NCTE High School Matters

Teaching Vocabulary, Successfully

2012-01-03T00:16:00.007-06:00

by Tara Seale
The best advice I received this year came from my students, and it related to vocabulary instruction. I struggle with the best way to teach vocabulary; and unfortunately, like most English teachers, I do not have the time I need to devote to vocabulary instruction (maybe it should be its own class, I thought, grammar too, but that is another blog post). I also recognize that a strong vocabulary is essential for effective reading comprehension. Looking for contextual clues only works if students understand the other words in the sentence.
Frustrated, I tried guilting my students into learning words because they just need to know them to succeed in life. That doesn’t work. I related a story about how my husband, at twenty-four, attended his first board meeting. He realized that it was imperative that he increase his knowledge of words and bought 30 days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. We still have this book with all of his annotations. They liked the story and realized that they might end up in this same situation one day, but they also decided that they would rather play video games, text, work, go to band practice, football practice, or any number of teenage life distractions that make additional learning outside of class something to put off until absolutely necessary.
After nine weeks of frustration, I asked my students, “What can I do to help you learn the words you need to know?” They told me that Paula Barker, their pre-AP 10th grade teacher, helped them learn words through vocabulary bingo, and they also received the added bonus of candy. I told them that if I was going to buy candy, I needed proof. I was amazed as my 11th grade students recited words they could still remember because of vocabulary bingo in 10th grade English. Of course, I immediately contacted Paula and asked her to explain her visionary bingo game.

This is it:

20 - 3 x 5 index cards will fit on a desk uncut, but you can cut the index cards to fit more.
Students write the vocabulary word on one side and the definition on the other.
The teacher also has her own index cards.
The class plays bingo during the last 10 minutes of class.
Students place all bingo cards word-side-up on their desk.
The teacher reads the definition, and based on the definition, students turn over their card.
The teacher goes slow at first letting students look through all of the cards, but the longer the game is played the more the teacher speeds up.
The first student to bingo receives a piece of candy.
Another version is to allow students to pick one card and stand up next to their desk. The teacher reads the definition, and students sit down as the definition to their word is read. The last one standing receives a piece of candy.
After two weeks, the teacher quizzes the students on the vocabulary words.

This idea is great for several reasons. First, it takes care of the last moments in class when some students would rather pack up than listen or participate. Second, competitive students want to win and just doing well on a quiz is not really winning, but blurting out bingo or surviving as the last one standing is winning. Third, it doesn’t take much planning or time out of class, so teachers can implement vocabulary bingo and not feel like they are sacrificing precious time.
The last reason involves a different implementation. I recently used vocabulary bingo for rhetorical devices instead of vocabulary words. It worked well; students wrote the definition and an example on their index cards.
Regardless of how a teacher decides to use this idea, students will be engaged because of the competition and the chance to win an inexpensive piece of candy. Learning vocabulary through vocabulary bingo is a win win situation for both the teacher and the students.

Flipping Out

2011-12-05T20:01:00.001-06:00

At the recent NCTE convention in Chicago, I saw a clip of spoken word poet Sarah Kay performing "B." If you haven't seen it, click this link right now. Kay's brilliance comes from the way she sees and hears unique linguistic combinations in ordinary words. The presentation that featured Kay's TED talks recitation of "B" was about mentor and model texts. Penny Kittle showed the clip, then asked Kelly Gallagher, and the audience, to pick a line and use it to jump start a free write. There are so many lines in the poem, choosing one was tough; in the end, I chose to write in response to the line "getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air." If this line does not define the craft of teaching, I don't know what does.

I mean, let's be real for a minute: How many times have you begun a lesson, believed in what you were teaching, had a clear goal in mind, saw in your minds eye the aha moment playing at the corners of your students eyes and mouths, and suddenly the reality challenges your view of who or what you are? If you aren't raising your hand, you probably aren't telling the truth.

How do we maximize instructional time so that students remain engaged and still get the coverage of prior knowledge needed to be successful?

A new technological trend has teachers flipping out in response to to this question. "Flipping" instruction is not just a profane phrase anymore (not that it ever was). A flipped sequence of instruction is one that literally flips daytime lecture with nighttime application.

Well that couldn't possibly work, Dan?! Are you "flipping" mad?!

My mental health aside, think about the possibilities; the good folks at the Harvard Education Letter did. The November/December 2011 edition of the letter addresses the use of flipping in schools to raise student performance:

"Since she began 'flipping' lectures and homework assignments, high school science teacher Shelley Wright has noticed something: the number of students failing her course has dropped from the usual three to zero. Departmental exam scores are higher, too."

Wright teaches sophomore, junior, and senior science at Cornerstone Christian School in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, so her practice and the flexibility surrounding varies compared with many of the teaching contexts we have; however, the article contains other teacher pioneers in this instructional method.

Despite this difference, any strategy that seems to improve students' abilities to learn and retain information is welcome information. I have spoken with a number of my science and math colleagues and they almost instantly saw the appeal of such a practice. One of my colleagues even began excitedly theorizing about extra lab time. The trouble for us, as teachers of English, is finding a way to apply this strategy to our classrooms. We generally don't have discrete, measurable skills that can be analyzed in a single lesson. In math classes, students can learn a method for working a problem. In science classes, students can discuss the effects of acid-base reactions and begin to solve acid-base equations. In English, teaching students to read or write in a single lecture is laughable; what could we teach?

I was recently rereading Deeper Reading by Kelly Gallagher and I found the answer. Having students measure their own level of comprehension could easily adapt to video lectures at night. Then, I came up with a sequence I think could work for English teachers; below I have provided my idea for a sequence of flipped instruction for the English classroom as well as the outline of a flipped instructional sequence as it appears in the Harvard Education Letter.

Basic Outline for Flipped Instruction:
Day 1: Exploring - "explore the material with an activity building on prior knowledge"
Night 1: Explaining - "watch and sometimes interact with some form of media online"
Day 2: Applying - raise "questions about the video from the night before" and pose "an application problem"

Flipped English Class on the Opening of The Great Gatsby:
Day 1: Exploring - Students open the text and read the first couple pages (up to that break as the action becomes present instead of the reflective frame); they write questions they have from their reading. The class discusses Fitzgerald and his life using the opening paragraphs of the novel as a frame for the discussion (ex: Fitzgerald is sometimes called the Jazz Age moralist and he opens the novel with a discussion of judgment). Finish reading the opening chapter. Students ask more questions, this time adding ones about spots where they struggled with comprehension. Unanswered questions are collected before students go home.
Night 1: Explaining - Students can pull up audio clips from the National Endowment for the Arts's The Big Read website. They can watch teacher created videos about comprehension strategies to help them measure their own understanding, applying the strategies to brief articles on background information for the novel. They could also watch videos from students or other sources about the value of what Gallagher calls "second-draft reading."
Day 2: Applying - The teacher brings up the unanswered questions to see if students have found answers for them on their own through the videos or the background reading. Students reread the first chapter in class, rating their second reading using their newly learned comprehension strategy. The remaining questions about the content of the first chapter are answered. Questions are generated about what will happen next.

I know it is rough and somewhat idealistic outline, but it is a starting point. The real value of flipping for English classes would be the development of skills that will help students become more successful independent readers. The more skillful the reader, the more likely he or she will not struggle to read independently assigned text; thus, even though two days are spent on one chapter of a novel (the essence of luxury), the time can be made up as students learn to read, not just consume, text with more skill and understanding.

There are many objections and questions we could raise about flipping: access, knowledge of ed tech, what to include in a video, and where to find good videos are just a few. These questions are best tackled by individuals from each school. I could sit here in my comfy chair at home in Virginia and offer grand pronouncements on ways to avoid these obstacles, but that wouldn't help many of us develop strategies to overcome these obstacles. Instead, I challenge you to look at each of these challenges and ask "what if" instead of "yes, but." For example, what if I could flip my instruction? What if I had the same success as Shelley Wright? What if my students got excited about homework? What if having them access lectures online brought some new motivation to their learning? I can't be sure, but I think this idea is not just another idea to make the public school system behave in the same way with a different outfit. This idea seems to require the kind of revolutionary thinking that could reshape the way public education works.

In any case, I have to go for now. I am going to try and record a lecture about rating comprehension and post it on my class page to help my students with their break reading; I'm excited because I get to play with an iPad to do it. Who says that we get too old for toys?

I hope you have a wonderful holiday season and winter break.

Follow Hashtags to Learn

2011-11-08T20:05:00.005-06:00

by Tara Seale
Twitter is one of my mainstays for communicating and learning from teachers around the world. I may not know their cell phone, their email, converse with them on a regular basis, or even live in the same country, but Twitter connects me to educators who are willing to share and connect using technology. When I first started tweeting, the constant stream of communication made me feel guilty and overwhelmed. First, I worried about my responsibility in responding to anyone who tweeted me or replied to one of my tweets, so I continually checked my twitter account to see if I needed to respond, which later led to an overwhelmed feeling, making me want to give up on Twitter. I realized that I needed a new perspective about how to use this social networking tool without becoming so overwhelmed.
Now, I see Twitter as a large flowing river with many twists, turns, and side streams which, unfortunately, I do not have time to explore, but because of the potential, when I can, I jump in and swim around immersing myself in a depth of discoveries. Hashtags assist me in my swim so that I narrow my exploration instead of dog paddling without direction.
What are hashtags? The first hashtag I want to introduce is #engchat. I am hosting an #engchat Twitter discussion on Monday, November 14, 2011. A hashtag is proceeded by, of course, a hashtag, plus an acronym or abbreviated topic. This allows Twitter followers to zone in on their area of interest and follow the conversation and add to it. In regards to the conversation on Monday, Twitter users need to log in to Twitter and follow the conversation that is marked with #engchat. It is helpful to use an app to follow a hashtag; I use tweetdeck so that I can see the posts related to the hashtag in one column, but Meenoo Rami, founder of #engchat, advises that followers of the Monday night #engchat conversations use Tweetchat. Regardless of which app you use, hashtags are instrumental in connecting tweeters with topics they want to understand and know more about.
As you can probably discern, followers of the #engchat hashtag are English teachers, and I would like to direct you to a great video and description about how #engchat began at the Digital Is National Writing Project Blog. I encourage you to read the blog post, but also view the Bud Hunt video.
Besides #engchat, there are other hashtags that also help to connect educators. The best list is probably compiled at the Cybrary Man Blog. In addition, the Edudemic blog claims to have the full list (nearly) of educational hashtags.
Although hashtags are great for connecting teachers on a daily basis, they are also dynamic in convention settings. Take for example the NCTE Convention. If you were at last year's NCTE in Orlando and followed the convention hashtag of #NCTE1o you would have learned about potential tweetups - when people who have the same interests and follow the same hashtags meet F2F (face to face). For example, #ecning tweeters - English Companion Ning followers and contributors - were able to meet face to face and get to know each other beyond the cyberworld, which I believe everyone enjoyed. Additionally, those who followed ncte10 last year were able to learn about excellent presentations by following the hashtag ncte10 even if they were unable to attend those presentations. Therefore, I encourage you to follow #ncte11 so that you can keep up with NCTE convention happenings on Twitter.
This post has highlighted only a few of the potential connections that hashtags create in the 21st century. I plan to introduce and discuss more on Monday, November 14th at #engchat, so if you have never participated in a Twitter hashtag discussion, I encourage you to join in on Monday to see what it is all about.

Writing for our Students

2011-10-10T18:52:00.001-05:00

I recently got a new teaching position that puts me in contact with truly gifted students. I mean, they are scary smart. One student was able to detail for me the specific technological specs on Wednesday's iOS 5 down to how they rewrote the code (if this seems vague, it is because his discussion was over my head). At the same time, the student could not write a crisp and pithy sentence to save his life. I thought I was going to have to start charging gas money for traveling those convoluted, passive-voice-driven superhighways of syntax. The experience is part of a lesson I have been learning since I began this job: genius does not make one smart.

These gifted students suffer from one of the most heinous educational problems of our day: neglect based on ability, or conscientious neglect (I am not basing this term on any research, it is something I am trying to define). Conscientious neglect is the teacher who does not provide scaffolding or clearly-written instructions or criteria because his or her students are not low-performing.

I am struggling right now with figuring out how much direct instruction and scaffolding is needed to help my gifted students increase their ability to read. Yep, you read that. We received the results of our literacy test back from our coordinator and some of my students were below basic. Why? Well, let's detail some possibilities: it was a diagnostic, so they blew it off; the test was beneath them; the testing administrator and a data entry person may have entered some data incorrectly. Now, let me give you some reasons why the scores seem accurate: they are consistently low in nonfiction as opposed to fiction; they are struggling with finding main ideas in nonfiction, a fact mirrored in their writing; the curriculum provides for almost zero nonfiction in 4 years.

The curriculum is the biggest stumbling block. In four years, the extent of their nonfiction includes: works read for research (a.k.a. without teacher guidance), a handful of essays, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Slouching towards Bethlehem. The irony here is that most programs for struggling readers swear by nonfiction for engaging and training their pupils.

On top of this pile lie assignments whose clarity is akin to the expressions of the Rapa Nui statues. There is enough detail to recognize human faces in those stern stone carvings, but to get more requires feats of invention and imagination, two things that students trying to follow instructions don't need muddying the waters. I mean, writing research papers on literature is hard enough without being unclear about the criteria.

As the National Day on Writing approaches, I encourage all of us to look at what we have written for our students. Are we modeling the care necessary to help our students succeed in class? Or are we being conscientious neglecters, overestimating or unfairly burdening our students' abilities to see into our minds and figure out what we want? I know I have some ways to go before finding that balance for my gifted students, but it is a journey, an examination, worth taking.

Using Prezi to teach Poetry

2011-09-17T16:22:00.004-05:00

by Tara Seale

Prezi is similar to PowerPoint, but so much more. It is like putting an extra shot of espresso in your Starbuck's. The wide canvas, the zooming in and out, and the novelty make it an engaging tool for presenting new information to students.

Lisa Westbrook, a 9th grade English teacher at Bryant High School, is currently using Prezi to do just that. Recently, she created a Prezi to teach her students how to analyze poetry. Click on the image below to view Lisa's prezi.

Keeping the Webs Off - "Making Summer Count"

2011-06-28T19:51:00.005-05:00

As a teacher of AP students, I have become intimately familiar with the annual struggle that is summer assignments. How much do I assign? How much do I respect the students' need for a break? How do I keep them learning while they wait to return in September (ok, this one might be a bit optimistically stated)?

The truth is that this choice is difficult. So, where do you draw the line?

First, we need to consider if the line is even necessary. Do students need activities to do over the summer? The purpose of such activities is to stop the gap that develops over the course of the summer. Keeping the academic side of the brain active is important, especially when students are going to be asked to college-level work upon their return. A recent study cited in an article from Utah's The Salt Lake Tribune shows that students lose an average of one month of learning over the summer. For students on an alternating day schedule, that is one-half of a marking period. For students on an everyday 7-period day, that is three-quarters of a marking period. For students on an everyday block schedule, that is an entire marking period. And some of my colleagues wonder why students don't take the final quarter seriously.

So, keeping students active academically in the summertime is important. How do we honor their lives as people, too? we provide them the choice of how to exercise their academic muscles. I am going to detail my summer assignment for AP English Language and Composition below. I am sharing this assignment to show how I respect students' time over the summer and still get them to practice good academic habits.

Requirement 1: A Writer's Notebook

Students are asked to keep a notebook about their lives over the summer. They are asked to place one entry per week of the summer in the journal in any form they wish. They can write about what they are doing in any form from poetry to prose. These entries are used later in the first quarter to talk about different modes of writing.

Requirement 2: Rhetorical Note Cards

I provide students with a list of rhetorical terms and logical fallacies. Over the course of the summer, students are asked to define each term on a flashcard. Then, they must provide an example of each term from something they've read. This leads me to the final requirement.

Requirement 3: Reading

Student must read one age- and ability-appropriate fiction and nonfiction piece over the summer. I use part of the final weeks of the year (you know, the post-state-testing lull) to introduce incoming AP students to rhetorical analysis. Students must analyze both texts rhetorically and write a brief essay explaining the big differences in analysis of fictional and nonfictional texts. I provide the students with some options of fiction and nonfiction texts, but ultimately they decide what they read and then get approval for their choices. In this way, I can join them in their discovery of new texts through the recommendations they make.

All in all, students do the following over the summer:

1. Write one paper

2. Keep a journal with a minimum of nine entries

3. Read two books: one fiction, one nonfiction

4. Create some note cards

Thus far, that is the best I have devised in terms of respecting my students' lives over the summer while still getting them to practice their academic skills. What I would like to see happen is something like this summer assignment with one-on-one academic counseling for ALL students. According to the article from The Salt Lake Tribune, students from lower socioeconomic brackets "don’t catch up during the summer, and they lose more ground the next summer. Over time, that loss is cumulative, and it’s really hurting [them]."

Imagine if teachers were given eleven months of pay instead of ten. The extra month would account for an every other week open academic "camp" for students whose families cannot afford to send them. AP students, those with the most academic ability, are being given an advantage that would really help lower-income students; however, they would need guidance and an accountability system to ensure that they show up. After all, schools are failing lower-income students everyday, why should they believe that a summer program would actually help them?

These are just some ideas about how to address the summer gap. I am going to get my hands on a copy of that report from The Salt Lake Tribune and see what they have to say. In the mean time, here is the electronic copy.

What ways do you stimulate student learning over the summer? Do you believe there should even be summer assignments? Would you support summer assignments with direct instruction for all students?

McCombs, J. Sloan, C. H. Augustine, H. L. Schwartz, S. J. Bodilly, B. McInnis, D. S. Lichter and A. Brown Cross. Making summer count: How summer programs can boost children's learning. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2011. http://www.rand.org/pubs/monographs/MG1120. Also available in print form.

The iPad 2

2011-06-26T17:21:00.007-05:00

by Tara Seale
My school district recently purchased an iPad 2 for my classroom. Up until now, I was not sure how I could engage students using only one iPad in my classroom, and like most educators, I believe technology is only worth spending money on if it can engage multiple students, so I was not too excited about the first iPad. That has all changed with the iPad 2.
Why? The original iPad had great apps, and it served as a great experience for one student, but for an entire class to view an app and all of its features, a student, a group of students, or a teacher would have to demonstrate the product produced with the app under a document camera, which would produce blurry images, be difficult to see, and lack engagement. Not really worth the money.

The current version of the iPad has changed the blurry images into clear images which can be viewed using an adapter for a tv screen or an overhead projector. You need an Apple Digital AV Adapter for $39 if you are using an HDMI port or an HDTV monitor. I am not quite as lucky to have those options, and I doubt many classroom teachers have those options, but the $29 Apple VGA adapter works well with classroom overhead projectors. In my classroom, I run the VGA cable through the ELMO to my Smartboard, but you do not need an ELMO or a Smartboard, the ipad will connect straight to the projector with an adapter.

The apps a teacher can use with students for presentations are numerous. Teachers and students can present information to the rest of the students in the class in a variety of engaging apps. If you are interested in exploring apps to use in a high school classroom, check out the following links: iPads in Schools, best free apps for education, and Cybrary Man's website with numerous links to articles and iPad apps.

I took the photo at a the Hot Springs Institute for Technology conference Schools Without Walls iPad workshop. At the workshop, teachers used the app Puppet Pals to create puppet shows to tell the stories of famous legends. To show the audience the puppet shows, teachers placed the iPad 2 on the dock which has a port for a VGA adapter, as shown in the photo. The adapter is connected to the the LCD cable which projected the puppet show onto the screen for all to see and hear.

National Board Requirements: Rigorous and Rewarding

2011-05-13T21:42:00.008-05:00

by Tara Seale
Recently, I completed my last national board requirement: the ELA Adolescence and Young Adulthood Assessment. What a relief!
The portfolio alone is daunting, and after the stress of mailing it off, I still faced the final assessment at the assessment center.
If you are wondering if you should attempt National Board, as a first year candidate, I would like to provide advice. I am in my sixth year of teaching, and this is the first year in which I feel like I am prepared to tackle the demands of National Board and also have a chance of passing. I realize that you can sign up for National Boards before your sixth year of teaching, and I wish the best to those teachers, but I could not have completed all parts of the portfolio. I do not want to sound too disparaging, but if you have less than five or six years teaching experience, this process is intimidating and stressful. With that said, attempting national boards has not only been one of the most demanding experiences of my teaching career, it has also been one of the most insightful.
Because I had one of the best reviewers possible, Delynne West, an elementary music teacher in my school district, I soon realized, thanks to her commentary, that I was a descriptive writer and not an analytical writer. Describing what I hoped to achieve and how I hoped to achieve it is just part of the National Board process, but not the most important part. National Board focuses on the student, and not what the teacher is doing.
As a frequent blogger, I write out descriptive examples of lesson plans and activities, and National Board assessors are somewhat interested in what I plan to attempt in the classroom, but mostly they are concerned with how it impacts students. I might have the greatest idea ever, but if it lacks rationale and if I cannot explain student impact, then it is irrelevant.
My greatest challenge in completing my National Board Portfolio was overcoming my descriptive writing and delving into the reasons I do what I do in the classroom. It is not enough that I believe that I know what I am doing, I still have to explain my decisions to people who have an interest in the achievements of my students: administrators, other teachers, parents, national board assessors, and of course, myself.
It is that process that has shaped me and forced me to continue to grow, challenge, and expect more from my students as I grow, challenge, and expect more from myself.
If you had asked me in February how I felt about National Boards, I probably would have asked you how I could escape the process without owing money back to my state, but just like my students who at mid-year always act like I am expecting too much out of them, I acquiesced and found a way to continue, believe, and succeed.
Most of us, teachers and students alike, need to be pushed to be the person, the inspiration, and the leader we can be. National Boards is definitely the institution that has pushed me to that next level.
So now that I have completed this process and I have the long wait until November to see if I have attained the standards to become a National Board Certified Teacher, I want to commiserate with the other teachers who are waiting with me, but I also want to celebrate the teachers who have attained National Board. You have achieved an award that affirms you are a hardworking teacher, and most importantly, your students know that you teach with your heart; therefore, you serve as an inspiration to other teachers to work through this rigorous and rewarding process.

Enough Already

2011-02-20T19:45:00.002-06:00

The great philosopher/education advocate Neil Postman is fond of quoting Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase "the message is the medium." The case of Natalie Munroe ties directly to this concept. Ms. Munroe is the teacher who has lately been under attack for a blog that had some *ahem* controversial statements on it. Some people love her; they taut her as the newest voice in educational truth. Others hate her; they believe she represents all that is wrong with the modern educational system: the teachers. With any luck, these polarized and myopic views will fall aside and Ms. Munroe will become a representative of what freedom truly means.

In Experience and Education, John Dewey had the following to say about the nature of freedom:

"The only freedom that is of any importance is freedom of intelligence, that is to say, freedom of observation and of judgment exercised in behalf of purposes that are intrinsically worthwhile."

This is particularly apt in the case of Ms. Munroe. If you click the title of this post, you will be taken to a website that had coverage of the story last week. Notice the clever removal from context of the phrases in the second paragraph. If these phrases were located near names or even highly intricate descriptions of students, I might understand. As it is, they were written in a way that preserved student anonymity; thus, no one's rights were violated. What really rankles people, especially those who left the inane comments below the story, is that this teacher would have the temerity to speak about the frustrations of her classroom in a public forum (yes, the internet is a public space; however, that is an issue for a whole different post).

At the climax of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, Howard Roark dynamites the Cortlandt Housing Project because other men warped his design. In his speech before the jury at his trial, he gives voice to Rand's philosophy saying that the creator's vision is his representation of truth. Essentially, the manipulation of Roark's original plan is tantamount to the construction of a physical lie, something that is an affront to all free, truth-loving people everywhere. Many high-level academics and most of the "mob" that is the general public want justice. In the end, they see the validity of Roark's position and acquit him. Then, as now, the general public does not wish to allow the truth to exist, but it continues to try and work its way to the surface.

Were Ms. Munroe's statements bitter? Yes. Were Ms. Munroe's statements true? If experience holds true, then yes. Should she have published them in the public eye? Yes.

Reformers from Michelle Rhee to that one lady at every school board meeting have ideas about how to fix public education. They have magic bullets galore, giant magazines of silver panaceas that rip through the windows and walls of our classrooms, destroying more than they create. The children get hurt, proper teaching gets sidelined, and generations are lost in the cross-fire. Then, these reformers turn to teachers with a pointed finger, wagging it in their faces until it accidentally fires which usually happens when one of them opens his or her mouth.

The awful truth is that people do not want to be confronted with the nasty human complexity of public schooling. The dialectic of freedom becomes a monologue of oppression, both of mind and spirit. Are there problem students? Yes. Do they affect classrooms and good teaching? Everyday. What Ms. Munroe is guilty of, if anything, is having the guts to exercise her rights as a person to pursue liberty on the behalf of others. She opened up a channel of communication between her classroom (a traditionally cloistered place) and the community.

So, let them charge after her. Let them wag their loaded fingers in her face. Let them do what they will. Ms. Munroe should stand tall, proud of the dialectic she has begun. As a citizen of these United States, regardless of the digital nature of the discourse, she has a right to free speech. She has that freedom and she has shown that she will utilize it. The message is in the medium: freedom comes from the writing, from the ubiquity and accessibility of the blog. Let us not forget, as teachers, that we have a voice just like Ms. Munroe. The best support we can offer her is the use of them.

