Tag: reading

Things I Know 103 of 365: Students should teach one another

The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.

– Thomas Stallkamp

Matt and I looked at each other halfway through the class period and asked each other why we hadn’t tried this until the end of the third quarter.

In the last class of the last day before Spring Break, our students were working together, collaborating and mentoring one another all the way to the end of the period.

My original plan had been for my G11 students to visit Matt’s G9 class and share the vignettes they’d crafted and then discuss their writing process. I saw it as a chance for the upperclassmen to mentor the freshmen in reading and writing.

Surely, the younger students would be enamored of stories from their elder peers’ lives as readers. Well, probably not, now that I type that. The point is, we’ll never know.

As in the best learning experiences, very little went as planned.

Matt’s class had been disrupted earlier in the week by a field trip that had only taken a portion of the kids our of the room. Some students were working on making up the day, others were revising their own memoir projects and still more were working on a smothering of other smaller assignments.

As shocking as it was, I came to terms with the fact that these kids weren’t clamoring to hear vignettes detailing my students’ lives as readers.

Instead, we did something much less contrived. We had the older students pair up and work with the younger students.

They sat around Matt’s room. They occupied tables in the hall. They migrated to my room for more space.

The conversations were real and earnest.

“Mr. Chase,” one student said, “I don’t know who needs help.”

“Walk around and introduce yourself. Then, ask how you can help,” I told him.

He did.

I looked to one side of Matt’s room and saw one of my students who is most frequently off-task completely focused on helping one of Matt’s students improve his writing.

I would be lying if I told you I hadn’t been struggling daily to find ways to motivate this student to engage in class. Turns out she wasn’t waiting for my help, she was waiting to help.

After I’d heard a student advise, “You’ve got the outline of a paper here; now you need to fill it with what you want to say,” another one of my students approached me asking what he should do now that he’d helped two students with their papers.

“Go back to the one you helped first,” I said, “And see if she’s made any progress. It’s something I do as a teacher all the time to help students focus.”

He looked at me as though I’d just given him secret teacher knowledge.

In reality, the whole process was a reminder of my general lack of teacher knowledge.

While I’m keen to point out teaching’s general lack of willingness to utilize the wisdom of the elders of the profession, I should also be looking to the wisdom of our older students.

My students have walked this way before. They’ve known what it is to stare confoundedly at a laptop screen trying to piece an argument together. They’ve also felt alone in the effort to be better writers.

Every one of my students, no matter their level of proficiency, was an expert today to someone who benefited from that expertise.

I can and should attempt this type of cross-pollination more frequently. Failing to do so ignores the resources of the school and reinforces the artificial boundaries adolescence creates in the presence of a difference of two years.

Classy: A student’s vignette

As I wrote before, my G11 students are writing their autobiographies of their reading lives as vignettes. Semaj turned in the rough draft below and said I could share it. It’s a lovely thing.

My First Love

I can remember the first time I fell in love. His cover was smooth and smelled like the words had been freshly printed onto the page, the bind was crisp and hadn’t been broken. “The Pinballs” was neatly and evenly typed across the cover in big yellow letters. I knew I had to get used to the image of those words for that would be all I would see for the next couple of days. I learned to love his flaws, the way he randomly stopped starting a new chapter breaking the flow of our connection, or the way he told me just enough to leave me hanging but not enough to give me what I wanted in that moment. But I loved him. I stayed up with him every night and held him close to me everywhere I went.

We were inseparable – me and him.

I stayed up past curfew for him, hiding my face under the blankets using the light from my phone to illuminate up the words on the page. We were only together for 3 days. Three days is all it took for him to steal my heart. Three days is all it took for me to fall in love with him. When our time together had come to an end, I shed my first and last tear in honor of him and the characters we had met and had become a part of over those 3 days.

I will never forget my first love. I will never love another the way I loved him, because he was my first. He made me realize, although I may never love another the way I loved him, there are other out there worth loving . I will always love my first book.

Things I Know 94 of 365: My reading has an epicenter

The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

– Dr. Seuss, I Can Read With My Eyes Shut!

