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Tuesday, November 18, 2014

Getting Together with the Secondary Section: 2014 Convention Edition

by Dan Bruno, M.Ed., NBCT

It is almost here. In two days, the 2014 NCTE Annual Convention kicks off in Washington, D.C. If you are going to be attending in person, the Secondary Section Steering Committee would love to see and meet you at any of our major events throughout the convention. Below, you will find a complete list of the SSSC events as well as descriptions of who will be there and what the focus will be. Additionally, interact with and follow the Secondary Section throughout the weekend by tweeting with the hashtag #HSM2014. We believe that high school matters and that high school teachers do the most important work in the world. Come socialize, celebrate, and inspire each other in the SSSC events this year.

Secondary Section Get-Together - Thursday, November 20th from 4:30 PM to 6:00 PM in the Maryland B Room

Come hear from researcher and filmmaker William Kist as he shares Running from Crazy and leads a discussion of the film. Following William Kist, Jim Burke of Burlingame High School will share inspiration and his trademark good humor with us. Before the talks and in-between there will be ample time to socialize with your section, make new friends, and reconnect with old colleagues. A good time is guaranteed.

High School Matters - Friday, November 21 from 2:30 PM to 5:15 PM in the Potomac A/B Room

Our annual smorgasbord of secondary ELA ideas and inspiration is guaranteed to leave you feeling enlightened, excited, and enthusiastic. As per the usual, we will kick off with Carol Jago's list of must-reads from the year. Following Carol's talk, we will continue the tradition of sharing our own book recommendations and then launch into the first roundtable session. This year's roundtable list features a ton of really interesting topics including sessions on text complexity and multicultural voices in the canon of high school literature. Following the first roundtable, Kelly Gallagher will share some of his insights about teaching in his usual entertaining and thought-provoking way. After Kelly's talk, there will be two roundtable sessions, giving you more opportunities to network with colleagues and learn something new about our field. This double session always generates great ideas to take back and use in the classroom; don't miss it!

Secondary Section Luncheon - Saturday, November 22 from 12:30 PM to 2:30 PM

Come lunch with your colleagues and hear this year's guest speaker: science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist Cory Doctorow. Note: This event requires tickets to attend. If you haven't purchased your tickets yet, there may still be time to snag one if you act fast. Ask at the registration desk when you check in.

The SSSC looks forward to seeing you in person; however, if you cannot attend, please engage with us on twitter, through e-mail, or on this blog.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Asking the Questions that there Are not Enuf Lifetimes to Answer

by Dan Bruno, M.Ed., NBCT

One of the most prominent discussions in the teaching of literature in high school is what makes a work worthy of review, thought, and criticism. In other words, why study To Kill a Mockingbird instead of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (or whichever)? The more I engage with good literature and even-better scholars of that literature, the more I begin to think it has to do with the questions we ask about people. While I will admit to the all-night read-a-thon that would happen when a new Harry Potter novel hit the shelves, I will also admit that there is nothing surprising or even intriguing about the characters and the choices they make. I can still remember reading the end of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and thinking (spoiler alert; although, at this point, really?) Harry, you do not need to dump Ginny simply because you are the hero. It was about as close to blatant formula as one can get. On the Mockingbird side of things, people are still mystified at the existence of non-racists in a town, community, or family of them; what makes people like Atticus rise above prejudice to do his best for a man whose social status has not changed that much since slavery?

