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changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Monday, October 31, 2005
While I was looking for resources for a lesson on the Grapes of Wrath, I found a National Archive lesson plan that's interesting in this time of War on Terrorism. Teaching With Documents: FDR's First Inaugural Address Declaring "War" on the Great Depression. Ties directly to the details from Bob Probst's talk at IATE as well.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Today, BBC News reports Today's teenagers 'more literate'. The article explains that "Teenagers are more literate than they were 10 years ago, one of the largest studies of exam papers suggests." The problem, of course, is that assessment of literacy in the study is based on those exam papers. The variety of literacies that teen (or any) readers and writers rely on every day cannot all be measured by a written standardized test. Students are very literate. We just don't ever measure all they know.
changelog @ tengrrl.com: Miscellany
Saturday, October 29, 2005
Cleaning out my Bloglines clippings folder (e.g., procrastinating):
- Mentioned on datacloud:
It Figures
This blog defines figures of speech with current events and pop culture examples. Not all will be usable in the classroom, but many could be tapped. The technique might make an interesting writing project for a cross-curricular project or for an exploration of pop culture texts.
- From Kairosnews:
Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents provides suggestions for publishing blogs in less than supportive environments (like that in Pope John XIII Regional High School) as well as ideas for getting picked up by search engines, blogging anonymously, and keeping e-mail private.
- From The New York Times:
- What's Cool Online? Teenagers Render Verdict discusses a marketing focus group exploring the strategies that attract teens. One of the cited resouces is "The Coke Studios Web site was designed to appeal to teenagers as a place to meet online, hold chats and make their own music."
- Got Wit? Make It Visual in Ads Online reviews an interactive exhibit at the Science, Industry and Business Library of the New York Public Library. The exhibit includes "some of the best ads ever made for television, radio, print and the Internet." I'm guessing copyright will keep the collection from being shared online for those of us who can't get to NY. The library has some info online. If you click through to the "Online Exhibit," you'll find some additional descriptions. The resources link there points to additional Web sites that may be useful for classroom studies of advertising and culture.
- Forget Blogs, Print Needs Its Own IPod focuses on how "In an attempt to leave the forest of dead trees and reach the high plains of digital media, every paper in the country is struggling mightily to digitize its content with Web sites, blogs, video and podcasts." I'll readily admit that I don't read a print newspaper. When I was in Texas, I got most of my news from CNN's Headline News, before the show turned into a circus. When I moved to Illinois, I switched to listening to NPR every morning as I get ready for work, and frequently every evening. Now that I've been using Bloglines for a while, I've returned to scanning the headlines of "print" news"papers" via their RSS feeds. Might be interesting to have an assignment where students look at how they get their news and compare that to how an older family member remembers getting news at the same age and/or now.
- Getting Your Point Across describes a forbes.com Special Report: Communicating. The NYT article explains that the "package on communication is a tour de force, taking on its subject from oblique angles using counterintuitive approaches." Could be interesting jumping-off points for student inquiry projects (as well as connections to our own practices in the classroom).
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Great. Everyone else gets cool pictures, and I'm the nerd librarian. Bonus. What a reason to live.
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You are a Revisionist Historian. You are the Clark
Kent of postmodernists. You probably want to
work in a library or in social services. No
one suspects you of being a postmodernist...
until they read your publications!
What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla
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changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Friday, October 28, 2005
I have lovely new soffits, which have appropriate venting that I can actually see. The roofing owner mentioned that this would be one of the features of the new stuff. Now if I had gutters and pressured washed all the cobwebs off the house it might look normal. Though all the trim needs painted. Sigh.
Supposed to be another week or two before I get the gutters replaced. Another exciting odyssey. At least they cleaned up very well today. Even swept the front porch clean of all the garbage that fell when the soffits were ripped down. I can't tell whether the plumber was here today. Nothing has really been moved that I can see. Who knows. I could go out to the garage for the step ladder and see if I can see up in the attic well enough to figure it out, but I'm not sure it's worth the possibility of knocking more insulation down.
