tengrrl’s thoughts & news on teaching writing, literacy, and literature
February 13, 2006
Blog Stalkers – Personal Safety for Bloggers: ProBlogger Blog Tips: Mostly obvious to me, but the list may come in handy later. We have a blog lesson plan coming along that may benefit from the link. If not, I’ll have it for later.
February 12, 2006
Book Report Alternative: A Character’s Letter to the Editor is now live! The fun part about this lesson for me was working up the examples. Carl Hiaasen’s novel Hoot is coming out as a movie; so I used the situations in the novel for my examples. It’s a natural for the lesson, since Roy (the protagonist) is on a crusade to save the burrowing owls on a plot of land destined to become Mother Paula’s All-American House of Pancakes.
I also (finally) gave in and brought the new microwave into the kitchen. I bought this thing two summers ago, but I was going to keep using the existing microwave till it died. It’s still going, but it’s very slow. Takes longer to get things done than it should. When I moved it, I also found that it’s much bigger than the new one and it’s heavy as lead. I’m not at all sure how I’m going to get it out of the kitchen without hurting my back. I need a boyfriend long enough to tote things. Sigh. The positive side: wow is a well-working microwave useful. For instance, I’m used to microwave popcorn popping maybe, on a lucky day, 1/2 of the kernels. Enter the new microwave! There wasn’t one unpopped kernel! Now I just need to finish cleaning and rearranging stuff. I want to get the toaster oven out there.
February 11, 2006
Continued work on the character letter to the editor lesson today. But more importantly, I copied an episode of South Park from the TiVo to my laptop. Got angry because I needed new software. Bought and downloaded software. And then the cool part—edited the show to remove the commercials and whatnot and burned it to a DVD that plays in the regular old DVD player. Very, very cool. It took a number of tries before I got the editing done properly, but the burn out to DVD was very simple. Now I have Lisa’s favorite episode ready to give her on Monday :)
February 10, 2006
Finished writing and published Persuading an Audience: Writing Effective Letters to the Editor, a basic 9-12 lesson plan. It links to the 18th List of Ten: Ten Persuasive Prompts: Persuasive-Descriptive.
I’m creating an alternate version that has students adopt a persona from a book they’ve read and write a letter to the editor from that character’s point of view.
Mom sent me flowers for Valentine’s Day, with a little stuffed dog and a heart-shaped box of chocolates. :) It was a nice surprise when I arrived at work. Especially today.
February 9, 2006
Lots of ongoing work on lesson plans and such today. I handed off the March calendar and our phase 2 entries for an editor to run through. Decided how to handle the 1984 Macintosh lesson plan, and continued work on my letter to the editor lesson plan. I have a book report alternative for the letter to the editor too.
A lot of the day seems to have been about rethinking problems that we have with some lessons that have kept us from finishing them or getting feedback to the author. Several lessons had minor issues that we just needed to figure out how to manage. The most complicated is the 1984 Macintosh lesson plan, which requires the 1984 Macintosh commercial as part of the lesson. Without it, there’s no lesson. We can’t find anyone at Apple who will respond to us. Well, I have one person who will respond to me from Apple, but he’s not really helpful in this situation. I’ve finally decided to be at peace with links to the commercial online at other folks’ sites. If Apple gets angry and makes them take their sites down, we’ll have to take the lesson plan down. We’re going to gamble for now. It’s a good enough idea that I hate to lose it.
February 8, 2006
I missed the Staff Appreciation Luncheon today because I was in bed feeling pretty iffy about my life. Some days, I just can’t get out of bed. Most days, even if I do get out of bed, my entire day is spent hating myself and wanting to go back to sleep where I don’t have to think about it. Today, at least, I had a raging headache to blame, so I didn’t have to go out into the world where everyone would see me. Some days, sick days are the best choice.
February 7, 2006
The Ideas section for today’s Inbox focuses on Reading and Writing in All Subject Areas. As the piece explains, “President Bush’s proposal to focus solely on the quality of math, science, and technological education ignores the important critical thinking and literacy skills that take place in the English language arts and composition classrooms. By focusing on reading and writing in all subject areas, we can ensure that students are better prepared to improve the analytical, technical, and problem-solving skills that the President’s plan targets. These resources offer suggestions for working toward these goals.”
Naturally, students need to do better. They deserve better. But as it’s presented the American Competitiveness Initiative comes up short. To suggest that reading and writing aren’t just as important to a student’s success is shortsighted and foolish. Not only do we want students to be able to read those math, science, and engineering texts in thoughtful and analytical ways, but we want them to be able to compose their own work in relationship to the ideas that they develop in these content areas. The President’s plan comes up short. With a wife who is a librarian, you would think that his educational initiatives would more fully represent the full range of learning that students need for lifelong learning and achievement.
February 7, 2006
As I was driving to work this morning, the local NPR station was talking with Philip Graham, Professor of English at the University of Illinois, and
Antonia Leotsakos of the staff of Pages For All Ages Bookstore about book recommendations (archived interview). As seems to always be the case these days, the conversation turned to A Million Little Pieces AKA the “Million Little Lies” of James Frey.
In the course of the conversation, Leotsakos mentioned that the basic issue in the Frey controversy, the question that needed to be asked, was “What makes a memoir?” Most folks know the problems with Frey’s “memoir” at this point, but the question lingered for me as a key one that could be useful in the classroom.
When we ask students to write autobiographical pieces, to what extent do we discuss the importance of truth in that project? When we push them to add specific and concrete details, do we ever ultimately push them to embellishing the truth in the way that Frey has? Memory is such a tricky thing. It’s often embellished in the retellings in ways that become socially constructed and “true” to the teller, even though they may not be truthful to the facts that an independent observer might record.
As teachers, we need to talk about the differences between truth and embellishment and how that interplay works in storytelling. I’m sure there’s an easy lesson for the site that focuses on the Frey articles; but it’s probably more important to create something that gets at the underlying issues without the sensationalism.
February 7, 2006
Blurb Home: Washington Post review of a demo of the product explains that you go from “Blogs to Books, using a ‘Blog Slurper.'” The service is still in beta testing.
It looks like an interesting product, but it’s not publishing books in the Library of Congress sense of things. No ISBN, etc. You’re publishing your own book in the same way that you could if you just printed it out using your home printer. Don’t really want to knock it, but it’s sort of like saying your photo album is a coffee table book.
Now I realize that in the classroom definition of things where we talk about publishing students work, it’s clearly publishing. And it’s a book if you think it’s a book. But it felt as if they left things out. It’s just a new tool for vanity publishing.
February 7, 2006
The sidebar on the Edutopia article “Tech Teaches” points to ReadWriteThink as a “cool link for online learning.”