This aspect of characters who puzzle us leads me to what I have recently decided must be my number one criterion for a novel, play, or poem to be considered worthy of critical reflection: does it make me ask questions that I could only answer in the span of a lifetime (and, if I am honest, multiple lifetimes)? I had the privilege recently of seeing a new theatrical piece at the Atlas theatre in Washington, D.C.: Caleen Sinette Jennings's Not Enuf Lifetimes. Before I go any further, here is what the website for The Welders, a DC playwriting collective with an excellent mission, says about the play:
It’s 2004, and Frank Riley—a well-meaning, white 50-something car mechanic—can’t understand why his son Ian dropped out of medical school to live and work in what he considers the ghetto. When Ian disappears, Frank must enter Ian’s world in order to find him. He must learn to communicate with Dante, Ian’s black roommate, and Manjit, Ian’s South Asian girlfriend. He must figure out whether Ronnie Holmes, Ian’s black protégé from the projects, could also be Ian’s killer. Most importantly, Frank must figure out why the child of his heart walked away from the life Frank worked so hard to give him. This exploration of rifts and potential bridges between the Boomer and Hip Hop generations features a hip hop-inspired structure with rhymes and music.
The play says one thing outright: Caleen Sinette Jennings loves people. In her profile on the The Welder's website, she declares that she is a Weldebecause "a welder doesn't talk a lot. A welder looks and listens." The people that exist on the stage truly do exist; they have so many facets and contradictions of being that build into the beautiful complications of their relationships. Few of the characters are likable from the start, much like we all are. But as the layers are peeled away, not one character exists as a type. There are moments when characters seem headed for the territory of stereotype, but then Jennings's words transform them in the space of a single utterance.

And those utterances can carry a power that seems unlikely given their brevity. There is a line from Dante, Ian's successful programmer roommate, about the type of hip-hop heard popularly. In response to Frank's denigration of the form, focused on all of the worst aspects of gangster rap, Dante simply replies that that type of hip-hop plays to something in the popular culture, creating greater divisions and keeping the money in the same pockets that have always had it (I am not quoting this line because my paraphrase is far clunkier than the way it came out on stage). It was one of those instances where a line comes out that so pithily synthesizes something you knew but could not articulate.

Even more powerful are the lyrics of Ronnie Holmes, the young father who works hard to take care of his mother and daughter while he tries to survive the Glendale projects. The lines he spits with Ian from his composition book reveal a man yearning to live his dreams, but dealing with the disappointment of failing to realize them. The frustration and righteous anger come through in each syllable, providing an interesting counterpoint to the manically optimistic Ian.

As the play closed, I found myself invested in the futures these characters might have ahead of them (which is no small feat in a show with no intermission). I could easily imagine teaching this play for the questions it was already generating as I left the theatre: What does it mean to love one's children? How can we best teach our children to live in the world? How can they best teach us to do the same? Where is the line between patronizing and supporting? My head just kept spinning. What I could say for certain is that this play taught me, again, the value of love over all other concerns. What is a better message than this with which to send students out into the world? Another very good question.

Not Enuf Lifetimes is still on stage and I would encourage you to go and see it if you can. Click the link here to get details.

Sunday, November 2, 2014

Tell Us About Yourself: The College Essay

Writing about the self is the hardest thing to do. Whether this results from social pressures to put the self aside, from familial pressures to be part of the whole, from peer groups who often (unintentionally or not) supplant the individual with a group self constructed from the impressions of others, knowing the self is hard to do at any age. Whether we are five or seventy-five, the protean concept of who we are shifts and changes as our lives shift and change. We move our lives about, hoping to hold onto a sense of who we were in the last moment even as we grow into the next. No one has a harder time wrestling with identity than the very people we ask to define that self in 250 words annually: high school seniors. Just take a look at these Common App essay prompts:
  • Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
  • Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn? 
  • Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
  • Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
  • Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.
Anecdotally, 40 percent of teachers who apply for National Board Certification will successfully complete the program and be certified. A large part of this process is the ability to reflect on one's own practice, to "discuss an accomplishment or event" to "recount" moments when a lesson fell apart and he or she "experienced failure." If 60 percent of grown teachers applying for an advanced certificate have a hard time writing about these things, how could we expect so much from 17- and 18-year-old teens?

And yet, the requirement is there. More so, these colleges need to know who they are letting in; their institutional capital rests on the quality of the people they admit. So, what is a young person to do?

They are to turn to their teachers. October's Engage Now from Lawrence Butti of the Secondary Section Steering Committee is here to help provide some very clear, stable structures for teaching seniors, or even juniors, about the college essay process. Of particular note is Lawrence Butti's college essay brainstorming sheet that helps students frame the narrative of self in clear, discrete pieces of information that can be hard to pull out of the fog of memory in the context of writing the college essay.

As with all really difficult tasks that students complete, teachers are there to help guide students to be their best. In this case, we get the privilege to be there for our students at a time when stress is high and futures are on the line. What a great part of the ever-changing self known as teacher.