Se Hace Camino Al Andar

Link: Dr. Homeslice: Carnival of Education!.

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Originally uploaded by NaniRolls.

Maybe, for permanent English teacher certification, the state should just make us play scrabble. (Click the picture to see the notes.)

Link: History Is Elementary: The Education Carnival: Edition 107.

My Google Reader this morning let me know that Jonathan gave me a Thinking Blogger award. Quite hilariously, I might add. But he wasn’t the first to nominate me. That honor goes to my homeboy, The Reflective Teacher, who did his meme yesterday.

Sidebar: I actually watched this meme go around for the past week and I was getting pretty offended at the fact that I ended up on nobody’s list, because I’m silly and shallow and petty like that (you never guessed, did you?). Now, here I am! On not one, but two lists. Woo hoo! I feel much better.

So, it’s my turn. Five blogs that make me think:

1. Jules: She is traipsing around yet another European country at the moment, so she’ll probably never see this. In any case, Jules, despite her tender tenure, always teaches me something. There are quite a few similarities between teaching middle school ELA and 9th grade ELA, especially when the 9th graders are low-level readers and writers.

2. The Reflective Teacher: Seriously, I’m just forever impressed by the work he is doing with his students and I totally stole his Anthem plans (I haven’t used them yet but that’s a different story.). I appreciate TRT’s..well…reflections!

3. Tamara: Even though Tam doesn’t write too much about teaching anymore, her posts on relationships and religion definitely make me think about my own issues with religion.

4. Miss Profe: She gets a hat tip from me for her posts on racial issues. She happened to write about a post about sensitive race issues in her school at the same time that I found myself dealing with the very same thing in my school. Mad props to her.

5. Chris: Sometimes Chris’ posts are too darn long and they make my eyes glaze over (sorry, dude…) but when I do read them, I always learn something (and suffer serious pangs of jealousy that he has a school like the one he does).

So, that’s all, folks. Don’t feel obligated to pass the meme on. We’re all busy and have other things to do, I know.

Dana at Huff English thinks she has a new meme in the works. Check it out. I’ve added three books to Dana’s original list, #51-53.

For books that you have read, put the title in bold. Books you want to read go in italics. Books you wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole are struck out. Books on your bookshelf are underlined. Books you have never heard of are preceded with a ? question mark. Books you’ve seen a movie or TV version of are preceded with # a pound mark. Books you have blogged about are preceded with an ! exclamation point. Books you’re indifferent to have no text decoration. Books you loved are starred *. To sum up:

* Books I’ve read
* Books I want to read
* Books I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole
* Books on my bookshelves
* ? Books I’ve never heard of
* # Books I’ve seen in movie or TV form
* ! Books I’ve blogged about
* Books I’m indifferent to
* * Books I loved

1. The Essential 55 (Ron Clark)
2. In the Middle (Nancie Atwell)
3.!* Possible Lives (Mike Rose)
4.?With Rigor for All (Carol Jago)
5.! The English Teacher’s Companion (Jim Burke)
6. # The Freedom Writers Diary (Erin Gruwell and the Freedom Writers)
7. Experience and Education (John Dewey)
8. *!Elements of Style (Strunk and White)
9. The Writer’s Reference (Diana Hacker)
10. The First Days of School (Harry Wong)
11. ?The Myth of Laziness (Mel Levine)
12. Classroom Instruction that Works (Robert J. Marzano)
13. Understanding By Design (Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe)
14. The Homework Myth (Alfie Kohn)
15. Classroom Management that Works (Robert J. Marzano)
16. Fires in the Bathroom (Kathleen Cushman)
17. The Teacher’s Daybook (Jim Burke)
18. Lies My Teacher Told Me (James W. Loewen)
19. The Unschooled Mind (Howard Gardner)
20. A Place Called School (John Goodlad)
21. Punished By Rewards (Alfie Kohn)
22. Inside Out (Tom Liner and Dan Kirby)
23. Teaching Poetry Writing to Adolescents (Joseph Tsujimoto)
24. !*Bridging English (Joseph Milner and Lucy Milner)
25. Teaching Grammar in Context (Constance Weaver)
26. ?How to Read Literature Like a Professor (Thomas C. Foster)
27. ?English Teacher’s Survival Guide (Mary Lou Brandvik)
28. !*Shakespeare Set Free: Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth (Peggy O’Brien)
29. ?Making the Journey (Leila Christenbury)
30. ?Teaching with Fire (Sam Intrator)
31. Multiple Intelligences (Howard Gardner)
32. A Mind at at Time (Mel Levine)
33. Teacher Man (Frank McCourt)
34.# My Posse Don’t Do Homework [Dangerous Minds] (LouAnne Johnson)
35. The Shame of the Nation (Jonathan Kozol)
36. Educating Esmé (Esmé Raji Codell)
37. Horace’s Compromise: The Dilemma of the American High School (Theodore Sizer)
38. Savage Inequalities (Jonathan Kozol)
39. Reviving Ophelia (Mary Pipher and Ruth Ross)
40. Among Schoolchildren (Tracy Kidder)
41. Cultural Literacy (E.D. Hirsch)
42. ?Getting the Knack: 20 Poetry Writing Exercises (Stephen Dunning and William Stafford)
43. Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire (Rafe Esquith)
44. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Will Richardson)
45. Other People’s Children (Lisa Delpit and Herbert Kohl)
46. Teach With Your Heart (Erin Gruwell)
47. There Are No Shortcuts (Rafe Esquith)
48. *Small Victories (Samuel G. Freedman)
49. ? Discipline with Dignity (Richard L. Curwin and Allen N. Mendler)
50.* Lives on the Boundary (Mike Rose)
51. Mosaic of Thought by Keene and Zimmerman
52. *I Read It But I Don’t Get It by Tovani
53. *!When Kids Can’t Read-What Teachers Can Do by Beers

Link: New York City Teacher Bloggers | Google Groups.

