BBC NEWS | UK | Net-illiterate ‘failing children’

Someone has figured out that “family literacy” actually means all kinds of literacy, not just book-learnin’.

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technology

Rewriting and Editing Day

When not winning books, :) I’ve mostly spent today editing. More accurately, rewriting and editing. First, I reformatted and made minor tidinesses to a framing text for a new Kit that is to come out next week. This one is about writing at the secondary level. It won’t make the bookstore for a few more days.

I also did rewriting and editing on a new 6-8 lesson plan, Building Comprehension Word-by-Word (at least that’s it’s name right now). It uses The Hobbit for its examples, which is good because at least I’ve read The Hobbit. But unfortunately, it reminded me of what I didn’t remember about The Hobbit. Another book I guess I should re-read.

I’m a winner!

Hey, my writing actually got me something!!! Woohoo!!!

Worker Bee

Today has been a worker day. First thing, I finished up the Inbox Ideas section on Summer Reading (rough copy). It will go out tomorrow afternoon.

I updated and edited a calendar entry on Yusef Komunyakaa. It had been cut because we had already included the maximum number of entries planned for April. But given that we now have a Vietnam lesson plan and American troops left Vietnam 30 years ago this week, I wanted it back in the rotation.

After that, I edited A Bear of a Poem: Composing and Performing Found Poetry. It was a fairly clean lesson, so the process of editing, marking it up, and loading it on the site wasn’t time consuming.

Most people would have quit at that point, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wrote Developing Reading Plans to Support Independent Reading. Really, it’s an idea that I dreamed up Sunday, and my colleagues encouraged me to get it written because it fits well with the Summer Reading Inbox entry. So this evening, while watching SpongeBob and The Daily Show, I wrote it and marked it up. Then I went back and added it to the Inbox draft.

Now, surely, it’s time for bed. If I keep working like this, I won’t have anything to do tomorrow.

Geography Club

X-posted to teenliterature

Geography Club by Brent Hartinger. HarperCollins, 2003.

In this young adult novel, a group of students gathers to form a geography club, “a
club that’s so boring, nobody would ever in a million years join it” (63). You
see,
“Geography Club” is code for a budding Gay-Straight-Bisexual Alliance, a society
so secret that not even its advisor knows what it’s about. Not only are its members
closeted, the club itself is in hiding. Chosen for its lack of appeal to the
student body, the name Geography Club highlights the importance of naming in
the book—what things are named and when we can name them. This book
focues on the geography of high school life.

Author Brent Hartinger maps
the terrain of Goodkind High School (which is, of course, anything but good and
kind) as he describes all the cliquish misfortunes of its student life. Russel
Middlebrook, the narrator of Geography Club, tries desperately to live
up to his name, straddling the middle of the stream, safe in (or more accurately,
from) all the cliques, but as the story progresses, his position becomes harder
and harder to maintain. Clearly, Hartinger is having fun with his names:

• Geography Club allows Russel to learn more about Land (Kevin Land).
• What better way to describe a lesbian than to give her the last name Buckman?
• And Trish Baskin certainly “basks in” self-enjoyment.
• Homophobia and sexual repression at the school have taken their toll (Ms. Toles).

But beyond the play with naming, the book deals with the much more serious issue of when these characters can name who they are. As the book begins, Russel hides who he is from his family, his friends, and other students. It is only online that Russel can identify himself, but even then he must hide his name:

There was only one other person in the room, which made sense to me, since I figured there was only about one other gay person in my whole hometown. His handle was GayTeen, which wasn’t the most original name I’d ever seen. Mine was Smuggler, for no reason I can explain. (13)

Hmm. A smuggler, of course, moves goods from one country to another illegally, and our narrator is definitely on course to explore the border region of high school respectability, the Land of the Popular, the Landscape of Love, Outcast Island, and all the country in between. The challenge for Russel is to realize when his travels are false, when they are smuggling from one region to another, and more importantly, how to navigate the geography honestly and openly.

Geography Club is a realistic exploration of the challenges of high school life. At times, I was bothered that Russel wasn’t smarter or quicker. How could he fail to realize what Kevin was really like for so long? Why hadn’t he noticed that there were other gay students? Where is this boy’s gaydar? But then again, if he knew all that, he wouldn’t be a high school student, would he? Russel and his friends face a much bigger challenge than coming out or fitting in; they face the very real challenge of learning to be true to yourself. I’d recommend the book for students of any sexuality who navigate the same terrain.

Turtlepoet

If last weekend I was speedwriter, this weekend I seem to be turtlepoet. Every line must be just so. Every blessed word must be right before I can go on to the next. I started with a chapter that had 171 words, and after hours of fidgeting with things, I now have 282, counting two sentences that are just notes. Woo hoo. At this rate, it shall take approximately 357 days to create the 125 page manuscript I proposed.

I did try to leave the trouble chapter and move on to a later section; but everything seemed to depend on what had been said first. Here, I’d told myseld, “It’s not a narrative. You can skip around without any problems.” But when I tried, it didn’t seem to work. I couldn’t really work on the chapter about challenges when I hadn’t written the chapter on theory that explained why the challenges are what they are. So go write the chapter on theory, but no. How can I write the theory until I’ve written the intro that leads to it. Where would I start?

See, turtlepoet. Every line must be perfect, polished verse, with the cadence of the angels. It’s a miracle that I have 282 words really.