Yesterday, I wrote about the first vignette I wrote in a serious to make up my reading autobiography. I’m completing my G11 students’ benchmark project along with them. I went back to the vignette today and revised and edited. It’s close to where I want it. I’m sure it will be made stronger in the soft places when we take it to writer’s workshop. For today, though, it is what I know.

Where I Started

The chair’s gone.

I’m not sure when it left us. My grandparents have never had a garage sale and my uncles were all well beyond the age when they lived in college housing collecting furniture when the chair departed.

All I know is it’s gone.

My last memories are of the shiny brown leather beginning to crack on the recliner’s arms.

Decidedly thrifty, but never one to appear the pauper, my grandmother must have decided the advent of these cracks heralded the chair’s demise.

It was a recliner stationed in the corner of the living room or family room (I’ve never learned the difference).

Though I was read to frequently and in many places as a child, this chair was the geographic center of my literacy.

Before bedtime, my grandfather would say, “How about a book, Zac ole pal?”

Footy-pajamaed, I would crawl into his lap as we read about the elephant in the bathtub, the poky little puppy or the monster at the end of the book.

I knew my grandmother would be reading to me again once I got to bed, but that didn’t stop me for pleading for “one more book.”

Grampa knew Gramma would be reading too, but acquiesced, “Alright, bud. I suppose we have time for one more.”

“Oh, Ted,” Gramma would say in that tone that let me know Grampa and I had gotten away with something.

In the echo of memory, propped up by family myth, I remember when my Grampa asked if I was following along with him as he read.

Though not new (books, like the Lincoln Logs and Light Bright were hand-me-downs from my dad and uncles), the book we were reading was one new to the chair’s regular rotation.

“Are you reading along?” he said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“Well, what’s that word?” he asked.

I read it.

“Well, I’ll be. Jean! Jean, Zachary’s reading.”

Perennially drying her hands with a dish towel, my grandmother entered the room.

“Good for him.”

I had no knowledge that that moment would signal the end of the chair and Grampa and me reading before bedtime.

Sometimes, I’ll be visiting and my Grampa will be reading with my cousins or my little brother. In those moments, I want to warn them to stay quiet, not to let on that they’re following along.

But that would be mean.

Instead, I leave them to the elephant in the bathtub, the poky little puppy and the monster at the end of the book.

Things I Know 88 of 365: We’re about to have some great discussions

There is creative reading as well as creative writing.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

In the second half of the semester, I open my storytelling class to greater student choice and control. This could be intensely dangerous considering the class is populated with students with eyes fixed firmly on graduation.

I operate under the assumption greater choice and control will help make our class relevant.

The guiding questions for the assignment I rolled out today are simple:

  • What is a text you connect with strongly?
  • What causes that connection?
  • How can you help the class understand that connection?

I suppose anyone else in a class about story would collect a set of stories from the Western Literary Canon and proceed with the indoctrination.

They’ll have college for that.

My goal is more to work toward the type of deeply curious conversations about texts that will equip them with the tactics to pull apart those dusty canonical behemoths later on.

The assignment is simple:

  • Pick a text that means something to you. Prep a whole-class discussion that will help us all learn more about the text.
  • For the purposes of the assignment, I put myself in the role of Mr. Chase as English student rather than Mr. Chase as English teacher.

Students are responsible for preparing copies, online materials or video clips as necessary. They must also prepare pre- and during-reading activities to prep their peers (and me) for at least 30 minutes discussion.

Last year’s initial launch of this assignment brought some amazing moments.

For almost an entire class period we debated the appropriateness, theme, and intended audience of Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree.

In another discussion, the debate over the narrative structure of OneRepublic’s “Say (All I Need)”.

Aside from checking in with students to make certain they’re finding texts and offering suggestions for planning their discussions, I stay out of things as much as possible.

I know the texts, but I haven’t read many of them.

There’s an element of trust there, I suppose.

It’s why I ask that the texts be important to the students sharing them.

“If you bring in something you don’t care about, it’s more likely that we won’t either.”

This is likely why I have such trouble teaching The Great Gatsby.