Do WE Make a Difference? - Happiness as a Goal of Education

2011-01-28T22:24:00.003-06:00

I apologize if this post smells of mothballs. I am utilizing some skills I had packed away.

ὅτε ἥμην νήπιος, ἐλάλουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐφρόνουν ὡς νήπιος, ἐλογιζόμην ὡς νήπιος· ὅτε γέγονα ἀνήρ, κατήργηκα τὰ τοῦ νηπίου.

The passage above is 1 Corinthians 13:11. One of my party tricks comes from the B.A. I have in Classical Studies, specifically Ancient Greek. Yes, I spent time earning that degree. The thing is, there is something liberating in translating a passage of Greek (says the ultimate Nerd). As I translated this one, I felt something familiar stir in me: a sense of discovery. Every time I translate a passage, I discover something unexpected. Consider my translation of the verse from Paul's first letter to the church in Corinth:

"When I was still a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I reasoned as a child: When I became a man, I nullified those childish things."

ἐφρόνουν means to care thoughtfully about something, hence understood. Meanwhile, ἐλογιζόμην means to reason out, like an argument. Both words represent thought of one kind or another, but both are present in the man as a child. Essentially, taken together, they equal the curiosity of the child, the sense of wonder children have innately wired to their perceptions of the world. As Willingham (2009) points out, people are very curious, but they are not naturally great thinkers. This is, of course, where schools come in, interceding and unintentionally severing the sense of wonder.

In a recent blog post (click the title of this post to read it), Jim Burke alludes to Hesse's Siddhartha, referencing how people must become their own teachers take "what wisdom will help us make sense of the world and find our place and purpose in that world." The heart of the post considers whether or not what teachers do makes a difference. People seek Truth about how to be happy, sending their nets into murkier and murkier waters only to come back with unrecognizable fish. The question of difference-making does revolve around whether or not the students we teach go on to successful and healthy lives, but I think happiness is perhaps something that is not readily added to that list. In large part, that is probably because nobody really knows what happiness , or "subjective well-being," is.

The verse from 1 Corinthians comes from the famous "Love" chapter; if anything makes people happy, it has to be love. Right? Well, coincidentally, the chapter contains another verse discussing how love helps us to "know as we are known." One of my thinking role models is Parker Palmer who wrote a book entitled To Know as We Are Known. One of the chapters is called "Knowing is Loving." OK. So Love, that which makes people happy, is knowing. Knowing what? Anything, says Palmer, as long as it is a knowledge that springs from love. Seems a little circular? Let me explain.

Quoting Dostoevsky, Palmer says that a knowledge that comes from love can be a "harsh and beautiful thing." He says that knowledge from love "may require us to change, even sacrifice, for the sake of what we know...If we want a knowledge that will rebind our broken world, we must reach for that deeper passion" (p. 9). He explains that "deeper passion" as "a bond of awesome responsibility as well as transforming joy; it will call us to involvement, mutuality, accountability" (p. 9).

So, I must whip a classroom full of thirty-five young minds into the fever pitch of a church revival over the greatness of Shakespeare. I can just see it now... Nope, just a pep rally.

In seriousness, Palmer does make a fantastic point when it comes to involvement, mutuality, and accountability; a point that Nel Noddings validates in Happiness and Education. She writes, "education for happiness must include education for unhappiness as well" (p. 36, emphasis from the original). Noddings makes the argument that, from the care theory perspective, students must understand both in order to make a happy life because happiness and suffering are always together. Essentially, without understanding what one has to offer, the other only provides a shadow of itself: hollow happiness or sham suffering.

I think she is right. As a rule, adolescents do not know what happiness is because they do not appreciate their unhappiness. Some may, given the family struggles stemming from the recession of recent years. Still others may not have ever felt true suffering and thus cannot understand true happiness. They find their great moment of joy in meaningless pursuits, chasing frivolity after frivolity, making fewer and fewer wise decisions. In essence, they never become "men" and throw away their childish understandings. When I was a child, I understood and reasoned as a child; anyone who spends time with children will tell you that childish understandings and reasoning are cute.

Childish reasoning is cute because it is innocent. They have "faith, hope, and love" in abundance: faith in their families, hope in their developing understanding of the future, and love for just about anything. Just the other day, my son, a fan of the Disney movie Cars, told me, unprompted, that the car he was holding was Lightning McQueen and that he loves him. At first, I was amazed and warmed by the sentiment; then, I felt embarrassed. Suddenly I had scene after scene of me as a child placing inordinate value on toys and video games flashing before my eyes. As a man, I was embarrassed by the things I loved as a child. I mean, who values a video game featuring pixelated Italian plumbers jumping on all sorts of creatures to save a princess. I certainly did; however, there are so many more things in my life that have so much more concrete value.

So, knowing is love. Love is harsh and beautiful, but also patient, kind. I think that is where we, the public school teachers, come in and make our great difference. We live out love and knowing through our faith and hope in our students. We incorporate Noddings's idea of educating for both happiness and suffering when we ask students to read books like Night and articles about modern-day genocides and then ask students what they mean. When not everyone in our AP and Honors classes gets an A, we teach about suffering and the value of hard work. We seek to understand knowing because we love 150+ kids from other peoples' homes unconditionally and we challenge them to love us back every day. That is the difference we make. That is the lesson on happiness we have to offer.

In Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, the title character offers the following about teaching:

"The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind."

That is what we as English teachers do best. That is what we should encourage all teachers to do best. We don't feed students knowledge like Grape Nuts, telling them they need more fiber so they should suck it up. We pick out a story, we guide them along its meandering pages, and we help them to see the reflection of themselves in the revelatory light of its ending. We are truly "offering something to children that should increase their lifelong happiness...Some things, even in schools, should be offered as gifts - no strings, no tests attached." We do this easily when we remember, as we get up way too early, as we drive hazily to our schools, as we look at our diminishing paychecks, as we feel the crush of more and more students, that we are rising to go to a building, to talk to kids, to teach them about literature, to talk about a book of all things, to help them see the potential for faith, hope, love, and happiness in each of their lives.

As we turn the corner into a new semester, or as we have turned the corner, I hope you'll keep this happiness in mind (it is a long way to Spring Break).

Who's Schools? - Over-analysis and the Question of Who Makes the Decisions in Schools

2011-01-02T18:09:00.003-06:00

This week is definitely dead week. So far, I've seen and heard a lot about nothing really special. Now, don't get me wrong, the woman who was killed by a neck massager is truly sad (the family is probably reeling), but I do not believe it warrants a 30 minute breakdown on the Fox News Channel.

But that is truly what US culture has become all about. I think that is why AP English Language and Composition has become such a big course in the past decade (including getting its own style of question). We are analysis junkies.

Critical thinking has become a part of our cultural raison d'etre (I apologize, I can't figure out accent marks in this format). I find it utterly confusing that a country that televises un-called for critical analyses of tragic appliance deaths should have such trouble educating and understanding its youth.

It has been a break from school, so I've been reading. So far, I've torn through The Hunger Games, devoured Dave Cullen's Columbine, browsed the first couple of chapters of The Geography of Bliss (I recommend this one highly), cruised through the first half of The Fountainhead, refreshed my Huck Finn, and am currently tromping through Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (also a fantastic read). For work, I'm reading Readicide (best...book...ever) and Kylene Beers's When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do (True Confession: I struggle with struggling readers). What Readicide and When Kinds Can't Read have taught me is that struggling readers don't struggle because they can't read, rather they struggle because they can't read anything under the text.

As a reader of text, whether it is composed of alphabetic symbols or visual images, I am looking for the big ideas so that I might engage in intellectual battle. Parker Palmer discusses big ideas in The Courage to Teach. Palmer says that we have forgotten how to center our classrooms on big ideas. The curriculum will be fine regardless of what we do to it because the big ideas cannot be submerged or destroyed. They are bigger than me, my department, my administration, my school system, Parker Palmer, Kylene Beers, Kelly Gallagher, and a partridge in a pear tree. They are not inviolate and pristine, rather they invite us to dismantle them and reassemble them; we are supposed to climb inside, get comfy, and find ourselves. In the end, that is what big ideas do. They show us the parts of ourselves we cannot physically see and challenge us to evaluate ourselves.

Struggling readers need to be challenged with the big ideas in the text. Why would I teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a group of 21st century high school juniors? For one, if you think racism is dead, you must live in the wrong country. Huck's awakening to Jim's humanity is slow and occasionally heartbreaking. Consider the scene where Huck is appalled that Jim might get away and steal his own children away from their owner. I love milking this scene with my students because they can easily access it and it stands in such sharp contrast to the scene later on when Huck gives away his soul to save Jim. Did Twain blow the ending? Maybe. But I am with Francine Prose on this one: I cannot, I should not, think that my chronological standing gives me the right to shake my finger in the face of the great writers of the past. Those two scenes fromHuck Finn are rich with meaning and stylistically well-written. They are excellent teaching pieces from a novel that has parts that are, arguably, better off ignored. But I will not concede to Jane Smiley's view that Huck is somehow part of perpetuating Jim's (and other slaves') dehumanization. There is simply too much heart in that character to write off. Whether or not Twain chickened out in the end, there are overt statements and actions in Huck Finn that bespeak a certain striving toward equality for all men, one of the foundational big ideas of the US.

Since the junior-year English course is a survey of American literature, big ideas that are foundational in the US are extremely helpful. This idea, the push toward a more egalitarian country, is particularly rich. To briefly describe where I work: we are the fourth wealthiest county in the US, but the high school I work in has a fairly high percentage of free and reduced lunch. This division comes from all sort of interesting historical details, like we were the real terminal point of the North during the Civil War. There is a house in the county that served as a headquarters for the Union Army as it stared across the Rappahannock River at the Confederate Army. The community is a result of that forced blending of motley cultures: northern and southern, white, slave, and free black. The students bite so quickly when baited with this issue while some teachers, feeling unmotivated by a lack of salary and a lack of respect, don't even consider having these conversations; worse, they think there is no time to have these conversations before "the Test." Our discussions of progress are usually driven by SOL (Standards of Learning - VA's unfortunate acronym) or SAT scores. Our SOL results have risen considerably over the past decade; unfortunately, our SAT scores have remained stagnant. They are higher than the national average, but they haven't changed. Before people from states like New York and Connecticut get confused, I can say with the certainty of someone who has seen some of the other tests that the SOL is not even comparable with the Regent's exam or the Connecticut test (I can't remember the acronym right now). The SOL is the epitome of a "readicide" assessment (Gallagher, 2009). Big ideas are not alive in a redicide school, so finding them, capitalizing on them, and sharing the success they bring is huge.

Which brings me back to where I started. US culture as over-analysis. Everything has become a matter of quantitative breakdowns, of measurable outcomes, of a populist accountability that asks amateurs to judge the work of professionals based on the most superficial of metrics. I still love the statistic that shows that most people think education is in trouble but are still happy with their neighborhood schools. Talk about contradictory findings. Yet, since education became a golden goose for politicians, everyone has an opinion. Everyone, that is, except those who should.

Consider the reasons teachers leave the profession. The top three, according to Richard Ingersoll's analysis of the Schools and Staffing Survey and its supplement, the Teacher Follow-up Survey (SASS/TFS), are: family or personal reasons, pursuit of another career, or general dissatisfaction. Salaries are part of this dissatisfaction, but other reasons actually appeared more frequently: "student discipline problems; lack of support from the school administration; poor student motivation; and lack of teacher influence over schoolwide and classroom decision making" (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003). The last one is key. Teachers are tired of being judged, blamed, and condemned based on the decisions made by politicians or other equally detached persons. The frustration of other professional teachers, even in my own building, at the inability to use a pedagogy that engages and grows students, versus a pedgogy predicated on readicide, is palpable.

Thus, teachers feel torn; torn between the need to educate and the need to appear accountable; torn between big issues and ideas and narrowly defining what matters; torn between growing students as critical thinkers and letting them stagnate in the upscale public daycare centers our schools have become. Then, the filmakers of the world make documentaries on the heart-breaking state of education, then laud people who have not directly addressed the issues fueling our stammering system. Are schools in perfect shape? Nope. Are there teachers to blame for this? Probably. Yet, teachers are not being allowed to influence how policy decisions are made. Why? They don't know. Ask an administrator (well, to be fair, ask some administrators) at the school or central office level. Teachers are not employed to be consulted, they are employed to do as the system wishes. Unfortunately, I can't think of another profession (besides nursing) that demands such autonomy within such strict regulations (and even nurses can become nurse practitioners; what should teachers become?).

The over-analysis culture has hamstrung our public school systems from curriculum to staffing. Everyone has an opinion, but most do not have the expertise.

Maybe I am wrong. Public schools are supposed to be for the public. What do you think? I struggle with this question all the time and I am interested in hearing others' opinions.

How Google Has Enhanced My Practice - An Homage to My Fellow Blogger

2010-12-17T18:38:00.005-06:00

I have dedicated this blog post to Tara Seale because I owe everything I know about using Google to teach to her wise counsel.

Here's what I was able to do with my AP English Language and Composition class. The assignment combines a lot of exciting elements from student self-assessment to guided process writing.

First, the basic assignment: I've been doing Mentor Text writing assignments since I started teaching, I just didn't have a name for it until after this past NCTE conference. This assignment asks students to read a professionally written text and then try and mimic it in style. This mimicry helps the student practice writing like the experts, helping them integrate professional skills into their amateur styles. The result is a more finely tuned compositional style, one with greater maturity and clarity.

I asked them to write a holidays-are-crazy style essay based on a "Shouts & Murmurs" column written by Larry Doyle titled "Is There a Problem Here?" The original can be found here.

Students read the piece (once in class, once at home), analyzing for Doyle's use of rhetoric; students were asked to also pay special attention to the elements of voice (diction, detail, syntax, imagery, figurative language, and tone) and the four basic elements of satire (irony, hyperbole, …, …). We read, they highlighted, we discussed, they took it home to reread.

Then, students had to draft their rough drafts. They needed to mimic Doyle's satirical style while focusing on some aspect of the holidays. Here is where the technology really came into play.

Before I go into how I used the technology, let me explain each component. All of these programs are located in Google Docs. The first is the Google document. This program is just like Microsoft Word (with some exceptions...it isn't Microsoft after all). The Google document features collaborative typing and pop-out chat, great tools to help guide students with their writing - in real time!

The second program is the Google form. These are great. Seriously. Imagine a world where you can create any information gathering form you want/need and then have that form generate a spreadsheet with the responses. I created a student survey earlier in the month and now I have actual telephone numbers for all of my students' parents.

For the assignment, students drafted their holiday craziness essay on a Google document. Then, they evaluated themselves based on a rubric I created on a Google form (you can see the rubric/form here). The idea was to have the students assess their own writing based on effort and perceived achievement (based on an A - D scale). Then, students wrote reflections justifying the choices they made in their writing and their assessment. Finally, students revised based on their assessment of their work. I will conference with them once we return to school on Monday (or, snow-willing, after the holiday break). The resulting Google document flowed from a draft, to a reflection, to a revision, showing thoughtful, process-oriented writing from beginning to end.

So, what did I get out of it as teacher?

First, I got instant feedback. The responses from my survey/rubric form dumped into a spreadsheet. I could see where students thought they stood in terms of their writing at a glance. I could also see what they liked about the assignment and their writing (a voluntary, extra box that nearly every student filled out).

Second, I got the ability to have writing conferences with my students without giving up class time. Using the real-time editing and pop-out chat features, I could have individual writing conferences without having each student come to my desk while the others worked on whatever. Additionally, I didn't have to make one stroke with a red pen.

I am sure that there will be many more advantages to using these programs. I really didn't expect to discover the versatility and utility I've already experienced.

As a side note, Google has a program called Knol. It is a collection of people's knowledge on different topics. I searched the Knol database for Huckleberry Finn and found a four minute synopsis video of the novel done in Legos. It...was….awesome.

Why High School Matters

2010-12-13T23:03:00.003-06:00

by Tara Seale

I recently returned from NCTE 2010 in Orlando. As always, High School Matters was my favorite session, packed with the best presenters and the best teachers sitting shoulder to shoulder. If only the whole room could work at the same school. What a school that would be.

First, Carol Jago related her favorite books for the year, and she provided a complimentary bookmark for each attendee. If you were unable to attend, and you would like to see Carol Jago's recommended reads, please click on this link: Carol Jago Recommended Books for 2010
As a bonus, she shared a book that was not on her bookmark. It was called The Room by Emma Donoghue. I also heard another recommendation for The Room by a fellow attendee at the NCTE, so it will be a Kindle download and a holiday read for me. Carol Jago's recommended reads are not only interesting, but inspiring. If someone as busy as Carol Jago can come up with 8 incredible reads for the year, what is my excuse? What is your excuse? We should all be reading and sharing in 2011.
On a more humorous note, Carold Jago also shared the YouTube video, "It's a Book" by Lane Smith. It is funny, but scary at the same time. Did you see Wired Magazine's cover from November titled "The Web is Dead." Will we have a magazine cover in the near future that announces "Books are Dead?"

Carol's talk was followed by one of my favorite ice breakers. Everyone at the round-table shares their favorite book of the year, and in the process, we get to meet everyone at our table. Never enough time, but it doesn't really matter because we all enjoy sharing, interjecting, and enjoying one another. It is a time to discover that English teachers attend NCTE from all over the country, and they are interesting, intelligent, and fun people to know (we did not make it around my table, but it was okay because we all bonded and connected).

There are usually three speakers. Last year, a poet performed in the middle, but at this year's High School Matters, a local Shakespeare group performed. I loved how the theater group utilized gestures created by the audience members who volunteered to paraphrase Shakespearean language. It had my head spinning as to how I could incorporate this into my classroom. I will, but I need to contemplate the best method.
As always, NCTE throws so many ideas at me that I need Christmas break to recover and incorporate.

High School Matters incorporates two round-table discussions. This year, I found myself at two tables titled To Hell with Romeo and Juliet and Exploring Zines. If you have not attended High School Matters at NCTE before, I suggest you attend this session because not only will you meet round-table leaders in secondary English, but you will connect with everyday high school teachers who just happen to sit next to you, like me! When you walk into High School Matters, you will see a number on each table. This number is important. If you look on the paper printout on each table, it will describe each table's discussion focus. Who wouldn't want to attend To Hell with Romeo and Juliet? If nothing else, could I use this as ammunition not to teach the next month or so? Alas, it was not a session to throw out Romeo and Juliet, but to accurately place the characters in their proper place in Dante's Inferno. What a great idea! My second table discussion involved creating small publications for passion, not profit. That is the definition of a Zine. I was unfamiliar with Zines, so I am glad I attended this round-table discussion.

The last speaker at High School Matters was Jim Burke. He has impacted many English teachers as the creator of the English Companion Ning which has almost 24,000 members. Jim Burke is funny, witty, and real. His senior moment talk was almost too real for me. We both have children who left home this year which is a scary realization involving not only our own life, but our control or lack of control over our children. Jim pointed out how literature reaches not only the kids we teach, but the kids we raise, and also the lives we live. Jim Burke made the audience re-live books we are all familiar with, but in a different light because every time we read them, it is a different point in our lives, and that is significant.
He created an heroic journey chart that rivals Joseph Campbell. I hope he will post it online. I have too many arrows, notations, and annotations in my composition book as I tried to keep up with him, but fortunately, he also provided an incredible visual for students and teachers alike by taking his students to the football field.

Although I scribbled many notes before this, I have very little here. I think it is because it was so poignant. Burke had his students sit on the yard line of their age. Most sat on 17 or 18. Then he sat (on his age) more than double the yards away from his students; later, he said this was a bad idea and doesn't suggest it. But fortunately, this is the best part, he had his students look back and walk the few short yards to their 9th grade year, not many steps. Look at how far you have come (but on a big football field, it isn't much). Now, let's hypothetically say that you live 100 years. Look down the field. That is how much you have to learn. That is how much you don't know. What a significant visual to the know-it-all teenagers. Maybe they don't know much after all.

Now do you see why High School Matters?

Business-Based Reforms and Foucault's Pendulum

2010-12-05T21:31:00.006-06:00

Back and forth, back and forth. In the middle of the city of Paris, a pendulum swings back and forth over a table. Foucault's pendulum, named for physicist Leon Foucault, works with the rotation of the earth; in fact, the pendulum is one of the first experiments that visibly showed that the Earth rotated on an axis. So now, there it sits, strung up in the Pantheon in Paris, swinging back and forth, ad nauseum. That is the way with cycles: seasons, calendars, water, business-based reforms in schools.

Efficiency has long been a by-word in our profession (and several other human service professions), but efficiency is not the way of schools. There is no efficient way to teach students because they are people with flaws and faults that are all their own. Larry Cuban's book, The Blackboard and the Bottom Line, includes the story of an executive who found his assumptions of business-based educational reforms challenged. This executive, the owner of an ice cream company, was addressing a group of teachers about their learning. During the question and answer session at the end, a veteran teacher asked him what his most famous favor is. "Blueberry," the exec replied. "What do you do with the blueberries that aren't up to your standards?" "We toss them out." "We can't toss out our bad blueberries," she replied.

At this year's NCTE convention, this story came charging back into my mind. I was sitting in a room at the Yacht and Beach club convention center and I began to remember why I got into the classroom. But, that happened a lot at this year's convention. I think that is why I get so excited in November; NCTE is my oasis of educational nirvana, my moment of zen in a year of otherwise tenuous situations at work.

The business-based reform crowd does have something to contribute to education, but more often than not the focus on efficiency grinds educators down. Why would something that should be beneficial be so destructive? The reason is the focus. The focus for efficiency is time, not people.

According to Cuban (2004), the things that teachers are looking for in a reform are "effectiveness, fidelity [to original goals], popularity, and adaptability." These four are not unreasonable requests. I think people have the conversations about the first and third of the traits listed, but the second and fourth really deserve closer inspection.

First, what are the core assumptions of these "efficiency," or business-based, reforms? They are:

Schools are inherently and malignantly flawed
Teachers, administrators, and support staff are glorified blue collar babysitters who only bungle our big business reforms
Schools should be run like businesses, idols of perfection in the American landscape
The strong economic growth, high productivity, long-term prosperity, and increased competitiveness in global markets depend upon a highly-skilled workforce
Public schools are responsible for churning out these highly skilled workers
All public schools are failing to create highly-skilled workers with urban schools failing the most
Business-modeled reforms can be applied to schools to match workers with their jobs, increasing public confidence in schools (does anyone have Ayn Rand's number in the after-life?)
Higher tests scores automatically forecast better performance in the workplace (All core assumptions from Cuban, 2004; sarcasm added by the author)

These assumptions resulted in a standard reform model, adopted along Bipartisan lines (now we need to call Gary Sheytengart), that eventually allowed for the national government's hijacking of state and local responsibilities in the public schools. Systemic reform - establishment of curricular standards, imposition of standard texts, merit pay, expanded parental choice, and hostile takeovers of failing schools and districts - was born, leaping unwisely from the brow of a group of business "leaders," politicians, educators, and parents.

Imagine my dismay when I read an article in the Wall Street Journal about a new non-governmental agency, "cutely" titled StudentFirst, created and helmed by the belle of the business-based ball, Michelle Rhee. That was when I had it.

I have had it, and so should you. I am in a fortunate position (which is unusual) in Virginia. we are obstinately holding out against the Common Core. The more I read of it, the more I am glad we are. The reforms of the Common Core appear to be doing more to fragment and micro-manage our teaching than any set of standards I have seen before. Reading an opinion piece published online at EdWeek's website on November 12th, I began to hear some of my own frustrations and realizations given life in the much more eloquent voice of Kelly Gallagher.

Gallagher, one of those teachers on my people-I-need-to-thank-for-sustaining-me-in-my-first-five-years list, has come to a realization about the proliferation of standards that I thought I was crazy for thinking. Let me syllogize (alright neologisms). Sprinting-and-covering material, while really efficient, does not build learners. Multitudinous and specific content standards create a sea of material that must be covered quickly to ensure students are prepared by the time state tests arrive in January (Semester Terms) or May (Year-Long Terms). Therefore, having a lot of content-specific standards assessed on the multiple-choice end-of-course assessment does not allow for the development of deep thinking we expect from students.

So, driving uniform, efficiency-style reform down the collective throats of educators and students alike is not the answer. What is the effect of fidelity and adaptability to reform movements? Let's consider the fidelity to original goals first.

The original goal of the NCLB reforms was to increase educational parity across every line, but especially the gap between the "rich" students in the suburbs and the "poor" students in the inner city. Yet, from international comparisons of our students with those from other countries to the Condition of Education reports published by the National Center for Educational Statistics, our students results have stayed significantly stagnant. If we were true to our goals, we would not cling to a reform that has had almost nine years of time and no significant difference.

The same applies to adaptability. Reforms focused purely on outcomes run the risk of repeating the same errors because they do not ask about how they got involved. There is no talk of adapting reforms to geographical areas and certain populations in the service of meeting educational goals, there simply is a meeting or not. If you miss the goal, you have not reached adequate yearly progress. You are not adequate. In uninformed hands, the notion of schools literally classified as "inadequate" becomes a dangerous political weapon.