I added some images to the NCTE Halloween Party gallery and added captions so people who explore have more of a shot at knowing what they're looking at. Adobe is my friend. Otherwise, I am very dull and boring.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
The unauthorized exposé is here:
NCTE Halloween Party. Yes, I know that you all never believed me when I said this happens. Now you have photographic proof.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Thursday, October 27, 2005
The dumpster was gone when I got home from the office; so I get to park back by the garage again. But who knows what they'll come up with tomorrow, so I'm leaving the car outside so that they know I'll need out. No evidence that the plumber was here. Maybe s/he was very tidy.
Today was a day of much more prom wear. In addition to all the dresses, the office now has bins of makeup and jewelry and other accessories. There was a pre-party meeting this afternoon to coordinate and make sure everyone had what they needed. I've pretty much figured out that nothing is going to get accomplished tomorrow. It's party stuff most of the day.
I found a cute shirt for my niece, the panda lover (Thank you Wonkette). Yes, I was off-task at work today too.
I've been working on a Grapes of Wrath lesson plan. I've gathered a lot of Web sites into a travelogue, with some specific questions, as a prereading activity. After the exploration, they predict some of the themes that the novel will explore before diving in.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Frappr was just posted on the TAWL list. They're using it to map the locations of list members, but it got me to thinking of lesson options. Students mapping their extended families. Mapping literary authors. Mapping important locations for a historical period (e.g., the Dust Bowl).
So I got to thinking about a Flash interactive that allowed us to pass whatever background we need via xml. Students choose locations for the markers and write associated descriptive text. In ways it's just an annotation tool. Perhaps the background could be a graphic of a Shakespearean sonnet, and the markers are features in the text that the student is explaining.
I think the functionality would be relatively simple to develop, because we have tools that do similar things. Dragging the bubbles and creating related text is no different in function than dragging the text tags for the Venn or Plot Diagram. The background could be passed with xml, as we pass in text for the Guided Tour. Or at the worst, we'd have subfolders for each new version (a la the Graphic Map).
I'm hoping to investigate the options on this. Could be a cool tool that wouldn't take long to develop.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
The owner of the roofing company just came to my door. Apparently my soffit is shot, and the facia (?) that it should connect to wasn't properly done in the first place. $600. He showed me places where someone had tried to use drywall screws to hold the soffit in place.
Before this discussion, I had no idea what a soffit was ("the exposed underside of any overhead component of a building"), let alone that I owned one. I still don't know how to spell facia. Thank you, Google. It appears to be fascia (not "a thick band of fiberous tissue" but "a horizontal band or board, often used to conceal the ends of rafters; the front of an object").
He promises that is the last thing. I told him I wasn't letting him in the house because he was gonna find something else. The plumber is supposed to come at the end of the day to work on the dropped pipe/vent. I'm okay with someone working on the roof while I'm not here, but it's creepy to have someone in the house while I'm gone. I'm trying to breathe and avoid anxiety. The plumber is probably going to find 15 more broken things. Why did I move far away from family handyhelpers and buy my own house?
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
I swear there are monkeys involved in this roofing project. You'd think that propping a ladder up against a house required a degree in astrophysics for the noise and nonsense going on outside my window. Hell, I looked out the window. They saw me, of course; but the bigger issue is that they dropped the ladder. How the hell do guys who do this for a living drop a ladder when they try to prop it up against a house? Now I could certainly drop a ladder, because I don't know what I'm doing; but this is a roofing company with their name on a sign out in my front yard...
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
While the roofing today was clearly, um, a different event, the strangest event of the day may have been the prom and bridesmaid dresses strewn all over the office. Several folks, including Lisa, are going to do 80s prom for the Halloween Party Friday. I've never seen so many crinolines, and there was puffy fabric everywhere. There's still fabric everywhere. It looks like everyone was playing dress up, which, let's face it, they were.
