* Please note the change in format between last week’s journal and this week’s. I’m going to try to make more frequent entries, and instead of logging my total number of hours in each entry, I will log how much time I spent during the particular day.

 

Monday, April 19 (5:23 hours logged today)

This afternoon, I finished the bulk of the materials I need for Friday’s session with the Minnesota Young Democrats. This includes my Google Slides presentation (which I have embedded at the bottom of today’s entry) and an adapted-for-Jamboard version of the Cambridge activity that I wrote about in my second Critical Reflection. I am especially excited for the hands-on gerrymandering activity—here is what it looks like:

When I tested out the Cambridge activity, I did so with pencil and paper. At some points, the lines would get so confusing and messy that I would just print out another sheet and start over. But with the Pen, Paint, and Eraser tools in Jamboard, it will hopefully be much easier for students to approach this exercise.

The activity also benefits greatly from collaboration (which Jamboard excels at facilitating), which I know from having tested it with my father. It’s a pretty difficult task to try to draw the most winding and horrifically unbalanced districts as possible, so having an extra pair of eyes (or more) can really make a difference.

Overall, I am very excited about Friday’s session. My next steps are to keep reviewing the presentation to make sure that it flows well and effectively balances my speaking portions with the activity.

 

Tuesday, April 20 (0:50 hours logged today)

I feel like today was our first “real” meeting as the Psychology & Education cohort (despite a few of our members being absent). We spent a majority of our time commenting on each other’s Critical Reflections. Taking a closer look at my peers’ thinking processes helped me discover the similarities between our projects. For example, Cole wrote a lot about how he has observed the effects of hands-on teaching (especially with students that struggle with traditional methods) at his internship. This connected with me since I have been very cognizant of the balance between hands-on and traditional methods as I have designed my gerrymandering lesson. I knew it would be boring (for the students and me) if I just spoke on top of some Google Slides for 45 minutes. However, I also acknowledged that the slides (a more traditional method of teaching) could be helpful as long as I balanced them out with other interactive teaching methods, which is what spurred my idea for a hands-on gerrymandering activity. 

I hope to make more of these types of connections in future cohort meetings. As we were leaving, Sergei suggested that we look at some examples of progressive teaching styles employed in Europe and other areas, which I think could bring a fresh perspective to my project and my peers’.

 

Wednesday, April 21 (0:50 hours logged)

Today was a day of exploration. After I finished reviewing my presentation for Friday, I looked into some options for designing a website to house all of my content. I mentioned that I wanted to do this in my very first journal entry, and I think it’s still on the table.

I have no coding skills whatsoever (and neither the time nor the will to acquire them), so I turned to online website builders. The first one I tried was Wix.com, which some of my friends had recommended to me. After answering some questions, Wix provided me with some template options. None of them fit my theme of American politics and voting rights (and few of them were even related to history). Furthermore, as I tried to familiarize myself with the layout and features of Wix, I realized that the UI was just too complicated for my purposes (not to mention laggy as heck on my school-issued laptop). Judging by all the SEO, Google Analytics, and advertisement options, Wix was probably designed primarily with businesses in mind. Learning to use this service and fuss about all the details would ultimately take time away from designing activities and lesson plans, which is really the meat of my project.

Abandoning Wix, I turned to Google Sites instead. It seems to have far fewer capabilities than Wix, but that’s okay for what I am trying to accomplish. It also integrates much easier with other Google products, which will make my workflow much more efficient. So, I chose a template for a class home page and got started! I’m still learning the ropes of Google Sites, so if any of you readers have experience with it, feel free to comment with some advice.

Now that I have the service and template that I want, I just need to develop a plan for how I want to lay everything out on the website. And this brings me back to the general outline that I tried developing last week—I know what units I want to cover (History of Voting, The Electoral College, Gerrymandering, Voter Suppression, and How to Vote), but I don’t know how much content I will have for each. I suppose this will come to me as I keep designing my lessons, but I still need to spend some time doing some big-picture thinking so I can get the website up and running.