So, what now shall we do? I think Virginia has taken step in the right direction this year. Our state standards have been revised, more unified, and more focused on the academic skills necessary for success in the English Language Arts classroom. What's more, all of the key elements of the Common Core are present in the condensed Virginia standards.

The START treaty has been in the news lately and I think it is time we learned the lessons nuclear war has to teach: keep the infrastructure small and specific and verification can be easily achieved. Just as the START treaties seek to reduce the number of nuclear weapons so that they can be tracked more easily, so we should streamline our standards, reflect and remind ourselves of the goals we have for our students, consider that perhaps the most popular reforms are not those that are the most effective, and keep searching for those reforms which we can adapt to our classrooms to create greater success for students. If we don't get involved and take back what we can of our schools from the business-based reformers now, we cannot be surprised when, as in Max Berry's novel, schools become named for corporate sponsors like Nike, McDonald's, and Office Depot (I wouldn't want to play against the team from Nike High if I went to McDonald's High). And, lest we forget, maybe we should ask Christopher Whittle how those Edison schools have done in the for-profit public school business (think the popular song "Breakeven" by the Script).

Project for Awesome

2010-11-24T20:49:00.010-06:00

by Tara Seale
Have you ever wondered how YouTube chooses the videos that are featured on their website? I just visited YouTube, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure it out.
Look at the bold titles: Trending, Most Popular, Featured Videos, and What's New.
What would it take to create a YouTube video and have it featured on the front page? Who would even endeavor to have their video featured on YouTube's front page? I can tell you who. The NerdFighters and their Project for Awesome (P4A).
On December 17, P4A will once again try to take over YouTube and the trending topic of Twitter by promoting videos that represent charities. This is truly an awesome project because it brings attention to the needs of our world. I first learned about this project from Lee Ann Spillane, a high school English teacher from Winter Park, FL. At NCTE's National Convention 2009 in Philadelphia, she told me that her class was participating in P4A by creating one video that they would promote on December 17th. I didn't really understand what she was talking about, but when December 17th rolled around, I found myself remembering our conversation as I followed her numerous tweets and shout outs that proclaimed something great was happening, so at this year's NCTE National Convention 2010 in Orlando when Lee Ann and I both showed up to an early Sunday morning session to hear Kelly Gallagher, Penny Kittle, and Jeff Anderson present, I asked her about P4A again. I paid closer attention to the details this time. This year, each of Lee Ann's students is creating his or her own video to promote a charity on the P4A day. The students will embed the P4A logo into their video to designate it as part of the P4A project. She is also working with the technology department to gain access to YouTube for a day so that her students can participate in commenting, viewing, favoriting, and promoting their videos to propel P4A to the top of the YouTube and Twitter trending lists.
What an incredible experience for these high school students. Congratulations to Lee Ann for creating a genuine authentic audience that brings attention to worthwhile causes and involves students using 21st century technology. Imagine the connections the students will feel as together they unite to take over cyberspace for a day with something they have created.
Lee Ann first became involved in P4A when she realized that one of the founders was a former student, Hank Green. Hank and his brother John grew up in Winter Park, FL, and John is a young adult author of several books including Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns. The two brothers are responsible for the popular VlogBrothers Channel on YouTube and for creating the Nerdfighters.
What are Nerdfighters? They do not fight nerds, they actually promote nerds and fight World Suck which they explain in the video below. I encourage you to watch their video because I learned so much. For example, I now know the difference between an acronym and an initialism. They also brought to my attention that I sometimes have a high puff level, which I knew, but I just didn't have a phrase for it. Thank you John and Hank for putting this all into perspective for me, and thank you Lee Ann for being a teacher who takes risks to engage students in something as amazing as Project for Awesome.
Project for Awesome Website (This website will update to the 2010 P4A in December).

Updates for P4A: Video Announcement about 2010 P4a

NCTE 2010 Convention Presentations

2010-11-22T12:24:00.007-06:00

By Tara Seale
NCTE members and convention attendees can view all of the uploaded presentations at the NCTE Connected Community website in the near future. Currently, only convention attendees can view the uploaded presentations. If you would like to post your presentation but need directions, click on this link: Posting on the NCTE Connected Community.
You can view my presentations below. At the convention, I served as an associate chair for one session and presented in another session.
On Friday, I presented with Julie Stephenson. Our presentation was titled: New Frontiers in New Literacies: Growing Multimodal Readers and Writers.

On Saturday, I presented with Bill Bass, Sara Beauchamp-Hicks, Andrea Zellner, and Troy Hicks. Our presentation was titled Using Google in Ways that Haven't Even Been Invented Yet: Visionary Reports from Cyberspace.

For more resources, visit this website: Google Monsters: Reports from Cyberspace

National Common Core Standards

2010-11-03T21:32:00.008-05:00

by Tara Seale
According to the Education Week Blog Post, forty-one states have adopted the National Common Core Standards. My own state, Arkansas, has also adopted the Common Core Standards, and my school district adopted the standards in the draft stage even before our state adopted the standards. The teachers in our district began writing out a curriculum to match the national proposed standards. I am proud of the hard work by the English teachers in my district, and our ideas are similar to the draft curriculum that is now available online. I wanted to share this draft curriculum in case some of you are not aware that it is out there.
The Curriculum Mapping Project is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and it is an impressive draft document. Click on this link to view the English Language Arts Curriculum Maps for all grade levels.
If you click around and thoroughly explore the website, you will find wordles (word clouds) of the curriculum maps for each grade level. The largest word in a word cloud is the most repeated word; therefore, the largest word should be the most important element in the word cloud. See the high school word cloud below or click here: Common Core Wordle

HEY! What's the Main Idea?

2010-11-01T17:57:00.001-05:00

This really seems to be the big deal this year. I haven't been to a single function with other English teachers that hasn't eventually brought this complaint forward. Overwhelmingly, students are struggling with separating the main idea from other topics included in the essay, story, etc.

I am not sure why this happens. I've only recently begun trying to formulate a plan of attack for the problem.

The first place I looked is Jim Burke's The English Teacher's Companion. Jim's work has been indispensible before, so I figured I couldn't go wrong. I didn't. There were the usual strategies available for use, but most of the meaning-making strategies felt like class activities. What I was looking for was a strategy I could give them to fall back on when I wasn't there to help them push through a dense text.

I looked next at Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading. In the book, Kelly divides reading into a process like writing, complete with multiple drafts. This spark led me back to Jim's work on Tools for Thought. In that collection of strategies, the Pyramid Notes sparked a memory of another pyramid device. So, I was off again, in search of the muse.

The muse, in this case, was actually a man: Doug Buehl, author of Classroom Strategies for Interactive Learning. Doug's strategies are universal, across-the-curricula, and easily adaptable. The fourth chapter of the recent third edition is all about fact pyramids. I reread the chapter, noting that the key to this pyramid was the fact that the bottom contained general knowledge facts while the top contained the overarching idea. The middle section contains short-term, organizing concepts. For example, a fact pyramid on the Crusades would have large concepts like the causes, effects, and impact of the Crusades, while the middle section would list the Crusades: First, Second, Third, and Fourth. The bottom slice would include related terms and names like "Pope Urban II" and "Cruciata." Thinking about Jim, Kelly, and Doug, I began to work on a synthesis of the fact pyramid, the text frame, and the drafts of reading.

And that is as far as I have gotten. Another colleague and I are going to work on it tomorrow (yeah...Election Day; let's hear it for the work day). I hope to post more later in the week.

In the meantime, what do you think? Do you have any strategies for teaching the main idea? If the problem is as widespread as it seems, please share away.

(P.S.) Click the title to see the post on the NCTE Connected Community.

Teaching with Our Own Wisdom?

2010-10-17T16:21:00.003-05:00

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

This oft-quoted poem has been used for many hopeful celebrations of life: graduations, college acceptance, internships, fellowships, study abroad, weddings, births; the list seems interminable. One thing many people do not know about Robert Frost is that he too was a disillusioned modernist. His adherence to form did nothing to alter his message. Another possible interpretation, one I think does the text more justice, is about the inverse relationship of power and intelligence in received wisdom. The “sigh” that Frost makes later in life is not necessarily the sigh of satisfaction. Rather, it is the sigh of momentary indecision, the what-do-these-youngsters-expect moment that characterizes later life. There is not necessarily any wisdom in experience. Living a long time means nothing unless it is examined. Frost echoes this sentiment in another of his poems, “Mending Wall”:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself…
He moves in darkness as it seems to me~
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."

Between Waiting for Superman and the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Act [ESEA or N(o) C(hild) L(eft) B(ehind) for short], there has been a lot of talk of school reform, but little of it contains any wisdom. Aiding the sweeps of received wisdom about education are the counterarguments claiming that public schools are performing admirably; but what is our metric for admirable performance? I personally get easily confused when I listen to closely to this maelstrom, so let’s take a moment and rise above.

First, let us look at the current iteration of ESEA. Essentially, there are four pillars behind the Bush-administration-generated education agenda:
1. Raise Academic Achievement
2. Focus on What Works
3. Reduce Bureaucracy and Increase Flexibility
4. Increase Options for Students and Parents
The first pillar includes considerations of raised expectations for all students, closure of the various achievement gaps, and measurements and reports of achievement. The second pillar deals with topics like research-based educational strategies, funding proven strategies, and communicating findings of what works to teachers. The third pillar provides flexibility for teachers to do their jobs while moving away from a culture of compliance to a culture of accountability (whatever that means; a recent CCC journal article speaks in convincing and eloquent ways about the need to eliminate this word from our educational lexicon in favor of the word responsibility). The final pillar seeks to dismantle the idea of a one-size-fits-all approach to education through more choice and more parent communication. There is nothing specifically wrong with these goals, but there is a lot here that, eight years from implementation, seems laughable or frustrating to people in our position. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I presented information on a radically different, yet highly effective new approach to teaching that did not meet with some resistance, rather than the funding and support called for in NCLB.

We all have our frustrations with NCLB, but a lot of that frustration is misdirected. Much of what we see as difficulty created by the Act is really ineffective implementation. The states are still the primary sources of control in education and the localities are still the implementation arm of the states. It is the locality level that really needs direction. For example, at a recent meeting in my county, people were upset with the upcoming budget and the lack of funding we have. To make a long story short, people are afraid, as many are, that their jobs will be lost. The only solution is to advocate for funding. But, people think our schools are great. Just last week, I quoted an article that offers the same piece of received wisdom. Education is in trouble, we all say doing our best Chicken Little, but my school is fine. The reality is that our schools, while functional, are not necessarily great. At the high school level alone, only two of our five schools made their progress goals. The other three did not meet the standards they set the year before. Sounds like we could use funding to develop more effective ways to teach.

Now, we can agree that there are multitudinous reasons for schools not to meet there progress goals. I’ll even concede that the eventual 100 percent goal is, statistically speaking, impossible. The reality is that these are the conditions under which we toil. The problem is about the structure adopted by localities. We cannot look up to the national government, hands out like the mouths of baby birds, without first looking at ourselves. Are our policies at the local level truly effective for teaching and learning? Are our budgets balanced for the benefit of people or facilities? I don't care how many SMART boards you have, poor teaching is interactive, too. So it comes down to examining our practices and policies in localities.

In Virginia, the state test, or Standards of Learning—SOL for short (make your jokes…welcome back)—tests, are given at reasonable points in the school year. The problem is that my locality does not use a school year; they use a hybrid system. Some of the classes in my building are on a semester schedule—everyday until the end of January, four classes a day, eighty-seven minutes each—while others are on an alternating day schedule. This can be confusing. Some buildings use this hybrid schedule; other buildings have either one or the other. The SOL test in writing is given in the spring to year-long classes; for semester classes, it is given this week. Just over a month into the school year and we are giving the writing test. Not to mention, the testing happens on the National Day on Writing, a day designed to promote writing, not reduce it to a chore (irony, don't fail me now). Talk about setting people up for failure? At the local level, there was a considerable lack of wisdom used in this decision. Additionally, students from year to year may have English in the fall, then not again until the following spring. That is an entire calendar year between English classes. As teachers of English, we know the value of consistent application of skills and feedback of progress.

This poor planning is not the fault of high-stakes testing or NCLB or even George W. Bush. Short-sightedness is not partisan. The wisdom we have received tells us to vote with the union, point fingers at the federal government, and demand better for our children. I agree one out of three times. We should demand the best for our children; however, we forget that education is a matter of local importance: local funding, local boards, and local children. When we remember this simple fact, our view of the “problem” of American education can become, paradoxically, more complete. When a student’s essay is confused and jumbled, the source of the problem is usually too large a focus, not too small.

Like Frost’s speaker, we have occasion to use our everyday skills to speak for ourselves, show others the potential of our schools, and build systems that defy the expectations of cynical politicians and jaded directors. I can’t tell people what’s wrong with schooling, but I can certainly show them and let them awaken to the understanding themselves. I would be satisfied with “elves” or even “boogeymen.” The bottom line is that if schools in America are failing, it is because people have forgotten their responsibility (not accountability) for our children in lieu of some other, less reliable, source of wisdom.

Rhetori-WHAT?: Teaching Rhetorical Analysis to High School Juniors

2010-10-11T16:46:00.003-05:00

Those of you who teach AP English Language are probably not impressed with the title of this blog. Rhetoric is the heart and soul of our curriculum. The juniors I speak of are not AP students. Rather, in this post, I will outline a method I developed for teaching my students in standard English about rhetoric and how to analyze its use in writing.

I spend about a week introducing the terms and having students identify how and where the terms can be used. You can really play with this portion of the unit depending upon how you teach new concepts and terms. I use a combination of graphic organizer and PowerPoint presentation. The real fun happens after I get through the basics, when i am ready to tackle the actual analysis.

First, I hand them one of the "Nacirema" lectures. In particular, I hand them the one on the "Body Rituals among the Nacirema" by Horace Miner. The real fun in using this piece is the reaction the students have. Usually, about half way through, portions of the class are fighting off sleep. Until, suddenly, one student begins to laugh and shake his or her head. The heads pop up like gazelle who have heard a lion nearby. Laughter? With this boring lecture. But then, another student starts laughing, as though the laughter from one was enough to help others that this piece is not to be taken seriously. Suddenly, everybody is trying to figure out what they missed. We finish that lecture and move on to the "Sacred Rac." Again, students frantically try and discover why their classmates are laughing (some so hard they've fallen on the floor--not really). Finally, we throw out the big reveal. "Nacirema" is American backwards. These crazy rituals? You did about half on your way here. Suddenly, they want to know how they were fooled.

Here's your moment. Reintroduce the rhetorical terms. Have a discussion about some examples of the terms in the text. Come up with a main idea. Model a think aloud wherein you link the examples to the main idea. Show the students that analysis has a function. They get into this discussion, throwing examples out right and left. Then, break their hearts.

When you say, let's write, they'll be upset for a minute, but they'll get over it. I write up the following criteria on the board:

"Your analysis will...
___ Discuss the use of 2-3 rhetorical terms

___ Define each term

___ Provide an example for each term from the text

___ Explain how the example is representative of the term"

This brief analysis hones the students' skills in selecting the correct term to describe an author's style and it pushes them to choose good examples and then justify them. Win-win all around.

But wait...they didn't explain how the example shows an author using style to support a main idea?

Slow down.

After students have written the analysis and turned it in, we move on to another challenge. Now, we read a piece of more traditional satire: Larry Doyle's "The Babyproofer." They love this one. The jokes are in your face and the ones who babysit/have younger siblings really identify with the message. Once we read it, students are asked to identify the author's main idea. They spend time doing this in groups, discussing their ideas and trying to find a common idea. Then we spend time refining this idea using evidence from the text. Then, I write the following criteria on the board:

"Your analysis will...
___ Explicitly state the author's main idea

___ Discuss the use of 2-3 rhetorical terms

___ Define each term

___ Provide an example for each term from the text

___ Explain how the example reinforces the main idea of the text"

By the time the students finish this analysis, they've done all of the steps from the first and then supported the main idea. The main idea portion of this analysis helps students pick out examples that specifically focus on support for the main idea, rather than just a grab bag of quotations that may or may not support the main idea.

After these two, I assign a piece of their choice. They then perform all of the steps on their own and explain how they went through the process. The students really seemed to enjoy the process this year and their scores on the Unit I Test were appreciably higher because of it.

Waiting for Reason: Documentary Films and Lack of Critical Discourse

2010-10-11T16:29:00.003-05:00

There’s an old movie starring Humphrey Bogart called Dark Passage that features an iconic and, at the time, unheard of conceit. Bogart’s character, an escaped convict, spends the first portion of the film invisible to the audience. Why? We are watching the events of the film unfold in first-person; that is up until the moment when the bandages are taken off of our surgically-altered face and we are finally able to glimpse ourselves. It is in this moment of reawakening, of a fresh start, that the film, and Bogie, really open up and fly headlong through the rest of the narrative. This critical viewing of self is what film is all about. We see ourselves in characters locked in timeless struggles, rooting for the good guys and cheering the destruction of the bad guys. In our postmodern world, this view has slightly changed. We’ve moved out of the completely fictional and into the realm of the real, too. Documentaries share marquees with the latest action thriller; unfortunately, these documentaries are swallowed as truth, not discussed with a critical eye.

I could spend paragraphs, lines, words, letters galore talking about the lack of critical intelligence in America; however, I would just be another charlatan trying to get you to read or buy something. In the end, that seems to be what Waiting for Superman is all about. Truthfully, though, I wouldn’t know. Why do I feel the need to write about it? Frankly, between Oprah’s special episode, my daily interactions with parents, movie reviews, pundits talking, the odd guy on the street who has a vision for education, and the founder of Facebook donating $100 million dollars to Newark schools, I feel like I’ve seen the movie, had the discussion, and moved forty years down the road.

What this overhyped monster does reveal is a truth that is fairly timeless (if timeless counts as the early 1800s). Horace Mann, widely recognized as the father of the American public school, wrote in his 10th report all about why people should fund public education. These reasons are the same ones we emphasize now: youth are occupied, communities are safer, and the country becomes more affluent. The only difference is that in Mann’s day, nobody wanted a public school. They didn’t mind paying a tax; just don’t spend it on that wasted institution. Mann argued, enough people relented, and the American public school was born. Now, nearly 200 years later, everyone wants everything public schools can offer for every child because it is those children’s right to go to school. Even the UN says so. They formalized it as a human right.
While education may be a human right, it cannot be forced upon people or used to promote or shape a particular political view of a people. Yet, since the early part of the 20th century, we have tried to do both. Now, we are reaping what we’ve sown.

Students get it the worst. I can think of at least one ethnography (Ain’t No Makin’ It) that shows how social and cultural dissonance can bring groups down and keep them there (feel free to check the book out; the research and argumentation are so solid, it is hard to disagree with MacLeod’s assertion that schooling can hinder as much as it helps). The children in the film are not alone in their struggle. Whereas Guggenheim, the filmmaker, holds folks like Geoffrey Canada and Michelle Rhee up as heroes, I ask what kind of heroic policies shut down public schools and offer only charter school raffles as an alternative. The crying faces of those left unselected by the lottery make an excellent platform from which to proselytize the blasé American public; however, it does us all well to remember upon whom we are standing.

This preachy, self-serving rhetoric really leads me to administrators. These middle-management folks seem to have come a long way from the classroom. I know that, as of August of this year, the combined teaching experience of one administrative team in my county was a whopping 20 years (among 5 people). I’ve been teaching longer than 4 years, I must have more knowledge of my job than my administrators; however, we continue to labor under the false pretense of principal educators and not principal managers. I bet many of my administrators wish they had time to devote to studying the content which they oversee. They are not envious of ignorance. They simply do not have the time given all of the accounting they must do to keep the school “accountable.” They, instead, spend those summers that teachers supposedly have off going to workshops, hearing an idea, and deciding that, despite a lack of evidence, we must change tactics. I have only one question: Who provides the funding for that stuff? I mean, College Board I get; professional groups, like NCTE, I get; but these other random corporations who suddenly have the answers to educational problems? I am not so sure. So the questions about the affluence of American schools—or rather lack thereof—become less about the lack of resources than the careful consideration of how to use those resources. Why does X Corporation spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on this educational theory instead of providing the funding to schools that need it to hire and retain teachers, bolster infrastructure, and buy some books?

And then come the teachers. Yay! We are on the front line. Yay! We love children. Yay! We want to bring our expertise to bear and help these young people become adults; however, we have some demands. We must be heard complaining, fighting, and naysaying as often as possible. We must be allowed to possess perpetually bleeding hearts, but we cannot afford them because our pay is too low. We must be treated as professionals, despite the fact that some of us act like we never graduated from the grades we teach. We, as teachers, cannot absolve ourselves from responsibility; and yet, Guggenheim’s film will have exactly that effect on some people. They’ll get their rear-ends up on their backs and parade around as though they are blameless, as though they speak for all teacher-kind. And for the most part, we’ll let them. Not because we agree, but because we are tired.

In all seriousness, color commentary aside, the whirlwind on the media has been about this coherent. So, I did some digging. And it all goes back to Dewey and Thorndike, an epic struggle for the hearts and minds of our children.

Thorndike, king of the quantitative, crushed John Dewey’s assertion that schools should be about experiential learning and the nurturing of learning experiences, or teachable moments. You think that is not true, just look at the plethora of standardized tests students are required to take anymore. This clash is also why we are constantly asking about preserving the teachable moment. Daft administrators will try and tell you that you can still do that; however, Thorndike would disagree. Thorndike believed that “whatever existed at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality” (Lagemann, 2000, p. 57). Thus, a new era in education was born. This era was one driven by quantifiable IQs, measurable standards of achievement, and paced instruction. The motto was learn it or lose it. On top of that, nothing measurable was worth doing. Training students to become better people? Show me a measurement. Training them to appreciate literature, art, and music? Pshaw. Show me a measurement. Teaching students that they could grow beyond their basic capabilities? Liar. Show me a measurement. Thorndike refused to accept that all things in education could not be measured quantitatively (Lagemann, 2000). If the lesson involved anything outside of the “simple variables” of the educational process, he could not be bothered; “observation within naturalistic settings” was a waste of time (Lagemann, 2000, p. 59). In the 1906 text, Principles of Teaching, Thorndike boldly declared that “it is the problem of the higher authorities of the schools to decide what the schools shall try to achieve and to arrange plans for school work which will attain the desired ends” (qtd. In Lagemann, 2000). In typical administrative form, he followed that line up with “the teacher is to make these changes as economically and as surely as is possible under the conditions of school life.” Ok, Eddie. How does one do that? Thorndike never had those answers. Thus, a myth was born: the teachers are the ones who mess it all up.

And so, it falls to the English teachers of the world to help set the record straight. Why us? We teach critical thinking more than any other discipline. Really. In science, math, and history, they are so busy learning the basics of their subjects, that students don’t have the time, or inclination, to read critical writing about those topics. They come to us to read Hersey’s commentary on the effects of the atomic bomb, to write about the history of the Civil Rights movement in America as portrayed in To Kill a Mockingbird, and to critically view documentaries on the application of math to complex social problems like public schools. If we don’t teach students to question the motives behind Guggenheim’s inclusion of the post-lottery meltdown, we haven’t taught our students. Furthermore, when they turn as an angry tide of parents and try to beat us down, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

And then we let it get away from us. Since the media frenzy following, and sustaining, Waiting for Superman, I have not seen a single public forum dedicated to bringing frustrated parents, bedraggled educators, consumed administrators, and broken politicians together to discuss the schools in their areas. Why? Let me provide you with an excerpt from one of the articles provided in September 28th’s NCTE Inbox newsletter.

Parent Renee Cooper, whose son is an 8th grader at Hudson Cliffs PSIS 187, said the film, "used real-life situations to provide a holistic look at the problems that plague our education system.
"With the resources we have as a country, there is no reason why every child should not receive an excellent education in a state-of –the-art educational environment.
"I liken the work of the director to the heroism of Harriet Tubman — it helps bring awareness of how we might escape the problems, and thereby, it contributes to the solution.”
As for her son’s school, "my view of the faculty is that, by and large they have the highest professional standards."

Within the same quotation, we go from righteous indignation, to uneducated analogy, to the familiar education-is-broken-but-my-school-is-fine response. So, while the article in question may start out saying that the audience was “seething” or “in tears” after viewing the film, our inability to think critically will create the same stagnant pool in which we currently sit. Meanwhile, a student fails the marking period and there is an unholy reckoning the likes of which has not been seen since Torquemada and the Inquisition.

While the Inquistion rages on at a theatre near you, what can we do to really open up a dialogue on this problem? Can teachers really get involved and make a difference, or is the frenzied mass simply too eager to dump this problem on the shoulders of a few bad teachers and wash their hands of it? Has Guggenheim’s film really accomplished its reformist goals or has it simply swollen an already festering sore in the social conscience of the nation?
I for one look forward to seeing the film, but I think I’ll reserve my judgment until then. Maybe I’ll even discuss it with my neighbors. Who knows?

The 5 Minute Recap

2010-09-18T09:50:00.005-05:00

by Tara Seale
Recently, I used a flip video camera to create a quick recap of what happened in class. I messed up a few times, but I kept going. I knew that if I could quickly create and post short video clips as reminders for students who need additional explanation or students who are absent, then I would make it a part of my routine, but if I spent hours editing and making it perfect, then I would become frustrated with the time involved.
The short video clip below did not take long to create. After I finished recording, I connected the Flip Video Camera to a macbook and imported the video into iMovie. I uploaded the movie straight to YouTube from iMovie. It took less than 15 minutes from beginning to end to have this video on YouTube. I also put a link for students and parents on my Teacher Google Site page.