I'm bah humbug and not participating. Where would we find a formal gown to fit me? Especially a formal gown from the 80s. I never went to any dance, so I don't have these dresses in the back of my closet. Everyone seems to assume that everyone else goes to the prom and has ugly bridesmaid's dresses around. That has never been my life. The only dances I ever went to, I went alone. I think I remember 2. Once in junior high, when I really had no idea what I was supposed to be there for. Once in high school, when I collected money and tickets at the door and did various set-up things as a student government member, because I was one of the losers who wasn't already occupied with a real life. I have such a stupid life when you really look at the details.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
The number one link in last week's Inbox was English "Must Reflect Technology"—an article that I found in the BBC and passed along to the newsletter's News section editors. I forgot to mention it here though. Silly me.
The article examines a research report by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which argues that "English in schools must adapt to reflect the use of text messaging and communication via new technologies." I'd say American schools might want to pay attention too.
Tags: English language arts
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
I know that a school can place limits on what students can write. I have personally asked that students avoid some topics at various points in my career (e.g., please don't write about abortion). I learned eventually that there were better, and easier, ways to avoid those sorts of papers, of course.
That kind of limiting seems completely different from the new censorship move at Pope John XIII Regional High School. As "Principal curbs kids' Internet activity" from Asbury Park Press Online explains, students are being forbidden to blog in school OR AT HOME:
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Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told.
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That's right. Students' independent, out-of-school activity is being limited by the school they attend. My hope? My making the act of writing illegal the school will turn them all into prolific bloggers. Viva la résistance!
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Roofing people are crawling all over. There is a lot of heavy dropping of things up on the roof. The whole house rumbles. My own mini-earthquake. I'm expecting the windows to all be broken by the end of the day. I think this is all just the truck that's putting all the shingles up there, but I have this fear of people falling through my roof. I'd call it an irrational fear, but well, they've already dropped things through the ceiling.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on Spooky Resources for Halloween and Dias de los Muertos. The piece includes several lesson plans and two journal articles.
Tags: English language arts |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox
Labels: Inbox
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Monday, October 24, 2005
 Today, blissfully unaware that my ceiling was falling in, I caught a wooly worm and brought him in the building. I was thinking of catching them when I was little. Probably 6 or 7.
Whenever I see wooly worms, I smile. When I came back with my exciting Chicken BLT Salad from Wendys, there by the building was this wooly worm. So on a whim, I picked him up and carried him inside. I figured I'd share him with Lisa, and then put him back outside.
But instead, Mr. Wooly Worm of Urbana got to take a trip to Philo to visit Lisa's girls. The oldest is studying insects in school, so this wooly worm turned out to be a major prize. Of course, I now must worry that I have tainted the Philo Wooly Worm gene pool with the Urbana Wooly Worm strain. I do hope the resulting moths will not be overly mutated.
Of course, now I have my ceiling to worry about. The mutant Wooly Worm is nothing to freezing in my house because there's a hole up to the attic. Not even a Wooly Worm can make it right.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
When I left this morning, the roofing folks were up on the roof removing the shingles. They couldn't start till today because of rain last week.
When I came home this evening, there was a hole in my ceiling.
Apparently they were working with the various vents, and one had an odd
elbow. They did whatever they did to remove shingles and lay new paper. In the process a huge pipe, bigger than my wrist, apparently dropped to the ceiling and broke through. It bounced. Didn't actually come through and hit the floor. The pipe seems to be original, 1937.
Luckily I keep the back bedroom door closed and have a blanket shoved under it so that I don't have to heat/cool it. That means that most of the plaster hit the blanket and not the hardwood floor. Unfortunately, now that I have a hole up to the attic, I've turned the heat completely off. It's all going to escape up that hole anyway. Logic doesn't keep me from freezing however, and I'm cold.
So now on top of the new roof and gutters, a plumber and a plaster guy have to be involved :( How I'm supposed to afford all this is beyond me. I'm feeling a mix of panicked anxiety, despair, and melancholia.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
From ASCD's SmartBrief:
"Parents curb children's online time"
Many concerned parents are setting limits to ensure their children don't go overboard in using cell phones, instant messaging and other digital media. A study this summer found that although teenagers' computer time has soared over the past five years, more adolescents still prefer to socialize with each other in person than in cyberspace. The New York Times (free registration) (10/23)
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What always ticks me off about these articles is the unchallenged assertion that the only social relationship that matters is a face-to-face relationship. When we look back at research on letter writing in the curriculum, no one suggests that pen pals are antisocial. GRRRR.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Sunday, October 23, 2005
Recovered some old notes from a year ago that were originally intended for a TechNote. I never finished it, but thought that the ideas might still be useful to someone.
