KARCHER STAFF BLOG

Student's of the week for

March 7 - March 11

Sara Boarini: (Karcher Bucks)

Sara puts forth great enthusiasm into her day often showing kindness to her friends.

Ollie Hoffman: (Applied Academics)

Ollie is an asset to our PE class! She comes ready to participate and gives her best effort and models all 8 character traits we encourage students to practice!

Breanna Grissmeyer: (Onyx)

Breanna displays "The Karcher Way" in everything she does. She shows respect and kindness to everyone she comes in contact with and she shows a great deal of responsibility in regards to her school work by staying caught up, by being organized and by putting her best effort forward.

David Smitz: (Diamond)

David has exhibited "The Karcher Way" through his behavior towards his classmates and respect for his teachers. He has been working hard to improve in the area of work completion and has shown a lot of growth this year.

Katherine Schoop: (Hive)

Katherine's is very loyal and kind within her contributions in advisory. She also displays responsibility in helping her teachers and her peers.

Serra Brehm: (Silver)

Serra's sense of humor and enthusiasm for learning is appreciated by all her teachers!

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Kudos

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Jeri Nettesheim was chosen as the KCB STAFF OF THE WEEK! Congrats Jeri and thank you all for continuing to reinforce our 8 character traits.
Congrats to Rod Stoughton, Ron Pedersen, Nick Buendia, and all the students involved in Orange Crush. A great little documentary was made Orange Crush - Wisconsin Life if you haven't watched this video yet you should as it is a GREAT tribute to what they have been working so hard on. Congrats again and AWESOME job on Thursday at Wilmot High School for the sectional boys basketball game.
Great season for the varsity basketball game and to Steve Berezowitz - tough loss but they played hard!
Wynne Slusar will be leaving us to take on a new position within a different field all together in Beloit. Wynne's last day is this Wednesday so there will be a farewell breakfast in her honor in the staff lounge starting at 6:45 am. An email went out regarding items for breakfast, if you are willing and able to bring an item the more the merrier!

We will all miss you Wynne - you have been a great addition to the Karcher Staff :(
We all wish you well in your new position!

Thank you Mike Jones, Donna Sturdevant and all the volunteer staff that assisted with FNL this past Friday - smaller turn out but still great for our students!
Congrats to Nick Buendia, Colin Galitz, and Sue Pedersen for a great night of Band-O-Rama on Monday night! Very nice performance - pictures are below.

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Reminders

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Student Led Conferences Monday night from 4:00 to 8:00.

Teachers you are free to leave the building once the bell rings and after school duties are taken care of so you have a break between school and conferences.
Student Led portion will be in your room. Please use this Google Slide Show for your initial discussion with parents.
Each advisory should be showing your iMovie showcasing the 8 character traits. How you decided to do that is up to you but everyone should be sharing - some are doing so within their student's portfolios and others are showing the full group at one time.
Once your conferences are done please come to the library for open conferences. Each teacher will have their own table with their name attached to the table.
Other items that will be located in the library:

Freshmen year scheduling questions.
Red folders for pick up - cumulative writing folder
High School Club information

Tech Tuesday focus this week is on Google Drawings.

Molly Ebbers room this Tuesday starting at 2:40.

PLC this week: Literacy Lesson this week with Molly Ebbers, Patti Tenhagen, and Jenny Geyso. The SQIDVPAC focus will be: Sequencing, Summarizing, and Synthesizing.
KCB Lunch Menu - March 18 - students can use their KCBs this Friday during lunch. Matt and I will be in the lunchroom with the menu to assist with the process. Please help remind students!
Forward Exam Updates:

Steve Berezowitz and I have been working on the schedule for the Forward Exam. Testing will take place on April 18- 22 with make-ups being done on April 26th. The modified schedule for April 18, 19, and 20th will be out soon. April 21 and 22 we will not need to modify the schedule as the testing only affects 8th grade and we will utilize the 2nd/3rd hour block of time for the science and social studies exams.
Forward Exams Training Tools
See below the Forward Exam Testing schedule we are going off of to determine the length of time needed to create a schedule.

Student Led Conferences day 2 - March 22nd from 4:00 - 8:00.
Just looking ahead for planning purposes... the PLC on March 23 will be split between:

Content area conversations regarding the infusion of sequencing, summarizing, and synthesizing. Discussing what and when you will be infusing these strategies and what tools will you use within your classroom.
Advisory Team conversation about the next iTime rotation that will start when we return from spring break on April 4th.

8th grade advisory teachers: Please take 2-3 pictures of your advisory students for a slide show we will be creating for 8th grade recognition. Once you have taken your pictures please send them to me via email. Due date: April 8th.
Huddle Week on March 21, 22, and 24th so that students can make sure they are caught up prior to spring break.
National Junior Honors Society awards will be held on March 21st in the BHS auditorium starting at 6:30pm.

