Author: Mr. Chase

Wired.com shoots us the indelicately titled “How American Youth Will Screw Viacom” describing Viacom’s lackluster sales growth in the Second Quarter.

After I dried my tears, I read on. What got me most was this:

Welcome to the classroom, Viacom. The parallels extend beyond the classroom. It might just be me, but each time I speak to a group of teachers, formally or informally, about new tools and tactics for the classroom, I invariably get the same question, “But, which one should I use?” It’s the silver bullet question, and I hate it. It’s the question that tells me either they weren’t listening or I didn’t strongly enough make the the case that it’s about a paradigm shift.
Undoubtedly, Viacom execs are confounded as to which tool they should use to bring their audience back. Of course, one tool won’t do it. If I may make a hyperbolic metaphor, their target demo is out of the cave.
The dancing shadows of I Love Money and Real World/Road Rules Challenge MMMCVI just don’t hold the same magic.
The same is to be said of the classroom, though it could be argued textbooks never held quite as much magic.
It’s not just networks; now Viacom’s gotta compete with the world.

Stupid copyright getting in the way. Philly City Paper’s staff blog, The Clog, 
reports:

Everything is ruined forever! 

Popular
social networking site Facebook finally pulled down Scrabulous, its
third-party version of Scrabble, after being threatened with legal
action. Following Mattel, who owns the international rights to
Scrabble, U.S. rights holder Hasbro slammed Facebook with a Digital
Millennium Copyright notice. F-book took the game down due to the
copyright concerns (which, let’s be honest, it totally violated wicked
hard), and Hasbro in turn is filing suit against the application’s
creators…

Can’t we just jump forward in time to a free and open exchange of ideas? Stupid copyright. Stupid, stupid copyright.

We’re adding another year to SLA this fall. I’ll be teaching Freshmen and Juniors. As such, it means I’ll be developing a new curriculum for the Juniors. I’ll also be working Larissa Pahomov the newest addition to our English Dept. We’ve started trading e-mails back and forth in prep for the coming year. My last epistle included some of the big and medium ideas for the year. I thought I’d throw them up here for review.
Freshman Interviews: This would be an opening mini-project where each of my 11th graders interviews one of my 9th graders using questions drafted based on the 11th-grade essential questions. The interviews will be edited as podcasts put on Drupal and iTunes. The hope here is two-fold:

1. It gives the 9th graders something they will be able to examine as 12th graders when they get there.
2. 2) One of the concerns I heard over and over last year is that the 10th graders never really got to know many of the 9th graders.

Objectives: Get them considering the essential questions, building communication skills and learning how to develop effective interviewing/research questions.

Bi-weekly 2fers: One of the pieces I want to build into the year is the idea that, at this point, the kids should be able to consistantly develop a thesis and draft a formal paper with little assistance. The plan would be to have kids write a 2-page paper every other week based on readings, class discussions, outside reading and/or current events. I’d set up a standing analytic soring rubric based on things like conventions, focus, organization, incorporation of outside sources, etc. Because I’ll have two sections of 11th, I’ll alternate the assignment weeks to help with grading.
Objectives: Develop independent writing skills, practice conventions of formal writing, build diversity of thesis development.

Change Project: This one’s still in the tinkering stage. Because, conceivably, half of my students next year will have been my students last year and half will have been in Josh Block’s class, I’m heading back to the drawing board on my 3rd Quarter “Change the World” project. I’m planning on working with our new History teacher Diana Laufenberg on this one too. In the opening weeks of the year, we’ll brainstorm and research different topics in the world that need attention/changing. The students will identify those areas they have the most interest/stake in and then be grouped accordingly. From there, they will be assigned the task of moving to define the problem through its relation to the texts we examine in class as well as identify and perpetrate needed change.
The project will culminate as their fourth quarter benchmark. The idea here is to get them thinking as a group in a year-long way they can then build off of as seniors when working individually on their capstone projects. I’m thinking the first quarter entree will be an examination of local community service groups and a required period of community service through volunteermatch.org. Again, this would be partnered with their History work. Maybe Q2 will be about selecting issues they have examined in Q1. I don’t know. This one is still fuzzy, but feels like a strong and compelling idea.
Objectives: draw connections between literature and real life, draw connections between history and literature, encourage community involvement and subsequent reflection, foster group communication skills, build intensive research skills, encourage real-world problem solving.