“ JFK Reloaded Game Causes Controversy” by Jason Tuohey ( PCWorld)
“ Games that teach” by Betty Reid ( Arizona Republic)
“ Computer games help children learn, says study” by Polly Curtis ( Guardian)
“ Computer games ‘can help children learn’” by Lucy Ward ( Guardian)
“ Gamers Make Serious Work of Computer Games” by Renée Montagne (NPR)
“ Problem-solving games on the rise” by Jose Antonio Vargas ( Seattle Times/ Washington Post)
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002070534_seriousgames25.html
A number of pieces this week [ a year ago :) ] focus on the positive effects of video games on children. The pieces are full of places begging for discussion. Whether you accept the claims of the articles or not, these questions can lead to great classroom conversation:
- Ward’s article explains that video games can “help children learn concepts such as critical appreciation of narrative structure or character development which they might otherwise study in a novel.” Choose a video game you’re familiar with and sketch out the narrative structure and the ways that the characters develop over the course of the game. Based on your experience with novels, how do the literary elements in the video game compare?
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changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Saturday, October 22, 2005
Edited and posted another elementary lesson plan. This one is K-2 and was written by one of NCTE's book authors. It's tied to Chapter One of Joy Moss's Literature, Literacy, and Comprehension Strategies in the Elementary School. The lesson, Comparing Fiction and Nonfiction with Little Red Riding Hood Text Sets, has students explore different versions of tale and facts and fiction about wolves.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Friday, October 21, 2005
Friday is apparently odds and ends day this week:
- I added the Gettysburg lessons to the Gettysburg Address calendar entry.
- Then there was the fun of cleaning up the broken links on the site. A new broken links report comes out on Monday, so I needed to get the old ones taken care of. I was disappointed to find that tooter4kids moved things all around, breaking all the links—mainly because that meant I had to find the new locations and fix them all. It's not exactly my kind of site. There's a little too much wallpaper for my tastes :)
- Got further ahead on Ideas columns by doing the draft for November 1, which will be on Native American Heritage Month.
- I tried to tidy up the office as well. My desk was piled high. It still is in places, but it's a bit less horrible.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Thursday, October 20, 2005
This morning at work, I finished editing a 3-5 lesson plan that uses an Avi book, Alter Egos and More with Avi’s “Who Was That Masked Man, Anyway?”. The abstract explains, "Today’s elementary students bring many experiences with a variety of texts to the classroom: print, music, online literacies, technical reading and writing, and so on. This lesson plan uses students’ knowledge of these new literacies to introduce them to similar literacies of the past." Basically, the Avi book is told in radio scripts; so students explore the scripts in the book and authentic scripts online. Then they write scripts of their own, similar to thoses written by the protagonist in the novel.
After the excitement of physical therapy, I spent the evening editing another 3-5 lesson. Lisa took the leftovers from my 9-12 lesson, and wrote Engaging Students in a Collaborative Exploration of the Gettysburg Address. Her abstract explains, "Working collaboratively, students learn more about the Civil War through the Gettysburg Address. Teams of students explore multiple resources and actively engage in learning more about this historical document, using words from the Gettysburg Address as their inspiration."
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Today has been totally mixed up. It was pouring rain this morning, so no dumpster in the driveway and no work on a new roof that I can't afford in the first place. Will it be tomorrow? Saturday? Monday? Who knows when the work will begin.
The physical therapy was a complete waste of time. Turns out that I should have canceled the appointment. So hours, days, of worrying and crying, and when I tell him I have no pain, he says, "oh, I'm sorry. Did you have to take off work to be here? That's too bad."