See Mike Jones or Stephanie Rummler for details.

March 24 - 8th grade Hive House field trip to Discovery World.
And we can't forget that spring break starts March 25th!!!

Looking WAY ahead:

Special Education Aides - I would like to have a meeting with all of you to go over some innovative scheduling ideas for next school year.

This meeting will be on April 26 (early release day) from 12:00 - 12:30 in the library. Please let Kim know if you are able to attend.
I will supply pizza for lunch.

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Pictures from the week

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Band-O-Rama pictures from their performance this past Monday night. What a great performance it was! Nice job to Nick Buendia, Sue Pedersen, and Colin Galitz AND of course the students!!!

Article of the week:

Four Predictions for Students' Tomorrows

Erik Palmer

To make students' futures better, we need to consider what skills they will need—and teach them.

If we really want to prepare students for life beyond school, we could begin by asking ourselves what pieces of our own education we are using now as adults. That is an edgy question, and many teachers will take offense if anyone suggests that, in spite of their personal, deep love of haiku/Shakespeare/geodes/the Articles of Confederation/cosine, most adults have never needed deep knowledge of any of those to succeed.

The truth is, many highly successful people gain success without remembering large amounts of material that they learned in school. When the Colorado Student Assessment Program was introduced, Bill Owens, the governor at the time, refused to take the test, despite being a proponent of standards and testing.¹ The legislators who did take a version of the test did not do well. This can be read as criticism of the politicians behind big tests, but it is possibly more of a criticism of our curriculums.

All of us would fail most of the tests we took in school. The information we were tested on has not been relevant to our lives and has been forgotten.

Does that mean we've been teaching the wrong things? Is it possible that TheScarlet Letter and the dates of the Hundred Years War are not crucial to life after school? Heresy, right?

What parts of your education have been critical to your adult success? What do you wish you had been taught? Many adults say they wish they were better at public speaking, so let's teach more oral communication. What else? These are tough questions that, answered truthfully, could radically change what we teach.

The relevant, long-lasting lessons from our own education will likely be relevant and long-lasting for our current students. But the world our students graduate into will not look exactly like the world of 2016. We want to prepare students for their futures, which leads us to make predictions. This is a tricky business and not one with which educators have had a lot of success. I remember learning to make computer punch cards because it was the skill of the future. I was also taught BASIC programming because that would be the key to getting jobs. There was a "Golly, kids, look at the new-fangled gadgets!" mentality behind these efforts, which, unfortunately, still exists.

When we are asked to think of the future, our minds go to hovering cars, 4D printers, teleportation, and knowledge chips implanted into the brain. I don't want to make guesses about the likelihood of these technologies coming to fruition. I can't tell you what the classroom of the future will look like or whether there will even be classrooms. I'm not going to bet one way or the other on the maker movement or flipped instruction or coding or anything else. But I will make four bold predictions.

Prediction 1. There will still be an Internet.

It will still be possible to pick up a device, ask a question, and get several million results in less than one second. Although I may not be going out on a limb here, the implications of this prediction are profound. Students will need to be able to make sense of the massive amounts of information they will find. These are just a few of the skills an Internet-literate student needs:

An understanding of what the Internet is. "I found it on the Internet" is not an accurate statement. You found it on a computer connected to the World Wide Web.
Ways to formulate queries. Typing "childhood obesity" into a search engine is not the best way to discover what health problems are associated with being overweight. Students need to know about Boolean searches, adding prefixes such as SITE and FILETYPE, and more. For example, "site:.edu childhood obesity" will yield search results from educational sites only and eliminate the massive amount of results from .com sites and others.
An awareness of various types of search engines. Google is not the only option. Specialized search engines can be much more fruitful. Kidrex is excellent for young students; Google Scholar only retrieves information from research articles, professional journals, university websites, and other scholarly resources.
An awareness of how search engine results are ranked. Teach students that being at the top of the list does not mean a result is the best source and that results are rigged to be most pleasing to your tastes.
An understanding of domain types. Teach the meanings of .com, .gov, .guru, .hr, and .org.
Tools to evaluate the people behind the website. Teach students how to find the credentials of content creators and evaluate their expertise.
An ability to analyze a website's purpose. Teach students ways to discover whether the site is designed to inform, amuse, persuade, or sell.
An awareness of bias. How is www.foxnews.com different from www.huffingtonpost.com? Teach students to look for slanted information.

These skills will continue to be important for evaluating the information the Internet provides, yet many teachers still send students online to research without direct instruction in these skills. The problems of information overload will get worse, and many students are leaving school without the critical-thinking skills needed to make sense of this information tsunami.

Prediction 2. Salespeople will still exist.