Do you know about the NYC Teacher Bloggers group? Click the link above! Jules and I have taken it upon ourselves to create this group, as well as a calendar. You can subscribed to both the group and the calendar from the links on the right sidebar. See you there!

Two weeks ago, I posted Miguel Guhlin’s Leadership Meme and tagged seven of my fellow bloggers. I’m happy to report at this late date that four of them have taken up the challenge and how!

Check it out, in no particular order:

1. Miss Profe.

2. Kelly.

3. Laura.

4. Ms. Cornelius.

The mark of a good meme is one that gets wide circulation. This one has been almost viral. I think it’s because it is interesting and worthwhile to take a few minutes to think about what qualities we have that at first glance may seem not so hot or exciting, but turn out to be excellent for leadership. I know, after reading these four responses plus the many posted by other bloggers, that I could probably go back and revise my list.

Link: The Silver Lining in MySpace? – Visual Thesaurus Online Edition.

Joe Bellacero, the associate director of the New York City Writing Project, and one of the facilitators of the Professional Writer’s Retreat that I’m participating in, was interviewed by Visual Thesaurus. Check it out! It’s a very interesting discussion about the evolution of language.

Link: The Education Wonks: The Carnival Of Education: Week 106 – Thoughts And Ideas Freely Exchanged.

I am painfully aware that my students, my freshmen in particular, have not done nearly enough writing, either low-stakes or high-stakes. Part of it has to do with too-short class periods and trying to squeeze in both reading and writing. I’m reading Anthem with both of my freshmen classes, and they are sharing one class set of the book, so I’m unable to assign outside reading, unless I make copies of the book. Note to self: Next time, use two different but thematically related novels and switch off with the classes. In the meantime, I need develop low-stakes and high-stakes writing assignments or exercises. Along with this, I need class time to model or teach the writing lessons. Low stakes writing exercises are relatively easy to do–it can be incorporated into each day’s Do Now or as end of period reflection, in the form of journal entries or responding to a prompt. For Anthem, there are three themes I want to touch upon: individuality, identity and conformity.

In Bridging English, Milner and Milner describe four stages of reading literature. The stages move from abstract to concrete, from simple to complex, from shallow to critical1.
This model is particularly handy in scaffolding comprehension of a text. The student moves from Reader Response to being a member of the interpretative community to formal analysis to critical synthesis. As I review what I’ve written so far, I’m amazed at how quickly I moved from wanting to incorporate more writing into my daily lessons to thinking about ways that students interact with text. So, how do I bring these four stages back to writing?
Well, reader response lends itself to low-stakes writing such as free writes or guided free writes or recording immediate impressions of a text, questions, comments, observations and so on. This can be done quickly, during the course of a lesson or at the end of a lesson. Developing an interpretative community begs collaboration among students and I can think of more than one activity in which students share ideas about a text in order to better understand the text, such as annotating a text in groups, in round-robin fashion (there’s a name for this activity but my old brain can’t recall it! Do you know?), or doing a carousel exercise. Formal analysis and critical synthesis lend themselves to high-stakes writing assignments, such as literary essays or short response pieces. I don’t know that it is necessary to bring my freshmen through all four stages. Critical synthesis, in particular, requires teaching the concept of critical analysis via various lens (feminist, marxist, psychological, etc)– in other words, not really stuff I’m prepared to get into with freshmen that can barely stand to read a paragraph.
Of the four stages, my focus for my (low-level) freshmen will be on the first three stages.
This is where being a packrat comes in handy. I’ve been to many, many workshops since I began teaching and I’ve saved nearly everything. I was able to dig up an old Institute for Writing and Thinking handout on the uses and kinds of informal writing. On this handout is a great quote from A River Runs Through it (the book, not the movie!):

“All there is to thinking is seeing something noticeable, which makes you see something you weren’t noticing,which makes you see something that isn’t even visible.”

This hand-out is a great resource, so if you’d like a copy of it, e-mail me your address or fax number (local area codes–212, 718, or 646 only!) and I’ll send it off to you.

The question I have now is: how do I use informal, low-stakes writing as a bridge to formal, high-stakes writing? My feeling is that low-stakes writing will reveal a pattern over time of a student’s relationship with a text. From that relationship, questions arise. These questions can be about the author’s choices or about a character’s choices. When we analyze text, isn’t that what we are doing essentially–looking at the choices made by either the author or a character? I think so.

So, here’s my idea: I will assign some chapters to be read at home (I’ll make photocopies). I’m not entirely optimistic that my students will do the reading assignment but I have to give them a chance to prove me wrong, don’t I? Worse comes to worse, we read the text in class together. But if they did do the reading at home, then more class time can be devoted to constructing meaning of text through writing. This meaning construction will be related to the three themes I mentioned earlier in this post.

I have think more about this, in terms of what all this will actually look like in the classroom, what kind of materials I’ll use and so on. I’ll keep you posted.

1Milner and Milner. Bridging English. New Jersey: Merrill, 1993.