Now because I was there, and he needed something to do, I suffered through an "educational session." He went in search of the fake spine so that he could show me what bones and disks look like and tell me how they work. Then we discussed sitting up straight, having a good chair at work, walking a lot, and other back care tips. And when I was released I did my grocery shopping for the week. I didn't need to go back to work, so I figured I might as well accomplish something. I found however that lots of kids and parents are wondering about the grocery store in the after-school, before-dinner hours. Another educational moment.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Several of the ideas on Micro Persuasion: Ten RSS Hacks, which I found via in someone else's blog (and I can't remember whose), seemed interesting. gada.be sounds useful, if I can ever figure out what I need to search for in the first place.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
Okay, it's late, and I'm completely agitated. The process of replacing my roof is supposed to begin too early in the morning. After 9 AM, there should be a dumpster in the driveway, which means that I've had to park my car on the street. It's making me crazy to have it out there. I can't see it without flashlighting it, and I'm overly worried about it. Logically this makes no sense. I parked my car in a parking lot the entire time I lived in Austin, but I could always see the car from the apartment. Maybe it's not being able to see it. But the thing is I've parked every car in front of my parents' house, and it never bothered me. If I went to the trouble of trying to look at the window, I might be able to see it at home. But I never bothered. I guess I always feel safe at home, and I never feel completely safe anywhere else. I wish I could. I wish I could relax and be unworried.
If the car thing isn't enough, I have my stupid physical therapy appointment tomorrow afternoon. My stupid back. It doesn't even hurt, and I have to go do this stuff. I want to cancel the appointment. We all know what's wrong with me. I'm fat. Having some person I don't know touch me and force me into mechanical torture devices isn't going to solve the problem. I wish I could disappear and avoid this.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
The Ideas column for this week's Inbox focuses on pieces that tie to speakers who will be at NCTE's Annual Convention in Pittsburgh.
Spent today setting up the new ReadWriteThink calendar entries for FY06. In the past, we've gone month by month, adding new entries each month as seemed appropriate. Now that we have gone through that process twice, we have a solid number of entries for each month. For this fiscal year's grant, we looked over the entire calendar. Some weeks ago, I added all of the entries to a wall calendar so that we could see any overall gaps in the greater scheme of things (e.g., weeks without enough entries).
We also looked for gaps in coverage on the whole site. For instance, what authors or kinds of writing did people expect a language arts site to include that were not yet covered adequately in the lessons and/or calendar. We have 30 entries to add over the course of three phases. The new pieces will include authors such as Alice Walker, Amy Tan, and Walt Whitman (as well as some picture book authors and important events).
To set up these entries, I added them all to the calendar, but not marked live of course. I had to hack some ASP to create running lists of the three phases, which took most of the afternoon. Odd how something that takes 5 seconds to say takes 5 hours to do. I ended up having to do a supremely silly nested if-then that handcoded the dates. There's no field in the database that I can use to indicate they're in one of these phases, and I'm too much of a scaredy pants to add a field to the table. One day, I really need to figure out how to play around with SQL, but I'm so afraid to do anything when the only working database I have access to is the site's database. But back the to point, the new entries are under development and should be 1/3 published by the end of the year, and the rest over the course of several months next year.
I guess that I left out that I took numerous breaks to put up those new Halloween decorations. I should get a picture. It's intriguing because we never managed to get the ladder to take down the snowflakes from last Christmas. That means we have ghosts, pumpkins, bats, spiders... and snowflakes hanging from the ceiling now. I need to dig under the desk and figure out what other pumpkinish things I have to pull out.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink
Labels: Inbox
changelog @ tengrrl.com: IPods Fast Becoming New Teacher's Pet, from the <i>Washington Post</i>
From the article:
At some schools, the rules are clear: Kids can chill out to downloaded music on portable players, but once they're inside, iPods and other learning distractions must be stowed in backpacks or lockers and kept there.
At Jamestown Elementary School in Arlington, Camilla Gagliolo took another approach. Rather than fighting the fad, she's capitalizing on it by giving students iPods and re-imagining them as a learning tool.
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THIS is what I was hoping to get from that Saturday IATE session. I was hoping for some stories on using iPods and mp3 players with students. Cool multimodal things. The students in Gagliolo's class are highly involved, integrating their own podcast productions with what is going on in class and at the school. In ways, the story reminds me of Hilve Firek's story on Saturday morning of her students asking to play on the computer, and for them play was creating their own class newspaper. Sigh... Maybe next year.
changelog @ tengrrl.com: The Colbert Report
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
I joined my niece online last night to chat and talk during the new Daily Show and the premiere of The Colbert Report. I had even set a reminder in Outlook to make sure that I didn't miss it.