After tinkering with the website for a bit, I got to work on something else: an “exit poll” Google Form for students to fill out after Friday’s session. I thought it would be useful to get some anonymous student feedback so that I can improve my teaching performance. It will also serve my documentation well to have some student reactions to my lesson. The questions cover both the students understanding of the content (eg. “rate your previous/current understanding of gerrymandering on a scale of 1-10,” “list 1-3 new things you learned after today’s session,” etc.) and the presentation (eg. “how was the pace of the lesson”). This “exit poll” will hopefully give me a good gauge of my performance.

On tomorrow’s agenda: 

• Meeting with the Young Democrats’ student leaders at 3
• Shifting around the order of some of the gerrymandering slides (as well as any other revisions that might come out of the aforementioned meeting
• More practice/review of the slides – get a better sense of the timing
• Maybe start gathering material for a presentation on voter suppression and the Supreme Court? (Goal for Friday, 4/30)

 

Thursday, April 22 (6:05 hours logged today)

Today was my last day to prepare for Friday’s gerrymandering presentation with the Minnesota students. I spent most of my work in the morning and early afternoon doing dry runs of my presentation with my friend and my mother. This helped give me a better idea of what to say (since I tend to not follow scripts when I present) and of which aspects to cut. Both people gave crucial feedback that helped tighten my presentation from 20 slides to about 15. 

One of my major concerns during these feedback sessions was time management. I wanted to give students enough time for the Jamboard activity (since that is really the meat of the class), which meant that I would need to cut down on some of the background material from earlier in the presentation. However, that background information was essential for students to understand how to do the activity, so I couldn’t cut too much. My friend suggested having students leave their questions until the end, but I thought that would diminish a lot of the possibilities for interaction during the lesson. It would also place a greater emphasis on me talking, which I think would be kind of boring for students.

I ultimately settled on keeping most of my background information. I cut one video and one slide on the 2020 Census projections for congressional seats; all of the information from those slides was either stated or implicit in the Vox video. After making these final edits to the presentation, I set it aside for tomorrow morning.

I spent the rest day planning my lesson for May 7th. The Young Democrats leaders had told me that students wanted to learn about the Supreme Court and voter suppression, so that’s where I started my brainstorming. I know I want to cover the Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder because it is directly connected to many of the allegedly suppressive voting laws passed today. However, I’m not sure how much I want to delve into the history of voter suppression by covering Jim Crow segregation and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Here’s the document where I have compiled all of my resources so far, and this is the sheet where I did all of my brainstorming:

 

Friday, April 23 (1:58 hours logged today)

I won’t lie, I was kind of nervous for today—it was my first lesson with the Minnesota Young Democrats. I felt satisfied with the content I had planned for them, but I was afraid that I would either present it too fast or too slow. As I reflected on yesterday, I had to move fast enough to leave time for the activity, but I also needed to ensure that students could digest the videos in the beginning. I was also concerned that the online format would make students reluctant to participate—something I have encountered too often during LREI@home.

I arrived on time at 10:15 and watched as the Minnesota students slowly trickled in (they don’t have any classes on Friday, so some came in a bit late). I began my presentation by showing the students a picture of a gerrymandered congressional district (not telling them what it was) and asking them to come up with some abstract associations for it. At first, students hesitated to answer, which only contributed to my fears about the online format. However, when I revealed that it was actually a congressional district, I saw some people light up with surprise. Seeing their reactions assuaged some of my anxiety and allowed me to settle into my teaching role a bit more.

I encountered some technical difficulties when I presented my first video (the one from TEDed). Ms. O hosted the meeting on Google Meet, which I had never used before. When I went to share my screen, I could not find the option to share my computer’s audio. I lost some time trying to troubleshoot this issue on the fly, but I was able to send the link to Ms. O to present to the class. I will be sure to better familiarize myself with the layout and features of Google Meet before future meetings.

After the brief technical troubles, the lesson went very smoothly. The Vox video about gerrymandering’s effect on the 2018 midterms went especially well. One of the main subjects of the video was Tom Hofeller, a consultant hired by North Carolina Republicans to draw maps to disadvantage Democrats. Students had some pretty strong reactions to Hofeller’s egregious partisanship—many of them asked “how is this even legal?” 