I did finish editing Focus on First Lines: Increasing Comprehension through Prediction Strategies Friday. My manager told me that it sounds like I gave it a Heinemann book title for a name. I apologized. She said it was a compliment. The lesson introduces a lit course by asking students to make predictions based on the first lines of selected texts that they will read during the course (or unit). The author included first line handouts for American, Contemporary American, British, and World Lit.

I was sitting here editing, surrounded by piles of my books, and I thought, Hey, why not a YA lit list. So I gathered all the books lying around me, took those that had great first sentences that I could use, and made an extra handout for YA Lit. I couldn’t use everything I might have wanted to. I was too chicken to use some lines—Like “Froggy Welsh the Fourth is trying to get up my shirt.” And it’s a one time per author kinda thing too; so I couldn’t use both Geography Club and The Order of the Poison Oak. Both have nice first lines, from which you’d be hard-pressed to know exactly what the book is about really. You know emotions and metaphor but nothing about the specific plot. But that too seems like a place for a conversation—why would the author begin with a metaphorical description of the character’s feelings?

I’m actually still reading Poison Oak. I finished rereading GC Friday night. It had been months since I read it, so I figured revisiting was in order before going to the next book. With my turtlepoet ways, it would probably have been better to just read today instead of writing 100 words. If only writing chapters were as easily as writing entries.

TengrrlFeed

So based on Perci‘s suggestion, I’m going to stop updating the LiveJournal. I made a feed of my Blogger site to LJ (TengrrlFeed), and that’s all I need. Besides having a FEED is so making me think of MT Anderson.

I’m staying with Blogger because I ftp my blogger entries to my server. LJ folks who want to read my entries can add TengrrlFeed to their friends and they’ll still see everything on their Friends list. So today’s will be my last public entry to LiveJournal, and more importantly, the last time that I have to double enter everything. Another RSS timesaver! Thank you Perci!

With LiveJournal, everything is on someone else’s server. With Blogger, I have more control over backups. Okay, I’m probably not writing anything amazing here, but I have that old print-copyright mentality. I want to own my words. Or at least believe that I can own them.

I’m still working on the prediction lesson plan that will use the “Young Goodman Brown” Flash piece. The lesson is currently titled, “Focus on First Lines: Increasing Comprehension through Prediction Strategies.” I’ll probably have it live by tomorrow afternoon, and then I have to get the June calendar live.

Unpredicted Developments

Well, I’ve been somewhat less productive today, compared to yesterday. Yesterday, I somehow worked on 4 different projects, turning in all the proposals, revising and editing a lesson, AND I think I republished my blogger site at least 2 dozen times. After much trial and error, I finally have comments and titles showing up on posts. You’d think that would be an easy accomplishment, but when I’m involved, nothing is easy.

I guess that I need to figure out what to do about the two separate sites now. I can paste over the entries from blogger to livejournal (or vice versa), but obviously I can’t synch the comments. I’m feeling conflicted about the decision. I know I need to give one of them up eventually, but for now I’m not even sure what the criteria for the decision are.

But back today. Today’s accomplishment was beginning work on a lesson plan to use at the beginning of a course or unit. The teacher pulls first lines from pieces that students will read, and the students do some prediction exercises. One of the tasks is to use think-aloud to demonstrate how someone might work through a sentence and predict what the story is about from the first line.

The lesson had the teacher narrating the think aloud, with the first sentence on the board or an overhead. I used one of the templates that MarcoPolo has provided to make an Online Think-Aloud Predictions for “Young Goodman Brown” interactive (You’ll need the Flash plug-in to see the file). And hey, if you go look at it, don’t freak out about the details there. It’s supposed to be the voice of a student who hasn’t read the story yet. It’s okay if some of the predictions and questions are not what really plays out in the story. That’s the way prediction strategies work after all!

I can’t really point to anything else that I’ve accomplished. Just spent most of the day revising and editing the text so that it fit in that tool properly. Sometimes paper-based work is more satisfying. That piles up in nice, neat stacks that look so much more tangible.

Because my life isn’t amazing enough, it’s been raining steadily most of the evening, since about 6:30 or 7. My roof has responded by leaking. There’s this lovely leak in the living room, where I know have a series of plastic washtubs lined up to catch the drippage. So now I need to find someone to repair the roof–and the plaster on the living room ceiling. The up side of all this is that the roof waited till after I’d had the house appraised. Very thoughtful of it. I guess I shouldn’t complain. But still, I really wish we’d stop having rumbly thunder. Some days I love the smell of rain and the rumbly springlike thunder. Tonight, it has me on edge. Who’ll stop the rain?

Digital Divide + Pyramid = Rotund Sphere

The Washington Post article You Are What You Click includes a number of quotations on how the digital divide limits the Health Department’s method of educating the world about its new pyramid scheme.

RWT Lesson: Analyzing Symbolism, Plot, and Theme in Death and the Miser

I just finished editing Analyzing Symbolism, Plot, and Theme in Death and the Miser. Okay, maybe it’s not what you’d use in your typical writing class, but it does play with visual analysis. From there you might go on to visual argument, visual persuasion in advertising, and so forth. I wrote a list of Final Projects that could be revised to go with any piece of art you might analyze. Most of the lesson is by the listed author, but it needed something more for the final project… Traci the ghost writer to the rescue!