Well, I’ve finally been tagged for this meme by Dana, so here goes:
1. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. I had a Sally Ride costume. It was the suit that astronauts wore underneath the actual space suit. It covered me from head to toe, literally. I had space shuttle toys. When I was 5, I saw The Challenger explode on TV and that was the end of the dream, according to my mother.
2. My hearing loss wasn’t diagnosed until I was 2 and half years old. Up until then, doctors thought I was retarded, slow and/or hyperactive and needed to be on drugs. I had ten vocabulary words by the time I was 2, and only half of them were intelligible. Now, you can’t shut me up.
3. My younger sister is also deaf, and my mother went back to school a few years after Dana was born to become an audiologist. Now, we get free hearing aids and free batteries. We’re very spoiled!
4. Speaking of sisters, I have four of them, plus one brother. We all have the same father but four of us have one mother, and the younger two have another mother.
5. I really want to move to a small, quiet town to raise my children.
With that, I tag Tam, Avi and Julie.
I’ve been inspired by one or two people to create my own 101 in 1001 list but I had a hell of a time coming up with 101 things to do! Then, I had a brainstorm: why not a list of 101 books that I want to read in the next 1001 days? After all, I’m always lamenting the fact that while I had an excellent high school education, the reading list was far from traditional and as a result, there are tons of books that I’ve missed out on. Also, I was quite the avid reader when I was younger and I didn’t always pick age-appropriate books. I have this funny feeling that if I went back and re-read those books, I would have completely different take on those books now.
So, I’ve made a list of 101 books. Most of the titles were culled from The Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Books. Some of the titles are books that I currently own but never got around to reading, and still others are books that I’ve read before, but that I didn’t necessarily “get” at the time.
You can see the complete list here but here’s a list of the first ten:
1. Ulysses by James Joyce
2. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
3. The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
4. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
5. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler
6. Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
7. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
8. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
9. The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
10. 1984 by George Orwell
The books are arranged in no particular order, and I most likely will not read them in the order they’ve been listed. I’m already in the middle of Middlemarch, by George Eliot so I’ll begin with that one.
I have a proposition for my fellow readers. My home library is already quite burdened and overflowing. I propose a book swap. I have a ton of books that you might want to read and you might have some of the books on this list you’d be willing to part with. I’ll make a list of books that I’m willing to part with, and post it sometime in the near future. If you see a book you’d like and you have one from my 101 list to swap, contact me to exchange mailing addresses. What could be more fun that getting a book in the mail!?
I’m still working my through the latest issue of American Educator and the issue’s How We Learn column was so interesting that I didn’t need to fake an excuse to ignore the personal trainer laying a hard sell on me while I was busting my butt on the elliptical. Daniel T. Willingham, in this column, addresses a question posed by a reader that arose out of a previous column about background knowledge and reading comprehension.
I often talk about wanting my students to be part of “the conversation.” What I mean when I say this is that I want my students to be culturally literate and able to “get” references and allusions. Some of this comes with age, for sure but there is also knowledge that comes from exposure to a certain environment, like parents who read a lot and engage their children in thoughtful conversation, provide opportunities for travel, and so on. I would argue, at the risk of seeming politically incorrect, that these are things with which middle class kids grow up, not poor kids.
Willingham says of reading comprehension, “…this is why it is so essential to build students’ background knowledge.” His point is that teaching comprehension strategies is effective to the extent that the student is able create a situation model[extrapolating beyond the information given] based on prior knowledge or experience–in other words, a student derives deeper comprehension from a text that describes something he or she has personal experience with or contains ideas that he or she has confronted before elsewhere.
The reading strategies discussed in the column are nothing new for anyone that has taught structured reading programs like Ramp Up. What is new for me, though, is that strategies are not skills; they are simply tricks to aid in comprehension. Though it never occurred to me to think of strategies that way, it makes total sense. The implication for the classroom here is that, as Willingham points out, practicing strategies is not key here–what is important is remembering to employ the strategies, once they’ve been learned.