Overall, I was really disappointed. We both were. Our comments ranged from "This is not funny" to "WTF?" We've decided to give him another shot tonight and see whether it was just first show problems.
This afternoon, I read The Colbert Report: Oui, Oui - Wonkette, which has actually clarified things a bit. It's hard to notice satire of a particular show when you don't watch that show. I've never seen the O'Reilly Factor in my life. It's no wonder I was lost. Maybe knowing that will help tonight.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
It's been an exciting day of odds and ends. We've updated the ReadWriteThink Advisory Board, which meant related changes to the Web page. One name is forthcoming, and we will eventually have bio pages for each member.
In preparation for revision and editing of the January calendar, I brought the entries all forward from 2005 to 2006. The goal is to have them live before December 1, so that the "Next Month" link works. Timing my be difficult on this one, given the fact that 4 of the 7 days allowed for editing are Thanksgiving holiday/weekend. I haven't exactly figured out my Thanksgiving plans, but they don't really include the January calendar.
I did a little working ahead on the Ideas section for Inbox. This week's edition hasn't gone out yet. It's being held for stories on the NAEP scores. But I finished my writing yesterday. I decided to look at the resources for next week, and it turned out to be easy to assemble. So next week's Halloween-inspired column is ready and waiting.
On a silly whim, I visited the Factory Card and Party Outlet and bought up more Halloween and Thanksgiving decorations for the office on my way home. Sorry. I didn't buy any costumes so there will be no pictures of me as Cleopatra or a Bar Wench. And no, you're not getting a bee either.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Monday, October 17, 2005
The middle of the month means it's time for another content report for ReadWriteThink. We submitted the two lessons that I've already mentioned ( one on Night and the other on Gettysburg Address). We also added a couple of reviewed Web Resources:
Story of Movies
The Film Foundation presents rich resources for teaching specific films in the classroom, including To Kill a Mockingbird and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Extensive guides can be printed from the site. [This resource really excited me when I saw the first commercials on TCM in mid-August. Sadly, at that time, they were directing you to a non-existent site, and they never replied to my e-mails. Because they are going to exhibit at the Annual Convention in Pittsburgh this November, they sent a copy of one of the To Kill a Mockingbird to someone in the Conventions Department. It's a rich and wonderful resource.]
Rapidcite
This free tool produces bibliographical citations in three easy steps. The site supports MLA, APA, and Chicago citation styles.
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Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Sunday, October 16, 2005
Can I just say that after writing and writing and writing entries the last few days it feels really weird not to have anything to say today? I have been a slug, and the best I could possibly write would be a description of my naps. I don't even remember any dreams. I am a bad blogger. How thoughtless of me not to do anything bloggable today.
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Saturday, October 15, 2005
And now the final session. Actually, it was one of the ones I had
really looked forward too! iPods & English!
Again, we have been called to the front of the room, this time because the
speaker is showing a PowerPoint show on his Powerbook for the session. The room is boiling hot and I really wish I were sitting on that table over there in the corner. I've grown weary of the laptop-on-my-lap arrangement.
This room is tucked far in the back corner of the hotel, and there doesn't
seem to be any wireless in here. I'm trying to work in a text editor, and I
can't get it to wrap text, which I might add is driving me crazy. I guess
that I will start hitting return. It's so odd to try to remember that old
typing skill of hitting return. I wonder if students even understand the
idea of a "return"; for them, there is nothing to return.
It took a while for the session to get started. The previous presenter took a long time to clean up and get out, and it's taken a while to get the handouts and the computer setup. He has this habit of trying to make a joke about every interaction with every person. The kind of corny jokes your grandfather might tell. Jokes that don't fit in the presentation, but finally we're underway. He's essentially reading through the slides, which he has given up copies of. Very basic and generic information (that I probably could have gotten from a commercial). Next slide is on his favorite uses for iPods. The first line: shopping with a shuffle.
