Category: reading

I won’t be telling them what to think

The Gist:

  • My G11 students are reading The Great Gatsby.
  • After the choice afforded them in the last quarter, I can’t be every other English teacher.
  • We’re challenging the Academy and having numerous books vie for the title of Great American Novel.

The Whole Story:

Monday, I tweeted out the link to a simple questionnaire. It contains two statements: 1) What is the Great American Novel? 2) If you’d like to make your case, do it below.

My G11 students also received their copies of our latest class novel Monday. Maybe you’ve heard of a little book called The Great Gatsby? Apparently, it’s quite popular. In fact, many argue it qualifies as the GAN.

Narrowing down the results of the questionnaire, my classes will be pitting 8 contenders against one another. The final contender will face off against Gatsby.

I’ve written about this before. The original idea was to put Gatsby on trial for libel and slander against other novels. After consulting with many people whose thoughtfulness and opinions I greatly value, I was left with a sort of literary March Madness.

I won’t be walking my students through Gatsby. I won’t be indoctrinating them to the symbolism of that light at the end of that dock. I won’t be talking about the American dream or gender roles and the power of adhering to them.

Instead, I’ve given my students some simple instructions:

Read this book with the idea that you will either have to argue against its status as the GAN

or defend its standing as the GAN.

If the American dream and gender roles and symbolism are really key and keen in the text, they should pick up on them. If something else is there, they’ll pick up on that. Is the symbolism important because my teachers told me it was there or because it’s important? I want to start clean.

We’ve talked about some strategies for tracking their thinking. They can use the tried and true sticky notes. They can make a bookmark for each chapter where they track positives on one side and negatives on the other. They can take notes in a notebook. Turns out I don’t care.

They’ve until April 5 to finish.

During classes, they’ll frequently have time to read, about 20 minutes. Tomorrow, I’ll help them decide how to schedule their reading. They’ve 180 pages of 9 chapters and either 12 or 7 days depending on if they want to read over Spring Break. Their pace and rate are up to them.

During the remaining 2/3 of class, we’ll be debating and deciding the qualifiers of the GAN as well as practicing discreet reading and writing skills using other texts.

April 5, they’ll compile their notes, hand in their copies of Gatsby and find out which text they’ll be reading over the next two weeks. This will, be the text on whose behalf they’ll be arguing.

Rather than discussing qualifiers of the GAN, we’ll be using non-reading class time to examine literary lenses they can use to make their cases – Feminist, Marxist, Reader-Response, Postcolonial, Deconstructionist, New Criticism. Throw in some more discreet skills, and you’ve got a hopping time.

The results coming in on the questionnaire are backing my decision to head this direction with things. Largely, the texts suggested line up as canonical standards. It seems dead white guys were really in touch with how to write in a way that resonated with the American spirit.

My goal for this is not to have my students look at any of these texts as the GAN, but to look at these texts and ask why they hold the status they hold and then ask whether or not they deserve that status.

I’m curious to see what they think.

You’re probably asking, “Wow, Zac, that’s great. But, what can I do to help?”

Great question, you.

If you haven’t already, take about 2 minutes to complete the questionnaire and nominate your contender for GAN.

Starting Friday, we’ll be seeding the top 8, check back then to help fill out our brackets.

Oh, one other thing, talk about your nominee with someone. The conversations I’ve had in the last two days have definitely enriched my appreciation for literature. If nothing else, twitter’s seemed less monocultural for a day or two.

This is better than writing a paper

The Gist:

  • Thinking about texts is complicated.
  • The ideas of success and greatness are fluid and subjective.
  • Rather than a paper, I’m having my students document their thinking.

The Whole Story:

This piece of work won’t end in a paper. If you’re a traditionalist English teacher-type, you should abandon hope.

In Storytelling as of late, we’ve been working with short stories.

Three questions have held our focus:

  1. What makes a short story?
  2. What makes a great short story?
  3. What makes a successful short story?

With the consideration of each question, the students have been keeping lists qualifiers they identify as we work through some classic and contemporary examples. The other day, they received this assignment:

Today, you’re working to create a flow chart I can apply to any text and correctly end at one of the five following conclusions:

  • Not a short story.
  • Short story, neither great nor successful.
  • Short story, great, not successful.
  • Short story, not great, successful.
  • Short story, great and successful.

To create your flow chart, use one of these five tools:

Once you’ve completed your flow chart, post the link to the final published chart here.

Admittedly, “correctly” in the opening sentence was subjective, but it took the kids to some interesting places.