Some early possibilities this year include an excerpt from the film version of For Colored Girls, a cross-medium analysis of a quotation from The Kite Runner, deconstruction of Hamlet’s most famous of soliloquies and a Rage Against the Machine song.

Aside from Hamlet, these will be texts with which I am largely unfamiliar. While this adds an air of novelty to the process, the greater benefit is my not having a preconceived notion of how a discussion should play out. I’m learning along with the rest of the class.

This year’s iteration of the assignment includes one major adjustment. Aside from the 30-minute minimum, the students and I are building the assessment criteria for the discussions together.

Before they’ve built anything, we work to answer the questions, “What should a great version of these discussions look like? What should we expect as help in our thinking? What is the role of the discussion leader?”

Before they graduate from high school, I want them to graduate to owning class and their thinking.

Classy: Using social media to tell stories…real stories

I wrote a while ago about the stories my seniors are writing in our storytelling class. Each randomly drew one of Aristotle’s identified human emotions from a hat and was asked to let that emotion inspire a short story.

A few days later, the students partnered with one another with the goal of getting to know each other’s protagonists.

“What’s the name of one of your characters?” was the starting question. From there, the sky was the limit. They inquired about the characters’ favorite colors, their histories with their parents, what kind of students they were in middle school, their appearances – anything.

As partners questioned, they took notes on the answers. Those notes were handed over to the writers when the interviews were over as reminders of whom they were writing about. The activity proved informative.

“I’ve never really thought about who a character was before a story I was writing.”

“This makes me feel like I know the character, like she’s real.”

That’s the idea.

Then they wrote.

And wrote.

And wrote.

Last week, we read Atlantic Senior Editor Alexis Madrigal’s story outing Chicagoan Dan Singer as the man behind the twitory of @MayorEmanuel.

We discussed the idea that an entirely new genre of literature (or several) was being created in our lifetimes. Story was being transformed.

As it’s a storytelling class guided in part by the essential question, “How does the way we tell stories affect those stories,” it seemed a good idea to try our hands at these new genres.

Enter the project.

Description: Taking the story you wrote based off of one of Aristotle’s identified emotions, plot the timeline of your story, select the tool or tools you’ll want to use and tell your story in real time. Think of it as a mix of 24 and @MayorEmanuel.

I informally launched it Friday as an idea I’d been playing around with. Nothing formal. Just words in a conversation.

Monday, I handed out project descriptions and we started building. Today, we collaborated on the rubric.

Any online tool is fair game – Facebook, tumblr, twitter, youtube, anything.

In traditional arts and letters, we have fiction and nonfiction with the line blurring from time to time.

If everything can be read as a text and if the more traditional texts are moving online, is anything inherently nonfiction?

Some of what they’re writing violates user agreements. I don’t feel badly about that. If Mark Zuckerberg can play in my backyard, I can play in his.

One student has solicited his friends to also build character profiles to improvisationally interact with his protagonist and the events of the narrative. Other students have created public profiles on Facebook for their characters’ public thoughts and anonymous tumblr accounts for those same characters’ private thoughts. Anyone with both links will have the whole story, but either link will provide a different narrative.

Differing from Singer, we built blueprints and timelines for these stories. As I checked them in today, the students explained how they’d begun posting as exposition already.

Thursday I received a friend request on ‘Book from someone named Kwadwo Watcher. A few minutes later, I received the message below.

Another character started following me on twitter. A few students’ characters are following and friending one another with plans for intertextual cross-pollination.

All signs are pointing to the probability that this will be an interesting project.

Things I Know 79 of 365: My students are readers

Books let us into their souls and lay open to us the secrets of our own.

-William Hazlitt

As my students amassed this afternoon, I met them outside my classroom with the door closed and waited for the last stragglers to, well, straggle.

“Partner up with the person in class who you think is the best researcher,” I said, “When you have a partner, you may enter the room.”

As they partnered and entered, I told each partnership that one of them should open a blank Word doc.

“I’m going to ask you a series of questions,” I said.

For each question, the partners needed to sniff out the answer, document their source and, if the source was a PDF, document the number. Answers needed to be in complete sentences, preferably restating the question as a statement.

