Category: Uncategorized

Important Words

The Gist:

  • What questions do you have?
  • Push my thinking.
  • Say more.

The Whole Story:

As it turns out, more than my habits of practice have been informed by the educators with whom I find myself interwebbed.

I’ve been mindful of this fact lately. The language I use whilst teaching and learning has evolved since my first days in the classroom. While I assume this change will continue as I continue, three phrases in particular have shaped who I am in the classroom. For two, I can point to their sources. The origin of the third is a partial mystery to me.

What questions do you have?

In my first two years of teaching, I was an 8th-grade Language Arts teacher at Sarasota Middle School in Sarasota, FL. If I gained nothing else from the experience, I garnered countless hours of professional development from in-house and contracted consultants. It was probably what the best student teaching experiences should be.

During one workshop with either Larry Biddle or Hal Urban – we’ll say Urban because I like him more – the room was asked, “When you ask your students, ‘Do you have any questions,’ how many of you see hands shoot into the air?” A brief poll of the audience showed the results to the question were worse than a teacher would hope.

“Try this,” he said, “instead, ask, ‘What questions do you have?'”

I have been ever since.

Push my thinking.

The summer after my second year of teaching, I moved from Sarasota Middle to Phoenix Academy. It was a new school working with a more varied population of students, and I wanted a challenge. Within a week of getting hired at Phoenix, then-principal Steve Cantees called and asked if I would take part in a pilot program the district was starting for 50 high school teachers in Sarasota. The NeXt Generation Teaching program (which has sense morphed to something else) lasted 2 years and brought David Warlick, Alan November, David Thornburg and others to Sarasota to work with that pilot group and give us the tools to see what was possible.

Without the NeXt Gen program, I wouldn’t be at SLA today. Without it, I wouldn’t have gone down the inexhaustible gopher hole of inquiry-project-experienctial learning that seems to be where my brain lives. For the purposes of this post, without the NeXt Gen program, I wouldn’t have found the phrase, “push my thinking.” Though I can’t speak to where he picked it up, I know I got the phrase from my first readings of Will Richardson.

The beauty of it lies in the phrase’s ability to put into pictures what I oftentimes feel happening in my brain or want for my students to feel as they learn. The lack of direction is also great. It’s not “pushed my thinking forward.” Value exists in pushing thinking backward or up or down or any other ordinal clarifier.

My awareness of the movement of my thinking is raised.

Say more.

The most recent, this sentiment is what I hope all my students are able to leave with the ability to do.

My friend Bud gave me this one. In fact, he offered it up in conversation over the course of about 2 years before I realized its value. In my oftentimes fervent explanation of an idea, I will come to the end of my pontification with the assumption my zeal has relayed all that needs be said about an idea.

In conversations with Bud, my conclusions are often met with, “Say more.”

By asking me to say more, Bud has the added effect of pushing my thinking and asking me to examine what questions I have about my own ideas. He’s never asking me to talk more.

Having incorporated this into my practice, I’ve started seeing the same self-inquisical looks on the faces of my students I remember feeling when I was asked to do the same thing I’m asking them to do. I’m not posing a new question, I’m asking them to answer the initial question – more.

I want everyone in my life to do this.

21 Ways: (1) Donors Choose

Last year, I cut back on the stuff I gave for Christmas. While my younger siblings still got books, other family members got gift certificates to various charities in leiu of gifts. Thus, this. Each day from here to 2010, I’ll be posting one charity, NGO or non-profit I can get behind in the spirit of giving.

Be No. 1... Give to Public Schools in Need! - Go to DonorsChoose.org
Starting off easy, today with Donors Choose.

I speak first-hand about the help Donors Choose can provide when funds for supplies are low.

Launched in 2000 and sprouting from a Bronx high school, Donors Choose operates as a community grant funding organization built specifically to help classroom teachers. Though the majority of the proposals are for classroom supplies, Donors Choose also hosts proposals to help with field trips, furniture and the like.

Donors can search for projects close to their heart, a certain type of school, or geographic location. Donations can be of any amount. If a project you’ve donated to is only partially funded by the deadline, Donors Choose will send you an e-mail asking you to choose one of these options:

  1. You choose a project to support. This option lets you browse through the many wonderful projects at DonorsChoose.org and find one that inspires you.
  2. We choose a project that’s in urgent need of funding on your behalf. This option is quick and easy, and gets resources into a high need classroom.
  3. The teacher chooses a new project. This option is the best way to ensure that your donation is used by the same teacher and classroom you originally supported.

Once a project’s fully funded, Donors Choose handles all the messy work of purchasing and shipping the materials. Teachers never handle the money, so there’s no accounting accountability over their heads.

The process doesn’t end once a project is funded. Classrooms are held accountable by Donors Choose and asked to complete a Thank You Packet including photos of students using the purchased materials, thank-you cards from students and a letter of impact from the teacher.

After the successful submission of the Thank You Packet, teachers are awarded points that allow them to post more and / or larger proposals. Failure to submit a Thank You Packet can result in a teacher’s removal from Donors Choose. From what I’ve seen, this means a certain level of quality is maintained.

If you’re looking to donate directly to a project, head to the Donors Choose page. If you’re looking to gift a donation, head here.

There’s a grammar war in my brain

The Gist:

  • There are pedants and anti-pedants.
  • I don’t know which one I am.
  • I see value in both.
  • It makes being an English teacher difficult.

The Whole Story:

One of my favorite courses in college was Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammars with Professor Gerry Balls. I like thinking about how words work. Semantics, grammar and all the conventions that go along make up the calculus of language.

This is why I’ve been watching closely as discussion has been brewing about David Foster Wallace acolyte Amy McDaniel’s posting of the text of a worksheet from Wallace’s class. Saturday, my brain moved more with Chris Potts’ announcement of a challenge to McDaniel’s post by Jason Kottke who scored a 0 / 10 on Wallace’s quiz:

Kottke is a thoughtful, creative English prose stylist, and Wallace thought that these questions were basic ones that should be taught in any undergraduate class. Kottke seems to think the problem lies with him. I take a different view: this test is useless.

Here’s where I step back. I don’t know where I stand on this issue. I’ve read Wallace and Safire for years. My grandparents wouldn’t stand a story about “me and him” at the dinner table. I like it when my students ask if they may go to the bathroom.

But it makes me feel false and a little dirty.

In reality, I’m not a pedant.

Sure, I have pedantic tendencies, but it hurts to hold those ideas in hand with the knowledge we speak and write a living language. It’s alive and changing faster than I can follow given the accelerant of the ease of communication.

More than once, I’ve paused when a student’s sentence ended with a preposition. Do I push him to the right to walk the path of my grandparents, or do I make Professor Balls proud and accept the kid’s disregard for an ancient and archaic rule?

Thinking of grammar as the calculus of language offers me a sense of security and set way to think and talk about the world. It also prevents me from speaking the same language as those we’ll be leaving the world to. I’m not sure which one I value most.

In her explanation of the thinking behind the quiz, McDaniel writes, “Probably the most important reason is to avoid ambiguity. We want to make our meaning clear.” I can get behind that. I’m just not sure rules get us there.

Really? We’re Still on This?

The Gist:

  • It’s not about the tools.
  • We have to stop talking as though it’s about the tools.
  • We need to start talking about what we want to do.

The Whole Story:

I dig the NCTE Inbox. It has lead to some pretty heated debates and it’s one of the most relevant voices I know from a professional organization. That said, yesterday’s post about the need for transformative rather than addative teaching missed the mark for me on one key point:

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we use social networking tools, or Web 2.0, to bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the social media revolution to the classroom (and not simply digitize the sage-on-stage tradition)?

Bud and Bill and I were talking about this at the NWP Digital Is… Conference. Bud summed it up nicely, “Instead of digital storytelling, let’s just call it storytelling.”

Try the paragraph this way:

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the revolution to the classroom?

One of those is something I’d like to be a part of.

Remember Facebook?

The Gist:

– Facebook is dying.

– Teachers are helping kill it.

– We need to respect public spaces.

– Content delivery on Facebook is like those people asking me to sign a petition in the park.

The Whole Deal:

Went with Tim Best to the Tech Forum Northeast conference last weekend to take part in a panel discussion of social networking applications in education. It was similar to our panel last year on the topic of wikis and google docs in education.
This year, though, we didn’t bring a slidedeck. In fact, we didn’t bring a single slide. Also, there were no handouts, no links, no wikis – nothing.

We were up after Peggy Sheehy from Ramapo Central School District in NY and Kristine Goldhawk and Cathy Swan from New Canaan, CT. (Here’s their preso.)
When it was our turn up, we diverged sharply from Sheehy, Goldhawk and Swan. In fact, we diverged sharply from the session title, “Social Networking in the Classroom: Tools for Teaching the Facebook Generation.”
Aside from a brief example of how I’d used twitter and adium to work with one of my students back at SLA during some guy‘s keynote address, we didn’t use any of the tools.
Instead, we asked what the room was thinking and what questions they had.
One of the participants mentioned using Facebook for course management. Goldhawk had said some of the teachers in her district were doing it, and this lady wanted to know more.
I answered with something I’d scribbled in my notes whilst listening to the other panelists, “We need to respect Facebook.” Actually, I started with, “Does anyone in here remember something called Myspace? Why hasn’t anyone in here mentioned it?” Someone in the crowd piped up, “Or Friendster?” (Aw, poor Friendster.)
Even if the prognostication of the NYT Magazine is wrong and ‘Book isn’t about to die, we need to respect it.
I say this knowing full well I designed a project last year using Facebook as the vehicle for the whole thing.
I wish I hadn’t.
The office at SLA has a conference room-style table at its heart. Though students are expected to give up their seats to faculty members, you can often find a mix of students and faculty at the table during lunch or before and after school. This is not the norm at most HS. The office is not a commons area in most HS. As a result, a slice of our faculty steer clear of the office and that table during lunch or before and after school.
It’s not that they don’t love our kids, it’s that they need a break from our kids. They need their space. They find it in their classrooms or our hidden faculty room.
As a result, I have less contact with those members of our faculty. Letting everyone in has meant that we’ve forced some of the people I’d most like to see out.
We’re doing this with Facebook when we choose it over creating a class ning or wiki or the like.
If my teachers had started trying to teach me to diagram sentences whilst I was hanging out in my clubhouse when I was a kid, I would have built a new clubhouse.

Let’s Plan

This semester, I’m teaching a senior English elective class called Sexuality and Society in Literature.
Our first text of the year was Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex along with several supporting documents including Helen Fisher’s TED Talk “The Brain in Love.”
The idea for the outline of the class is to take a look at sexuality and society in lit throughout the different phases of life. The idea behind reading Oedipus first was to look at the idea of how some society’s have interpreted our course in “love” prior to birth.
Rather than wrapping unit plans around a particular book as has been the practice of English teachers for time in memorium (with the possible exception of short story and poetry units), I’m approaching planning by theme. Oedipus looked like this, and I wasn’t satisfied.
I find myself asking “What do I want them to learn?” vs. “What do I want them to learn from this book?”
I know it seems like a simple thing. Look around, though. It’s not how most English teachers are planning.
Speaking of, here’s the point of all this.
This is my sorta blank unit plan for the “Childhood” unit which is next. If you’re reading this, then I’m looking for your input.
What can we build?

So it IS a popularity contest

In his Sunday NYT column “An Echo Chamber of Boom and Bust,” Yale economics and finance professor Robert Shiller explained global finance thusly:

…[T]hink of the world economy as driven by social epidemics, contagion of ideas and huge feedback looks that gradually change world views.

So, basically, recessions, depressions, and tight-rolled jeans all have the same cause?

Powering the Grid

7-14-09

 

I was going to get to bed before 11 tonight, but I promised myself I would write everyday whilst I’m here.

I’ve some thoughts brewing on Monday’s workshop with EduNova and the principals’ boot camp, but they’re not quite ready for prime time.

Instead, let me recount the fulfillment of a prophesy.

Before I embarked on my trip, I was told I would hear a certain phrase at some point, likely multiple points, along the way. Today, it happened.

Amid a workshop in which the assembled Khanya facilitators were in the second-floor computer lab at Glendale Secondary School in Mitchells Plains, everything went dark. I don’t mean that we lost the Internet or that the server went down, I mean that the power was gone. Each of the 30+ computers went blank, the lights shut off and the projector I was using for demonstration wasn’t quite so demonstrative.

My face, I think, registered the appropriate surprise circulating in my brain because one of the facilitators toward the front said, “Welcome to Africa!”

The room laughed, and I took a moment to marvel at the truly genuine tone in my host’s voice as those I was participating in the foundation level of some sort of right of passage.

A few minutes later, the power was back and we rebooted.

The second time the power cut out today was during the first quarter of Noble’s afternoon session. I sat watching and expecting Noble to receive a greeting such as I had. He did not.

The power had gone off whilst one of the Khanya facilitators was asking a question, and she didn’t miss a beat in her sentence with a worthless tip of the hat to the fact that we were no longer with power. She had a point to make.

The same thing happened when the power returned the second time and when it cut out and returned the third, fourth and fifth times. Indeed, Noble was mid-sentence when one of the reboots happened, and it didn’t phase him at all.

All of this is to say that the educators in that room today adapted, rather, had already adapted, to the occurrence of something that’s happened to me maybe twice in my time as a teacher (and only then during intense storms).

My primary reaction was one of admiration. Messages were being sent and they were to be powered by their own ideas – not the room’s ambient electricity. We were making do with what we had.

My secondary reaction was one of cultural comparison. These outages took place throughout what would normally be school hours on a Tuesday and severely handicapped the connected learning possible within the school’s computer labs. The desktop computers cut out and had to be rebooted each time. Had conditions reached such a point in my own education, I can imagine ire on the part of my parents and community members. I’ve been trying draft a scenario all day in which my family’s reaction to multiple power outages would be simply, “Welcome to Illinois!”

My own brain answers back, “But this isn’t Illinois. Conditions are different. Politics are different. Needs are different. Thereby, expectations are different.” I get that, but only have my own experiences to compare against. The longer I’m here, the more diversified my experiences will be.

I’ve come to learn the day’s outages were more frequent than normal, but that SA’s infrastructure lags behind its population growth. Throughout the country, there are scheduled rolling outages whilst the government builds the nuclear plants to sustain the need.

I suppose I wanted outrage from the people in the room today. Outrage would have signaled these events were not in keeping with expectations for the schools. Even more, it would have signaled a lack of acceptance.

Educators in the US have been experiencing rolling blackout for the last few decades if only in the figurative sense. The power’s been cut so frequently that our expectations of our own abilities to connect and network ourselves and our learners with the outside world have sunken consistently. More frightening, our near acceptance of inconsistent access to the power to drive our own profession and careers has become commonplace.

If educators here are to have a hope of cutting class sizes of 45-55 learners, they must first demand power.

If educators in the US are to have a hope of owning our profession, we must first demand power.

Something Else Not to Take for Granted

 

Wikipedia was a hit.

I know it seems a small thing, and Noble looks at me almost comically when I get excited about it, but Wikipedia was a hit in Sharon’s and my last session of our week working with Captonian teachers at Liwa Primary School.

In all honesty, I’d almost forgotten to bring it up in the week, until it hit me on Thursday.

Working with what are slower-than-ideal connection speed, teachers here must be conservative in their use of graphic-heavy sites like flickr or continuously-updating tools like Google Docs. Yes, the connectivity and speed will improve with time, but that’s hardly welcome news to teachers who want to put their learners to work in their computer labs now using current and relevant resources.

And so we showed them Wikipedia.

Monday, when answering the question of what ICT integration could do to help successful learning happen in their schools, many of the teachers offered the almost cliche promise that lies in connecting their learners with the world. Here, they were finding something that did just that almost in real time. To illustrate this point, we looked up the ethnic clashes in China which had begun the day before our workshops commenced. Their interest was audible.

Even more impressive – Wikipedia in Xhosa, the mother tongue of many black Africans. Or Wikipedia in Afrikaans. 

Before setting them out to play and explore, we had a discussion of the possible implications for having their learners interact with and contribute to a reference bank in which they are woefully underrepresented. Each school can literally write the (e)book on the history and culture of its people and township. Imagine primary school learners in the townships contributing content about the places they live while older learners at partner schools in North America study life in South Africa and help to edit and proofread the content. 

Meanwhile, the overall online community benefits from a much needed accrual of firsthand information. 

The opportunities locally are intriguing as well. South African learners are taught English starting in Grade 4. Wikipedia in Xhosa has only 122 entries. What then, if high schools and primary schools serving the same townships partner so that the high school learners build content connected to the needs of the primary school learners? The implications here cross all content areas and disciplines – from maths learners explaining polynomials to physics learners explaining kinetic energy.

While we oftentimes talk about using wikis to build knowledge repositories that can be used by our classes for years to come, over time these begin to lose authenticity and grow stale. For the South African students, though, they have an encyclopedia in front of them waiting to be written. It harkens back to the compilation of the first edition of the OED.

It stands as one of the most exciting offerings of the Internet (one I’m reminded daily here that I’ve been taking for granted) – all knowledge, one place.

Day 2: The Townships

The goal for my writing whilst I’m here has to be to get it all down whilst I’m still to close to my experiences to have perspective.
Our first full day began with a trip to the Liwa Primary School which is where we’ll be conducting the bulk of our workshops over the course of the next three weeks. Honestly, John got it best during tonight’s debriefing when he said conditions at the school were better than he’d expected. From our Skype planning chats and this morning’s cursory drive through the townships, I wasn’t entirely certain what to expect. Two padlocked, razor-wired gates later and we were in.
The tech capabilities within the school include a 25-station PC lab with a 3-gig monthly Internet cap and three Smart Boards.
Now, I enjoy my interactive white board, but I can’t say as I’d sacrifice any of SLA’s student laptops for it. Think of the netbooks the school could have purchased.
After the school and a planning meeting to go over Monday’s schedule, we headed into Cape Town proper for lunch at a Muslim restaurant.
Konaye, our guide for our township tour this afternoon, met us at the restaurant and arranged for a friend of his from the neighborhood to give us some history on that section of town. What I learned whilst waiting for our appetizers would fuel a world history class for at least a semester.
I’m still sorting it all out. I likely will be for quite some time.
From lunch, we loaded into a van for the township tour.
I need to pause for a moment. “Township,” until today, had painted a quaint idyllic picture in my head.
In Cape Town, the townships are where black Africans and colored Africans were relocated after the displacement of Apartheid.
One family on top of another, on top of another in buildings of scap wood or corrugated metal.
According to Konaye, the government of Cape Town plans to have properly constructed government subsidized housing for the 2.5 million families who need it by 2014. I shared his doubt in the achievement of that goal.
The question Noble posed to one 23-year-old man who was working on completing his diploma in IT was what had kept him in school rather than dropping out.
“Education is something no one can take away from me,” he responded.
Clearly, someone put this guy, the eldest of 7 children who lives in a 3-bedroom apartment with his siblings an mother and father, the value of an education.
With the amazingly high dropout rate and sheer number of students in need of an education here, I wonder how to help make a difference and help teachers here communicate that same value to their students.