OMFG. I can't believe what he just said to us.
"My wife and shopping, well, you all know how women are. It's not pleasant,
and it's not cheerful. I just shove on earphones and I listen while she
shops."
How is it that I could let him speak such a thing to me and I haven't
gotten up and left this room. It's the front row thing. I feel like I can't
get up and leave without being rude. But the thing is that comment was rude.
Why is it okay for him to be rude to me, and not for me to get up and be rude in return? I guess it's an issue of respect. We are supposed to show respect for our elders. We are supposed to respect presenters. When do we get to respect ourselves?
It's 1:45. The session is supposed to be over at 2:15. 30 more minutes? We're on slide 7 of a 36 slide PowerPoint. All the information is incredibly basic, and I think I've just mentally checked out. There's so little being said that there's nothing to even type about.
1:57. I've just glanced back and noticed several people have left. I'm so
fortunate. Bruce Ericksson just came in to remove some equipment. That gave me the chance to move back to the third row. As long as I feel that I have to stay, I may as well have the chance to put my feet up on the chair in front of me.
2:03. I wish that instead of a battery timer telling me how much more time in the session, I had a session timer telling me how much longer in this boiling room.
2:07. Walking around the room, showing us a family picture.
2:10. Next PowerPoint slide. "I don't even know what this is, but I'll share it with you. Podcasts which I think are visual sounds."
2:13. "Apollo 13 scared me. The moonshot that went awry and killed all those astronauts. I believe in redundancy. In Apollo 13, they were working on improvisation, but I like all these things because they provide backups." [The Apollo 13 astronauts didn't die. Well, not during that flight anyway.]
2:14. "Just a footnote. How do I have the time to do all this? I retired 5 years ago."
o_O
2:16. The chair/recorder for the session has stopped the pain. Presenter says if we want to stay a few more minutes he can go through the rest of the slides. The recorder says that she will sign the Continuing Ed sheets. People trip over each other to get to her and get out of there.
I've never been so disappointed in a session.
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I admit that I wasn't even sure if I should post this. With even the slightest bit of net know-how, you could figure out what this session was, who the presenter was. But here they are. More than anything, I think that the reason is that as I sat there with a group of young preservice or first-year teachers who needed their forms signed, I felt more than sorry for them. I felt responsible for them. I felt that I really should at the very least apologize for them. They came to find new ways to use iPods in their class. It's definitely not what they got. I wished so much that there was a way to pull them all off to another room and talk to them about multimodal teaching in ways that would matter. Sigh. What a sad conclusion to the conference.
Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
First afternoon session is actually a substitute. It was supposed to be a writing workshop session tied to the Writing Project strand, but the speakers were unavailable. Instead Willie Bobbie's friend Susan Spangler [be jealous Willie Bobbie. we want you to be jealous] stepped in to do a session on Music and Writing. I'm convinced that this was worth staying here for. I'm so glad this session suddenly appeared. She's doing a great activity on culture and writing that asks students to rewrite Cole Porter's "You're the Top" for modern culture. She really has everything here to make this into a ReadWriteThink lesson. I just have to convince her :)
So it's a Writing Project session, which means that I've been writing. We tried to complete the activity. Then discuss the things that you can teach with the activity: audience, poetry (meter, rhythm, rhyme), layers of cultures and subcultures, allusions, look at the structure of other songs, research to determine the meanings of the original.
[My spins: do an immersion in a time period, do a book report alternative where students write the lyrics for a character in the book, using the setting from the book.]
Tags: English language arts |
IATE conference
changelog @ tengrrl.com:
Okay, so people were hanging around and I stayed to ask my exciting intellectual property issue question. She's saying that the movie is satire so it's protected as fair use. I'm still not convinced, but that's her story.
Then she asked if I was a librarian, because it's usually the librarians who are bothered by this issue. Sigh. That's actually my point, I'm thinking now, as I write these notes. We should ALL be asking these questions and they should be dealt with up front and completely, not as an afterthought.
She went on to say, "George Lucas has seen this and he's not bothered by it." To which I responded, "His saying that it's okay doesn | |