If you are interested in the directions for the essay, you can view the assignment at The Most Dangerous Game Mood Essay and the rubric is at The Most Dangerous Game Essay Rubric.

Precis Writing

2010-09-11T11:18:00.004-05:00

by Tara Seale

At the June 15, 2010 Common Core Standards meeting in Arkansas, Dr. Sandra Stotsky from the University of Arkansas discussed several areas of the new National Common Core Standards for English Language Arts. As part of her presentation, she discussed precis writing and shared an article by K. D'Angelo titled, "Precis writing: promoting vocabulary development and comprehension" Journal of Reading. Dr. Stotsky emphasized the importance of summary writing as a key writing and comprehension assignment in classrooms of all ages.

Last year, I incorporated precis writing into my 9th grade English curriculum, and I believe it helped my students develop reading comprehension and writing skills.
Kelly Gallagher in his book Readicide addresses the problem that English teachers struggle with when they try to balance literature and nonfiction. Gallagher has a weekly reading assignment that he calls "The Article of the Week." This assignment addresses real-world writings and forces students to consider ideas that affect them today. You can access Kelly Gallagher's suggested articles at: www.kellygallaher.org. Gallagher refers to Ed Hirsch's Cultural Literacy as a reason students must read nonfiction in addition to literature. Students need prior knowledge of texts that are part of our culture to understand allusions that will appear on standardized tests and throughout their lives. Kelly Gallagher, on page 50 of Readicide, lists several ways to create assignments that evaluate student reading comprehension of nonfiction Articles of the Week.

For Example:

After reading an interesting article, create a t-chart. On the left side, bullet the key points of the article. On the right side, list what the article doesn't say. What has been left out?

Pick three articles and rewrite their headlines. Explain why your headlines are better.

I incorporate nonfiction article reading into my classroom, but instead of using a variety of methods to test reading comprehension, I have introduced my students to precis writing. In four well-written sentences, students demonstrate that they comprehend the big idea, the tone, the audience, and the purpose of the article.
If you Google precis writing, you will read several versions of precis or summary writing. I adapted what I could find from teachers and professors on the World Wide Web to my classroom.
Because most 9th grade students are usually confused when they read a satirical piece, I decided we would all read an article from The Onion first, and then we would write a precis together. After reading the article (see below), I realized I wanted to use it, but I also wanted to edit out some of the words that were inappropriate for my 9th graders. I took the liberty to do so, and here is a Google Doc (G version) of The Onion article, "Underfunded Schools Forced to Cut Past Tense from Language Programs."
Next, I walked my students through annotating the article and answering important questions, such as, Who is the audience? What is the author's purpose?
Finally, we wrote a 4 sentence precis together and used it as a model for further nonfiction articles. See the yellow highlighted model sentences: Precis Model Sentences and Directions.
I was surprised by how many assignments students returned in which they adequately wrote out four well-written sentences that demonstrated their understand of the text. I used this assignment for homework during the 2009-2010 school year, and I plan to use it again this year.

Some of the articles I used during the 2009-2010 school year are below:

"Cassandras of Climate Change"

"The New Sputnik"

"Is Your Baby a Racist?"

"The Teen Brain: It's Just Not Grown Up Yet"

Resources for teaching English

2010-08-26T18:10:00.009-05:00

by Tara Seale
An earlier NCTE Secondary Section blog post titled "On your mark...," by Dan Bruno discusses books and resources to use throughout the school year. Definitely a great blog post to start out the school year, and I completely agree with the titles Dan suggests. Check out the link to read the post.

Building on Dan's awesome idea, I have decided to share my favorite resource books below:

Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose
This is a great book for teaching students how to close read a passage. Not only does Prose delve into great classics and even some lesser known works, she discusses how to slowly appreciate each word and line written by the author. Prose provides reasons to slow down and really understand an author's craft instead of rushing through to get to the next required read.

They Say, I Say by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein
This book teaches students how to embed quotes by building on the ideas of others to enhance their writing. I use this book to provide my 9th graders with templates for their own writing. My students begin 9th grade by reading Edith Hamilton's Mythology. They Say, I Say helped me create a handout for my 9th grade students: Embedding Quotes handout.

Readings for Writers by Jo Ray McCuen-Metherell and Anthony Winkler
We all have our favorite anthologies, and this is mine. I would love it if you left comments about your favorite anthologies in the comments. I have found this one to be a great collection of writings with thought provoking questions.

The Writer's Journey by Christopher Volger
If you focus on archetypes, the heroic journey, or Joseph Campbell's monomyth ideas in your class, then you need this book. The explanations are easy to understand and relate to pop culture, so students really appreciate and connect to the ideas presented in this book.

Readicide by Kelly Gallagher
I can't imagine a resource list for English teachers that could be complete without a Kelly Gallagher book. Everything Kelly Gallagher writes is applicable to all English teachers. Readicide explains how to elevate the reading experiences of all students. I particularly like chapter 4: "Finding the 'Sweet Spot' of Instruction."

My favorite way to share books that I enjoy reading or using as a teaching resource is through Google Books. To look through the online Google Book library I have created, click here: Tara Seale's Google Books Library. If you have a Google Book library, please consider sharing the link in the comments of this post.

Rhetoric, Logic, and Argumentation

2010-08-25T08:37:00.003-05:00

As a teacher of AP English Language and Junior-Level English, composition is a huge part of my curriculum. Last year, I began experimenting with using information from the AP English Language Curriculum (information on types of arguments and rhetoric) with my Junior-level classes. At this year's AP Conference, I was looking for a resource that would help my AP students get into rhetoric quicker and help my Juniors develop a sense of what rhetoric is and how writers use it. I found that resource (link in the title): Rhetoric, Logic, and Argumentation: A Guide for Student Writers.

This guide, published by Prestwick House, is very useful for any level of composition. It is a slim volume, running no more than 107 pages. It is well-designed, featuring blocks of text that introduce new terms and a summary definition of those terms between the first block of text and the next one. The text seems to be designed around the 10-2 rule of teaching: for every ten minutes of teacher talk, there needs to be at least two minutes of student summary. Once the student is done, there is also a handy glossary at the back defining all of the terms found in the text.

The book has a lot going for it, but it still has its flaws. The text does not get very deep into rhetoric, nor does it discuss the various types of arguments; however, that is why school districts hire us. This resource proves valuable for introducing the topics of rhetoric and argument.

The real gem in this text is the exercise set-up. For each unit in the guide, there are four final exercises. These exercises should just be labeled "climbing Bloom's ladder." In each sequence, the first exercise is called "Identification." These exercises ask the students to identify information that they have just learned. Next, they are asked to provide "Explanation" for something they have just learned. The third exercise calls on students to "Imitate" sound arguments, etc. Lastly, student's are asked to "Evaluate" certain examples based on their learning. Like I said, climbing the ladder.

The imitation piece will be the best part of the text for my students. As a composition teacher, getting my students to try new compositional techniques is difficult. The more chances I provide for them to imitate advanced composition techniques, the more likely they should be to try them out when it comes to essay/paper time.

All in all, I am pretty excited to try and integrate this resource into my classroom repertoire. I found this resource fairly helpful and I couldn't help sharing.

On your mark...

2010-08-22T09:29:00.003-05:00

It is almost here (and for some it is here). The school year is getting ready to begin.

When I first started doing this blog, I thought that it would be cool if there were an entry at the beginning of the school year where people posted either titles or links to some of the resources they use the most during the year. That is exactly what I am going to post here.

Books:

The English Teacher's Companion by Jim Burke:
A great resource for any level of experience. Chock full of great ideas and great tools for thinking and teaching.

Reading Reminders and Writing Reminders by Jim Burke
Two books that are very similar to The English Teacher's Companion, but broken down into between classes, at the copier, or after school chunks. Learning on the go.

Cohesive Writing by Carol Jago
I used to think good teaching of writing was hard. This book showed me just how easy it can be if you approach it systematically and in smaller steps.

Deeper Reading by Kelly Gallagher
If your students have trouble scratching the surface and looking beyond the text, this book has the strategies to get them into that deeper meaning. Very readable and instantly usable.

Voice Lessons and Discovering Voice by Nancy Dean
Goodbye pesky fears about helping students identify what makes an author's voice. Each exercise focuses on a specific facet of voice, has students answer questions about the effect of the specific facet, and then asks them to imitate the example. Instantly usable.

Series:

The People's Education website has a lot of materials for AP and non-AP classes. It can be found here.

The Applied Practice company has many supplemental materials to prepare students for just about any external assessment from the SAT to the AP exam. It can be found here.

There are a bunch of other good places to find resources. These are a few of the ones I've used extensively in the past. What resources do you run to when you are planning or are just plain stuck?

Argument and Teaching for a Democratic Society

2010-08-15T21:10:00.001-05:00

In the latest installment of the Indiana Jones series, our unflappable archeologist tangles with a couple of South American grave guards, saving the life of his sidekick, Mutt Williams. Mutt, a rebellious youth, turns and looks at Jones in surprise as he surprises and kills one of the attackers. In his shock and awe, Mutt stammers, “You’re a teacher?!” “Part time,” Indy nonchalantly replies. We cannot all be globe-trotting archeologists who must constantly save the day, but we all must be just as tenacious in our pursuit of scholarly purpose as we are in the instruction of our students. After all, if I am simply a person who teaches the mechanics of writing, I am neither worthy of a pilgrimage nor ecstatic about my life. Our purpose may not be the stuff of cinematic epic, but that does not mean it isn’t important.

Too often, we are not active critics of ourselves as a community of scholars. This spring, I heard President of the University of Virginia John Casteen deliver the commencement address during the ceremony on the lawn at UVA. What President Casteen said was the lesson of two decades at the University of Virginia was that knowledge cannot exist without action. In the case of American education, our greatest action is the shaping of our democratic culture. When we are not careful, we destroy our democracy rather than improve access.

American education can be said to have the furthering of social justice and democratic equity at its core. In order to improve and defend democracy, we must understand what we mean when we refer to it. “Democracy,” as a term, is often the victim of warping and deliberate tampering. Democracy is about one undervalued thing: knowledge. Knowledge is power in the United States because our entire way of life is built upon the idea that power comes from language, specifically, the language of the American Constitution. Like a cruel joke, our founding fathers set us up with a system of government based on contention, competition, and constant adversarial conflict. Thomas Jefferson, one of the earliest proponents of public education said it best:

“The basis of our government being opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them.”

This oft-quoted idea is the key to the convergence of the teacher as monk and minister. We must seek to reach our students from the perspective of the expert of knowledge; like a monk in medieval monastery, we must dedicate ourselves to constant scholarship. We must also interact with students, guiding them to an understanding of how this content can help them direct and shape their lives. The result of this approach to teaching is the capability that Jefferson refers to above. We teach students so that they can become models of democratic citizens, citizens whose need and love for equity encompasses not just who they know, but what they know. The strength in our way of life is the strength of our schools, a universal and well-rounded educational program that equally engages all the interests and needs of a person.

John Dewey said that “Education…is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.” In a democratic society, that living is based on its deepest and most strongly held convictions. There can be no understanding of these values if the student lacks a wide base of cultural knowledge. Math, science, English, and Social Studies are all essential, but they are not enough. Small Engine Repair, Graphic Imaging, Choir, and Visual Art are also essential, and necessary to draw complete pictures of ourselves. John Dewey realized that “education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race”; thus, an education cannot take place where the individual has not been given the ability to access the social consciousness of the society at large. If the individual has no means by which to engage the corps of society, then that corps remains sacrosanct, untouchable, unimpeachable.

The single largest unifying element of American culture is our unique Constitution; however, as well-known author and scholar Neil Postman said, “the American Constitution is not a catechism, but a hypothesis.” Consider the recent economic collapse. Newspapers, magazines, and books have addressed the murky economic moves that led us to this mess because we, as a democratic society, have a social duty to understand the problem and repair the damage. I don’t know the differences between economics and accounting, but I do understand how to read. In reading about the economic collapse, I have learned what went wrong, where, when, why, who was involved, and how it grew from the first moment to the inevitable fall. Am I an expert? No, but I have let them inform me and I have made my own opinions. Most importantly, I can structure a persuasive argument to convince others of the correctness of my position.

Democratic society exists to pursue the common interests of those who live within it; that pursuit suggests argumentation because we must come to some consensus of what those common interests are. These societies only work when these ideals are considered more worthy than the people who argue about them. If Ad hominem is more enticing than the reduction of poverty in our cities, then we have lost sight of the spirit that makes US society so unique. If we spend time bickering about the virtues of this politician over that, as though we were preparing for a fantasy legislation league, then we have belittled the aspirations of those audacious statesmen who entrusted us with an experiment in cohabitation that has not yet been equaled in human history. If we allow our emotional response to cloud our rational humanism, then our society of law ceases to keep us safe and sets us up to become the victims of the shadows in our cognitive processes.

So, we must seek to teach the critical nature of every subject we teach. The history teacher must teach historical inquiry, not the recitation of facts. The math teacher must teach mathematical reasoning, not just how to get an answer. The science teacher must teach unrestrained curiosity, not just what is already known. The English teacher must teach the pursuit of knowledge, not just how to read a novel or write an essay, and the best ways to express that which we believe to be true. We must ask ourselves if the ways we teach serve the critical development of the student, and, if not, how we must change. Democracy is about placing the ideal above the individual while respecting as many individuals as we can; people cannot learn to respect something larger than themselves if no one ever teaches them that these things matter, or how to tell the difference. If we are to teach to serve our democratic society, we must teach as both monks and ministers, guiding our students on the path to being proficient learners and rhetors.

Toulmin and Howard Zinn

2010-08-08T19:54:00.003-05:00

This most recent issue of English Journal is chock full of Toulmin. Many of the articles use Toulmin, others reference his name, but it seems like he is somewhere on every page. With a theme like logic and critical thinking, Toulmin is a natural choice for discussing how we can get our students to approach logical thought. Last year, my colleague and I came up with a great lesson featuring Toulmin and their summer reading, A People's History of the United States by the late Howard Zinn.

There is a bit of deep background on how we came up with the lesson. The year before this past year, a parent in the community raised an objection to the use of Howard Zinn's text as assigned summer reading. This person cited Zinn's wearing-my-Marxism-on-my-sleeve approach to history as offensive. My colleague stated that this attitude is essential for students because it is so very contrary to what they have been taught in the past; or, as Vygotsky would say, the students were being placed in a zone of proximal development. They came back from the summer, primed and looking for an intellectual fight.

The trouble was...what would they fight about? Were they focused on the point-of-view Zinn was putting forward, or were they simply miffed about some of the things Zinn said? More often than not, especially considering our proximity to Washington, D.C. and Quantico, the students just saw Zinn as an "unpatriotic jerk." What about his service to his country? What about his years in the classroom, educating American students? The questions start flowing back at us. the inevitable question is: "Well, who's right?"

That was when we decided to do a lesson called, with apologies to Capital One, "What's in Your Wallet?" Students are broken out into groups of about 4-5. They are given a sheet of paper with details on it, such as:

Brown Leather
Pictures of a woman and two children
Pictures of a Porsche
Pictures of a beach house
Three $100 Bills
Two $50 Bills
Ten $20 Bills
Business Card for Accounting Firm
Three Credit Cards from different companies

They are then asked to interpret the contents of the "wallet" and tell the class about the person who owned it. This is where Toulmin comes in. Students usually want to say something like this guy is a stuck-up business man who cares more about his possessions than his family, or something very similar. We ask them to provide the data that support this claim. Then we ask them to provide the warrant that links the data to the claim. When they do this, they suddenly realize how pre-programmed they are to jump to conclusions rather than look for what they can actually see. Looking at the process of stating a claim, examining the data, and analyzing the warrant helps students to go back to the Zinn book with a critical eye.

We build on the concept after that, but this gets the students thinking in terms of what can be proven to be true with the data, but also what else can be proven true. They begin to view history as the interpretation of a set of data that can be interpreted in radically different ways. This realization increases both their willingness to read history and their ability to read critically.

How do you encourage critical thinking in your classrooms? What connections do you try to emphasize when you teach logic? I look forward to the conversation.

Education vs. Training - To Think, Learn, or Both?

2010-07-29T22:08:00.003-05:00

As teachers of English, we know words have power. The two that lead this post are two I have been thinking about a lot lately. Let me explain why.

I did not have TV for a number of years. My wife and I had trouble with our cable provider and, since no resolution could be reached, we turned in our equipment and said see ya later. That was two and a half years ago. (I find it interesting in a country run on a "free market system" that we could not get cable from any other provider unless we moved miles from where we were. Just a side thought.)

In any case, when we moved into our home in May, we had TV connected. (This was mainly for guests. You won't believe, when you have not TV, how many people will come visit and ask about the TV. "You don't watch any TV?" "Some DVDs." "No cable?" "Wow." [Insert shaking head].)

Since the box has been back on, I've been distracted, not by gratuitous sex, violence, and police procedurals, but by commercials for the University of Phoenix online. The crux of many of these commercials has been that the University of Phoenix has technology...and they know how to use it. Oh, and they have professors who still work in their field. (Feels a little bit like the old "can vs. do" argument.)

Believe it or not, I started asking myself questions about these commercials. I know what you are thinking: This stuff gets this guy thinking...whatever. The commercial goes on and emphasizes the University of Phoenix's ability to make people ready for careers in the 21st century. That is what got me. Is that why we get an education? We learn Shakespeare, the quadratic equation, the scientific method, and Pearl Harbor so that we can get that cubicle with the view?

If we look at an education as solely job training, we serve a false idol. The student who will become the CPA for Microsoft probably doesn't need Shakespeare. The student who works as a preschool teacher probably doesn't need the quadratic equation. The student who will stay-at-home probably doesn't need the scientific method. The student who will do research on non-Hodgkins lymphoma probably doesn't need to know about Pearl Harbor. I only have one question: Who are we to decide that students should not be exposed to certain cultural capital?

On the TV today, I saw an episode of Cash Cab featuring two of the most vapid people I have ever seen. When asked what "level-headed pamphlet" Thomas Paine wrote, the gentlemen in the cab were stumped. They used a "mobile shout-out" and called a friend of theirs who had Dr. in front of his name. What did these three gentlemen give as the answer to that question? You guessed it...The Declaration of Independence.

This all leads me to what I think I will use as a theme for the month of August. As we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I am going to make each of my posts focus on the relationship of content knowledge to critical thinking.

Education has, at its heart, the goal of encouraging critical thinking skills. Training is about knowledge alone. If I am training for a certificate, I am not being educated; rather, I am being inducted into a set of terms, ideas, and concepts related to a specific field. When I am receiving an education, I am learning to seek knowledge and do something with it. When I say "do something" I mean in a way that will affect that body of knowledge. I worked at a school once where a colleague's nephew, a lawyer, was published in a prominent legal journal. The article talked about a particularly difficult legal matter; he used a literary allusion to Scylla and Charybdis in the title. Not only did he communicate his point, but he did it with style.

On the other side of the issue, there are people who say that we don't need to teach knowledge, but how to think. If we follow this logic, the thinking becomes very difficult. What are we to think of if we have not learned what things are. But seriously, the argument on this side is that students graduate with a lot of facts, but no context. The context and the abilities to synthesize and evaluate information are the hallmarks of higher-order thought. Teach those skills, they say. Who can argue with that.

So, as we get ready to (duhn duhn duhn) go back to school, I will ask this question: How much of our content do we give up to focus on critical thinking skills? What should our focus really be? If we teach thinking skills instead of knowledge, can we blame anyone but ourselves for the shallow thoughts that result? I don't know, but I look forward to the discussion.

This will make you laugh

2010-07-27T10:52:00.006-05:00

by Tara Seale

It is the last week of July. Summer is slipping away, so I am sharing three videos that make me laugh and also remind me so much of my students.

This first video is a dramatic reading of a break up letter. I wonder if I could get this guy to create dramatic readings of some my students' writings. There are a few swear words in the video, so I decided to just post a link and not embed the video: A Dramatic Reading of A Real Break Up Letter.

This second video is an older SNL skit in which Jerry Senfield is a history teacher. You will recognize some of the students in the classroom, and it is sure to make you chuckle. If you have trouble viewing the video below, you can also view it at this link: Jerry Senfield SNL Skit

This last video is a funny rap about Arlington, VA. Although it really has nothing to do with students, school, or classrooms, it could be used as a project in a classroom. I can just see a funny, parody rap video of Maycomb, AL. Students would really have to understand the setting and characters of To Kill a Mockingbird to create a video like the one below.

AP Annual Conference 2010 - Part 1

2010-07-20T19:45:00.002-05:00

This past week-end, a murder of AP teachers descended upon the Marriott Wardman Park and Omni Shoreham Hotels in Washington, D.C. to pick over each other’s brains. These teachers were gleaning all they could from the 2010 AP Annual Conference. I attended, representing my school as an AP English Language teacher. By virtue of my focus, many of my observations will be couched in terms of that course’s sessions; however, there were many other events going on, too. I will do my best to give a fair reporting of what went on. Perhaps others who attended could reply to this posting and put forth their views on the conference.

My conference experience began on Thursday. I attended the Pre-conference session for AP English Language: Experienced. The presenter was very informative and helped everyone really dig into what a synthesis essay does and how to better prepare students for it. I’d never really considered using novels as a jumping-off point for a synthesis essay. The process was very easy.

First, you have to read the novel (I’m sure this is not surprising). Then, do the whole literary-theme talk with your students. Consider The Great Gatsby. One of its most prominent themes is the decay of the American Dream (love those cheery modernists). What you would do is select a passage from the novel, find some other short pieces that embody that theme, and develop a prompt on the theme.

Example:

“Many Americans work their entire lives to make their dreams into reality. Using the passage on page such-and-such to page what-not, develop an essay in which you assess to what extent American society still promotes the successful pursuit of dreams. Use the supplementary documents to support your argument.”

Perhaps you include Lou Gehrig’s “luckiest man” speech. The man lauds aspiration and hard work in a very humble and refreshing way; however, he is being cruelly robbed of his dream by the very mechanism that helped him attain it. The comparisons draw themselves.

The actual conference started on Friday. On the first day, I attended three sessions (which were hard to select based on the incredible selection): a session on the results of the AP Language Exam, a phenomenal session on teaching satire, and a session on teaching irony in a vertical team (Pre-AP through AP Literature and Composition).

The session on the test was helpful in recognizing the places where students are still struggling. In particular, the presenters mentioned that students need help on:

1. Archaic Prose

2. Argument

3. Writing Exam Answers vs. Writing Exam Essays

The archaic prose piece is about comprehension and analysis; specifically, if students cannot comprehend the text, they probably cannot analyze it. There was a suggestion made about using the 2006 Free Response Question from William Hazlitt’s “On the Want of Money” to help students understand what they might come up against. One of the presenters stated that a three-column chart (Headings of “Rhetorical Moves,” “Effect,” and “Exigence” (or how the move and effect tie into the overall purpose), helps his students develop a method for approaching archaic text.

In the realm of argument, the presenters suggested a focus on anticipating the “naysayer” and integrating deep examples. One presenter even said that he frequently tells his students that one deep example is more effective than three shallow ones. When anticipating the “naysayer,” writers are simply thinking about what someone else could say to the argument they are writing. The idea is that thinking this way will help students to determine if they have fully and deeply explained their ideas.

When answering the synthesis and the argument question, students need to write an essay; in other words, they must construct a strong, fully-formed composition that fully illustrates a point. The presenters mentioned that many students try to do this for the rhetorical analysis, too, but that it is not necessary. Now, that doesn’t mean throw essay writing conventions to the wind, but it does mean that students need to focus more on explaining the rhetorical moves a writer makes, the effects they have, and the overall purpose of the way the piece is written (that chart again). The emphasis for the rhetorical analysis is heavily weighted on analysis and less so on written style of the essay.

That was the pre-conference workshop and the review of the exam results. I am going to distill my notes from the other sessions and post those separately. In the meantime, feel free to post your reactions to this information or ways that you tackle writing and rhetoric in your classrooms.

And a final question I have been wrestling with from before the conference: Should rhetoric and writing be the focus in the classroom of regular grade-level courses? We don’t have these ideas in the Virginia standards, but I don’t see the point in withholding information students will be asked about in freshman composition. What do you think?

Common Core and the 21st Century Student

2010-07-18T22:05:00.025-05:00

by Tara Seale

On June 15, 2010, The Learning Institute brought a panel of experts to the Bryant School District to discuss the National Common Core Standards. Educators and educational leaders in Arkansas attended the event to listen to Carol Jago and Dr. Sandra Stotsky discuss the English Language Arts Common Core and Dr. Stephen Wilson and Nancy Livingston discuss the Mathematics Common Core.
NCTE President Carol Jago's presentation focused on the 21st Century student. She said that webpages are teaching us to read in an F pattern. We read across the top, down the side, across the middle, and down the side again. Quick skimming works for online content, but not for great works of literature. Jago also referred to an advertisement that said, "Read Less, Know More." I Googled this ad and found out that it is the slogan for a company called Newser. I am not sure if this is the same ad that Carol Jago referred to, but it seems like it could be. Newser summarizes news stories for people who do not want to struggle through a lengthy article in the New York Times but only want to know the gist of the article as summarized by an employee from Newser. The founder of Newser, Michael Wolff, claims that he is going to put newspapers out of business, which seems to contradict the strategy of his business enterprise. You can view Mr. Wolff explaining the value of Newser in this CNBC interview below.