Outside reading: While I think Larissa and I agree the texts we’ve selected for 11th are great, I know some of the students are going to have other ideas. I don’t want to have the kids feeling like the only time they read is when we’ve selected and assigned a text. As such, I want to incorporate outside choice and reading this year. I’m not certain how the accountability side of this would work. Perhaps the assignment of one outside reading book per quarter. Maybe one of the 2fers each quarter would be assigned to include a comparison between their selected texts and a class text or current event. I know that moves away from inquiry a bit, but I’m just brainstorming, right?
Objectives: develop personal choice in reading, build comparative analysis skills, increase the breadth of literary experience.

Outside speakers: Because of our partnership with The Franklin, SLA has had the opportunity to hear from some scientists at the head of amazing scientific endeavors. I’d like to work with Diana again to pull in as many relevant outside speakers as possible. I had the chance to meet Andrew Carroll last April. He lives in D.C. and would be great to have in whilst the kids are reading The Things They Carried. For that matter, I’d like to get in touch with Tim O’Brien who lives in Boston. If we can’t get him down, I’d like to at least blog/skype/whatever. This is to say nothing of Larissa’s work with the Free Library last year and getting Sudanese refugees in to talk while we’re reading What is the What. I’m thinking one speaker a month would be good to shoot for with other, smaller speakers coming in as a type of brown bag lunch series.
Objectives: Authentic textual connections
School Paper/Lit. Magazine: This never got off the ground last year. I’d like to see it as an extracurricular activity. Just putting it out there for now.

Visiting Professors: I’d also like to get some local professors who specialize in the books we’re reading to come in and talk. Maybe that could be a brown bag seminar. I’m not sure.
Objectives: Deepen understanding of literature, build academic dialogue about given texts.

So, I was doing a little Stumble Upon because it tends to garner some pretty cool tools for helping my students research and write.

Then I stumbled upon this:

I had to laugh to keep from crying. The district has blocked the Sarcasm Society website. The best part? It is blocked because the content falls under the category of “Humor/Jokes.” I suppose we now know the district has a sense of humor, it just chooses to keep it blocked. What would its therapist say?
More Later.

As of today, Philly’s got one month left of school. It’s starting to show. I’m fine with that.
In retrospect, I probably wouldn’t have saved Hamlet and Othello as the last texts for my ninth and tenth graders respectively. Still, I did, so we’re here and there’s nothing to be done about it now.
I co-teach my freshman sections with an equally energetic teacher whom the kids dubbed Ms. WaWa before I arrived.
We’ve made it to Act V Scene i and this is where the good stuff starts, right? I mean, daggers are drawn, poison is discussed and NO ONE is reading.
When reviewing the plot as it relates to the main themes in one section of today’s class, I did one of those teacher pauses and noticed that thing that happens sometimes where a teacher asks a question, gives the appropriate amount of think time and then in the absence of eager hands, answers the question with an energy level that would make the Micro Machines Man winded.
Direct questions to the more aloof members of the class resulted in the bewildered stare I remember giving to my mom where I hoped I could wait out her interest in an answer rather than offer something self-incriminating.
My sails a bit wind-deprived, I stopped WaWa and asked a question to which I already knew the answer.
They hadn’t read. Well, to be fair, four of them admitted they had completed the required reading. The rest of the class was either sitting idly hoping to go unnoticed or proffering up answers that belied a less-than-complete knowledge of the text.
I got my ire on.
“If you’ve read, that’s great, get started on tonight’s reading and you’ll be ahead of the game. If you haven’t read, start. Tomorrow, there will be a reading quiz asking for detailed answers to what happened.”
I was met with the requisite, “oh-geez-we-ticked-him-off-feign-shame” silence. A minute or so later, shame had passed, a laptop was opened. “What are you doing?” says I.
“I’m going on sparknotes to read the No Fear Shakespeare version.”
“No, no you’re not. We’re keeping technology out of this one and we’re just reading and making notes where we don’t understand things, so that we can ensure a rich class discussion tomorrow.”
Yeah, I used the teacher “we” when I was talking about them – that’s how ticked I was.
Now, I’ll admit to faking my way through many a class discussion (I like to think it’s a part of why they gave me my degree), but I also knew the classes where actually reading the text was key to survival:

They don’t know how to honor these differences yet. Today’s class pulled back the curtain on a rather befuddled All Powerful Oz. Tonight they will read. They may not like it, but they will read. Such is life in compulsory education.
Tomorrow’s class will be better for it. They will feel smarter because they will actually be smarter. They will know which questions to ask and how to ask them. At least that’s the goal. No computers, no ActivBoards, no wifi, just kids, books, teachers and the occasional stickie note.
Here’s hoping.
More later.

As part of every induction session (usually the part we don’t get to because we fall behind in the script) we are supposed to read a journal article loosely based on the session topic.
The first session’s article dealt with the cycle of a first-year teacher. Nevermind the fact we’re none of us first-year teachers.
It used the graphic to the right.
I’m worried.
Chris blogged the other day, “Too often, the rhetoric of schools does delve into the heroic martyr teacher succeeding against all odds. That’s not sustainable. That’s not even useful.”
Let me be clear, I do not want to be a martyr – that never ends well. I can’t say I even want to be a hero – tights chafe.
I worry as I read this and this and this that teachers around the country are getting stuck somewhere in winter. Teachers are hitting the wall.
Something noble still exists in teaching.
Dana Huff writes:

The tale end of her description falls nicely in line with what Chris has to say about ex-teachers: Those teachers felt overworked, under-prepared, under-challenged, and under-appreciated.”
These teachers live in November. They teach daily in a long, cold winter of disillusionment after a gray, dreary autumn of survival.
Seeing this, watching it happen to teachers I know, I wonder why I’m still here. What’s wrong with me that I still look forward to coming to school everyday?
I’ve yet to teach in a perfect school. I never will. I’ve yet to teach in a school where I couldn’t fall in love with my job. I never will.
When it comes down to it, I come to school everyday because I’ve made certain I work in places I love. I always will. As cliche as it sounds, I live by choice.
I exercise control in what I have control over. That makes the horrible days – the really horrible days – when the things beyond my control take center stage still livable.
When did teachers abdicate control?
More later.

I think I may have stumbled on to one of the causes of the high rate of new teacher attrition.
Wednesday night, I finished session 4 of 5 of the School District of Philadelphia’s New Teacher Induction program.
My blood pressure wasn’t as high as it had been for sessions 1 and 2. I got out of session 3 by presenting with Marcie at Penn State’s 1:1 Laptop Conference. Coincidentally, it was the session where we talked about whether or not technology integration was important to differentiated instruction. (Had I been there, I’m pretty sure my eyes would have bled or I would have rocked back and forth in the corner humming “The Farmer and the Dale.”)
I had to go through new teacher induction my first year in Sarasota. The process took the entire year. SRQ uses a mentor/mentee model where novice teachers are teamed up with veterans. I’m pretty sure my mentor didn’t like me because our meetings usually consisted of the following:
Her: How you doing?
Me: Fine.
Her: Good. I guess I better initial those papers.
It was a synergy to make Stephen Covey proud.
Philly’s induction, like Philly’s core curriculum, is scripted, minute-by-minute. You can imagine what that does to class discussion. Not surprisingly, this also means, we have avoided the topic of differentiated instruction.
Wednesday, as we began looking at data and AYP and core curriculum and needs assessments and PSSA trend analysis and everything else, I could take no more.
“This is insulting,” I said, “We are all professionals, we have been trained as teachers.”
The instructor/facilitator/swami agreed, but pointed out that our ability didn’t mean a few bad teachers didn’t enter the profession.
“Yes, but I’ve had a few weeks with the 20 people in this room, and I’m pretty confident we’re not those teachers, but we’ve allowed for the building of a system that treats us as though we are.”
At this point, the train had jumped the tracks.
It was wonderful. We had an honest discussion of race and the history of Philadelphia, about systems and the like. For the first time, the car ride home was filled with discussion not of how things could have gone, but what things can become.
I’ve more thoughts on this swimming around. They’ll appear shortly, but the crux of it is this: I know new teachers need support in their first two years or they’ll revert to teaching the way they were taught when they were in school. But shouldn’t that support be dynamic? Shouldn’t that support be about what teachers need? Shouldn’t we be engaging each other in the kind of dynamic discourse we’re hoping for in our classrooms? Shouldn’t we?
More later.