Before I began with the questions, I told the class about running into a friend this weekend at the coffee shop near my house.

A fellow educator who knows the belief structure of SLA, with a smile in her voice she asked, “So, have you guys just been drilling and killing?”

We both laughed.

“Not so much,” I said, “I did bring it up last week. I figured, if they’re going to take the test, we should probably talk about it.”

It’s true.

That’s what I said to her and how I brought it up with my students.

Tomorrow, my G11 students will take the first two sections of this year’s standardized tests.

Today, we prepared.

Rather than prepare a slidedeck explaining the inane nuances of the test, those same inanities became the questions for our research today.

“How many sections of reading are their on the G11 Reading PSSA?”

“How many of each type of question is in each section?”

“What are the possible genres of reading passages on the test?”

And they searched and found and filled in the holes. Some were frustrated, others downright competitive.

The moment that struck me and the moment that let me know we were doing the right thing was when one of my students offered up, “It feels like we’re searching for classified information.”

I flashed to David Perkins and Making Learning Whole and everything he had to say about learning the hidden game.

I know Perkins was talking about the hidden game in real, worthwhile learning and not standardized tests. In the eyes of the state, sadly, the next few weeks represent the realest of real learning my students will be doing this year.

The grant project and the building history project will mean nothing, nor will the multiple books the kids have blazed through and the conversations they’ve had as readers.

Perkins talks about the hidden game as the pieces of learning that are unspoken and unknown except to those who know how to play well. They might not even been understood by those who play well – they just are.

I suppose, aside from some practice in researching, that was the other goal of today’s exercise. I wanted them to know they will find 22 multiple-choice and 2 open-ended questions tomorrow before they sat down so they don’t need to worry about the rules. All they’ll need to worry about tomorrow is reading.

They can do that.

They can read, question and converse better than many undergrads and grads I’ve known. They know what they look for in a book and can tell you. They can tell you why a book is boring and why it’s exciting. And, they’re working on learning to read more closely than most people I know.

They are readers.

I told them that.

I told them that, and I told them to slow the frak down tomorrow.

It’s the best way to play the game.

Things I Know 77 of 365: What we read makes who we are and what we do

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.

– Atticus Finch, To Kill a Mockingbird

To mark AOL’s consumption of The Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington announced Monday that “AOLers and HuffPosters (who are now AOLers!) will be volunteering in their local communities” as part of a 30-Day Service Challenge.

Aside from being a good public relations move, it’s also good work. No matter one’s political leanings, jumping in and helping the rest of humanity is a good idea.

I used to teach with a science teacher who had completed a fellowship during which she attempted a different job each week for 52 weeks. At the end of the year, she’d done it all – including her personal favorite, learning to drive an 18-wheeler.

She walked through life with a different and deeper understanding of the people with whom she interacted.

She had taken Atticus Finch’s advice and walked in the skin of others.

This gets toward the heart of why I want so badly for my students to connect with books and be more thoughtful about what they view. These stories, mostly fictitious, provide moments of connection and portrayed experiences that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. I want my students digging deeply into texts because the more they read, the more they will archive. Their brains will become rife with archives of the “what ifs” of all the plots and characters they encounter. And this, this will prepare them for those moments when they are up against odds unknown or come face-to-face with someone diametrically contrary to who they are.

I grew up in a small town of 250 people. My school was in the next town over and educated just under 400 students. While each of us was an individual, the world our interactions created was nothing compared to the complexity of life for my students in Philadelphia or Sarasota.

While I can’t deny thoughtful parenting was the largest preparation I received for the world beyond Cantrall, IL, it was the books, television shows and movies I read that picked up where my family’s experiences left off.

Nothing can replace the actual experience of mucking in as the “AOLers and HuffPosters” are and my former colleague did. Reading, though, can serve as the primer in the absence of the physical experience – the original virtual reality.

Starting next week, my students will be spending dedicated class time on change.org. Launched in 2007, the site both raises awareness of acts of injustice and calls on readers to take action as well by signing petitions or contacting government leaders. I cannot provide my students with exactly what they will need for every possible eventuality they might face. Absent that ability, I can help them build connections with texts, read those texts closely and then ask questions about how what they can do in relation to what they’ve just read.