Carol Jago said that this generation may be too distracted to read. She provided a handout that included startling statistics from the Kaiser Family Foundation Study, such as, the average 8-18 year old spends approximately 7 1/2 hours utilizing electronic media during a 24 hour period. Carol Jago claimed that our youth is paying a "mental price" as they "twitter away their focus," but the National Common Core Curriculum may provide some hope by bringing what Mark Bauerlein called the The Dumbest Generation back into focus. Jago shared several lessons aligned with the National Common Core Curriculum that would force students to focus. For example, she used artwork from Jacob Lawrence This is a Family Living in Harlem and the poem "Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden to compare the details and images used by the artist and poet. This lesson corresponds with the National Common Core Reading Standard for Grades 9-10:Literature on page 38 of the Common Core:

7. Analyze the representation of a subject or a key scene in two different artistic mediums, including what is emphasized or absent in each treatment (e.g. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts" and Breughel's Landscape with the fall of Icarus).

In my classroom, I've discovered that this multi-tasking generation would prefer not to focus and would rather read short snippets and move on, but when provided direction and encouragement, students maintain concentration as they try to decipher difficult text, and the Common Core looks promising for providing a curriculum that encourages students to deepen their comprehension. Unfortunately, this skill is threatened by Newser and other 21st Century distractions. If Newser has its way and manages to change an entire generation into skimmers who let others do the heavy thinking, I wonder who they will employ to condense those lengthy articles?

Podcast Interview Script

2010-07-07T20:07:00.008-05:00

by Tara Seale

Have you ever asked a student to write a script for a podcast or a video? I have, and most students want to get started now and avoid the actual script writing process... you know... they wing it.

Winging it rarely works, but occasionally, it is best to let 9th graders learn from mistakes. Well, maybe more than occasionally since doing it on their own and creating a mess seems to be what most teens choose to do regardless of directions and advice; of course, the students who see the value in script writing always perform better and receive a higher grade. Usually students who do not spend time creating a worthy script will ask for a re-do after they have viewed better presentations from more prepared groups, and I assure them that they will have a future opportunity in my classroom. I always hope it becomes a learn from mistakes lesson, but sometimes lessons have to be repeated.

Recently, I decided to join a trio that includes myself and two co-workers in a podcast about technology and education. We are still working on our first podcast idea, but I decided to write out a script for what I would contribute. As adults, we realize the value of script writing as opposed to winging it. We are in the process of merging our ideas for our first podcast and creating a podcast name that includes something catchy, hopefully with alliteration.

I thought I would publish my rough script contribution here so that the readers of this blog would see what I consider worthy to contribute to our first podcast. This script is my first attempt. I haven't merged my co-podcasters' ideas with mine yet, so I know I will revise. The final script may not even resemble what I have shared, but I see value in the information below, so I wanted to share it with all of you.

Name: Tara Seale

Employed: Bryant Schools - high school English teacher & part-time tech specialist

Credentials: GCT, NCTE Blogger, wrote an official Google Blog post, & recognized in an edu magazine: NEA Today.

Why am I doing this podcast? To help Tait and Mark because they haven’t published an official Google post or been recognized in any magazines. Ha! Actually, they are the people who keep Bryant technology up and running & I couldn’t do anything cool or 21st Century-isc in my class without their support and expertise. Behind every great teacher is an awesome tech department & Bryant has an awesome tech department, and we just owe it to the world to share our awesomeness.

Why am I excited about web 2.0? I started investigating Web 2.0 to understand the world that my students are a part of, and I guess I am a part of it to. Actually, all educators are a part of the new Web 2.0 world even if they understand it after the fact or never understand it at all... regardless... it is the reality of the 21st Century.
As I realized that the education system as a whole was an after the fact system, I wanted to be a part of the educators who anticipated the latest web 2.0 tools as they happened or even before the app or next web feature was invented, so I knew I needed to connect with educators who were out there finding out the latest information.
I knew I had joined the Web 2.0 Educator Geekdom Society when I tweeted out a great new web find and 20 people re-tweeted my tweet, and I yelled, “Yes!”

So what would I consider the best web tool for a 21st Century teacher? When I searched my brain for the best of the web, I immediately thought of all of the free Google tools available for my students and myself, but if I really wanted to explore how I learned about all of the free Google apps, I would have to say Twitter played a large role. So picking just one tool right now, although it is difficult, I would have to tell teachers, get a Twitter Account.

Why? Twitter is the one connective device that has allowed me to get to know other teachers across the globe. I can even remember the first time someone from another country commented on something I posted. It was an amazing moment for me. An Australian teacher told me that she liked my last tweet and had also read my blog. I had to take a double take and think about it. Was that teacher really from Australia? Since then, I have followed and communicated with many teachers from Australia and other countries. I can remember the first time I responded to something Sue Waters tweeted, who is probably one of the best known Australian educators (she is the Edublogger), and Sue Waters responded back to my Tweet, so cool.
Twitter is an incredible tool, but it is just a partial tool that really requires tweetdeck, seesmic, or another advanced twitter feature in order to operate efficiently. When I talk to a teacher who is new to Twitter and trying to connect and communicate with other teachers on twitter, I realize that Twitter alone is just not enough, but I also know that baby steps are needed. First, an educator needs to understand the basic principals behind Twitter, the Web 2.0 tool before they can venture into adding a twitter app to their iphone and start re-tweeting, shortening URL’s, etc... Probably the best starting point for a teacher on Twitter is to read the Twitter Teacher’s Guide by Donna Cox from Queensland, Australia. I obviously have a fondness for Australian educators.
http://www.k-3teacherresources.com/teachers-guide-to-twitter.html
Teachers tell me all of the time... who has time for that (Twitter)? And, I know they are correct because it took a good month for me to understand and begin to tweet effectively, but once I realized how Twitter worked, I knew I had a gold mine. The secret is not to let it take over everything. I see it as a river of incredible information. I jump in when I have time to swim around, and then I head for the shore and dry off when I need to get back to my husband, kids, and personal life. I know I am missing the great ideas circulating out there in the Twitterverse, but I also know the ideas are endless. They will still be there the next time I jump in.

Who do I follow? If someone follows me, and he or she is a teacher, I follow them back. Occasionally, I am on vacation or busy with school, and I do not have time to shift through the people who are following me, but I do try to follow every educator who follows me. It is impossible to read all of the tweets of the people I follow, so I use twitter lists, groups, and hashtags to shift through all of the tweets coming my way. For educators new to Twitter, I would suggest going to: http://twitter4teachers.pbworks.com/ and following teachers or educators in the area you are most interested in teaching.
My Twitter ID is @tseale

Dan Bruno's Twitter ID (the other NCTE Blogger) is: @Daedalus605

Click here to Follow Carol Jago on Twitter

The Future is...Overcast?

2010-07-01T09:14:00.003-05:00

The future is usually portrayed as a dystopic nightmare of oppression and limited freedom. In Max Barry’s novel Jennifer Government, the future is dystopic, but very livable. You see the government, that stalwart body of justice, law, and order, is now privatized. Nothing can be done unless the revenue is raised to do it. Someone kills your loved one; you better have the money to mount a trial. Of course, the power in this world has become vested in those places that have the most money, corporations. So the battle-lines are drawn—the government takes on the corporations with unadulterated fervor.

And they need to be opposed. The corporations, bearing their actual names (a genius device), gives guerrilla marketing a whole new, almost literal, meaning. From the murder of fourteen teenagers to sell shoes to the attempts to assassinate the government president, the corporations will stop at nothing to gain that niche market. There are even alliances of companies that use the NRA (yes, that NRA) to wage war on each other. Amid all of this corporate chaos, Jennifer Government emerges to restore order, or at least snag the bad guy behind it all.

The names are where Barry’s genius really emerges. As I said before, Barry uses actual corporation names. Nike sells shoes, the NRA sells its services as corporate mercenaries, ExxonMobil launches a computer virus to cripple Shell. The list goes on and on. And the characters…Jennifer Government? She works for the government. John Nike. Violet (She is unemployed). Billy NRA. Claire Sears. Whichever corporation you work for is the last name you adopt; even if you transfer jobs. One minute you are Bob Nike, then you are Bob Wal-Mart. The eeriest aspect of this naming device is the schools. Schools are owned by corporations as well. Kate Mattel (Government) is Jennifer’s daughter.

This balance between our admiration for the larger-than-life heroes and our wariness at a society that owns our children is masterfully maintained throughout. One minute, you are rooting for Jennifer Government and her partner, Calvin. Then you are sympathizing with Billy NRA as his quest for finding a good skiing destination leads him further down the path to becoming a NRA assassin.

Perhaps the most chillingly balanced scene in the entire novel is near the beginning during the massacre at the Nike Town store. One of the characters, Buy Mitsui, a stockbroker, attempts to save a young girl who has been brutally shot in the back of the neck, all in an effort to sell more Nike shoes. As he tries to heroically staunch the bleeding, everyone else ignores his calls for help. Then the real scare starts. Buy dials 9-1-1 and tries to get an ambulance. He can’t get an ambulance mobilized unless he pays for it. Buy is more than willing to do so, but the operator requires pre-payment. The scene ends with Buy futilely reading his card number into the phone as the operator continuously messes it up while the girl bleeds out on the floor.

That darkness emerges frequently, but not nearly enough. One of the flaws of the novel is its tone. It is a satire, but, unlike Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, it never brings us to the edge of the abyss to let us sneak a peek. The latter portion of the novel gives way to raucous action sequences that bring up the ghosts of Riggs and Murtaugh more than Yossarian and Orr.

For all that distraction, we still get a smart critique of the culture of “capitalism” that seems to predict the real-life horrors we’ve seen in the past 4 years. Villains like John Nike are nothing more than fiction-clad Bernie Madoffs, bringing destruction through their own personal quests for more. As you turn the last page, you realize, with sudden satisfaction, that you’ve read a satire of capitalism that is willing to give that system a chance. The usual down-with-capitalism-socialism-will-save-us shtick gets old after the fifth time you teach 1984. Jennifer Government is a rollicking, fast-paced read with a smart economic bent. You’ll like it, and I bet students will, too.

Knowing is Doing

2010-06-26T14:30:00.004-05:00

As I wind down every school year, I usually reflect on how I do some things in my classroom. Here is something I wrote down reflecting on whether or not we can tell if teachers "know" their content.

I remember taking English classes with gimmicky worksheets designed to help me read this part of Shakespeare or that part of Homer, etc. I remember these worksheets quickly giving way to comprehension tests that never seemed that hard if you read the book. I then remember showing up in my first college English class and being blown away by what was expected of me. I never really learned how to do the study of English literature and language; I was woefully unprepared.

When I finally figured it out, I was hungry for it. I wanted to learn why Chaucer calls the doorway of Cressida’s house "quaint." I wanted to experience Shakespeare because he was the only superfamous writer I knew of who could incorporate romance, drama, tragedy, and fart jokes in a single play. I fell in love with writing. Once I understood, I became more and more interested.

Then I returned to high school. I didn't teach every lesson this way, but I found myself using some of those worksheets again. Students were uncomfortable with doing the study of English, but they sure loved doing the worksheets.

After 5 years of teaching, I can safely say that teachers who best know their subject are those who don't need the worksheets. Let me explain.

All academic study (science, history, English, mathematics, foreign language) becomes more and more ambiguous as you go higher. Most people are uncomfortable with ambiguity, so they try to avoid it. I can think of no better way to avoid ambiguity in the English classroom than by turning to worksheets. Those simple fill-in-the-blanks; those elegant comprehension maps. They take ambiguity and box it. They take that complex, central concept and they sterilize it. The best teachers I have known are those who take the ambiguity and place it at the center of their classroom activities without the sterilization endemic in too many worksheets. I say too many because the occasional thinking map is a good stepping stone, while constant thinking maps just become monotonous.

So, how does this ambiguity appear in the classroom? There are numerous discussion-based ways of making ambiguity the center of teaching. One of the best ways is to create essential questions for a unit. When teaching a novel, I usually come up with a central question to guide our reading. For example, when we read The Crucible this year in my English 11 class, we asked ourselves “When and why rebellion is necessary?” Our investigation of this question led to many great discussions of many core American values (including the War for Independence). Navigating these complexities is easier when you begin with a question in mind.

There are also seminar-style lessons that can be used. My personal favorite is Socratic Seminars. These seminars can be used to teach deep discussion methods or even good questioning techniques. When my AP seniors read Paradise Lost, we held a Socratic Seminar on whether or not Milton thinks Satan is a sympathetic character. There were great questions and great points made throughout our 60 minutes of seminar. The questions are central again, but this time students practice coming up with some solid answers. Watching the students have this discussion without teacher input (one of the caveats of the seminar format) has really shown me how well I have communicated some of the key concepts in a literary work.

There are also ways to have students wrestle with ambiguity all on their own. The I-search paper and project is a really fun way for students to wrestle with ambiguities that they want to explore. The presentation portion of the project is especially important. When they are in front of the class answering questions about sensitive topics, they really struggle with the content they’ve undertaken to study as they try and formulate answers. Watching students develop these projects and then defend them shows me that they are comfortable with ambiguity.

As I enter the summer, I develop a list of content-growth opportunities. These are things like a new novel to read, a seminar on some aspect of my teaching, exhibits in museums I'd like to attend--even opportunities to teach different classes. First up on my list this year is reading Jennifer Government by Max Berry. My mentee this year recommended this novel and thus far it is not disappointing. Following that, I have the AP Annual Conference in nearby Washington, D.C. I hope that the experience there will be as rewarding as my other AP experiences have been. The bottom line is that knowing comes from continually doing the things we profess to teach.

What are you doing this summer? How do you keep current with your content? What will you be doing to reinforce your knowing? New ideas are the most refreshing thing about summer, so let's hear yours.

Happiness and Education, or Why Nel Noddings is the best author for the end of the school year

2010-06-06T19:57:00.003-05:00

I was sitting in my room the other day...just sitting. I was looking out over the desks, counting the small shreds of Otis Spunkmyer muffin laying on my carpet (a daily ritual thanks to the "muffin cart"), and generally wondering what I would do to finish the school year. I mean, a lot of stuff has happened this year. I got involved with the county policy making side of teaching, taught both AP English classes and crossed my fingers on each testing day, and watched my students grow from teens to college-ready adults. I watched the smaller dramas unfold, too: the happiness of winning awards, the heartbreak of losing a boyfriend or girlfriend, the sad silent struggles of a dysfunctional family. I asked myself a question, one I still have resonating inside my burnt-out and tired skull: Will my students remember this year fondly; have they found a little joy in the exercises of this year?

I know that this question doesn't seem all that big, but let's pause and look a little deeper. I had to go to one of my favorite educational philosophy books of all time to do my digging, Nel Noddings's Happiness and Education. I reread the first chapter about the philosophical history of the term happiness. I found this interesting note about some of the earliest speculations of what happiness might be: "The Greeks located happiness in the full exercise of rationality. Reason, they argued, is the essential characteristic of man, and the development and use of reason constitute his genuine happiness" (Noddings, 2003, p. 10). I know that this is simplistic and even a little flawed, but it is interesting that ever since the early days of modern philosophy people have considered thinking to be a key component of happiness.

There are many more fascinating, and more thought-provoking, reasons to read Noddings's book, but this one started me down the path to my culminating assignment. The purpose for which Noddings brings up happiness is the discussion of aims, or ends, in education. Another great writer, Neil Postman, wrote a book in the mid-nineties all about this aims-talk. The End of Education is a brilliantly, ambiguously-titled labor of love that pushes us all to consider our narratives, or "gods," for why we attend school. You may have heard one of these before: the God of Economic Necessity, or the work-hard-study-hard-earn-good-grades-and-get-a-good-paying-job-one-day reason for going to school. Postman deconstructs this narrative or "god" and a few others before turning to some narratives which he believes benefit all people. These narratives usually deal with community ("The Spaceship Earth"), the uncertainty of what we know about certain disciplines ("The Fallen Angel"), the tenuous agreement we call American culture ("The American Experiement"), and even the ways our words define our world ('The Word Weavers/The World Makers"). So, after reading both Postman and Noddings, I decided to ask my students what their narratives will be, not for schooling, but for their future pursuits.

We used literature as a backdrop as always; there is plenty of literature that talks about the uncertainties we face and the potentially devastating results of a lack of conviction in individual thinking. Coincidentally, our last two novels in my AP Literature class were 1984 and Brave New World. What better way to discuss the potential result of a loss of belief in our own convictions than the juxtaposition of two undermined societies? In comparing and contrasting the cultures of fear and pleasure that 1984 and Brave New World present, students can ask questions about how societies end up this way or that way. How did Big Brother come to dominate Oceania? Why do the people in Brave New World need to take soma to repress their sad thoughts if their society is so perfect? Why is it that both societies must destroy those who would stand apart as individuals? What would I be in that society?

The assignment is deceptively simple: Write a narrative that describes why you wish to pursue what you are going to pursue in college and beyond.

I say deceptively simple because the students had no clue. They had never been asked to think about it before, they said. It is almost graduation, they whined. But I persisted. We studied Noddings's first chapter before discussing the hedonistic controls placed on the citizens of Huxley's London. You want to really watch someone struggle for words, ask high school seniors to define happiness and how school has made them happy in June of their senior year. But, then it happened.

During that conversation, they suddenly seemed to realize what school was all about...or at least what it was all about to them. They began to critique themselves as students, to criticize the teachers they felt didn't challenge them, and to praise those courses that did challenge them and the teachers who taught them. They began to ask why they wanted to save the whales, oceans, babies, baby whales, and so much more. They began to ask each other about their dreams, about what and who they wanted to become. And they began to be satisfied by their dissatisfaction at the simplicity of some of their answers.

It has been a joke around my school the past two years that you should never ask me a question unless you want a question in return. Usually that question is something like "is it?" or "are you sure?" or some such. Suddenly, the students began to see how some questions ask for more questions, how they need to seek depth and clarity in academic discussion. I even saw one girl stand up to her parents, declaring that she did not want to go to business school but to music school to become a music teacher. They asked her why, didn't she want to make money. She said, in a reply that made me cheer aloud somewhere inside me, that she didn't need or want money if she had to live the rest of her life without happiness.

These are the moments I teach for. She had struggled for a number of years with this decision, and she finally developed the courage to stand by it. If schools and the education they provide cannot galvanize us into better forms of ourselves, why do they exist?

I told a colleague about Noddings's book. She laughed at the title as though it were some sort of inside joke about the lack of happiness in our world. I've thought about why schools end up as places of negativity, regret, and discontent all year long. That colleague was the person who directed me to the following: Our students cannot find joy in a process that provides no joy to those who direct it. If we continue to sit on the sidelines and allow the happiness in education to be obscured by data-driven bottom lines and ethnicity-driven census forms, then we should all quit and move on. That was the gift of picking up Nel Noddings's thoughts in June. She gave me back the fire I started the year with, and that fire got passed onto my students. They are still tentative about the world after June 19th, the day they graduate, but at least they are ready to face the world with an idea of what they believe and why that makes them happy.

As always, I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this post. As we all begin to settle into our umbrella-drink-induced hibernation modes, think about the joy you bring. Where is the joy in your day? What do you do to keep your self burning bright through the end? I know I didn't always have a clue about what to do; I can honestly say I like ending the year full of fire more than feeling burned out by it.

See you next week.

Teaching tone in poetry

2010-05-27T21:17:00.008-05:00

by Tara Seale

Before my 9th grade students tackled Shakespearean sonnets, we started with a simple poem from a popular teen movie released in 1999. Although the movie was dated by their standards, they all knew the lead male actor, Heath Ledger, which provided some connection and interest.

You may be familiar with the movie, 10 Things I Hate About You. It is a modern day remake of Taming of the Shrew, so that was helpful in making the jump to Shakespeare later. In the movie, the heroine, Kat, is the shrew. She writes a sonnet to her love interest, played by Ledger, and reads it aloud in English class.

Actually, I did not provide this background information before we read the poem. Instead, I passed out the poem and asked my students to work with a partner to label the tone of the speaker in the beginning of the poem, draw a line at the tone shift, and label the tone of the speaker at the end of the poem.

See the poem below:

I hate the way you talk to me
And the way you cut your hair
I hate the way you drive my car
I hate it when you stare

I hate your big dumb combat boots
And the way you read my mind
I hate you so much that it makes me sick
It even makes me rhyme

I hate the way you're always right
I hate it when you lie
I hate it when you make me laugh
Even worse when you make me cry

I hate the way you're not around
And the fact that you didn't call
But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you
Not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all.

I walked around as students argued with their partners over tone words. When everyone agreed that they understood the poem and could explain the tone and the shift, we shared our thoughts.

Students discovered that when they picked different tone words from another group of students, they also had different ideas about the overall intent and meaning of the poem. Students began to realize that if they didn't catch the tone of the speaker, then they would not be able to fully comprehend the meaning either.

We discussed how it is more difficult to understand written tone versus spoken. Some students shared stories involving misunderstandings because friends misread the tone of a text message, which we decided could easily happen due to the brevity of that type of communication.

Fortunately, the video clip of this poem is on YouTube and can be downloaded or embedded to show to a class.

Students watched the clip from the movie, and then they re-evaluated and relabeled the tone of the poem.

After discussing the poem, students were curious and asked about the movie. It was a perfect opening for introducing Shakespeare and his sonnets.

Tech Tip for Downloading from YouTube:

If your school blocks YouTube and you want to use this clip, you can download it using Zamzar.
Step 1, click on the words URL. Next go to the URL, web address, and copy and paste the URL into the box in Step 1.
Step 2, select the format. Scroll down and select wmv for Windows Media Player and mp4 or mov for a mac or Quicktime.
Step 3, provide your email address.
Click Convert, and then Zamzar will email you the converted file.

Tattoo Essay

2010-05-18T15:31:00.027-05:00

By Tara Seale

Last year at the 2009 NCTE Convention in Philadelphia, I was lucky enough to attend a session titled You Gotta See it to Believe it: Visual Literacy and Reading Between the Lines. Shelbie Witte from Florida State University chaired the session and Robyn Seglem from Illinois State and Matt Skillen from Elizabethtown College presented.

During the presentation, Shelbie Witte presented the idea to have students create tattoos for characters in Romeo and Juliet as a modern day family crest. I expanded this idea to include an essay to explain each element of the tattoo. I created and wrote my own tattoo essay so that I would have a model; I used Rosaline because I did not want to take one of the main characters away from one of my students: Rosaline Model Example.

To create the tattoo, my students used the new addition to Google Docs: Google Drawings. You can see from my crude drawing that I am not concerned with students’ artistic abilities, but instead, students’ critical thinking skills. The rubric indicates that I expected students to put thought, intent, and effort into their drawings, and the majority of the student’s grade focused on the explanation of their design: Rubric for the Tattoo Essay.

As part of the assignment, students also discussed tattoos and the reasons why people get tattoos. Additionally, students read an article that discussed the dangers related to tattoos and the procedure to remove tattoos. After providing background information, I gave students the directions for the assignment: Romeo and Juliet Tattoo Assignment Directions.

Overall, I was pleased with the results of the assignment. You can view some of the student tattoos below.

Juliet Tatt too

Friar Lawrence Tattoo

Lady Capulet
Mercutio Tattoo

This student created a Shakespeare Tattoo

Using models with students

2010-05-10T14:50:00.014-05:00

by Tara Seale

Recently, my 7th grade son wrote a news article related to the book he was reading in his English class. Unfortunately, he was not sure where to begin. With most students, the first sentence seems to be the hardest. I told him he should be sure to include when, where, what, why, and how, and he looked at me like I was crazy if I thought that was going to help him.
After further questioning, he told me he was writing about a chapter in which a sinkhole destroyed a building. He wrote down the facts, but his vocabulary and sentence structure were awkward and did not meet the "sound professional" requirement of the assignment.
We scanned our newspaper for articles about storms and other disasters in our state. He read like a writer and noticed how the authors began articles. He examined the difference in his sentence structure and the vocabulary used by the newspaper reporters. He revised what he had written to mimic the same sentence structure, tone, and vocabulary in the article we picked as a model. Once he had a guide, he rewrote his article. He used the same sentence format, but adjusted the sentences to reflect what he was writing about. My husband said that his sentences sounded like someone in college wrote them, and of course they did because the model he used was not written by a 7th grader. The words he pulled out of the articles were also not 7th grade words.
His simple, awkward article was at once transformed. He searched on the internet for pictures to include in his article and even added subtitles to explain the pictures. He formatted the beginning of the article to have a byline, much like the article in the newspaper. His end result was an article that he could not have achieved without the help of using a professional example. Writers trying to break into the profession of writing study the sentence structure and vocabulary of professional writers in order to develop into better writers, so I question why I do not do more of this in my own classroom.
My students use model sentences as guides, but probably not as extensively as they could.
For example, until I worked through this assignment with my son, it had never occurred to me to use a news article as a model for my students. I was so pleased with the differences in the drafts from the first, second, third, and finally his last attempt, that I plan to incorporate this assignment into my classroom. I started bookmarking online news articles, specifically disaster related articles. My students could craft news articles that relate the details and exploits of Odysseus or the snow and fire chapter in To Kill a Mockingbird.
It isn't an easy process though. After all of his re-writes, he hoped he would never have me as a teacher, but he was also impressed with himself at the same time.
You can read his article on his blog page: http://jimboseale.edublogs.org/

Assuming Too Much or Too Little?

