Building & Leveraging Relationships with Students

Helping Mr. Warren putting on this Hip Hop History event in the lunch room illustrated how powerful music can be. In my experience, music and poetry are media in which students feel the most comfortable expressing themselves and sharing ideas. Allowing them to do so makes them feel important - and they are.

From journal entry dated 11/03/19:

"Friday kicked off National Hip-Hop History Month and Mr. Warren held a Hip-Hop History activity in the lunchroom where he played older music and had students sing, dance and rap to the music as a celebration of student voice and to the musical genre. Needless to say everyone had a good time and it was good to see students engaged and building a rapport with other people that they wouldn’t regularly talk to. This helped the school climate very much."

Students took their extra energy and put it into writing and performing their songs and raps. A very rambunctious lunch room was transformed into a concert hall with  very engaged students that were cheering on their peers.

Drew, from the group called Drew Nugent & The Midnight Society came to Palumbo to do a lesson on 1920s music. He brought with him a "flapper" that taught students how to do the Charleston as well as the fashion of the "Roaring 20s."

From journal entry dated 11/10/19:

"Another event I am putting together is a 1920s cross-curricular experience. I know a band leader whose band plays 1920s music at special events throughout the tri-state area. The plan is to have social studies teachers teaching the 1920s in American history class, English teachers teaching The Great Gatsby, music classes and photography classes bring their students in for this cross-curricular lesson about how the music, dance, and fashion of the 1920s is a depiction of how society shifted in post-World War I America."

Music students enjoyed taking turns playing with Drew and connecting the music, dance, and fashion of the time with the shifts in culture from the Victorian Era.

A student showed me this picture on their phone and I asked them to email it to me to make a point. I shared it with the math department head.

We decided that using the math to help students make decisions about how much in student loans they think they could afford was a good way to make math relevant.

When students cannot answer the question, "do you know why are you doing this in class?" a different approach is needed.

Numbers are an abstract idea. Students may need help making the math more concrete.

Creating a fluency in translation is crucial in understanding mathematical concepts AND being able to explain them.

When students are more connected with the content, they are more confident in sharing their thoughts through class discussions.