My mom likes to tell the story of the first time she read me a children’s biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. I’m not sure of my age, but know I was still in the realm of footy pajamas. As my mother tells it, we’d finished reading the section explaining racism and it affected me deeply.

“You were pacing back and forth yelling, ‘That’s wrong, mommy! That’s just wrong!’”

Though the texts my students or I encounter may not always draw on themes as clearly unjust as racism, both they and I are missing the story if we’re not looking at how the characters are treating one another and how we see ourselves in the pages or scenes of what we’re reading.

Things I Know 66 of 365: English is hard

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

– Walt Whitman

“Mr. Chase, am I getting an interim for your class?”

Interims are notifications the district requires we send home if a student is earning a “D” or “F” at midterm.

“No.”

“Ok, good. I didn’t think so, but I wanted to be sure. I’m getting one in math, and I told them, but they understood because math’s hard. If I were getting an interim in English, they’d go crazy.”

And he’s gone and done it.

English is difficult. Really. I swear.

I don’t just mean remembering how to spell “recommend,” “accomplish,” and “necessary” (though that takes a definite level of skill).

English is difficult on a user level.

I struggle with communicating the intricacies of the language to my students. For the vast majority, it’s the language they’ve been learning since birth. Economics, biochemistry, pre-calculus – these all came online later in their development. They are foreign languages.

Not only are they foreign, but communicating in them requires a specificity of detail my students often fail to see in their consumption and production of language.

Though Mark Twain may have said, “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug,” students are often not interested in such precision of language. Moreover, they don’t consider the construction of meaning difficult.

But language is tough. To take an idea from the ephemeral and frame it in with words, send those words out into the world and then process the reaction – that is linguistic chemistry.

I’m not talking what my student could be doing with language; I’m talking about what they are doing with language.

I wish they could see it.

They look at a page with arbitrarily connected ticks and curves, they translate those ticks and curves to individual pieces of meaning, they string those individual pieces of meaning together, they connect those strings to their own experiences and then they store them away to connect to later strings or experiences.

I’m not just saying this is what they do with Kafka or Joyce or Woolf. This is what they do when they read a cereal box.

It’s what they do with one another. They take the laxidasically imprecise language of the colloquial, put it up against more formal internal language charts, find meaning and respond with the properly coded answer. To complicate things further colloquialism are shifting at lightning speeds.

Incredible.

Still, it’s math that has the street cred for being the T-Birds in our educational production of Grease. English is as easy as Cha Cha DiGregorio.

Even there, in the last sentence, I created an intertextual comparison that required the understanding of multiple meanings of “easy.” Admittedly, the joke loses something in its explanation.

This is the idea Taylor Mali is playing with when he says, “I make them show all of their work in math and hide it in English.”

Perhaps that’s the answer.

The next time I have a student write a summary of what they read, I’ll have them start at the morphemic and phonemic levels.

“Well, first, I realized I was looking at the letter I. Then I noticed there was a space after the letter, so I took that to imply the letter was representative of a singular idea…”

“I’m going to stop you there for a moment. When you say, ‘I realized I was looking at the letter I,’ what gave it away?”

This could be fun.

Things I Know 64 of 365: A balanced reading diet is an important part of this complete teacher

Reading is a means of thinking with another person’s mind; it forces you to stretch your own.

– Charles Scribner, Jr.

In their book Subjects Matter, Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman outline the importance of helping our students construct a balanced reading diet. Speaking of the need for such a balance of text consumption across all disciplines, Daniels and Zemelman write about the importance of fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, websites, books, magazines, blogs and anything else.

By feeding our students a monoculture or near monoculture of texts, we do them a disservice. Reading is a diverse act.

I’ve been attempting to remind myself of this lately.

While re-reading Daniels and Zemelman I’m also reading Nel Noddings’ Caring. Every once in a while, I pick up Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything. I just finished Sam Chaltain’s American Schools. Next up is Kathleen Cushman’s Fires in the Mind. During reading time in class, I’ve been re-reading Volume 5 of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 8 comics so I can finally read my newly purchased copies of Volumes 6 and 7.