2010-05-03T20:55:00.005-05:00

Oftentimes, I hear my colleagues talk about how little students seem to know. They complain about how little students are able to retain. The bottom line: They are complaining about how little content knowledge students have and retain. Is content knowledge important? Does it have anything to do with making students college- and career-ready?

The answer to both questions is yes. According to E.D. Hirsch, Jr., content knowledge is essential to understanding a text. Since the 1980s, Hirsch has been advocating the necessity of having content knowledge. In Cultural Literacy, Hirsch and his colleagues provide a very detailed list of basic cultural knowledge students must possess to be proficient readers of Literature, etc. More recently, in The Knowledge Deficit, Hirsch outlines the loss that students suffer from not gaining content knowledge. According to an international study of productivity in schools, US schools are one of the least productive in the world; our students decline 38 normalized points in reading achievement (Hirsch, 2006, p. 82).

By comparison, Hirsch's schools-Core Knowledge Schools-offer an alternative curriculum to the traditional American public schools. In Core Knowledge Schools, teachers follow a set K-8 cultural literacy curriculum. Despite the many critics (more on this in a second), these schools show a remarkable, steady rate of achievement from Grade 4 to Grade 6; meanwhile, the traditional schools show a higher starting point, but a stagnant trend over time. Perhaps teachers aren't too far off when they feel that students seem to have the same knowledge gaps year-to-year. Core Knowledge Schools seem to know how to be efficient; students start at around a 640 on the Stanford 9 in the sixth grade and they end somewhere around a 710 (Hirsch, 2006, p. 90).

So, who would oppose such success? Educators who identify themselves as "naturalists" or "formalists" or just those who think learning "just facts" is a waste of time. Naturalists believe that learning is a natural process. This theory is just not true. People are naturally curious, but they are not naturally good thinkers (Willingham, 2010). Cognitive scientists have shown that engaging interest is easy, but promoting thought is hard. Formalists believe that once students know the forms of learning, they can learn anything if presented in the preferred form. What will students learn? Without the purpose and direction of a learning goal in mind, thinking critically can be very difficult. (Some writers, like the late David Foster Wallace, could literally critically think about anything. I don't think everyone is quite so talented.)

We need information because our brains are built of schema. These schema are built of information. The more schema, the more quickly we can read and assimilate a new text (Hirsch, 1988). Teaching students information is not useless; teaching students information is an efficient and constructive use of time.

This idea leads me to the next consideration in preparing a college- and career-ready students. How can teachers present a series of regimented information pieces without giving up their autonomy in the classroom? My home county has been trying to develop a new evaluation protocol intended to bring administrators into the classroom. Instead, we've been getting a narrow interpretation of The Skillful Teacher masquerading as an evaluation system. I believe that we are being placed in the position of teaching with the "pedagogy of direct command and absolute control" (Kozol, 2005, p. 64). In Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol recounts the efforts of a program called "Success for All." This system seeks to create "the establishment of 'faultless communication' between the 'the teacher, who is the stimulus,' and 'the students, who respond'" (Hirsch, 2005, p. 64).

This monotonous give-and-take is what all good teachers fear will be implemented in their classrooms at any moment. Regimentation and a lack of flexibility do nothing to help students gain the knowledge and understanding they need for college; however, learning is not something that can be held up as though it were some type of new Apple gadget you must have in order to be tragically hip and cool-you know...like Justin Long.

What needs to be done is for us to remember that content knowledge is not just mere facts. Teachers should have deep content knowledge of their subject area in order to be the most effective. They cannot be in charge of the dynamic energy of a classroom if they must grasp for straws whenever they are asked an insightful question.

Teachers also need to be given the flexibility to achieve results on all levels. Massie Risch, Deputy Assistant Secretary for External Affairs and Outreach at the US DOE, said it best on Advocacy Day: "We are looking to tighten up on the goals and increase flexibility in how you get there." Students need the hard and fast learning goals that show them and us that they are learning; however, the strict order described in Kozol's book only helps to deaden a student's approach to the content. The monotony of teacher give, student take only makes education look like mechanical schooling. If teachers are no more than purveyors of information that students are to assimilate, then teachers need not be in the classroom and TVs and computers can take their places. But, if students are more than empty vessels, they need living, knowledgeable, and dynamic people who can and will challenge them to be the best people they can be, regardless of how they reach that goal.

To Bend or To Break: Flexibility in the Blueprint for Reform

2010-04-25T18:22:00.003-05:00

During this past Thursday's Advocacy Day, two members of the US Department of Education presented those assembled in the Hall of the States with some of the highlights from A Blueprint for Reform. One of these highlights was the new school rating/classification system.

In the No Child Left Behind version of ESEA, schools either made AYP or they did not. Schools either passed or failed. According to the DOE, these classifications were too narrow. I agree.

In the No Child Left Behind version of ESEA, the response to failure was heavily prescriptive improvement plans. According to the DOE, this prescription was too narrow. I agree.

In the No Child Left Behind version of ESEA, successful schools were those that implemented a prescriptive set of practices. According to the DOE, our goals should be tightly defined and our methods should be more flexible. I agree.

The only problem comes in the implementation of these flexible measures. According to the DOE, flexibility is only allowed in successful schools. Low-performance schools, altogether about 10% of the nation's schools, would need to follow a prescribed path to redemption. I disagree. So did a number of members assembled in the Hall of the States on Thursday. Many asked why low-performance schools, institutions classically in need of flexibility, would not be given latitude to reach their goals. The answer was rather surprising.

Both gentlemen concluded that all students must successfully reach the tightly defined goals because students can no longer afford to be unprepared for a college education. They even have this defined clearly in the Blueprint. All students will be college- and career-ready.

I wanted to get this dialogue started because I think it is important for people to discuss how these new policies will affect them. Unfortunately, all of my resources with which I would write are packed in boxes as I wait to move into my first home this week. I guarantee that this week-end I will bring some other thinkers' thoughts to this discussion, but for right now let's take the topic head-on.

Should low-performing schools be given the flexibility to accomplish their goals?

Should they be prescribed a remedy?

Will this remedy even be remedial or will it be more of an intervention strategy?

I look forward to reading others' thoughts on this portion of the new legislation.

Advocacy in an Age of Acceptance

2010-04-20T22:05:00.003-05:00

Has anyone ever considered the downside of an accepting society?

For some reason that question popped in my head tonight as I was re-re-re-re-reading Chinua Achebe's essay in response to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (the essay is titled "An Image of Africa" for those who are interested in reading it). The most surprising idea in Achebe's essay is that Western psychology needs Africa's otherness in order to define its own success. Looking at his analysis, there is little that can be said to challenge his argument.

I was also thinking about politics and advocacy. I live outside of Washington, D.C. Politics is a way of life here like you would not believe. Lately, those politics have been given free reign as we experience seismic shifts of our own within departments and between people. Some people in the school have been asked to step down as leadership. Others have had class "scheduled" away from them in an effort at reprisal for perceived slights against the administration. People have gone from upset to angry. Politically, we are at a crisis point.

Then, I stop and think. See, a very important decision for the School Board in my home county has crept up and made victims of more than just teacher salaries. Now, the gap patrol is seeking to fill in the needed money by slashing the contracts of 11 and 12 month employees to just 10 months. There are thousands of employees in this county. Only 800 are in this predicament. Yet, there is enough outcry and organization that they may not take the 11 and 12 months anyway.

This organized rebellion is managed because the managers are the leaders. They set the rules; rules that are used to keep teachers from advocating for themselves. Meanwhile, administrators send out e-mails advocating for themselves, and getting results.

What do other teachers say about this? Anything but what should be said. Some are frustrated but unwilling to speak up. Some say they can't care because they are disappointed. None feel like they can do anything or else risk employment.

This fear and complacency is why events like the Advocacy Day are so important. Education is a communal, social enterprise. Who will educate students if the teachers don't feel they can do their jobs? Who will send their children if they lose faith in the schools? Who will run the day-to-day business of the school if the administrators are busy canvassing for their salaries? If we do not cooperate, then the whole mess falls apart.

The NCTE National Advocacy Day is a chance for us to stop and remember that we do have a say in how we are assessed, how we teach, and how we help students succeed. It reminds us that politicians and administrators sometimes need to be reminded that teachers are career professionals who are unafraid to voice their concerns to make education a better process.

Literacy education is particularly important to how schools work. History, science, math, and English all require that students read. Small engine repair, agriculture, and auto body classes require that students read. Health and Physical Education require that students be able to read. The focus on literacy that the LEARN act provides is an essential part of making our schools more focused and successful instutions.

I hope that tomorrow results in a focused and clear message of how English educators believe literacy should be handled in our schools. I'll follow up this week-end after Advocacy Day is over.

Thoughts on Consumerocracies: Commodifying Truth

2010-04-06T14:05:00.004-05:00

Bear with me. I am about to wax philosophical.

From Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation, p.96:

"Learning itself…is now defined increasingly not as a process or preoccupation that holds satisfaction of its own in propreitary terms. "Taking ownership" is the accepted term…children are encouraged to believe they "own" the book, the concept, the idea. They don't engage with knowledge; they possess it."

Every teacher has had that explosive epiphanic moment when a great concept dawns fresh in his or her mind, allowing each one of us to glance at the truth of human existence; from our most poetic literature to our most elegant mathematics, we seek to understand our world and discover a bit of Truth in our short, yet important, existences. From the most experienced professor to the most down-trodden of poor and homeless, we have no claim to the common Truth that binds us. We seek instead to kill, to steal, to swindle, and to shop our way to a counterfeit feeling of purpose that can never satisfy. How dare we, we teachers who are meant to guide our students in a quest for Truth, pretend that anyone can own any part of our great human Truth, our great lives.

Anymore, we acknowledge the Truth with our lips, and then betray it in the face of real need, love, and understanding: the children and teens of tomorrow's world. These young trustees, for they are as entrusted to us as they attempt to place trust in us, expect a world of market-readiness in school. The truth is that not all subjects supply "McKnowledge" on a sesame seed bun (with or without the special sauce); they shouldn't and they have no business trying. Find the business application of Coltrane, seek the bottom line in Orff, delve for the cold equations of life in Proust--I am an English teacher and I'm still seeking my slice of Truth in Proust--these things simply do not exist in parcel form within these great human works. They will not and they cannot exist in the humanities. The humanities exist as a counterpoint to the almost deific experience of finding natural truth in a science lab or abstract truth in an imaginary number.

When Roman emperors would ride into Rome victorious, they used to have slaves that would stand next to them in their chariots and whisper into their ears one phrase over-and-over again: "You're only human." The humanities, and forgive my subservient metaphor, are the slave to the mathematics and sciences in our schools and in our worlds. Where science may think it has found truth, literature finds a way to remind it of the humans that helped it discover that truth. Where mathematicians believe they have "found" golden ratios and numerical patterns in the natural world, musicians have known how to apply these ratios and patterns to the notes that please and inspire us. The sciences and mathematics may deal in more tangible truths, but only the humanities can interpret their worth; they are both necessary in the "educated" person's life, the yin and yang of our schooling.

Science and math are important, but they are only human inventions, not the keys to apotheosis. Trump and his millions be damned, but there is more satisfaction in the sublime realization of glanced-at truth than in all the dollars I've ever earned or spent; yet, we tell our trustees, our charges who place their intellectual faith is us, that the bottom line matters and the larger Truths are irrelevant. That may be our greatest failure as teachers and as people: missing an opportunity to awaken our students to the beauty of human life so that they may see, engage in, and learn some form of Truth.

In the Purgatorio, Dante's pilgrim is branded with seven P's by the angel who guards the gates of purgatory. The angel says to the pilgrim "When thou art within, see thou wash away these wounds." As he climbs each of the levels of Mount Purgatory, an angel confronts the pilgrim before he passes to the next consecutive level. The angel wipes away one of the P's as he speaks the beatitude that cures the particular sin of that level (e.g., pride's opposite is the beatitude "Blessed are the poor in spirit" or the humble). School is the purgatory of life. Our students come to us and we are supposed to give them the knowledge not just to live, but to live good lives. I have no space here for a discussion of moral definitions or religious apologetics, but I find it interesting that a lot of what we say is "wrong" in our hearts and minds seems to match up across the board (at least when it seems to really matter). The point is that unless we present humanity at its weakest and at its strongest, we are letting a golden opportunity slip through our fingers. We are playing at becoming Satan, directing students to consume the fruit of knowledge without showing them its proper and improper uses, without showing them how to make critical judgments. We show them the sin and we present to them the beatitude; then we, mistakenly, tell them that both have equal value.

We don't own knowledge. We don't own Truth. We do occasionally get a privileged glance at it. We want our students to come to the Truth as it can be seen, to engage with it, and to have it leave its mark on them; however, most of all, we want them to leave their indelible mark upon it. We wonder why our students misbehave: they know what we are cheating them out of, holding out in front of them. We are dangling the ability to interpret and appreciate Truth in front of them like a carrot before an ass. I wouldn't like the metaphor either.

Mann, those Transcedentalists

2010-04-06T13:59:00.002-05:00

Horace Mann's Tenth Annual Report contains one of the most passionate and well-reasoned arguments in defense of the public schools ever written. The core of the report deals with one of the most difficult arguments in public education: the level of responsibility people have to fund the school, even if they are not currently benefitting from the services it provides. Mann's central assumption is that no one person can own the land because it is the naturally inherited gift of all men, an idea firmly rooted in the philosophy of the Transcendentalists. Mann's premises in the Tenth Annual Report are heavily indebted to the philosophies of the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially Emerson's ideas of the universal spirit that unites all men and the location of that universal spirit in nature.

In the Tenth Annual Report, Mann takes on the task of convincing people who have no connection to the common school system to pay the taxes that finance their daily operations. In Mann's day, those who wanted to, and were able to, educate their children sent them to private school. These upper-class and middle-class elites saw no need to finance a school system for the lesser members of society; after all, what could their simple minds hope to learn? Mann's argument had to circumvent this bias in order to win the support of these wealthy people. Mann decided that his best option would be to redefine the notion of ownership. Only with Emerson's philosophy as an inspiration could Mann take the common notion of what property was and relocate it to the "capacious storehouses of nature" (Mann, 1957, p. 64) to which all men have access. Mann, taking from Emerson's philosophy, uses the notion that "none of them owns the landscape" (Emerson, 2007, p. 18) to reinforce the idea that there are higher moral callings that require those very wealthy people to survive. There is no better place than in the natural landscape, "the woods, [where] we return to reason and faith," (Emerson, 2007, p. 18) to be the place where the rights and possessions of all men are safely stored; conversely, there is no better place for them to be shared.

Mann used this idea, that all people are connected through the natural, and spiritual, landscape, to justify the use of community property for universal education. Mann explicitly states that:

"I believe in the existence of a great, immutable principle of natural law, or natural ethics…which proves the absolute right of every human being that comes into the world to an education; and which, of course, proves the correlative duty of every government to see that the means of that education are provided for all."
(Mann, 1957, p. 63)

This premise is directly translatable from Emerson's ideas on the divinity of nature. Mann even places the power to ensure the right of every child to an education into the hands of "the will of God" (Mann, 1957, p. 63). There is a direct link between the right of man to live and be educated and the universality of the property people can own while they are alive; both of these rights, the right to property and education, are provided by reallocation of capital from the "capacious storehouses of nature" (Mann, 1957, p. 64). Directly after he establishes his belief in the natural ethics of education, Mann states that "nature ordains a perpetual entail" (Mann, 1846, p. 65) between all the successive generations on earth. The riches of the natural world are available to "no one man, nor any one generation" (Mann, 1957, p. 65), but to all people who live in the world. Nature is a universal right, education is a universal right, and God finds a way to provide both equally to all. No member of the elite families of 1846 Massachusetts would want to betray their "PILGRIM FATHERS" (Mann, 1957, p. 60) by not performing their divinely-charged duties on earth.

Mann returns to the natural world to illustrate the nature of natural ownership. According to Mann, those who live upstream from their neighbors have no right to mistreat the spring because it belongs to those who live downstream. Ownership constantly moves, shifting down and down and down until the stream reaches the sea. To complete Mann's metaphor, the stream will again belong to the man at the source since the water will be caught up to the clouds as rain and then poured out to replenish it. Mann then sets up a conceit between the natural property people think they own and the knowledge provided in school. Mann demonstrates that the knowledge of generation A must be respected by the subsequent generation; consequently, generation B does not own the information any more than generation C, the beneficiary of generation B, can claim ownership over the improvements they will make for generation D. The knowledge is constantly recycled, constantly brought back to its source, to be replenished and rejuvenated.

The knowledge of the previous generations, being a part of the property that all men have a right to possess, is the basis of the existence of the common school. Mann rails against ignorance because it only serves to stifle the community's ability to innovate. Mann believes in what Emerson said in his American Scholar Address: "the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better" (Emerson, 2007, p. 82). Mann and Emerson realized this country's potential for innovation and focused on what it could and would give to the world. Emerson wished that "our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, [would draw] to a close" (Emerson, 2007, p. 83) and that this nation based on the protection of natural rights could provide a superior form of education for its people. Mann was able to open the door to the school system that is now the right of every American citizen because of the Transcendentalist beliefs in the natural, divine right to an education and the perfectability of man.

Using Wordle in an English Classroom

2010-03-24T17:51:00.016-05:00

by Tara Seale

Wordle is a fun Web 2.0 tool to use with students. The most repeated word in a Wordle is the largest. Wordle also allows users to change the layout, colors, and font.

How can this web tool be applied to an English classroom? Just recently a Nebraska English teacher named Julie posted a visual rhetoric idea related to the health care debate on the English Companion Ning. Her idea was to review two wordles created by a website called FiveThirtyEight. If you visit the website, the explanation and the wordles will explain how instrumental a Wordle can be as a rhetoric tool.

In my classroom, students use wordles to evaluate literature. Recently my 9th graders used wordles to understand tone shift. Students read the short story "The Sniper" by Liam O'Flaherty, and then using a collaborative Google Spreadsheet, shared the one word that they felt best represented the attitude of the sniper at the beginning of the story and the one word they felt best represented the sniper's attitude at the end of the story. I created wordles from the tone words submitted by students. See the wordles below:

1st Block - beginning and ending tone word wordles

2nd Block - beginning and ending tone word wordles

Last year, students in my classes picked out passages from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird that they felt most represented a major theme in the novel. Students typed in the text of the paragraph or passage into wordle, and then they evaluated how the wordle represented a major theme. I created a wordle from one of the most famous passages in To Kill a Mockingbird below. Maybe you can recognize it.

My students also read a famous Langston Hughes poem and discussed how this poem relates to the dreams of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird. See a wordle of the poem below:

One last plus: I used Wordle to create a word cloud of the novels that are required 9th grade reads in my school district. I then uploaded the image, added one of my favorite quotes about reading, and bought the poster from Big Huge Labs.

If you are interested, you can read more about how to create a poster wordle on the Enhanced English Teacher Blog.

Finally, I would like to leave you with a few technology tips about saving and posting a wordle on the WWW:

To capture a wordle as a jpeg image using a mac, hold down the shift>command>4 keys. A small cross hair will appear. Drag the cross hair over the image of the wordle, and let go of the keys. The wordle image will be saved on the desktop as a jpeg image.

To capture a wordle as a jpeg image using a PC, use the screen capture key on the keyboard. This action will automatically copy the entire screen. Using either power point or paint, paste in the image. Use the program's cropping tools to crop the image so that you only have the wordle. Then save as a jpeg image.

Next, upload the image to Flickr. Right click on the uploaded image and go to properties. Highlight the URL located under image properties>location. Use this URL when inserting the image into a blog, wiki, or website.

Annotating text using Google Docs

2010-03-14T14:32:00.012-05:00

by Tara Seale

Recently, I wrote an article for the Google Docs Blog titled Google Docs: the tool for the 21st century classroom. The focus was how to use Google Docs and folders in an English classroom.

Besides the ideas in the Google post, my students are also using Google Docs to annotate articles, short passages, or poems. See the annotation doc for the poem "Ozymandias".

To create this annotation doc go to Create New>Document. Then click on Insert>Table. Then chose one row and two columns. Next, edit the first cell by clicking on the cell> then right click > Change Cell.
See the pop up below:

Under Alignment, use the drop down to select Horizontal: Left and Vertical: Top. See the image below:

Repeat the steps for the other cell. Next, paste in the text in the first cell. Then in the 2nd cell, use the return key to enter all the way down. Students will be able to insert text on the right side of the table at any spot if you enter all the way down. I suggest students highlight key words in the text so that they stand out.

Share this document with students as a View Only document. To do this click on Share (in the upper right corner)> Invite People. A pop up will appear, see below:

Click on To View. and then insert email addresses in the Invite box. Students will receive this document as a view only file. They will have to go to File>Make a Copy to be able to edit the document. This is important so that students will only edit their document; otherwise, students will edit and annotate over the top of each other if you do not have them make their own copy. I sometimes have students share the document in groups to complete a small group annotation, but it does not work well with an entire class. When students save their document, I also have them rename it with their block number first, last name, first initial, and the title of the assignment. My students use TP-CASSSTT to annotate a poem and DIDLS to annotate literature. When students finish their annotations, they share the document back with me for grading.

Some example annotations:

Ozymandias

The Sniper

If you are new to Google Docs, and you need to learn more about how to use Google Docs in an English classroom, Google and the Writing Magazine teamed up to create a great Revision Lesson for Teens. This website also has a step-by-step tutorial for students and teachers.

For additional resources, view the videos and other links in the presentation below:

Flip Video Cameras in an English Classroom

2010-03-05T11:48:00.012-06:00

by Tara Seale

My 9th grade English students recently used Flip Ultras to create heroic journey videos. First, students read Edith Hamilton's Mythology and then analyzed the "Monomyth" chapter from Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Students used Google Spreadsheets to create their own heroic journey chart with explanations and examples. We also read excerpts from The Writer's Journey by Christopher Vogler to discuss archetypal characters and watched a great YouTube clip called the Matrix Monomyth. Students worked in groups to combine all of this information into a script to illustrate how a modern day character follows the same heroic journey path established in many of the Greek myths. Students also included explanations of archetypal characters that the hero meets along the way.
Click on the link to view my Students Working on Scripts. You will need QuickTime to view the video (probably already installed on your computer, but if not, it is a free download).

Several students featured video game characters. Apparently, many X-Box and Playstation games have heroes on a quest who meet archetypal characters along the way. I guess a good story is still a good story, even in a video game. Students were highly engaged in this lesson, and the insight they gained about how stories are created and how patterns and common elements are repeated has added to their analytical abilities. I created a Mash-Up of Clips from the Heroic Journey Projects as a sample from all of the final projects. You can also watch each group's video on my student podcast page.

If you are interested, this is a link to the Directions for the Heroic Journey Video Assignment and the Rubric for the Assignment.

I was lucky enough to win some grant money through Ann Taylor Loft's Kids in Need Grant to purchase flip video cameras, and also to find a great deal at Digital Wish --Flip Ultras 2 for the price of 1. Ultras seemed to be the better choice because Ultra HDs create larger file sizes, and we were not trying to make picture perfect videos. Our camera angles were not great, and students did very little editing because that was not the focus of the lesson. The objective was to use technology to collaborate, to communicate, and to create an effective explanation of the heroic journey; students did not have time to add the "Wow" factor with fancy editing or effects.

The engagement and learning that I witnessed made me realize the usefulness of using Flips in the classroom. I hope to use the Flips again while we read Romeo and Juliet.

Some Technical Tips for using Flips on a PC or Mac:

The Flip Ultra will allow you to edit film in iMovie on a Mac and Windows Movie Maker on a PC. Just follow the simple directions below:

On a Mac, open iMovie. Select File>Import from Camera. Wait for the thumbnail clips to load. To import all clips, select Import All. If you do not want to import all clips, select Manual and Uncheck All. Then click on the small box under each clip you want to import and click on Import Checked.

On a PC, you need to install the Flipshare software that comes already loaded on the camera. Next, select the clips that you want to use. While in the Flipshare software, select Share>Online>Others. Then you will click on Other again and select Next. Name your folder and click Go. The folder will appear on the desk top. From Windows Movie Maker, you will need to go to Import Video and browse for the folder on the desktop. Select the clips you want to import.

The Myth of Learning Styles

2010-03-01T18:09:00.006-06:00

Note: Make sure you click on the title of this post to see the video.

Daniel Willingham of the University of Virginia is unpopular with many school systems. His research in cognitive psychology shows that the learning styles theory is not quite what it seems. What does that mean for education? In particular, what does it mean for the English classroom.

As students of language, Dr. Willingham's findings about meaning-based learning should not be a surprise to English and Language Arts teachers. The indeterminacy of language is firmly entrenched in the discourse of literature, composition, and criticism; deconstructionism is literary theory based on the shakiness of the meanings behind words. In our classrooms, we teach vocabulary and reading based on discussions of meaning, but how do we bring this meaning out in conversations with our students.