Both the video and slideshow portions of my presentation went well, but I think the absolute stand-out was the gerrymandering Jamboard. I was afraid that the earlier parts of my presentation would have not explained the subject well enough for the activity to be successful, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Students got to work as soon as I let them into their breakout rooms. I went around to each room to observe their strategies, and it was clear that they recalled the “packing and cracking” techniques I presented earlier. Some students approached the activity with more mathematical precision. One of them from the Democratic redistricting group said, “no no no, we can get more seats if we make 5-3 majorities here and here and pack those Republicans over there.” Here’s what their map looked like by the end:

After each group had finished its map, we all debriefed as a class. Many students reflected on how the activity “felt like a game,” which made it all the more unsettling for them in light of what they had learned about gerrymandering earlier in the session. One student commented that the gamified aspects made it “easy [for them] to ignore the ethics” of gerrymandering since they were too “stressed about not getting enough districts for [their] party.”

A Google Form exit poll that I sent out also reflected the kids’ positivity about the gerrymandering activity. Five out of the roughly 15 students have responded so far, each of them giving them the activity a ten out of ten. Furthermore, I asked students to rate their understanding of gerrymandering on a one-to-ten scale before and after the lesson: the average before the lesson was 4.2, and the average after was 8.8. Here are some other important responses to my survey:

You can read more about my gerrymandering session in my third Critical Reflection. I look forward to talking with the Minnesota students two Fridays from now!

 

Saturday, April 24th (4:04 hours logged today)

Today was a slower day than usual. I spent most of my day catching up on my journal entries from the previous two days. There was a lot to reflect on after yesterday’s lesson, so this task took a while.

I am beginning to wonder how much I am conceivably going to accomplish with this project. It took me close to half a week just to design my gerrymandering lesson for the Minnesota students, and my next one about voter suppression and the Supreme Court may also take just as long. To prepare for the Highland Park lessons, I have essentially sidelined material on the Electoral College, the history of U.S. voting rights, and how to vote (as well as work on my website). Perhaps I am biting off more than I can chew by trying to include all these topics in my course. Regardless, I think they are all important and want to see if I can fit them in somehow. However, I will need to put in more hours and be more efficient with my work (eg. not being as fussy about design as I am now) to make this a reality.

Here’s what’s on my plate for tomorrow and next week:

• Continue outlining the big-picture scope of the course, potentially scaling back the number of lessons per topic to leave more room for a variety of material. I want to set up a meeting with Ann to discuss this further.
• Continue research into the Supreme Court’s impact on voter suppression. Don’t make this process as long as it was last time. Get started on making the presentation sooner rather than later. 
• Pick up my work on the Electoral College (i.e. finish designing the debate activity and preceding lesson), voting rights history, and other topics.
• Make the website functional.

 

Sunday, April 25th (5:25 hours logged today)

This morning, I received a fascinating offer from Ms. O. She said that her local Indivisible group is interested in learning about gerrymandering, what citizens can do about it, and how the For the People Act would affect it. The group will meet on May 17th at 8PM EST.

I am really honored that she would reach out to me with such an offer. It makes me feel even better about how I did during my presentation on Friday. I was initially hesitant to accept because it fell outside the scope of my project. Firstly, I would be advocating some form of action (which I felt would have extended beyond my role as a teacher). Furthermore, the presentation would be for adults, and I felt that my material for kids may not suit them well. 

Despite my reservations, I accepted Ms. O’s offer. My project has already deviated from its initial design in several ways (eg. teaching to high schoolers, focusing on voting rights, doing Zoom sessions), so why not welcome this new change? Incorporating the elements I described in the previous paragraph could introduce a new dimension to my essential question—how does age affect how I communicate with people about voting rights?

I know this does not relate directly to voting rights or even education, but I recall a piece of advice jazz pianist Thelonius Monk gave to working musicians: “Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene.” In English: “Demonstrating your work ethic and adaptability is a better way of getting recognition from your peers than constantly asking to be let on board.” I think this quote applies well to my situation with the Indivisible group—accepting the offer is my way of showing that I’m “on the scene.”