Hannah created this.

Narayan and Jarmel created this.

Jesse did this.

Patrick did this.

And, Levon did this.

When everyone’s chart was submitted today, the students beta tested:

Pick a flow chart here.

Plug in 5 different texts:

  • Not a short story.
  • Short story, neither great nor successful.
  • Short story, great, not successful.
  • Short story, not great, successful.
  • Short story, great and successful.

Keep track of where it comes out. Take notes of where you got lost or where you needed more direction. Pass your notes on to the flow cartographer as a reply in the forum.

Repeat for two more charts.

Not only did it lead to some interesting informal discussions of what constituted “great” or “successful,” it pushed students to revise and iterate their process for arriving at these conclusions.

I won’t be assigning a paper at the end of this. I don’t need to. Writing a paper no one will care about is not the skill I want them working toward. They’ve shown me their thinking in a way that is more accessible than they’ve be able to in a collection of paragraphs analyzing one or two chosen texts.

This, I can interact with.

Time I was Wrong #3,596,897

The Gist:

  • The CtW Project is something different this year.
  • My students are grappling with the issues and their possible solutions in more authentic ways.
  • I’m teaching ways of reading that won’t be tested.

The Whole Story:

The project description around Phase 2 originally stood as:

Phase 2: Research work being done to solve problem. Create campaign to get donations for that work.

Draft an action plan around a realistic solution to the problem you’ve selected.

Meet with an identified change agent and present your pitch and action plan.

We’ve moved away from that.

Last year’s iteration of the project wrapped itself around an Ignite-style presentation uploaded to slideshare and then posted to the students’ drupal blogs. There they have languished for almost a year. I’ve called them up for conference presentations, but they haven’t been affecting much change other than that of classroom practice, perhaps. It’s striking me as ironic that I used one group’s product from last year as an example during my “Doing Real Stuff in the Classroom” session at CoLearning. If it had been “Doing Almost Real Stuff in the Classroom,” well, then that would have been something.

From the original description of Phase 2, we’ve scrapped the donation campaign, the action plan and the pitch to a change agent. Everything.

As I wrote earlier, I’ve move kids who have been researching similarly themed projects into Solution Groups. Armed only with a fact sheet built off of their 6 weeks of research and a Solution Organizer that helped them to put their thoughts in order, the groups met to share their work and discuss their individual goals for changing the issue each had been researching.

Once the groups had decided whether or not my initial groupings would work / made sense, they set to work making connections across their problems to identify a singular action that could catalyze change in each issue.

It was fascinating to watch.

After two classes, I sat with each group and had them pitch their proposals. What they came up with was better than any donation campaign my brain had envisioned.

One class has a group organizing around the issue of abuse in its many forms. They’re planning to create a resource for SLA students dealing with abuse, contacting counselors to help them and organizing a fundraising walk to help a local non-profit working with people living in abuse.

Again, more than a video dying on drupal.

As I moved from group to group, I realized no one had talked to these guys about leveraging and social media. We talked about the fact that the room probably had around 5,000 Facebook connections they could push. Then I showed them Southwest’s twitter page and we discussed why 1 million+ people would even think about following an airline.

We watched this video I’d seen the night before thanks to Ewan:

And that led to a discussion of non-verbal communication and how a video with only 6 significant words could lead to change.

Anthony commented, “That video changed my life.”

We’ll see.

From there, we visited Chris Craft’s kids’ TeachJeffSpanish.com and I walked my students through the idea that a class of sixth graders had built a site with the potential to create real sticky change.

Finally, we ended w/ a google search for “Joe’s Non-Netbook” and then “Joe’s Non-Notebook” as some re-posters have called it. I told the kids how I shot and posted the video on a whim almost a year ago.

The real fun was looking at the stickiness of the video. My original posting has 2451 views. This posting has 9673. This one has 730. There might be more, but I didn’t care.

We stopped looking at re-postings and started checking out where people had written about the video.

They started to get the idea that this video recorded as a gag had made an impact.

“You’re the first generation to be advertised to since birth,” I told them, “You’re going to need to be the savviest thinkers about this stuff so far.”

Having made it through my filter with their first pitches, the groups will begin drafting sales pitches Monday that will have to meet with unanimous class approval to move forward. It’s our own little ad hoc shareholders meeting.

So, yeah. That’s happening.

Meanwhile, the PSSA looms on the horizon and I can’t help thinking I’m going to have to move their brains into a mold where they see questions as having one answer and answers as being un-refineable. You know, like in the real world.

The ideas they’re working with now are big ones. The solutions they’re striving toward are impassioned and thoughtful. Come April, they’ll have four weeks of testing that doesn’t fit any of those descriptors.

Oh well.

Wave in an English Classroom (beta)

The Gist:

  • Group work can be messy.
  • Collaboration is a key.
  • I’m playing with Google Wave to try to make these work together.

The Whole Story:

If you want to see a myriad of responses, tell a room of seniors at an inquiry-driven, project-based high school that they’ll be working in groups in their final semester. The kids who are aces roll their eyes. They don’t want to carry another group across another finish line.

The kids who don’t do much breathe a sigh of relief. (Thank you, aces.)

The kids who get lost are lost.

The teacher of these 32 crosses his fingers and rolls the dice.

Collaboration is one of SLA‘s core values. I attempt to build it into every primary and secondary element of my classroom. Collaboration in the form of group work in a more relaxed, mid- to long-term assignment gets messy.

Sometimes I manage to create mechanisms that hold group member individually accountable for their contributions to the final product.

My attempts to monitor contributions during the projects has often created a paperwork fiasco that tells me a lot of but doesn’t tell the kids much.

In my G12 storytelling class, we’re dealing with a unit around the question, “How do stories tell us who we are?”

I’m having kids read multiple works, take notes, share notes, have conversations in class, see what they can learn.

I decided to use Google Wave to manage the unit’s study. Here are the basics:

  • SLA has Google Apps (incl. Wave) installed so that every community member has an @scienceleadership.org sign-in.
  • I created a wave and invited every student across both sections of the class as a participant.
  • One of the blips on the wave listed the 3-member groups (with sections intermingling across sections).
  • Each group was assigned to create their own new wave for the group adding me as a member.
  • I post the readings to the main class wave, students copy the assignment to a new blip in their group waves and take their notes.

The first reading went up last week.

This might come across as creepy, but I was able to watch students do their homework. I was able to poke, prod, question and suggest as they were working to head off problems before they became problems.

Before class, the day after the assignment, I knew who was prepared and who wasn’t. I was able to needle the kids who hadn’t done anything. I’d already helped the kids who didn’t get it.

The endgame of this assignment is for the students to create a product that answers the essential question as their knowledge stands.

With each successive reading, they’ll add blips and build their collective knowledge.

Ideally, they’ll begin poking, prodding, questioning and suggesting within their group waves prior to class. Ideally.

Here’s what was messy:

  1. Some of my kids were early attempters with wave and (not unlike many people I know) had decided wave wasn’t worth their time.
  2. It’s something new. As intuitive as much of wave is, there’s a learning curve.
  3. They didn’t realize #2 and signing up, adding contacts, etc. ate up a chunk of one class period.

I’m sure there will be more mess, but that’s learning.

My aces asked me, “What if I read my article, but my group members don’t read theirs?”

My answer, “I’ll know and work with them.”

In the end of the beginning: My aces were accountable for their work, and I was able to help them make it better as they did it. They only had to worry about carrying themselves across this finish line. The kids who don’t do much had done some more. Not all of them did something, but more than usual. The kids who get lost had been given re-direction as they cut their path into the unknown. Maybe they got lost once we got to class discussion, but they made it to class discussion.

I really like learning.

“The Whole Story” behind “The Gist”

The Gist:

  • A few months ago I changed the way I format posts.
  • This article influenced that decision.
  • The resulting format is a blend of writerly intent and an attempt to help readers.

The Whole Story:

Just before winter break, I started a project with my G11 students that asked them to research and blog about their findings. It was the first phase of three in this project. Their work is here and here. You’re welcome to read and comment (but this isn’t one of those posts).

In prep for the project, I did some research about reading and writing online. That led me to this Slate article by Michael Agger. It’s a great read.

I learned a lot.

When I showed it to the classes, we walked through it in a “I noticed. I wonder. What if?” sort of way.

From their the blogging commenced.

Before all of this, in the prepping phase, the article influenced my own online writing.

I get what Agger says, I definitely do. Anyone who’s had a conversation with me or seen me teach knows my brain likes shiny – ideas, objects, etc.

Still, when I write here, it’s partially for me and it’s partially for whoever happens by.

You’ll note, I don’t follow all of the rules / guidelines Agger presents.

I don’t want to.

It did, however, force me to examine, once again, my intent as a writer. I process here. I refine here, I spitball here. Later, I come back and see where my thinking was a week, a month, a year ago.

As for those who happen by, my intent is to spark some sort of thinking. I’m fairly certain that’s my intent in life.

I don’t know who subscribes to this space. I don’t know whose feed readers I’m in. I don’t want to know. To know would be to subvert the thinking process.

Conversation is great. Comments are superb. They make me think more.

“The Gist” lets you know whether or not you want to move on. “The Whole Story” makes certain I do not.

Putting a Great American (novel) to the Test

The Gist:

  • My G11 students will start reading The Great Gatsby soon.
  • I’m not the biggest fan.
  • I’m thinking about putting the book on trial for slander / libel against other books.
  • I’m looking for suggestions.

The Whole Story:

One of the things I noted at the end of my last post was the importance of nailing my approach when I have my students reading a common text again. That will get underway come March. One of the anchor texts in our G11 English curriculum is The Great Gatsby. The theme for the G11 year is Change, so Gatsby certainly works. The thing is, I’m not a huge fan. Truly.

In all honesty, I made it through high school without encountering what many people (English teachers especially) count as the pinnacle of American letters. Not until my first unit whilst student teaching did I come into contact with Fitzgerald’s masterpiece. In subsequent readings, I’ve found value in the book, but it doesn’t make me feel weak in the knees.

I see overlap and relevance in the text, but I’m hesitant to be another English teacher unpacking this book and making my students understand the symbolism of all those damned shirts.

Here’s the thinking:

  • Every student in the class reads Gatsby.
  • In small groups, the majority of the students (minus a Gatsby group), read one other text per group.
  • Each of the other groups build a case for how their text is equal to or better than Gatsby, thereby proving claims of Gatsby’s place as the ultimate American novel as slanderous and libelous.
  • The Gatsby group is given a heads up by the other groups as they read on what passages of the other books will be important in making the case against Gatsby and the Gatsby group reads those passages.

This all culminates with a trial or debate which I’m envisioning as something similar to a class action suit.

Here are my trepidations / questions:

  • Is a trial / debate played out?
  • Should the other texts have a common theme such as “the American dream?”
  • Do I select other texts from across all time periods?
  • Does this pass the authentic learning muster?

I’ve been mulling this one over for quite some time. I’m writing about it here, before the fact, because I’m looking to cast a wider brainstorming net.

Thoughts?

DAY: Commenting on Student Writing

Article HL

Patrick Higgins tweeted this article from the National Writing Project on commenting on student writing.

This section stuck to my ribs:

When I was younger and more naïve, that would be the juncture where I would say, “Comments?” and look at a circle of staring faces. No hands would shoot skyward; instead, everyone would carry the look of a prisoner about to be shot.

As my students embark on the 09-10 Change the World project and begin researching and blogging about the causes of the issues they’ve chosen, I needed something that would help avoid the online manifestation of comment impotence.

Mostly, I appreciate the article for its ease of access. Surely, there’s someone out there who’s written or tempted to write a tome on the online writers’ workshop. Slusher’s piece gives me the three pages I would need from such a book and lets me work out the rest. Nice teaching.

We’re reading excerpts of the article tomorrow.

Blame “Rock of Love” on English teachers

The Gist:

  • We’re dedicated to teaching the whole book, but not the whole video.
  • This does a disservice to our kids.
  • They don’t know how to read NBC.

The Whole Story:

I’ve been using Ma Vie en Rose as we examine childhood and narrative in Sexuality and Society in Literature. It’s accompanying our reading of Peter Pan.

In Shakespeare, we’re looking at Elizabeth.

In Grade 11, the kids watched pieces of The Taming of the Shrew and Deliver Us from Eva in their study of the print version of The Taming of the Shrew.

As such, I’ve been looking for resources.

I found this.

It says loads of things, but this is what got me thinking:

There is no rule that says a video must be shown from start to finish. While some films have valuable content throughout and are good to show completely, sometimes individual scenes are all that are needed to achieve the goal.

Take out “video” and “shown” and all the rest and make it apply to books.

My students are reading / assigned to read each of the book-based texts in their entirety. We look at arc, language, character change, etc. The temptation, though is to watch clips of the films as though they are lacking for arc, language and character change.

Over the last few weeks, students have asked if we’re going to finish the films. They’ve never asked the same of books. Now, this might be because they’ve conditioned into believing they will always read a book from cover to cover. I’d argue they don’t care as much.

For Ma Vie en Rose and Elizabeth, I’ve decided to show the full films. Grade 11 is on a new unit and so Shrew won’t fit.

My great-aunt Barbara recently commented that it wasn’t until recently that she realized she didn’t need to finish every book she started. She’s in her 70s and has decided she’s not wasting any more time on books she doesn’t like. She got that belief in finishing every book from somewhere. If they’d had video to use in her classroom when she was little, I don’t imagine she’d have gotten the same message.

This all leads to the bigger point. We’re doing our students a disservice when we don’t teach them how to watch movies. We’re doing them a disservice when we don’t teach them how to watch TV.

Books are the coin of the realm, for now. That is only because of who is governing the realm.

You want to get a room of adults interested in education on your side? Stand in front of them and bemoan the prevalence of television and hulu and youtube and all other video mediums. Complain about how kids aren’t reading books, but Hollywood is making millions.

I guarantee nodding heads – television’s the devil.

No one taught them how to watch television – certainly not in the same way they were taught to read. Television and movies, for the vast majority, don’t exist as rich, valid texts.

I’ve friends who proudly proclaim they have no television in their house. Oftentimes, these proclamations are met with, “I wish I had that kind of self-control.” Why?

We would be a little weirded out if someone declared they had no books in their house.

Yes, video and the printed word are different and ask the brain to do different things. That’s not a statement of worth. There are good books and bad books. There is good video and bad video. The difference is we spend years teaching students how to refine their tastes and understanding of what are good books and almost no time on video.

Perhaps teachers a few generations decided to take the “ignore it and it will go away” tack in response to the advent of video. It hasn’t worked.

Flash Assignment: History

The Gist:

  • We have 1:1 laptops.
  • I’m using the laptops to have kids jigsaw an understanding of the world in which Henry V exists.
  • It’s putting their research and reference skills to use in a way that will prove valuable in the immediate future.
  • They’re owning the learning (wouldn’t November be proud?).

The Whole Story:

My Shakespeare course just finished up The Tempest. It was fun, they created audio versions of the play which will be posted for other teachers to use soon. (Silly editing process.)

Our next work will be the first Shakespearian history they’ve encountered whilst at SLA. We did a minute of historical interpretation of the other works we’ve looked at so far this semester (King Lear and The Tempest). For Henry V, I want to make sure they leave with a better understanding of what was what during and leading up to Shakespeare’s day. Here’s what we did:

  • One person from each table group came up and pulled a slip of paper from the Coffee Can of Fate.
  • They read the slip of paper aloud and either kept it or gave it up.
  • If they kept it, all was set.
  • If they gave it up, another team would steal it and be set and the team that actually pulled the paper would wait for the next round.

Eventually, everything worked out and each table group had a paper.

The topics:

  1. Theatrical History (1400 A.D. – 1650 A.D.)
  2. The 100 Years War
  3. Social Classes
  4. Daily Life
  5. Henry IV (the plays)
  6. Technology of Warfare
  7. Divine Right of Ascension
  8. Feudalism

They have today to use their laptops to research their respective topics.

Next class, they will teach the class about their topic for approx. 7 minutes. They’ll have to create something that allows the rest of the class to take notes, is a physical handout or is a digital handout. I’m planning of posting what they come up with for anyone to use.

Based on what they present, I’ll make a quiz and incorporate the new knowledge throughout our unit of study.

This assignment would be possible without the laptops, but it’s so much better because of the laptops. It will also be a better class for their uses of multiple platforms to present their lessons than if I were to attempt to put together the same material in a small window of time.

Weighty Words

One of my Grade 12 Students, Bre Bonner, brought me her copy of Eclipse today. As she handed it to me, I observed the relative ease with which I was able to hold it. This led me to pick up some other texts in the room and head down to the physics room. They have all sorts of cool toys. What’s below illustrates what I found.

Here are the standings:

Text

Pg. #

Weight

Dimensions

The Norton Anthology of Poetry 4th Ed. edited by Ferguson, Margaret, Mary Jo Salter, Jon Stallworthy

1998

3.1 lbs.

9.125”x5.625”x2.125”

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer

629

1.3 lbs.

8.5”x5.75”x2”

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J.K. Rowling

652

2.1 lbs.

9.25”x6.25”x1.75”

And, before you ask, I checked, the average length of a full line of text in Eclipse is a little over 3.75″. In Harry Potter, it’s approximately 4.25″.

There’s an easy joke to be made about the literal and figurative weights of these texts measuring up, but I won’t make it.

Why, though, is Eclipse comparable in size to these other texts, but weighing in nearly one and two pounds lighter than Harry Potter and Norton respectively?

Forget anything with an electric charge, let’s work this media literacy first.