2nd Period, Some Discipline Issues.

It is 4th period and I am tossing up a quick blog. I had the 2nd period class just end. There is a substitute in the room, but she is just here to make sure that nobody burns the room down.

The kids were finishing up their Band Site. This is a webpage that has to do with their favorite band, incorporating a Flash movie. Flash is the computer animation program that makes all of the cool rotating, spinning, fading-in and -out effects that you see on webpages nowadays. This kids are doing some great stuff, with band logos splitting apart and coming back together, spinning and flipping, flashing and fading, etc.

One kid, H., who is actually a pretty good kid, indicated that he was done early and what should he do. I asked him to please get into Macromedia FreeHand, a program that we have on our computers, but do not use. I wanted him to play with the program a little and then tell me what the program does and how we could use it in class. In general, the program helps with web graphics by using drawing tools. He tried for about 4 seconds and then went to do other stuff. Stuff like disrupt everyone around him. I tried redirecting him about 5 times, but he kept getting into other people's stuff. Finally, he said that he wanted to work on a "game that I am making in Flash." OK, that is possible, you can make games in Flash, and it would keep him involved with something other than bugging everybody.

The next thing I look over, he is playing some helicopter game from a website that is has happened to slip through the school's Web Filtering program. His neighbors were cheering him on, congratulating him on finding a game from the Internet. Playing Internet Games on school time is strictly forbidden.

H. was busted.

"H.," I said, "Close up, get out, you are in ISS (In-School Suspension) for the rest of the class!" He was shocked. I would not normally do this, but he had been playing me all class period and he was breaking the Code of Conduct by playing an Internet game and he had lied to me. He quickly came to. "Mr. Burkhard, I'm sorry, please give me another chance. I promise, I will work on FreeHand!" He was about to cry. I finally "gave in" and said he could stay.

The neat thing, though, is that H. finally started playing with FreeHand and figured out that you can do some really cool spiralling, layering, coloring tricks in the program. By the end of class, he was showing off the stuff he was doing to some of the more advanced kids in class.

I think that it went pretty well.

More later.