I’m going to remember this article as I continue my planning for the freshmen classes. I highly recommend reading the article as it goes beyond what I’ve described here.
This month’s American Educator (the AFT member publication) has an article on the union’s involvement in protecting academic standards, in one particular DC school. Written by the teacher who started a campaign to investigate suspected grade scrubbing in his school, the article laments the decline of the high school diploma’s value.
Teaching seniors this year for the first time, I’m getting a new glimpse into what it means to be ready for graduation. Sometimes I think to myself, it doesn’t matter… high school diplomas are worthless anyway. You can’t get anywhere without at least an associates or a bachelor’s degree, and even those degrees don’t mean much anymore, in certain fields. Truth be told, if my seniors were held to the standards of suburban high schools, none of them would walking across a stage in June to pick up a diploma. Sad, but true. I do as much as I can to catch them up but they have been failed by the system, by teachers with weak standards, by teachers who dumb down content, and don’t provide opportunities for rigorous inquiry, teachers who just go through the motions of reading a book, giving a reading quiz and assigning essays without actually teaching the craft of writing.
One of my Juniors wanted to know why he had only received a 75 in my class. After all, he did all the work and he came everyday. You should have seen the look on his face when I told him that it wasn’t just about doing all the work, it was also about the quality of the work. In my suburban high school, he probably would have gotten an even lower grade but I can’t hold my kids to the same standards, no matter what anyone says. They haven’t had the same preparation, they’ve been grossly neglected in their education, or even mis-educated. Unless all teachers in a school are of the same mind when it comes to academic rigor and expectations, grades and high school diplomas are pretty much worthless.
As for my seniors, all I can do is catch them up as much as possible. I wont fail them, because many of them are college-bound, believe it or not. They’re not going to Yale or Harvard or anything but college, nonetheless. They’ll learn the hard way what it means to be a student, and a good one, at that. Those that have the drive and motivation to overcome their under-preparedness and are lucky enough to find a support system will survive. The others, they’ll come home and figure out what else to do with their lives.
Tamara, who teaches in Los Angeles, is teaching Night, by Elie Wiesel next term and would like to take her students to The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. She put up a proposal on Donors Choose, so please take a look and give what you can, if you are so inclined. (Yes, I already ponied up cash, so I’ve put my mouth where my money is!)
Link: Donors Choose.
Here’s an excerpt from Tamara’s proposal:
“This museum is high tech and interactive, just the type of experience today’s high school kids thrive on and learn from. I want the kids to explore their own notions of racism and prejudices while learning how these thought processes have and are causing great turmoil in our community and world.
Again, this experience would be more than valuable to my students. They come from low income families, many of which are immigrants who came here because of genocide (Armenia) and wars (Central America).”
My AP students have a synthesis paper due. I told my students that I wanted them by the 15th, so they would have a chance to revise their papers, if necessary, before the holiday break. Otherwise, if they didn’t hand it in on the 15th, there were no guarantees. I got 4 or 5 papers, one of them e-mailed to me on Saturday.
I took myself to my local irish pub, ordered up a bottle of Magner’s (or 3) and tackled the first paper (I have to remember next time to not invite my sister, because as soon as she showed up, all paper grading went out the window.) Because I’ve taught freshmen for so long, my paper grading usually subsists of making sure they have the 5 paragraph essay down pat. So, I was a little excited to read some AP essays, not that I expected they would be any higher in quality; the subject matter is infinitely more interesting in these papers. Since I have these fabulous new Staedtler pens that come in all sorts of colors, I decide to color-code my comments. I’m not grading these initial drafts, so I paid close attention to rhetorical elements that I wanted the student to focus on in his re-write. I used one color pen for rhetorical/mechanical notes and another color for my actual edits.
As I read the paper, I kept a running list of issues that I need to address with the class. So far, the list includes:
Using active voice, avoiding repetition (diversifying analytic/rhetorical vocabulary), transitions, run-on sentences and quoting versus paraphrasing.