Over on the English Companion Ning, Jim Burke has been leading a study of his new book, What's the Big Idea?: Question-driven units to motivate reading, writing, and thinking. I have been reading the book along with the group and had a bit of an epiphany in conjunction with this video. The best way to get at meaning is to ask the questions that delve into those bigger ideas, those essential understandings. This book has already been a great help in organizing the essential questions I already used to guide my unit and lesson design. Particularly, a quotation Burke (2010) cites from Neil Postman spurred my epiphany: "Students enter school as question marks and graduate as periods." I think this connection between learning styles theory and meaning-based instruction may be the reason students graduate without any questions or imagination.

Think about Willingham's assertion in the video. Asking students to learn something aurally or visually asks the student only to learn a characteristic of something (like the shape of a country or the tonal quality of a voice); meanwhile, asking students to learn words asks them to learn the meaning behind something, its big idea. The trick is while visual and aural learning focuses on characteristics of something, meaning is more abstract. So, just like knowing the shape of Sudan won't help students understand the suffering of people in Darfur, asking students to learn the meaning of something visually or aurally won't either.

A recent NCTE inbox issue contained a study with similar findings. The January 12th edition of the newsletter featured an article on a recently released study of learning styles. In the summary section of the article, the authors state that they "conclude therefore, that at present, there is no adequate evidence base to justify incorporate learning-styles assessments into general educational practice" (Pashler, McDaniel, Rohrer, and Bjork, 2009, p. 105). Taking these findings into consideration, why do we place so much emphasis on learning styles.

The students we serve thrive not on superficial characteristics, but deep probing questions. They are not unlike ourselves or the young children they used to be. My son is turning two this March 12th, and as I write this he is sitting next to me asking me all kinds of questions (as long as you speak 2-year-old-ese). His "whastht?"s ("what's that) and "whahappnd?"s ("what happened") are the mind's first forays into learning the most essential lessons we learn. He questions me constantly which, as a teacher, I love. He loves learning new words and repeating them...endlessly...until "truck" or "car" or "broken" fall away to newer and newer concepts. His curiosity is insatiable and joyful. Then I think about the lack of curiosity some of my students exhibit, usually on the standard level, and I get angry. Maybe that is the answer for parents who don't like, understand, or trust our schools: they've grown angry with watching learning-styles-driven teaching make students focus on the concrete and forget the importance of abstraction, of searching for meaning.

I for one have taken Jim Burke's new book to heart because it speaks to something I always knew was true. Standard, AP, IB, Honors, etc. are just labels. Question-driven teaching belongs in all classrooms. If a student doesn't understand a concept, make analogies, make connections, but most of all help your students ask the right questions that will guide them to the meanings they seek.

As always, please share your thoughts on the video, learning styles, question-driven instruction, or any ways this topic has come up in your professional lives.

Oh, and have a pleasant March. I'll see you all in April.

Boogiemen, Administrators, and Other Make-Believe Monsters: Problems in Power Dynamics in Publilc Schools

2010-02-21T15:01:00.005-06:00

Editorial Note: Before I begin, I just need to take a moment and be very clear about what I believe. I believe that teachers and administrators have a duty to themselves and their students to do the best they can to make their schools the best. Occasionally, that means having to work against one another, but it should mean that more often, they work together; however, I have noticed a disheartening trend in today's schools. More and more, I am seeing teachers who are afraid to put themselves out there, be upfront, and stand up for what is right. This post is made in the spirit of bridging the gap of mistrust and paranoia that seems to widening between administrators and teachers, especially in this day and age of declining resources. Together, we can teach; alone, we will fail.

I have been in many different school systems considering the number of years I have taught. In one of the schools, a Principal Intern made the unfortunate following statement:

“If I am not careful, [Name of the Principal] is going to demote me to teacher.”

What made this statement so profoundly ridiculous was that the Principal Intern made it to a library full of teachers on the first day of the first workweek of the year. OOPS. Most importantly, why do people swarm to every mistake administrators make? I seem to remember a story about not casting the first stone. When can teachers and administrators come together and agree on what responsibilities they will share and which are separate? When will teachers become content experts and administrators become the show runners? But, most of all, when will the two groups learn to trust each other for the benefit of the school.

People from that school still refer to that incident and still quote that line. Thinking about those words got me to thinking about the dynamics of power in a public school. Who is “in charge”? Is it that simple?

I do not believe it is. Schools are not simple hierarchies. In the last posting, I made reference to Bernstein’s three rule sets. One of those rule sets, hierarchical rules, is put in place to teach children where they belong, to help them learn their “place.” If that sounds distasteful, then it is right. American society cannot be built upon hierarchies because we all are all “equal in the eyes of the law.” Yet, we have hierarchies in much of our society. At work, we have the relationships between the employees and the various managers. At home, we encounter people of different economic classes. In schools, among students, status can be as simple as a swoosh. Are these separations actually a part of society, or are they engendered in people through schools? I think the answer may surprise you.

Are administrators of a higher rank than teachers? Rather, are apples better than oranges? Teachers are not administrators. Administrators are not teachers, regardless of what the original intention behind the name principal might be. Principal and Assistant Principal are just shorthand for in-house bureaucrat. They are responsible for discipline, for evaluating teachers, for gathering data, and for implementing policy. Seems like a lot of responsibility and knowledge for a position that can be filled by someone without a doctoral degree. How could someone with just a master’s degree have a full knowledge of the standards and content for each subject area?

The point is administrators and teachers are not even in the same professional sphere. One’s job is political and legislative, while the other’s job is about content and students. I have seen so many decisions, more than are necessary, that have been made to the detriment of the students at any of the schools in which I’ve taught. Why were these decisions made? Administrators were given the “authority” to make them and teachers assumed that authority was absolute. Principals, like teachers, are employees of the local school board, not the individual administrators. While their evaluations are important to the reissue of annual contracts, they are not the people who sign the contracts. Part of those very contracts asks us to be advocates for our students. What type of advocates are we if we give into the hierarchical rules of school and let ourselves be subject to the will of people no longer connected to those for whom they make decisions. As Cassius once said, the fault is in ourselves.

Do not make the mistake of interpreting my disregard for the “chain of command” as a call for all out insurrection; I assure you that a rebellion is not the way to solve this problem. In The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paolo Freire discusses the nature of all oppressive relationships and how, if they are to be salvaged, they must end. The oppression of one group by another results in the “dehumanization” of the other. I’ve heard people call teaching a “calling”; what else is oppression if not the barring of someone from the thing they feel called to do? If consciously making decisions that negatively affect the students we teach, even when there are alternatives that would be less harmful, is not an oppressive decision, what else is? Budgetary constraints are fairly universal right now. That is the reason why having administrative personnel filling half-time positions and earning six figure salaries is particularly baffling. These are the moments when teachers must step up and open a dialogue with administrators at all levels. The oppressed cannot become the oppressors; this only makes matters worse (Freire, 2006, p. 44). We can open an honest dialogue and do what is best for our systems and our students.

Opening a dialogue may not be too easy. How long have teachers been hiding behind the mask of “job security” when they should have been defending their students? I don’t know nor can I find out. All I know is that a study done by Richard Ingersoll of the Department of Education’s Schools and Staffing Survey and the Teacher Follow-up Survey says that this adversarial relationship has been going on long enough to truly affect others (Ingersoll, 2003). After researching the results of the survey, Ingersoll collated a list of the top reasons for teacher dissatisfaction. He then ordered that list from most dissatisfying to least dissatisfying. The first reason is the usual, poor salary; however, the second most common reason for teacher dissatisfaction is “poor administrative support” (p. 169), or “lack of recognition and support from administration; lack of resources and material/equipment for your classroom; inadequate support from administration” (p. 169). This on its own is not surprising, but it is not alone on the list. The fourth most common reason for teacher dissatisfaction is “lack of faculty influence and autonomy” (p. 169), or “lack of influence over school policies and practices; lack of control over own classroom” (p. 169). What is oppression on the job if not lack of respect, support, and autonomy? These complaints are widespread enough to be the second and fourth most common reasons for teacher dissatisfaction; furthermore, it may not be too much of a stretch to connect poor salary with lack of respect for faculty.

Who is the higher-up and who is the underling? Is there such a thing as a chain of command in public schools? Is that the right question? I don’t think so. The right question is how long are we going to pretend that there should be a chain of command as opposed to a cooperative effort? People always seemed shocked when I get clearance to try new pedagogies and new class arrangements. I question, I demand, and I explain in an effort to serve my students better and I’ve yet to find an administrator myopic enough not give any ideas a try. I cited it before and I will cite it again, perhaps the reason for our status is in us, not the administrators.

I encourage those of you who believe that becoming an administrator is a promotion to be happy where you are first. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that administration is a step up from teaching because you become the very problem that made you unhappy in the first place. In a democratic society, all people should have a voice; John Dewey said that the schools were the great laboratories of democracy. Thus, schools should be the place where all different types of people with all different types of skills should be allowed to do their best to make students successful, not a place where people feel like they are not allowed to grow and become the best they can. Next time you feel downtrodden, put upon, or just plain overwhelmed, try and find out why. If the reason you are upset is administrative, don’t just complain, open a dialogue.

Note: Anyone who wishes to get full bibliographic information for any sources used in this or any other posting can send an e-mail to MorganWriter612@gmail.com.

To Write or Not to Write: The Ethics of Posting Objectives

2010-02-06T18:25:00.004-06:00

I love the show Lost. I mean, besides all the twists, turns, and mystery, there is a heavy amount of allusion running throughout the show. Take this season's premiere episode. Without getting into the not-so-necessary specifics, a power shift has occurred amongst the two "beings" who live on the island. Jacob, the kind and beneficent being, has just been murdered by another, meaner, and unnamed being. Things have gone from bad to very bad. In another scene, in another part of the island, another character finds a copy of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, his treatise on "theodicy." Theodicy is the philosophical inquiry into why bad things happen to good people. The allusion introduces a theme that I think the power shift will reinforce.

But that is just it. The writers and producers of this show have spent countless hours choreographing this type of plot device time and time again. From its inception, Lost has had an ending point in mind. It is a complete story starting at the crash of Oceanic 815 and ending with...well, however it ends. How do people create such enormous, epic story lines that take six years to tell? They know where they are going.

The same goes for teaching. How do you know your students have learned the material they need to learn? When you plan, you write objectives. You know where you want to end.

Lately, there has been a push to post objectives on the front board. In my home district, that push has been translated into posting an objective on the board in the old school "SWBAT" plus objective framework. Literally, they want me to write "SWBAT ('The Student Will Be Able To')" and, for example, "read and analyze relationships among American literature, history, and culture." (This objective is the third standard from our junior English curriculum.)

We are told that this push is taken from a new "professional growth system," the not-so-new Jon Saphier and Bob Gower (1997) book The Skillful Teacher. The edition I have was published in 1997, but the original incarnation was printed in 1979, so Jon and Bob have been lending their expertise to teachers for quite some time. Does this time frame limit or otherwise nullify what they have to say? No. The time they have spent researching teachers and teaching should show us the depth of their commitment to the art of teaching. I make this somewhat emphatic statement to underline the point that I was deeply confused when they were given as the justification for such a rigid and unflinching approach to teaching students.

So, being the intrepid investigator that I am, I made the effort to open The Skillful Teacher and review the section on objectives. Shock of all shocks, no where in the text of the chapter could I find anything about "SWBAT," formulaic language, or writing objectives on the board.

I found that Saphier and Gower (1997) believe that there are five types of objectives which must all be utilized at different times in lesson or unit planning to provide students with an education devoid of "significant gaps" (p. 398). These five types of objectives are:

Coverage - what the teacher will cover in a lesson
Activity - what the students will do in a lesson
Involvement - how students will connect with the lesson's content
Mastery - what the teacher will do to increase the likelihood that students will master some curricular knowledge or skill.
Generic Thinking - What strategy students will learn to apply across lessons and curricula.

Saphier and Gower (1997) even supply a graphic organizer to show the hierarchy they believe exists among these different type of objectives (p. 406). Nowhere is there talk of any objective that explicitly begins "SWBAT." Instead, the authors define a clear objective as "one that creates an image of specifically what a student will know or be able to do" when a lesson is completed (p. 408).

Additionally, Saphier and Gower (1997) discuss the idea that objectives should be inferred by the lesson. They write, "Each of us in teaching...ought to be able to infer a clear [objective]" (Saphier and Gower, 1997, p. 408) from observing a colleague's lesson; the same expectation is applied to students (p. 409).

So, so much for that logic. On a separate note, there are more important reasons not to post objectives on the board. As teachers of language, we know the power words can have. In sociolinguistics, power becomes a focal point for why people do and say certain things in certain ways. If any theorist of the past century embodies the ideas of sociolinguistics and its application to education, Basil Bernstein is that theorist. I highly recommend any of his essays or books to anyone interested in the power structures set-up by the use of certain language in the classroom. (An aside: the more reader-friendly American version of Bernstein is Shirley Brice Heath. Her book, Ways with Words: Language, life, and work in communities and classrooms (1983/1996), is a great resource for breaking into discussions of language, power, and education.)

Basil Bernstein's chapter in Sociology of Education: A critical reader (Sadovnik, 2007, pp. 97-114) is entitled "Social Class and Pedagogic Practice." This rather lengthy chapter (the font is like size 6 or something ridiculous) discusses most of the basic theory Bernstein builds his arguments upon. The one I am most concerned with is his theory of the three sets of rules that keep order in classrooms. These rules are:

Hierarchical - rules that place students on a lesser level than teachers, teachers on a lesser level than administrators, and so on. These rules also teach students lessons about which culture, group, or belief set is the most valued by the society in which they are attending school.
Sequencing - rules that determine the pace at which learning will take place as well as in what order content will be learned. These rules assume that the school and the home are both environments for learning. Generally, as students increase in grade, more and more learning is shared between home and school, regardless of what the home environment may be like.
Criterial -rules that legitimize what is learned and illegitimize what is not acceptable as learning material.

Placing objectives on the board falls into all three of these categories of rules.

Placing objectives on the board reinforces the hierarchy of teacher as gatekeeper. Students see teachers writing the objectives on the board in "teacher talk" (that is a Shirley Brice Heath term) and they perceive a certain cognitive distance between themselves and what they are supposed to learn. Ironically, if an involvement objective were placed on the board, this relationship between student and posted objective would cancel out the goal of having students connect with content.

Placing objectives on the board reinforces the back-breaking pace of learning. How will students feel comfortable asking for help on yesterday's objective if the board says that today is a new objective? Furthermore, the student who does not have mastery of the previous day's objective is made to feel inadequate since he or she is not ready to move on. Essentially, posting objectives on the board works against treating the student as an individual learner and reinforces the feeling of being just another "jar" to fill in the assembly line.

Placing objectives on the board reinforces notions of what is and is not legitimate for school. The information in the objective is valuable; any other explorations or "teachable moments" are not to be considered. If the objective is "the student will be able to read and analyze relationships among American literature, history, and culture," any connection to literature from other countries is considered irrelevant. Additionally, the literature covered in the class is considered representative of American culture. If omissions of cultural groups or experiences occurs (for whatever reason), students of the omitted group may feel as though their culture or their experiences are not valuable in discussing what "American literature, history, and culture" stands for and is.

An unempowered and disenfranchised student usually becomes a failure or a discipline problem. And for what? So an objective can be posted on the board for an observation by a supervising principal or some such. In a democratic society, shouldn't all vices be given some validation? Can I teach only the classic "dead white guys" without including Hispanic, Italian, Polish, etc. authors in my class's reading selections? Can I do that in an area as diverse as mine (we are 45 minutes from the heart of Washington, D.C.)? As an instructor, should I blindly follow policy or should I ask questions about how that policy will affect my students?

If I was asked for an overarching answer to this question, I would say that no one should post objectives for the class anywhere. Not even the state or national standards. Teachers need to know these. I have my three thin volumes lined up next to my desk at school: the Virginia State Standards of Learning, or SOLs (I know; don't laugh too hard); the NCTE/IRA Standards for Teachers of Language Arts; and my home district's scope and sequence/pacing guides. I refer to them when I formulate objectives that I write on my lesson plans. These plans get reviewed when i have an observation. My administrator should be able to do as Saphier and Gower said earlier, infer what my goal was. When we conference after the observation, the administrator should ask what my objective was; then we should discuss whether or not my goal and what was observed matched.

But I am not one for nice neat answers. I don't post objectives, but I do post an outline of what we will be doing in class. I write up the date and then I list the steps we will take throughout the lesson. Being mindful of my friend Basil Bernstein, I write them up in ways that are flexible, but I also make sure they are definite enough to actually guide the class through the period. On any given day, my board may read:

"5 February 2010

English 11

Warm-up: [Instructions] (I walk around and check on students during this time, but who doesn't, right?)
PowerPoint and Notes: [Title]
[Name of Culminating Activity for that Lesson; I usually try to be catchy]
Wrap-up"

So, that is my way to keep students on the path to the goal. I would really be interested in reading what some of you use in your classrooms. How do you keep your students on the path to your lesson objectives? What types of objectives do you think you favor? What do you think about Bernstein? I look forward to reading some of the responses. Just don't expect a reply on Tuesday nights. Lost is on.

The Data Driven Aughts

2010-01-23T08:23:00.011-06:00

by Tara Seale

I titled this post the Data Driven Aughts, first because educators and students alike have been driven by data accumulated from the NCLB assessments, and second because I wanted to use an Urban Dictionary word because I am hip like that. Aughts refers to the decade between 2000-2010. Even though teachers frequently complain about standardized testing, and I am a proponent that believes much of what we are testing and how we are administering the tests (Please - a paper and pencil?) isn't relevant in the 21st Century, I still pour over the data produced from the NCLB assessments. Maybe it is my competitive nature because I want to know that what I am doing in the classroom is really making a difference, maybe it is because I haven't seen a way to use data to indicate growth through project based learning portfolios, but I currently depend on standardized testing to determine if my student has moved, hopefully in an upwards direction, or unfortunately, maybe he or she has not moved at all.

In a recent blog post by Lisa Nielsen at the Innovative Educator titled 21st Century Educators don't say, "Hand it in." They say, "Publish it!" Lisa spells out why standardized tests are not reliable indicators of what students are capable of achieving. She advocates publishing student work for an authentic audience, and she also provides six ways for an educator to move from a classroom that hands it in to a classroom that publishes it. I highly recommend reading this post, and I completely agree that this is the best environment for students, but I also believe that standardized testing is not going away in this next decade either.

Data is even becoming more flashy. I recently checked out data on the NAEP website to discover that they were using the Google's data in motion gadget as a visual graphic to demonstrate how 4th grade and 8th grade math scores have changed between the years 2003 to 2009. As a literacy teacher, I quickly noticed that only the math scores are using the cool visual motion graphics, and most of the scores move in an upwardly direction. I wonder what direction the literacy scores move?

This is my real worry. There are many articles out there suggesting that students growing up in this Googlized Century cannot maintain focus long enough to read a full length novel or write a lengthy prose, I don't necessarily believe that (read my response to one of these article at Sharing the Solitary Self for a Greater Mind), but I do have some concerns that arose when I read an article about the NAEP data from Detroit.

Ryan Beene wrote an article at Crain's Detroits Business titled Detroit's public schools post worse scores on record in national assessment. At the fourth grade level, only 3 percent tested at the proficient level and at the 8th grade level, 4 percent tested at the proficient level. This is alarming. Even if we should be moving towards project based learning and a publish it instead of turn it in classroom, when less than 5 percent score proficient on a basic skills test (even though they did use a pencil in a texting world), this is alarming. Do I think the scores would have been different if students created a portfolio and took a digital assessment, probably, but there is still obviously some serious issues and deficiencies in this urban area. When I went to the NAEP website to see how the rest of urban America performed on this test, it was better than Detroit, but scores were still very low. The highest 8th grade reading score was
in Charlotte with 29 percent of students scoring proficient.
The blog comments at the bottom of the post in the Ryan Beene article list a variety of reasons why the Detroit scores were so low: lack of parenting, politics, economics, inadequate teaching, inadequate classroom equipment, etc... but what emerged for me as I read the comments is that there are numerous problems without a clear plan to fix it.

If nothing else, the data driven aughts have shown us that something needs to change, but I also see change. The NAEP will have a digital component in literacy by 2011, and we are moving in the direction of adding 21st Century equipment in all schools. I am not sure if this will all be enough, but I hope when I click back onto the NAEP website in 2020, I will be able to see the literacy scores set to motion, but of course, there will be another gadget by then, something even more visually dynamic, something not even invented yet, something that one of our students will create.

Glogging - not Blogging

2010-01-17T16:44:00.016-06:00

by Tara Seale

Have you heard of a Glog? I recently used Glogster in my classroom to allow students to display a short, descriptive paragraph before we embarked on a long narrative.

I wanted my students to be able to describe a place to create a setting, usually essential for a great narrative. I do not teach Pre-AP or AP English, so for regular 9th grade English students, a model sentence is usually the best way to start.

The sentence below, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, is absolutely the best model sentence that I have found to use in describing the location of a place.

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel.
F. Scott Fitzgerald

I like this sentence because it starts with three prepositional phrases, and most 9th graders can write prepositional phrases even if they do not usually incorporate prepositional phrases into their writing. I also like that this sentence starts with a general idea of the location and moves toward a more specific location, so I instruct my students to do the same. After the prepositional phrases, this sentence has a verb. Hopefully, all 9th grade students can supply a verb. Then the sentence uses adjectives that describe the subject, which allows me to teach comma rules related to adjectives. The last word in the sentence is the subject. Most of my students do not write sentences in which the last word is the subject. It is usually the first word in most of their sentences. This model sentence forces my students to explore how to end a sentence with the subject. I usually have great success with students who are trying to duplicate F. Scott Fitzgerald's sentence. See some examples below:

At the top of the wooden stairs and down the hall to the right, the loud sound of music filling the air, waits a large, cologne-filled room with clothes and junk all over the floor.
Through the wide turns around beautiful trees, about seventy-five miles from Little Rock, stands the two-story house, aging.
In the dim light of the afternoon sun, just through the back door, is my old, warm kitchen.

There are a few minor differences but basically the same structure. Next, I discuss the difference between showing and telling sentences. I always share Mark Twain's famous quote:

"Don't tell me the lady screamed. Bring her on and let her scream!"

After my students are satisfied with their descriptive paragraph, we record their voices reading the paragraph. I am fortunate enough to have a class set of ipods with voice recorder capablities, but if you aren't, you can always use Audacity, which is a free open source software used for recordings. This assignment made me realize how important it is for students to hear themselves reading out loud. Even though my students read their own writing, they still had to read it several times to develop fluency.

Next, we uploaded everything to Glogster. Students selected images that best represented their paragraph. I discussed Fair Use and Creative Commons Licensing. We practiced using Google's Advanced Search by clicking on Google Search > Images > Advanced Search and under usage rights, we changed the default to labeled for reuse.

I am very pleased with the Glogster results. Click on the links below to see some of my favorites (be sure to click on the player to hear the student read his or her paragraph):

1st Student Example Glog

2nd Student Example Glog

3rd Studnet Example Glog

4th Student Example Glog

5th Student Example Glog

I try to model every assignment I provide for my students, so see the Glog I created below:

Link to the teacher model Glogster

The hardest part of the ACT was writing in cursive

2010-01-09T11:40:00.013-06:00

by Tara Seale

That is what my son told me after he took the ACT in December. He said that he couldn't remember how to write in cursive, so he just printed and made a few loops here and there. When the proctor collected the tests, she paused, looked over his statement, and he worried that she would announce that he did not write in cursive. As my son and other students filed out of the room, they asked one another, "Do you know how to make a capital S in cursive?" and "Do you think it matters if I messed up the statement by not writing in cursive?"
When he arrived home, he had a discussion with his sister, a freshman in college, about writing in cursive. They both asked me why teachers waste so much time teaching students to write in cursive in elementary school when they never use it again.

I have been thinking about this discussion and their question. I am not sure I know the answer. When I decided to write this post, I Googled writing the ACT statement in cursive to see if anyone else had posted about students finding this difficult. Ironically, I found a student who started a Facebook group called The Hardest Part of the ACT test was copying the statement in cursive. I also found a post describing a situation similar to my son's titled Lost Art of Cursive Handwriting.

I decided to continue my quest to answer these questions: Should students write in cursive? Does it matter? Should we quit teaching cursive writing? Have we quit teaching it?
Time Magazine published an article in August 2009 titled Mourning the Death of Handwriting, and I found an interesting blog post response to the article at the Freestyle Pen titled Is handwriting really dead? A Washington Post article titled The Handwriting is on the Wall provided some interesting statistics, such as, in 2006 only 15 percent of the students taking the SAT wrote their essay in cursive, the rest printed in block letters.

I am not providing the answers to my questions in this post, but I am seeking answers. In my school district, students are required to learn cursive writing in 3rd grade, but that is the last time it is required. Students take keyboarding in 7th grade, but maybe it would be more beneficial to no longer teach cursive writing in 3rd grade and move keyboarding to 3rd grade instead. What would happen if we abandoned cursive altogether and totally embraced digital writing? I believe we are doing it slowly anyway, but I am not positive, so if you are a teacher, please complete the survey I created in Google Forms to gather information about how often teachers present handwritten material to students and how often teachers require handwritten material from students. You should be able to see the results at the end.