For those who are unaware, SLA is a textbook-less school. More to the point, we’re a paper textbook-less school. It is a beautiful thing. Truly.

Today, preparing my 10th graders to create the Action Plan portion of what they’ve dubbed the “Change the World Project.” I created a Word document complete with step-by-step instructions with guiding questions. It was good teaching. I threw the doc up on our Moodle page and worked the kids through the prep they needed to undertake the assignment. Then, it happened, Moodle was down. The Moodle (sometimes we call it that in our Seinfeldian way) was down.

If I may drop some sarcasm on you, one of my favorite moments in a class is when something simple doesn’t work and hands shoot up and the kids start shouting my name like it’s a button for an elevator that won’t show up.

I say all this because it’s the thing about actual textbooks, they don’t crash. That’s it. I’ve worked in a 1:1 school in some incarnation or another for almost three years now. I love it.

They crash. Yes. You know what, though? They come back.

A few things can’t be done easily with paper textbooks: upgrading an entire curriculum in a day, patching, getting the most timely information possible, receiving information free of charge or corporate filtration, researching innumerable points of view, differentiating instruction on a dime…

Here’s the rub, when a kid forgets his book, that kid just needs to share with his neighbor. When an online book crashes, sadly, it falls on the shoulders of a schools techies. The shift or added layer of responsibility that comes with paperless texts can be difficult to maneuver. That, though, is why we are the teachers. Since the days of slate tablets, Plan A has failed and Plan B has been picked up on the fly.

The point is this, paperless books are not perfect, but they are far better than the tools of old. By the time I’d printed the pages I needed for today’s lesson, The Moodle was back up and what I’m sure was half an acre of Brazil had been clear cut. My own personal Change the World Project?

More later.

I stumbledupon this, and it made me smile.
More later.

A Pownce from a student yesterday:

She’s not the first person to find herself when searching for new information on her benchmark project. I was hoping this would happen. I could have preached the shortcomings of the almighty Google, but they wouldn’t look anywhere else until they truly needed it.

They’ve started needing it. They’ve started needing the deep web. We started talking about it today. A somewhat convoluted metaphor of Google being like the garbage men on my block and deep search engines being like the little old lady who picks up the actual litter started things off.

Wikipedia’s entry on the Invisible Web says this about its size:

Philly schools have a subscription to EBSCO. It’s one of the best kept secrets in the district. Now, EBSCO got me through college. Fully text searches were the reason I spent minimal time in the library (sorry Doug Johnson). Showing it to the kids today, though, I felt like I was handing them a Vespa in celebration of their 16th birthdays. For some, it got the job done. For others, more was needed.

Enter “99 Resources to Research & Mine the Invisible Web” and a tutorial from Berkeley on using the invisible web.

Not all of the tools were right for all the students – I know, I was shocked too. It’s weird when they learn and see that it’s important.

More later.