As you might guess from the photograph, my AP kids and I have lots of work to do before May.
My team-teacher designed a unit on Dante’s Inferno, which we’ve been tackling for a few weeks now. I though the kids use some more practice with allegories, using easier ones, so I designed a lesson on understanding allegory, using fables.
I began by having them take notes on the definition of allegory and moral.
I have five copies of Aesop’s Fables, beautiful children’s books with great illustrations. I split the kids up into 5 groups, and gave them a graphic organizer that had four columns on it. The first column was headed "Title", the second, "Characters", the third, "What happened" and the fourth, "The Moral." I asked the groups to choose three stories from their books, read them aloud to each other and fill in the graphic organizer. This took about 15 minutes or so.
When they finished the graphic organizers, they broke out of the groups for more note-taking. I made a chart on the board with three columns-"Animal," "Action," and "Character Trait." They copied the chart into their notebooks or on the back of the graphic organizer. I solicited from each group an animal that had appeared in one of their stories. Then, we wrote the gist of the animal’s actions and decided what character trait was displayed by that action.
They were engaged, they really got into reading the fables and figuring out the character traits at the end.
We’ll see tomorrow if they can transfer this awareness to Dante’s Inferno…
Update: I’ve been thinking this over. I need to come up with a way to bridge today’s lesson to Dante’s Inferno. I mean, what was the point of today’s lesson? It was to make the concept of allegory a little easier for my students to understand.
The Reflective Teacher has started a great meme: Day in a Sentence. He’s been doing it for a few weeks now, so go over there and check it out.
A group of NYCWP members met at 9:30 this morning in front of the 42nd Street Library, in the bitter cold. We made a plan to meet up at noon, then split up into small groups to explore the neighborhood and find a place to write, then share our writing, offering only “Thank you” to those who shared.
I got lots of personal writing done, more than I have in ages. I don’t think I will take the writing I did any further but it was good to get out of my system and work on my stamina. My main writing focus right now is a professional piece. I would like to have a reasonable draft completed in time for my next Writer’s Retreat meeting in January. Seems like a lot of time, right? Not really, when I have a lot of other stuff going on, plus I need to do observing in my classroom before I can write.
I was asked to teach an extended day class, a class that kids take for the sole purpose of “credit recovery.” I said yes because hey, it’s good money! I didn’t realize though, exactly how energy-draining it would be. Basically, it meant that I was in the building for 11 hours straight, two days a week. That’s not including the other day of the week when I stay late to advise the acting class. So, I dropped the extended day class and passed it on to two teachers who will share the class.
It’s just as well because all of a sudden, I’m very busy after school. I was invited to join a Professional Writer’s Retreat by NYCWP. We had our first meeting on Wednesday night, up at Lehman College. We don’t meet very often but I will be spending a lot of time working on a piece for publication, getting a draft ready for our next meeting. The exciting part? Our final meeting, in the Spring, will be a weekend retreat at a camp on the Jersey Shore. As my friend Jill would say, “niiiiice.”
Back in September, I participated in a panel session for an NBC education project, in partnership with MIT. I can’t go into much detail but it was geared towards teachers of AP courses and is technology-based. Because of my participation, I’ve been asked to sign on to consult the producers on educational design and goals for the project. I have a meeting next Friday, to talk more about what my role will be in all this. I’m excited about this. I think it’ll be a great opportunity to sharpen my interest in curriculum and instruction.
Last spring, if you remember, I participated in the Writing Project’s Satellite Invitational (so-called because it’s usually done in a more intensive form over the summer, but the spring one is not as intensive and time-consuming). For next spring’s Satellite Invitational, I’ll be a tech intern, working with the two facilitators of the group. I’m not sure exactly what my role will be but I’m excited because I would really love to sign on as a consultant with the Writing Project, so lots of interaction with the Writing Project is a good thing!
I’m still doing Tech Thursdays this semester and working on my inquiry project. I’ve been writing about that over at Inquiry. Drop by. Your feedback is welcome!