Over the last 12 months, I read David Perkins’ Making Learning Whole because Gary said I should. I also picked up Democracies in Flux by Robert Putnam, Eating Animals by Johnathan Safran Foer, A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne, DIY U by Anya Kamentz and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

This is to say nothing of the countless pieces of first-rate long-form journalism I’ve consumed thanks to longform.org, articles encountered by trolling reedit, links grazed through twitter and whatever friends send me through e-mail.

If I haven’t been lying to my students, and everything is a text, then the TED Talk, This American Life, Planet Money, Moth Theater and Dinner Party Download podcasts must also go on the list.

While my food diet is most certainly corncentric, my reading diet is not.

It shouldn’t be.

If I’m to do my job as best I know how, it can’t be a monoculture.

My grad school assignments regularly require that I use the course materials within my annotated reference list. They go so far as to allow for the use of individual chapters within the same book to be used a separate lessons so we need not stray too far from the prescribed reading.

My last reference list had 12 entires and the minimum 2 course-assigned entries.

It struck me as I was compiling the list how much of a disservice the program is doing to the students of those other members of my cohort who only referenced the two books and decade-old DVD segments.

Too many ideas are floating in the world.

My friend Jeff is working to answer the question of what kind of school he would like to lead. He pinged me tonight to ask what texts he could reference to get the pedagogical language that serves as the cognitive infrastructure for what we do at SLA.

Though he was likely hoping for one or two, I listed quite a few more than that and am still thinking of minds he should be looking into.

The best ideas I’ve ever eaten were cooked by the combination of ingredients from several sources.

It’s a type of communal individualization.

I used to know a principal who could be counted upon to have her faculty read a different book each year. They’d come back from summer break to find their copies of the text of the year waiting in their mailboxes. Each year, the processes from the previous year’s text were laid down in favor of this new book’s frame of mind.

In the same way a body will deteriorate if you feed it only one food, the teaching in the school became ideologically thin. If the principal had asked the teachers to read what they were interested in and share what they were reading, think of the culture shift.

I’ve heard the arguments why teachers don’t have room for reading. Family and friends come into play. They are so exhausted by their teaching days that they cannot fathom picking up texts that asks their minds to return to the classroom.

My answer is unapologetically simple – Don’t watch that episode of Law & Order: Akron or House Hunters Antarctica. Cut an hour or 30 minutes of vegetating and play in a text.

But, there’s one remaining rule:

If you only read one book about education this year – don’t.

My teaching is better because I move between Perkins, Whedon and Bryson or turn my back on them entirely for the humorous simplicity of Oddly Specific.

I’m pretty sure my brain is happier too.

Things I Know 25 of 365: We need to ban more books

Every burned book enlightens the world.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

We need to ban more books.

Let me be more specific.

You need to ban more books.

I don’t mean a small, intimate banning with just a timid teacher and an irate parent.

I need a top-level, principal, school board, superintendent, someone-call-the-press banning.

You see, the bigger the banning, the easier it is for me to get my students to read – that book.

When they’re finished with that book?

We celebrate the history of your banning brethren.

We’ve been keeping track.

“Yes, other books have been banned before.”

“Yes, there is a list.”

“Yes, they are in the library.”

“Yes, you may be excused to run down and check it out.”

Your banning is like an NC-17 rating daring my students to forge fake library cards and sneak into the pages of ideas undetected.

What’s more, it’s a bat signal of ignorance that lets me know I need to teach your child to ask. Ask everything.

My pedagogy forbids me from telling him what to think, but it demands that I ask him to think.

I hope someday I’ll write a banned book. I’ll join the ranks of Twain, Morrison, Orwell, Faulkner, Crutcher, Blume, Sacher, Huxley, London, King, Sallinger, Walker, Myers, Hemingway, Mitchell, Atwood, Rowling, Conrad, Sinclair, Lawrence, Silverstein, Wright, Hinton, Zindel, Hurston, Miller, Joyce, Lee, and so many more.

So, ban.

It keeps me in business.

Ban.

It helps me know who you are.

Ban.

It keeps them reading.

Ban.