better conference than if you stay quiet, resigned, or ambiguous/ambivalent. To make the best use of our 25 minutes, please take a look at this list of possible topics to cover.

Our first overnight field trip will be the CalCoast Waklabout, which is a trip that a group of kids and I designed many years ago for those who stayed behind during the 8th grade Washington DC trip. I've made tweaks and extensions since then and taken the trip about a dozen more times with various homeroom classes. The result is a full schedule with lots of good things to see and do along the coastal route from Santa Cruz to Stinson Beach. I'll give the kids an overview tomorrow or Tuesday and then they'll choose the area that they want to learn about in order to serve as the guide or docent while we're there.

There, look at that... there are REALLY only two things in this week's newsletter -- the first time I've ever lived up to the "coupla things" title. The best part of this one, though, is that it marks the beginning of the student news article contribution. Josh Hall writes below about the ropes course field trip (link to doc)!

Ropes Course

By Josh Hall

Difficult, challenging, thrilling, fun, scary, playground like. How could one field trip be so many things? DCS has had this tradition of going to the Mount Hermon Ropes Course to let the students reach out of their personal bubble and challenge themselves in different ways.

The Sequoia Aerial Adventure has self-guided options which, as their website says, “combine solo and partner balance elements focusing on challenge, fun, and group interaction. Each two hour session gives visitors access to the entire aerial adventure course of 30 elements plus two zip lines”.

DCS uses the ropes course to build a classroom community and push students out of their comfort zones. Students find their own level of challenge and work to overcome fear, inhibition, or whatever else might be getting between a personal goal and the achievement. Students need to work together to support each other, listen to each other, and trust each other. These social skills can be very hard for middle school students, and the ropes course provides a great outdoor experience that allows students to practice these skills while growing in their own personal risk taking.

DCS sends the students to the ropes course because they want the students to get pushed out of their comfort zone and embrace new challenges. In 6th grade, students focus on team building and are exposed to lower risk ropes elements as a way to gently push them out of their comfort zones. The ropes course in 8th grade is meant to build on the skills and experience that 6th graders had, but requires more risk taking as well as trust in their classmates and in oneself. The 8th grade course is more difficult and challenging. DCS brings the 8th graders back to the ropes trip because they want to see how much the students have grown since the last trip, they also bring the students back to see how they will interact with other classmates.

Mr. Heumann’s 8th Grade class recently went to Mount Hermon Ropes Course - Sequoia Aerial Adventure. On this course students could “select their level of challenge on three different heights of aerial trails and over 30 elements, including swinging logs, cargo nets, and cables set 30 to 80 feet in the air!” (www.mounthermonadventrues.com)

When our class arrived, the Herman Ropes instructor, Mike, gave students two rules that they should always follow on the ropes course: Challenge by choice, and positive speech. First, challenge by choice means that you can challenge yourself as much or as little as you want. A good example of this is on the ropes course there were multiple paths that were different levels of challenge, some easy, some intermediate, and some challenging. Secondly, positive speech means pretty much what it sounds like, speak positively. Positive speech also means to encourage other people if they are having a hard time on the course or need some motivation. These rules were used throughout the day that Room 25 was on the ropes course. When someone was having a hard time with getting past an obstacle the people around them were giving them tips of where to place their feet, and they were encouraging them.

At the beginning of our journey our class went on a hike instead of doing lots of community building games. Some students liked doing the hike and others liked doing more community building games. About half of the students would recommend doing more community building at the beginning instead of doing the hike, because it would build the community more and you would not get the chance to get dirty. Yet, others enjoyed the hike and being out in nature. “I had fun while I was getting exercise,” said Adi. “It was also more fun because it was more adventurous.”

Most of the students that went would highly recommend the ropes course because they said they had a very fun time and the ropes course felt like a “playground without the ground,” Andres observed. Students that went on the ropes course said that it does not get old. This is probably because you could do lots of elements and different paths where you could work together or just go solo. On the ropes course there was always more than one path. It’s kind of like life - students get to cho0se their path, and choose what challenges they want to take on.

Personally, I think this ropes course experience brought our class together because we had to trust each other or else we would have a hard time getting through the course. We had to trust each other when someone said to place your foot in some place or use a certain strategy. I would highly recommend that DCS continues this tradition because it is really fun to grow as a class as well as learn to trust each other more.