Se Hace Camino Al Andar

The Education Wonks: The Carnival Of Education: Week 34 – Thoughts And Ideas Freely Exchanged

A great (and timely) post about lit circles at Tim Fredrick’s Education and ELA Teaching Blog.

My sister admonished me for being busier now than when I was in school. She says I’m creating work for myself. You know what? She’s right but the thing is, the stuff that’s keeping me busy now is stuff that should have been keeping me busy all along but I’ve been too preocuppied with grad school. My first year teaching, I wasn’t in school but I was a wreck…I had no idea what I was doing. The following three years, I was in grad school and my attention was pulled in two different directions. My work on both ends suffered as a result. It was a catch-22. No work, no money to pay for school and live. No school, no permanent certification.
Now, I finally only have one job…being a teacher and it is time-consuming when you actually care about what you are doing. I don’t want to write thoughtless lesson plans and go through the motions. I want my classroom to be alive and that takes work. So, I stay late at work because I can. I get the grading done, so I don’t have to bring it home with me. When I come home, I do my lesson planning, something that is easier for me to do at home, with my Internet for research and my three bookcases full of books, any of which could contain literature I want to use next or ideas I can tap for making learning happen in my classroom.
The plan this week:
Read My Man Bovanne by Toni Cade Bambara and All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury. Talk about how these two stories have details that support the ideas that we control our lives, or that our lives control us. Then, these two stories will be used to teach my students how to use supporting evidence in an personal essay. They’ll start an outline for the essay. That’s probably all we will do this week, since I’ll be out of the building on Thursday for an eChalk training and Friday is essay day.

I also need to clean house a bit for a special guest who plans to take New York by storm this weekend. That requires taking care of the boxes that remain in my bedroom, so there will be room for the aerobed, and cleaning my newly visible floor. It’s gonna be a good week, readers!

Thanks to Tim Fredrick for turning me on to a revised Bloom’s Taxanomy. I began writing a new curriculum today for teaching the personal essay and one of the skills that I will be assessing is whether my students can respond to literature using the taxanomy. I don’t much like the graphic representation of the taxonomy that the school gave me (It’s a series of multi-faceted boxes stacked on top of each other, one box for each skill. It’s ugly.) So, I’ll be using the revised one. It’s much more user-friendly and easier to read.

Today, while the kids were taking their Friday Essay and in between pleads to stop talking so damn much, I wrote down these notes for next week, when I begin direct writing instruction:
1. When faced with an either/or, pick a side and defend it.
2. Intro-what side you picked, list reasons why.
3. Body-devoted to one reason each.
4. Expand your argument by calling on resources/sources.
5. Conclusion-wrap up essay by re-stating main idea
6. introduce the essay outline–require complete outline before writing draft.

The last one is one that I think teachers/students do not do enough of (or maybe it’s just me!). I remember having to write outlines when I was in middle school and then continuing that process when I got to high school. It made it so much easier to write my papers! The other notes are things that I want to share with them, impart to them. I said in my response to Jenny’s comment, that I wanted to focus on word usage, vocabulary and conventions before working on idea development but I think I’ll have to do it all together.
My plan is this:
1. Gather up essays that I think are well-written. Examine those essays and figure out what makes it work.
2. Introduce them to the personal essay, using LaMott’s Bird by Bird
3. Use the Do Now to provide rote pratice in punctuation and other conventions, so that when I address those issues during the lesson, they know what I’m talking about it, even if they don’t understand it/know how to use conventions properly.
4. Eventually, I’ll tie in the essay with Romeo and Juliet, the first text I’m using this year.

I used this rubric for today’s Friday Essay, different from last time:
Expresses Ideas Clearly
4: The student clearly and effectively communicates the main idea or theme, and provides support (examples) that contains rich and powerful detail.
3: The student clearly communicates the main idea or theme and provides suitable (good enough) support and detail.
2: The student communicates important information but not a clear theme or overall structure (your ideas are all over the place and unorganized).
1: The student communicates information as isolated (separate) pieces in a random, unorganized way.
0: No judgment can be made.

I think this is my main goal this year–to have the kids scoring a 3 or 4 on the rubric. Right now, they’re at 2 or 1. It’s a daunting task, and a large part of it is figuring out how to do direct writing instruction with a class of 34 kids.

Jenny asked in the comments how I plan to teach structure. My response is kind of lenghthy, so I’ve posted it here as well:

Since this is the first few weeks of school, I’ve been assigning writing without giving any instruction so that I can assess their abilities in a variety of situations. We are wrapping up our opening unit, and starting next week, I’ll be looking at how best to work with them on their writing. For the most part, what I am seeing is that they have big problems with writing conventions, vocabulary and word usage. Most of them have the general essay format down–intro, body, conclusion. I’ll beging by working within the structure they already know, focussing on those three areas I named above before I begin working on idea development. The Friday Essay is only two pages, and even that is daunting for many of my students. Instruction usually takes the form of modelling, doing whole class essays, looking at examples of what I consider to be good essays and thinking about what makes those essays good. I also have rubrics that guide my instruction. I share the rubrics with the students, so that they can see what is expected of them and work from there. I have to admit though, that writing instruction is not something that I have mastered. I am a good writer, I know good writing when I see it and I can work with kids one on one with their writing, but teaching writing to a class of 34 kids, all at different levels of skill/ability is pretty daunting, so I’m constantly looking for ways that I can teach writing to a whole class and still be able to individualize instruction. I’d like to be able to work with kids in small groups. Before I can do this, I need to develop exercises that students can do on their own or with a group, so that I can meet with small groups without worrying about the class getting out of control/bored/restless.

I’ve started a new tradition in my English classes–the Friday Essay. I came up with it last week, on a whim, as I was wracking my brain, looking for something to round out my lesson plan. It was only supposed to be a Do Now but it turned into a full period exercise and after doing, I realized that all of them need it, a chance to practice writing short essays in response to some prompt or other, plus it gives me a way to see if they’ve been paying attention all week. So, today is Friday Essay #2. I’m looking at a fairly easy day, which is good since I’m flat-out exhausted. I’ve been breaking my own rules all week–besides not staying at school to grade papers, I’ve been going out on school nights. Last night, I had to go to see Hairspray, for the Stage Doors program that I’m doing. That alone would have been fine….if only I had gone straight home after the show. Nope! It was off for post-theatre ciders with my girls, one who was at the show with me and another who was in the same neighborhood to see a friend in JC Superstar. I finally stumbled home..er…cabbed it home after midnight. I came in to see my two roommates, who I hardly ever see, chilling on the couch with “I Heart Huckabees”…didn’t watch it with them but we went outside for a little smoke break and talked for a little while, mostly about boys.
This is bad bad bad. It affects my performance at work and I have to go back to my regularly-scheduled programming….grading papers in a timely fashion and being in bed by 11 on school nights.
This weekend is a different story, however. I’ve got the NYCWP Technology Retreat this week, starting tonight and then a full day tomorrow at a high school in the East Village. Needless to say, I’ll be coming straightaway tonight to crash and be prepared to wake up at 7:30 on a Saturday morning to face a whole day of the retreat. I’m very excited!
Plus, Saturday night, Frizz has arranged a ferry party, so I’ll be hitting the high seas with my girls and taking lots of pictures. Aren’t you lucky?

As a teacher at a vocational high school, the majority of my students are male, so Tim Fredrick’s Research on Helping Adolescent Boys Be Engaged in the ELA Classroom is interesting. Fredrick will be at the NCTE Conference in Pittsburgh, in November. Hopefully, I’ll be able to catch him there.

Welcome, Tim Fredrick!