Whether selling standardized tests to the board of education (yes, there will still be Big Tests), holodecks to homeowners, new-generation "geniusphones," candidates for the Interplanetary Council, or virtual reality glasses, the sales profession will remain. Commercials will bombard us from everywhere. The arts of argument, persuasion, and rhetoric will be in high demand.

To evaluate these sales pitches, students will need an understanding of logic, reasoning, argument, and persuasive techniques. We have to teach students the definition of argument (statements leading to a conclusion); how to evaluate arguments (Do the statements force us to accept the conclusion? Are the statements true?); and how to support statements (the five types of evidence: facts, numbers, quotes, examples, and analogies). We have to teach them how to recognize and avoid reasoning errors, such as confusing causality and correlation, generalizing, making ad hominem attacks, derailing the train of thought, and stereotyping. We have to make students aware of persuasive tricks such as transference, bandwagon appeals, and loaded words, as well as rhetorical tricks such as hyperbole, allusion, and euphemism.

We ask students to do argumentative writing, but do we teach the skills involved? Teachers I've surveyed say they've never been trained to teach argument, reasoning, persuasion, and rhetoric, but students will need to understand these techniques as adults.

Prediction 3. Listening will still be important.

That's not an exciting, sci-fi, high-tech prediction. But listening in the future will be high-tech. When we think of listening, we tend to think of verbal messages. If you pay attention to what I'm saying, that completes the listening task, right? Actually, listening is more complex than that, and it's getting even more complex. Messages are not merely oral communications but rather an elaborate mix of words, sounds, music, and images. This means that all students will need to be media literate so they can listen well to different kinds of media.

I guarantee that a team of students with a camera can make your school look terrible today. They will find garbage that missed the trash can, a student upset about something that happened at recess, a torn poster on the wall. Another team can make your school look great today. They will photograph a teacher and student engaged in conversation, a well-organized classroom, and a trophy case. Both teams told the "truth," but they made a point by selecting one image over another. Teach students about the power of images.

Good videos are carefully constructed. Have you seen "A Pep Talk from Kid President to You?" In the video, YouTube personality Kid President offers some words of inspiration and encouragement. Why is Kid President in a locker room? On a football field? In front of a board covered with Xs and Os? Each scene is chosen for a reason. Are students aware of this? And why are there so many scene changes? How does that affect viewers? Teach students about the construction of videos.

Sound and music are selected for a reason. Teach students how to alter a message with sound. You can find several fun examples on YouTube of movie scenes that have been given alternate soundtracks. Find the video that makes the movie Frozen seem like a horror film or the silly video of a snail, in which different types of music make the same scene scary, funny, and even somber. All of us are susceptible to manipulation by music, and every day we experience it. Teach students specific lessons about sound and its powers.

Prediction 4. People will still be speaking.

The last several years have seen an explosion of ways to display verbal messages: Facetime, Skype, Periscope for Twitter, and cell phone apps, plus tools for video conferences, webinars, podcasts, narrated slideshows, and many more.

Unfortunately, schools have often ignored speaking skills. My son works for a company that connects people who have ideas for high-tech financial innovations with potential investors and users. He reports that there is no shortage of brilliant people with brilliant ideas but a serious shortage of people who can verbally communicate those ideas. Turning ideas into reality involves collaboration and communication. Prerequisites for collaboration and communication? Listening and speaking skills.

For students to thrive in a world of oral communication, we have to teach students how to build and present a message. Teaching students to create a valuable message means teaching them

How to analyze an audience and craft a message for that audience.
How to include interesting and important information that connects with the audience.
How to organize the talk with a grabber opening, clear transitions, and a powerful closing.
How to create effective visual aids.
How to adjust their personal appearance for the audience and occasion.

Teaching students how to present the message means teaching them

How to appear poised and avoid distracting behaviors.
How to make sure every word is clearly heard.
How to add life to the voice so listeners can hear passion and emotion.
How to make eye contact.
How to use hand, face, and body gestures effectively.
How to adjust speed for effect.

Just as we teach lessons about capitalization before asking students to write an essay, we need lessons about use of pacing when speaking. Just as we have lessons about finding common denominators before asking students to add fractions, we need lessons about designing slides for visual aids. In a future with oral communication on display to an even greater extent than it is today, students' shortcomings in these areas will hurt them. Teach students to be well spoken.²

Classic Skills for a New Age

Not very sci-fi. No new devices offered. No massive restructuring of schools. No wildly new areas of instruction. Indeed, two of my predictions lead to an increased emphasis on classic arts: Argument, rhetoric, and oral communication have been important since ancient Greece. Still, I feel confident that if you ask students 40 years after graduation what they needed to know and be able to do, many would verify my choices. Internet literacy, media literacy, good thinking, and good speaking will be valued every day of their lives. Let's do more teaching about them.

Calendar for March & April: