Category: Uncategorized

I’ve honestly been trying to go to sleep for the past 45 minutes, but I can’t. No good reason, just restlessness.
I got much done today.
The book I’ve been waiting to teach, Dave Eggers’ What is the What, lingers in back order purgatory, so I’ve decided to move on. Not only have I mapped out the remainder of this quarter, I’ve a plan of attack for the third and fourth quarters as well. I’d been letting things live in my head for a few months now because the final three quarters of my year will be linked. Tomorrow, I unveil this triptic project to one class of 11th grade students. I’m expecting it to be a bit intense.
The outline is available here, but I’ll give you the skinny on Q3.
The essential question they’ll be investigating this quarter is “What causes systemic and individual change?”

Reading: The students will be operating in Lit. Circles, reading and analyzing texts related to the question. They’ll be organizing a timeline to complete the reading on schedule, having online conversations using moodle’s forum feature and having three f2f group talks about the book. Even better, I’m working to get at least one teacher SLA or not working with each book (spaces still available) to put more of a focus on the exploration of texts.

Writing: The 2fers continue this quarter. This may be my all-time favorite assignment. A bi-weekly 2-page analytical paper built around an original thesis from each student with MLA citation. The frequency gives me time to provide each student individual feedback for the next paper and shapes my remediation or decision on which skills they’re ready for next.

Thinking: This is the long one. The students will be working with partners to identify a problem facing Philadelphia. From there, they’ll be responsible for researching the problem’s history, causes, impact and cost. They’ll be drafting annotated bibliographies on all of the above and then creating presentations in the vein of ignitephilly.org. The presentations will go up online where the world will vote for the problem and presentation that shows the most promise to be relieved. The top presentations from each class will create action plans in the third quarter and the fourth quarter will be all about putting those plans into action.

It’s not how I was taught English. While Mrs. Henning-Buhr and Mrs. Miller were lovely women, I don’t remember ever completing an assignment in their classes and feeling connected to the outside world. The goals across the three are simple: 1. Examine various texts for insight as to how their characters help shape a possible answer to the quarter’s essential question. 2. Incorporate that insight into frequent analytical writing to deepen their thinking on the topic. 3. Carry that enduring understanding to application using literary ideas to inform real world problem solving. All right, maybe not so simple.
More later.

Never one for the “What are you thankful for?” essay, my students watched the Water Buffalo video in class yesterday. I suppose I’m now one of those teachers who watches videos on the day before break, but that’s my cross to bear.
The plan was to have them watch the video where a $450 water buffalo which equals an Indonesian family’s yearly salary is gifted to such a family and we all learn a little bit about life and maybe, just maybe, ourselves.
To hit the lesson home, the students were going to catalog the price of everything they had on their person. This leads to, “Ohmigosh, I am carrying around the salary of an entire Indonesian family,” and our very special episode of Blossom concludes.
In another instance of underestimating our kids, they got it.
First hand up, “It just made me think of how much I have and how much I take for granted. I mean, all that work they have to do just to farm…”
Well, my work was done.
The nods of agreement across the classroom told me I needn’t proceed with the cataloging.
“Look up here,” say I, projecting the Kiva.org homepage on the board.
After a 10-minute explanation, the kids are working in teams to find a loan to which they think we should contribute the $50 sitting in my Kiva account.
When we get back from break, the class will vote.
The judiciousness with which they approached the selection process was inspiring.
There’s your critical thinking.

A Canadian teacher friend of mine made an impassioned plea to a group of assembled teachers the other day to get them to stop buying bottled water. “It is wrong to charge people for something necessary to their survival,” he reasoned.
As much as we speak of the fact our students don’t know a world without an Internet, they don’t know a world where where it isn’t the norm to pay money for a bottle of water either.
And then, there’s this:

If this is a harbinger of things to come, no one tell Kevin Costner. I’ll be picking up Bottlemania by Elizabeth Royte.

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.