Survey Link

Link to the Results for people not taking the survey.

The Year of Twitter

2010-01-04T21:34:00.014-06:00

by Tara Seale

So did you try out Twitter in 2009? If you didn't, then apparently you weren't one of the 18 million who did. Several websites claim that 2009 was the year of Twitter.

Mashable's How Twitter Conquered the World in 2009

Yahoo! News: The Year of Twitter and Facebook

and Time Magazine explains "How Twitter will change the way we live"

I tried Twitter in early 2009, and I really didn't get it. I left a few measly tweets and thought there was nothing I could possibly say in 140 characters that anyone would want to read. I picked it back up again after a few months, and I lucked out by finding and following teachers who shared links to great resources that I could use in my classroom, so I began to share my ideas and to learn how to abbreviate and convey what I wanted to say in 140 characters. I currently use Twitter to keep in touch with teachers from all over the world @tseale.

As I began to use Twitter effectively, I wanted to share this powerful communication tool with my students. Luckily, I am in a school district that allows me to experiment with Web 2.0 to enhance my classroom curriculum. I created a teacher account @bryantenglish, next my students signed up for a Twitter account, and then we followed each other. We began by tweeting about outside reading, and I used Twitter to send out homework reminders.
I decided to use Twitter to engage my students while we read Edith Hamilton's Mythology, required for 9th grade students at my high school. Some students love the book and enjoy mythology, and some students think I am trying to torture them by forcing them to read about Greek gods and goddesses, so my hope was that students would want to read about Greek mythology if I connected it to a fun web tool, and I also decided it could help me teach one of our 9th grade required literary terms: persona.
I began by creating a list of mythological characters spread throughout Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I did not use any of the major gods or goddesses because they are all covered fairly quickly in the front of the text. I then gave the list to my students and asked them to look up the characters in the index and decide who they most wanted to be on Twitter. Students picked their top three, and I used their preferences to assign each character to one student. The students were sworn to secrecy to not share the identity of their Twitter persona. Students, over a period of ten days, created ten tweet clues in character as if they were their actual Twitter persona. They even changed their Twitter photo to match their character. The first student to correctly guess everyone's identity received the incredible award of sitting in my big comfy rolling chair for the day. I was surprised that this award was so appealing and inspired so much competition. By the second day, students were already on to me though. They claimed that I came up with this assignment so that they would have to read through the whole book to discover everyone's identity - busted- but it didn't matter because they kept participating. Plus, students learned how to create a persona. In the beginning, student tweets were rather weak. See some examples below:

I am the master builder.

I made the god's angry.

I labored long and hard.

Students tried their best to follow the rubric I provided in class, but I realized I had to create better models of a Twitter persona. I became Apollo and added my tweets to the rubric as an example. I also have to recommend the book Oh My Gods! by Scholastic for example tweets. The book even provides example Facebook pages for the Greek gods. I began to post my favorite student tweets on our class blog page to inspire students to create better tweets. See a few of my favorites below:

Shoot...you think you have a big mouth... you apparently haven't seen what I have eaten. (Cronus Persona)

Ha Ha King Minos you can't catch me now. (Icarus Persona)

Hey Theseus you know I am a better hero than you. (Hercules Persona)

I am so selfish...How could I have let it get this bad... a war over me... It's really not that worth it. =( (Helen Persona)

I can't wait to open my gift! (Pandora Persona)

I used a Google spreadsheet to create a list of each Twitter account and a word bank for each persona that students had to research. Students filled out the spreadsheet as they guessed each identity, and they shared the spreadsheet with me when it was complete. If you are interested in seeing the links to my rubric, spreadsheet, and the directions I gave the students, visit the link to the Twitter Assignment on our class blog page.

I am considering how my students might use Twitter next. I like NPR's recent use of Twitter. They asked people to tweet about the year 2009 in one word; participants could also Facebook the word. Then NPR created a wordle out of the words they received. In a wordle, the most repeated word is the largest. I am going to steal this idea because I am Hermes, the God of Thievery (all of the good teachers are Hermes), so I think I will ask my students to tweet the one word that sums up 2009 for them, and maybe they will also find 2009 full of change and challenge, but somewhat awesome and hopeful too. See the NPR wordle below:

Read the NPR article here: NPR's The Year 2009 in one word.

GRRRRRading

2009-12-28T23:08:00.003-06:00

So, I've tried to stay away from toxic subjects, but grading is one that is a hotly contested topic currently in my district. So...here it goes.

A few weeks ago, our district sent around a flyer about a grading study group that they were putting together to investigate new ways to grade. One of these new ways involves a no zero policy allowing for the lowest grade assignable to be a 50. In the words of Hamlet, "Angels and ministers of grace defend us!"

I get perhaps shielding maybe some students occasionally from getting a zero, but to never assign them? I am supposed to give a student who turned in nothing for the quarter a 50? Something seems wrong here.

Now, I am aware of all the blah-blah arguments about grades, but here is a brief list of reasons why this policy is a bad idea:

1. Grades are a measure of student progress. A student who does not understand 50 percent of the material should not be misled into believing that he or she does.

2. NOT because it will inflate grades. There is a great article which I cannot find at the moment (of course) called "The Drama without a Villain." The whole article is dedicated to the myth of grade inflation. It begins with the Committee of Ten, those guys who created Carnegie Units, complaining about, you got it, too many "A"s being awarded. Not going to go deeply into it here, maybe in another post in February, but according to this fine article (which I swear I will find and then post the bibliographic information for at a later date) grade inflation is about as real as Nessie and the Creature from the Blue Lagoon.

3. I've seen too many students in AP English courses who can't write. I am not being over-the-top here. Let me give you an example: "incase" as a word throughout an entire essay. Once would have been a typo; twice, tragic. No less than twelve times did this student, who is actually on of the best I have, write this as one word.

4. I don't spend my precious time tackling mound after mound of papers so that I can give a student who completely ignored the assignment a 50. If I ask for a paper on Jude the Obscure and I get an essay on the merits of certain waterfowl, I should be able to give that student an appropriate grade.

5. Where is the justice in assigning a plagiarized paper a 50?

These reasons and many more have me stewing about this attempt to rewrite policy.

An aside on the policy piece. In Virginia, the COMMONWEALTH where I teach (all caps on purpose), there are only local Boards of Supervisors who control the purse strings. School boards are dependent upon these local boards for their budgets, etc. School boards are not allowed to generate a private revenue stream. Thus, much like the federal government, our Boards of Supervisors have a little bit of control over what is done in the schools. Just thought I would mention that for those from most of the other states who have independent school boards.

So, this attempt to rewrite policy is being driven by assistant superintendents of curriculum, etc. who wish to get a gold star on their resumes, School Board members who have children in the system, and Board of Supervisors members who have school children in the system. There is a trifecta if I ever saw one.

So, I began thinking about what the implication would be for students in the English classroom. Potentially, students could pass English classes while avoiding an entire section of the course. Don't like the essay writing? Skip it and do everything else. Don't like to read? Skip it and write the essays. With the lowest grade being a 50 and the highest F being a 59, there are only 10 percentage points that need to be attained before students get a passing 60.

What do you think?

Can this grading system be used for anything other than turning out a bunch of students who can't read, write, or think?

Has this system been implemented in your district? If so, how is it working out?

Is it a good idea to destroy our own competitiveness as the forces of globalization once again demand that we compete for ideas, resources, and power?

Is it destructive to students to lie to them about where they really fall?

AP Break Assignments

2009-12-23T16:01:00.003-06:00

I don't know about you ("you" being anyone who teaches AP English of any level), but one of the hardest parts of the job is assigning work during school breaks. For me, the dilemma lies between assigning the right amount and respecting the families' time with their loved ones.

So, I open it up to you (same referent). What do you assign for break? What factors help you decide what to assign?

This post is an open discussion, so please write back.

The Seven Personae - English Journal Nov. 2009

2009-12-23T12:48:00.004-06:00

In the November 2009 English Journal, Jim Burke outlines the seven personae students will need to learn to master the future. These seven personae are “necessary [for success] as students, employees, and citizens” (Burke, 2009, p. 13) in the 21st century. Burke (2009) claims that these personae are derived from Gardner’s Five Minds for the Future. I mention this bit about Gardner only to make sense of my next thought. Often when I read Gardner, I find myself looking for a way to connect it to classroom practice. Despite Gardner’s frequent assertion that Multiple Intelligences are not intended for educational assessment or lesson design, I, like many other teachers, see potential for a way into students’ minds. That is why Burke’s article was so intriguing. His framework is simple, yet developed in a way that invites discussions of implementation in curriculum and lesson design.

Burke’s idea is unassailable. These personae represent many extant frameworks for new 21st century job skills. Take Daniel Pink’s (2006) book A Whole New Mind, wherein Pink outlines the six senses of the right brain and how to develop them. His reasons for these new skills include the usual trifecta of “Abundance, Asia, and Automation” (Pink, 2006, p. 30). The jobs that people could get without a college diploma are being reduced dramatically. Students must be educated to think, but they need more than the typical left-brain approach that is given high value in the test-score driven high school system. If students are to be successful, they must go to college; if they are to go to college, they must know what we ask in the academic standards and be able to imagine new possibilities and uses for this information.

Let’s look at the seven personae. Burke’s (2009, pp. 13-14) framework outlines the following:

Storyteller: “everyone must be able to use a range of means and media to tell the story of an experience, an event, a situation, or a problem and its proposed solutions;…we must be equally able to understand and analyze the stories…others tell us.”
Philosopher: “[students] must be able to understand and grapple with [complex ideas] by posing questions and considering a subject from multiple angles;…they must be able to convey their own perspective on and response to these ideas through words, images, numbers.”
Historian: “we must know how to gather, assess, and apply background knowledge relevant to the text or task at hand in order to comprehend its ideas and arguments…[students] must also know how to reason like a historian.”
Anthropologist: “[students] must all develop the ability to understand not only our own but also others’ cultures…developing the ability to observe, examine, and communicate insights about these cultures, for such skills are fundamental to our personal and economic success.”
Reporter: “Everyone today must be able to watch for, locate, evaluate, and analyze a remarkable amount of data from different sources;…we must develop and continually refine our ability to investigate, research, and navigate…[the] sea of information…[and] convey the results.”
Critic: “We all need the skills critics use to evaluate and analyze a text…[and] now it must also…examine retirement plans, medical options, and competing products and services.”
Designer: “Design is such a crucial aspect of any text…we need to know how to ‘read’ for it, noticing the features used to invest the text with meaning…we must consider design when we compose documents, create online content, produce videos, or otherwise communicate with people.”

These personae are well-framed and highly adaptable. I can think of a number of lessons and assessments I use that feed into one of these. This fusion of Gardner and educational practice is easily understood, seems to be perfectly suited for thinking about the goals of instruction, and can be used to design assessments.

The first thing I notice is that there may be a way to streamline the seven personae. For example, the Reporter persona seems as though it could be the Storyteller persona; also, the Anthropologist seems as though it could replace the Historian. This overlap could be beneficial for the implementing instructor or it could hinder implementation. The benefit would be the specificity with which each persona discusses the outcomes of English education. Thus, a Storyteller becomes a creative writer while a Reporter becomes a non-fiction writer or journalist. The hindrance of the overlap comes from the openness of each persona. An Anthropologist could not study culture without understanding that culture’s history; moreover, the “thinking of a historian” is part of how Anthropologists make sense of their findings. Perhaps some streamlining could make these personae easier to keep in mind when thinking about how to design lessons that develop each one.

I assign some projects built on a rubric I constructed from Daniel Pink’s six senses of the right brain (2006, p. 65-67). This rubric assesses student creativity in each of the six areas: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, and Meaning. Jim Burke’s personae represent a set of right brain skills that can be used to create a classroom consciousness of assessment and assignments. In these creative projects, I could use the skill set Burke presents to even more specifically describe what I am looking for within each rubric heading. For example, my design column could have varying levels of “considers how the features of his or her project invest it with meaning” or some such.

Think about essays. If these seven personae were part of how you approached creativity and imagination in assessment with your students, you could remind them that the narrative essay should draw most on their Storyteller skills, while the expository essay (depending upon the content) should draw on their Reporter and Historian skills. Using these personae to discuss imagination and creativity in student assessment and assignments could result in much more insightful and developed papers that would allow students to demonstrate how much they really understand.

My head has been buzzing with ideas since I read this article. These personae offer such an opportunity to discuss how we approach creativity and imagination in the era of the standardized test. Using these personae when we think about lessons and assessment can help us honor the right brain while still educating the left. Education does not have to flatten out; students can be well-rounded in an era of standardized testing.

So You Think You Can Read? Rigor in Reading

2009-12-15T23:32:00.004-06:00

“About two-thirds of those who enter high school graduate. About two-thirds of those who do go on to some form of higher education. About two-thirds of those who go on to higher education take remedial courses in college (so they are not doing college-level work; they are really in high school). Fewer than half of those who go to college get a degree of any sort. Yet virtually all analysts agree that those who do not have at least two years of real college-level work will be in real trouble as adults” (NCEE, 2008, p. 35).

The following scene may be familiar to some of you:

It is a hazy weekday morning. You pull into your parking space at school, open your car door, sling on all your gear, and enter the building. You pray you balanced all of your things correctly because you must sidestep a zillion teenagers who will, and have, run teachers down on occasion. You make it to the office, sign in, sigh at the mountain of mail in your mailbox you wish you had a hand for, and then you head to your classroom. The smell of freshly-brewed coffee drifts slowly down the hall, welcoming you to another morning at school. You drop the gear in your room, run back to the office mailbox, grab your mail, and then return to your desk. (They should call it your castle since the numbers of student papers piling up in the corners are beginning to look like parapets.) You grab your mug, head across the hall, and fill up your cup. Then, you walk back across the hall, grab a legal pad and a pen, and head for your weekly department meeting. Your serene morning is about to end.

At the meeting, you and your colleagues debate over the use of materials in the classroom. The honors/Advanced Placement/Dual Enrollment/ International Baccalaureate students get short shrift. The special education students get mentioned and the special education liaison takes them on by him or herself. Then there are the standard students. I have found that whenever these students come up, people get weird. Once motivated and intelligent people become work-o-phobic. Teach them Shakespeare, you say? Make them do homework, you say? Do I look like a miracle worker? Yes, you do. You are a teacher—time to start acting like one.

If this scene is familiar, then perhaps the quotation from the National Center on Education and the Economy’s report Tough Choices or Tough Times also struck a familiar chord. Our standard students are being fed fairy tales of the power of education. They are being told of the empowerment an education can provide while some teachers quietly exchange rigor in the curriculum with easy-to-read books and easy-to-grade assessments.

At our school, the newest drive is for literacy. We have been adapting all sorts of new methods (new to us that is) to raise students’ vocabularies. We have adopted root word strategies, interactive reading strategies, cross-curricular classrooms, ad nauseum. What we haven’t added is the rigor. What possible vocabulary growth can tenth grade students get from To Kill a Mockingbird? What a fantastic novel; its simple language makes it all that much more powerful. The problem is that that may be the only major work students read all year. The rest of the time, students read short stories, poems, and the phenomenal, yet equally simple, Night. Where is the challenge of Shakespeare? Some of our teachers teach Julius Caesar to tenth grade, others try to find ways to run out of time. Where is the challenge of at least one difficult novel? I mean, my AP Literature class will read A Tale of Two Cities because we have it for twelfth grade. Some districts use that novel as a freshman text.

The bottom line is what the bottom line always has been in a meaningful education: effort. Many teachers do not want to struggle with their students to teach them Shakespeare. They would rather pull out Harper Lee or Elie Wiesel and get a powerful story with little linguistic development. Learning language is hard, but I’ve never thought it was optional.

So, what is to be done? The answer is simple. Next time you consider what to teach next, think about the numbers. Do you want half of the students you teach to be unsuccessful? I think the answer to that question will give you all you need to know about the importance of a rigorous curriculum and whether or not you should push your students to become better readers. They will need two years of college to be successful. Could your students make it that far?

I know mine will; we just started reading The Merchant of Venice as an anticipatory piece for The Great Gatsby. The play is the thing for a comparison with Gatsby. Considering its discussions of wealth, dangerous conflict, and forbidden loves, The Merchant of Venice could be Gatsby’s long-lost cousin. The students are using many of the tactics offered in the Folger’s Shakespeare Set Free collection to become comfortable with the language. I am not worried about them getting the story…yet. Right now, I am tackling the task of getting students excited about reading Shakespeare. Turns out, with the Folger’s help, it is not all that hard.

How do you inject rigor into your curriculum? What are some strategies you use when teaching a difficult text?

Introducing…Us

2009-12-14T21:05:00.002-06:00

Hello NCTE secondary section community. We are your new bloggers Dan Bruno and Tara Seale. We look forward to getting to work on this blog for you and with you. We will write entries based on our own classroom practices, our own areas of expertise, and your e-mailed questions. See below for specific contact information and our individual interests.

Dan Bruno
North Stafford High School
839 Garrisonville Road
Stafford, VA 22556

I graduated from the University of Mary Washington with a B.A. in English Literature and Language and a B.A. in Classical Studies with a concentration in Ancient Greek. I also have a Master of Education from the University of Virginia in Social Foundations of Education. I currently teach an ever-changing class load in a school with a hybrid bell schedule (something I will definitely be posting on in the future). As my schedule now stands, I teach English 11, Journalism I, Journalism II, Journalism III, AP English Literature and Composition, and AP Language and Composition. This year, my AP Language class has been paired with an AP US History class to create Hislish, an interdisciplinary approach to learning about American history and letters. I am also involved with school politics, serving on both the School Board Roundtable and the Superintendent's Advisory Council. I will be adding posts on the following topics:

1. Teaching Shakespeare
2. Teaching Classic Texts
3. Advanced Placement English Language and/or Literature
4. Integrated Learning Teams
5. The Policy Arena
6. Educational Philosophy
7. Educational Sociology
8. Educational Psychology
9. Applied Psychology
10. Teaching Vocabulary
11. Writing to Write/Writing to Learn
12. Ancient Greek Literature

I look forward to working with all of you in the future. Please e-mail blog post requests, comments, and questions to MorganWriter612@gmail.com.

Tara Seale
Bryant High School
200 NW 4th Street
Bryant AR 72022
tseale@bryantschools.org

I have a B.A. from Louisiana State University and further education classes from Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, AR. I consider myself a 21st Century educator, and I am an active tweeter, blogger, and ninger (I am not sure if the last one is a word yet). I teach two 9th grade English classes a day, and I serve as an Instructional Technology Specialist for my district when I am not teaching. I recently graduated from the Google Teacher Academy, and I plan to add blog posts related to the following topics:

1. Educational Philosophy
2. Student Engagement/Classroom Management
3. Data and Curriculum
4. 21st Century Practices & Assessments
5. Required Reading
6. Sentence Modeling
7. Smartboards in and English classroom
8. Web 2.0 in an English classroom
9. Other technology devices in an English classroom
10. Reluctant readers

Good-bye, Teacher Crankiness--Time for Gratitude

2009-11-26T09:15:00.001-06:00

As always, stressful, cranky periods in my teaching give way to more pleasant stretches where things go better. (It has nothing to do with school actually being closed this weekend. Not at all. Ahem.) In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I thought I’d share some of my appreciations specific to teaching.

I’m grateful for:

* Inspiring teachers who continue to try new things in their lessons after more than twenty five years in the classroom who befriend me and share their wisdom generously

* The print shop I can use to order copies ahead of time

* Students who give a damn

* A grown up job that allows for a “do-over” semester to semester

* Technology which allows me to communicate with students without having to be physically available all hours

* A career which keeps me up to date on buzz words that impact my own child’s education

* A classroom with windows that look out onto a nature preserve

* A built-in excuse to buy new fiction in order to “keep up” professionally

* A job where I never have to try and get the holidays off in order to be home with my family

* A profession which continually challenges me and fills me with the knowledge that I am doing something worthwhile with my life

Happy Thanksgiving!

Where Does the Buck Stop?

2009-11-20T18:00:00.003-06:00

Lately, I’ve been feeling like a triage doctor in a disaster area clinic tent. No, nascent critical thinking doesn’t cause immediate death, but I believe that strong thinking, reading, and writing skills empower people to build healthy lives. I blog about education to further the conversation and promote positive thinking; this semester, I’ve felt short of those energies.

For a myriad of reasons, a larger majority of my students are resisting critical thinking this semester. When I wrote one student about an entire viewpoint the student’s argument ignored, I got a very polite email explaining that the student preferred to simplify the issue by avoiding that part of the problem. %$@#? In truth, I found that student’s candor refreshing. Most students greet my encouragement to take on complexity with a “I don’t know what you mean” stare. “That would mean I have to look up another article,” one student told me as if my expectation required a run across a minefield. “Yes,” I countered. “Sometimes research argument writing isn’t a linear process. Our research leads to additional questions we didn’t have at the beginning, and we need to double-back to find answers.” “I don’t double-back,” the student told me flatly. At no point have I given a zero or threatened failure. Most students, for the first time in my fifteen years, are telling me that what I’m asking for sounds exhausting and difficult, and like the Bartleby they might never read about because the story exceeds five pages in length, they sigh, “I would prefer not to.”

I’ve drafted numerous rants against “the millenials” in my head, but really, what I want to ask is, where does the buck stop? What changes in my expectations reflect my flexibility and understanding of changing generations and what changes reflect a lowering of standards? If students prefer not to take guidance on persuasive argument, do they fail despite having turned in a paper of the required length? After a semester of patient persuasion, do I have the energy for the fallout that position would require?

co-posted on Between Classes

Teaching Civil Argument in today’s America

2009-10-30T19:35:00.001-05:00

I’ve just finished grading my students’ argument essays. In third person voice, students are asked to argue a point of view using three quotations from an assigned reading. I’ve done some variation of this assignment each of my fifteen years of teaching writing. Across that time, I’ve seen students’ arguments grow more…well, more bullying.

I teach my students that the goal of an academic argument is to persuade people who don’t already agree. I encourage them to strike a tone that acknowledges the opposing point of view while refuting it with examples and evidence. Lately, as recent as the last few years, a growing percentage of students (not all of them), try to vilify the other side in their arguments. Now, hyperbole is not new to novice writers, but the tenor seems uglier to me. Gross generalizations characterize their enemies: “Parents today are fat and lazy.” “Everybody’s a pervert on the Internet.” “Stupid people deserve what credit card companies do to them.” Yikes!

As I spent this past week writing comments that asked how those remarks would persuade rather than alienate an audience who recognized themselves in the statements, I thought about the current media climate in which my students are growing up. Polarity and anger seem to be the modern media’s cash cow. Regardless of party affiliation, blogs and cable news channels teem with bile and anger. Gone are the David Brinkleys of my own coming of age. Phil Donahue, once considered such a hot head because he leaned forward in his chair and even stood up and ran around his audience, strikes me now as a gentle journalistic hippie. When I think of the people they see as models of “academic argument,” I realize my students might just be imitating the nation’s model for argumentative discourse.

I try not to be outdated as a teacher. I don’t teach MLA the way it was in my day (end notes, anyone?), and I don’t require that all their sources in a research essay come from hard copy sources. One of my responsibilities is to prepare my students for the current marketplace they face—and yet? I don’t know if I can change here. I might just retreat to my ivory tower and teach students the civil argumentative discourse I believe is the root of understanding and change in the world and trust that our current ravings will pass.

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher

Okay?

2009-10-10T11:30:00.001-05:00

According to the ever-venerable Wikipedia, “okay” is a word “denoting approval, assent, or acknowledgment.” I think I need to post that definition where I can see it prominently. I often use “okay” for acknowledgment; my students hear approval, and between those two uses stretches a field of misunderstanding.

Here’s how the scenario usually goes down:

“Ms. K?”

“Yes?”

“I’m not going to be here for the test tomorrow because I have to pick up my uncle’s second cousin from the airport because my grandmother has diabetes, and my father’s car is in the shop and I have to be at work on time or I’ll lose all the fingers on my left hand.” *Details have been changed to protect identities, but please note that the convoluted and urgent nature of the student scenario has been retained.

“Okay.”

“Great, bye!”

Weeks later after grades have been posted.

”Ms. K?”

“Yes?”

“I have a zero for that test I missed and when I told you I was going to miss it, you said it was fine.”

“I’m sure I never said it was fine. You need to make up that test.”

“You said it was okay! I would have made it up weeks ago when I still knew that story if I’d known it wasn’t okay! Why did you say it was okay?”

“Uh. Hmm.”

Note to self: eradicate “okay” from teaching language. I need a new verbal filler for that scenario. It’s not “okay” with me that the student will be absent, but these aren’t scenarios where I’m being asked for permission. I’m being informed of a decision. Nodding seems like approval, too. I feel rude not saying anything. What else would signify acknowledgment without approval? “Gotcha.” “Sounds complicated.” “I see.” Yes, maybe “I see.” Or maybe, “See me when you get back.” Leave the ball clearly in the student’s corner…I may need to snap a rubber band on my wrist for a while to change this habit…

co-posted on Between Classes: Living a Balanced Life as a Quality Teacher