Se Hace Camino Al Andar

I tried my hand at writing the syllabus for my 12th grade ELA class. I drew inspiration from the departmental “curriculum”, the reading I’ve been doing on the AP class and my memories of 12th grade.
Here’s what I came up with:

Welcome to E7, or 12th Grade English. This course assumes that you are on track to graduate, that you have passed the English Regents, that you will take the SAT in either November or December, and that you are ready to handle college-level work.

This Fall, you will have two major writing assignments:

• The Personal Essay, due in the first week of October.
  
• The Research Paper, due before Thanksgiving.
  

In addition, you will be expected to craft short, informal pieces during Writing Workshop days. These Writing Workshop days will be a central feature of this course. On these days, we will review specific skills that help you write well.

The Fall Reading List:
Essays

1. How It Feels to Be Colored Me by Zora Neale Hurston
2. The Ethics of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiograhical Sketch by Richard Wright
3. The Way to Rainy Mountain by N. Scott Momaday
4. No Name Woman by Maxine Hong Kingston
5. Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying by Adrienne Rich

Novels

1. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
2. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

In addition, you will be asked to read one article from The New Yorker a week, as well as an article from The New York Times.

In the Spring, you will have two more major writing assignments:

• The Literary Essay, due in the first week of March.
• The Critical Essay, due in the first week of May.
  

Writing Workshop days will continue, as in the Fall.

The Spring Reading List:
Plays

1. Othello
2. Fences

Novels

1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Weekly New Yorker and NYTimes article readings will continue, as well.

Additional resources used in this course:

1. MLA Handbook
2. Strunk and White’s Elements of Style
3. Internet databases
4. Electronic media
5. Blogs
   

Your grade in this course is based upon the following:

1. Writing Workshop portfolio
   
2. Major written assignments, counted as a test grade
   
3. Responses to readings
   
4. Vocabulary quizzes
   

This course is designed to arm you with knowledge of:

1. Plagiarism
2. Academic resources
3. Conventions of genre
4. Literary Devices
5. SAT vocabulary
6. Rhetorical terms
   

This course is designed to teach you the following skills:

1. Writing citations
2. Using quotations
3. Paraphrasing
4. Building a portfolio
5. Metatexting
6. Criticism
   

This is not a difficult class. All it requires is dedication, maturity and effort. Please take advantage of my office hours,  if you have questions, are struggling or you just want to chat.

Terry Wassall at Elgg.Net has a post about a keynote speaker he heard at a learning conference. I wasn’t able to listen to the audio clip of the keynote speaker addressing the issue of internet literacy and how it enables us to arm ourselves with important medical and health knowledge. I think it is apropos to post this here because this is one of the reasons why it is important to think about ways we teach media and information literacy in our classrooms.

Link: Life long learning, information literacy and the ‘expert patient’.

So, today is not the actual first day of school but it feels like it. I’m giving a PD today on reading across the curriculum. You can read my talking points here: Download Reading_Across_Curri.rtf

It’s in RTF, so it should open in any word processing program you use.

Thanks to Tamara for this tip! You can recieved free materials for your classroom from Tolerance.org.

Link: Tolerance.org: Teaching Tolerance: One World Poster Set.

I ordered the poster set, as well as videos…for FREE! There are materials for all grades, younger grades and older grades.

This article made me think about how I deal with repeaters in my classroom. The details that emerge out of Dr. McGrather’s research is really nothing new to me. I see it nearly everyday and I do agree with her when she says that repeating a year is "an exercise in futility".  This is kind of where teaching gets political, because a repeater student’s grade is no longer just about his or her behavior and the work they’ve completed in my class. It becomes a question of whether failing this student is worth it, for anyone. I’ve had repeater kids who are obviously able to do the work, and are academically inclined but were failed by former teachers based on behavior. This is not something I agree with, just because kids are immature. It’s a hard, cold fact–kids have a lot of growing up to do and sometimes act impulsively and say stupid things and do stupid things. This, most of the time, has little to no bearing on their actual ability to perform academically. Sure, their behavior interferes with the performance but it isn’t a measure of their potential or ability, and sometimes, I base a passing grade on that knowledge that eventually the kid will grow up. There are other, more effective ways of dealing with immature children and impulsive behaviors, tactics that will address the problem head-on, instead of setting a kid back years and years.

Students’ repeating is ‘futile’ | Schools | The Australian

I got a phone call today from my AP, checking in with my progress on preparing a brief PD presentation for Thursday, the first day for NYC teachers to report back to work. Good thing he called because it’s been the furthest thing from my mind, amidst all my lesson planning (I wrote three today!). I have to come up with a one hour presentation on reading strategies that apply across disciplines. I’ll probably do a brief overview for the first ten minutes, then go into breakout groups.

While on the phone with him, I also got my program. It’s….not perfect but not totally awful. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I’m programmed to team-teach two classes. I’m too anal to team-teach! Those are freshmen classes. My other sections are AP English (yeah!) and seniors.

He also asked if I would consider teaching night school. It’s very, very tempting. The pay would mean an extra 700+ a week. What’s holding me back? A couple of things:
1. I’m programmed to teach zero period, which means I would have to be at work before 7, and if I taught night school, I’d be there until 8pm. That’s a long day, not including the time it takes me to travel home (I live a lot further from my school this year!).

2. There’s the safety factor. My school’s neighborhood is not the worst but it’s not a place I would hang out in after dark, either. There’s the issue of walking to the train, at night. There’s another teacher who goes in the same direction as me and he usually takes a cab. If I split the cab with him every night, it won’t be an issue.

As my sister pointed out, I pulled these kinds of hours during grad school, and I can do it again. Not to mention, because I begin so early, I would definitely have a huge hunk of downtime before night classes begin. I think, for the money, I can suck it up for a semester and see what happens when Spring rolls around.

I’ve been dabbling in some teachers’ social networking sites. First, there was TeachAde. Then, I signed up for Elgg because I heard about it on Edublogger News. I also read about We The Teachers on Edublogger News. It’s a lot to maintain but I’m checking out plusses and minuses of each, then I’ll probably eliminate either TeachAde or We The Teachers; those two websites are very similar in mission and purpose. Elgg.net seems to be more professional and tech-oriented. We The Teachers seems to have more activity and participation than TeachAde, whose development is moving just a bit too slowly for me and is pretty boring, frankly. Anyway, check out the sites. If you belong to any of them or decide to sign up, let me know!

Tim Fredrick is also thinking about writing. His thinking reminds me of Peter Elbow. Check it out and weigh in!

Every year, I tell myself I’ll go to Staples for Teacher Appreciation Day and every year, I lose my motivation to go or I just don’t get up early enough. This year, I was up early enough but was doing other things (dropping my niece off at home, taking a friend to the bus back to the city, grocery shopping). Once I realized that Staples was only giving out 200 bags of free stuff, 45 minutes after the event started, I lost all desire to go down there, convinced that all the bags would be gone (this is NYC, c’mon!!). So, home I stay, to enjoy the rain, and my coffee, whip up some blueberry pancakes and watch TV.

If you know absolutely nothing about blogging and web 2.0, then this book is for you. It’s kind of like “Web 2.0 for Dummies”. I fast-forwarded through the whole book to the section on assessment. I was hoping this section would offer some insight into appropriate modes of assessment for Web 2.0 tools. Instead, what I got was yet another advertisement for a Warlick web development. Namely, the rubric tool that can be found on The Landmarks for Schools website, a site created by Warlick, of course. I’m a little put off by the whole thing but maybe that’s because I already know everything that Warlick discusses in this book and I haven’t learned anything new. This is a book for the communal textbook shelf in the departmental office.