Last session for today. Bob Broad’s session on writing for Illinois English Bulletin

He’s asked us to share name, affiliation, & something you want to see in the journal, something you want to learn about teaching in the bulletin. I said, “my name” [I’m literal] and then talked about possible partnerships with ReadWriteThink.

His goals for the session: for us to leave more inclined to do research and write for the IEB. Spring issue is short write-ups of fall conference. Summer issue is fewer longer pieces.

We do writing territories (Nancie Atwell, In the Middle)—a bulleted list, broken into categories that you have written in/about, want to write in/about, are writing in/about. Atwell’s categories are topics, genres, audiences. Bob adds purposes/exigencies and forums. An activity done at the beginning of the term to encourage students and spark ideas.

Topics

• designing writing assignments
• multimodal literacies
• technology and popular culture
• student-centered literature
• specific techniques but more than cookbook recipes
• reviews of tech kids lit

Genres (sort of)

• lesson plans
• website
• short framing texts
• print journals
• book
• memoir, description
• proposals, resolutions, etc. governance material

Audiences

• english teachers: beginning teachers, teachers looking for new ideas and techniques
• not for cranky teachers who aren’t interested in change
• students: handouts, resource materials, feedback
• family in e-mails, etc.
• friends/general public in blog

Hmm. I got an idea for the beginning of a piece for Spring:

I’ll admit it. I didn’t present at IATE. But hey, I was present. I was here, or there, I guess now. Maybe I’m disqualified. Perhaps being there wasn’t enough. But there are ways that I did present. Many ways that we all present. Ways that may not be indicated in a conference program.

Well, maybe it’s not all that smart. I had this great idea, but as I review it now, I’m completely unsure. Oh well.

Tags: English language arts |
IATE Conference

My first afternoon session is on popular culture. The info in the program mentions using CSI/forensics, so it may be a useful idea for a lesson.

Lisa and I came to the session together. Before the session starts, the eight young women in front of us (I suspect all pre-service teachers) are comparing engagement rings and the stories of when he popped the question. I feel so sick. Lisa showed me her engagement ring, so I didn’t feel so left out. I’ve missed that entire rite of passage. But self-pity has yielded as I have decided that I am glad not to have ever looked so silly in pursuit of my MRS degree. They were all young. and cute. And shiny. And sickening. And the one directly in front of me has long curly dark hair. Very pretty really. But if that young co-ed flips her hair over this laptop screen about one more time, she’s getting a haircut (or worse).

Unfortunately, I think we just got off to a wrong start. I just don’t like the demeanor of the presenter. She’s treating us too much like a class of high school students, beginning the session by loudly telling us that she “always begins and ends on time.” Good for you chickie. And why does she have a black ribbon tied around her wrist with a big bow? Next the usual standards suck routine. She tells us that she like to refer to the state standards as “the ss” because they are so problematic. I’m not amused. I’m troubled. The comparison she’s making isn’t acceptable. Maybe she wasn’t at Bob Probst’s session. Back to the session. The presenter is talking about the difficulty of finding resources for popular culture. So many of the resources are so recent that it’s challenging to find and use them. She’s pointing to Amazon, which allows you to search texts online and provides many other tools for teachers. :-/ She’s provided us a list of discographies from Amazon (citations and annotations) to help us find lyrics and song info. She tells us, “You can’t really use the reviews on Amazon for models for students because anyone can write a review. Because you can vote on whether they are useful, you can use the system to identify reviews that have mattered to readers.” She’s using these Amazon examples to talk through the characteristics of book reviews, and how to use the resources on the site (search the book, toc, etc.) to identify and evaluate materials for the classroom. Additionally materials are online and available to “everyone.” [Because everyone has a computer and Internet access after all.] She shared these tips for use with any program that will make it easier: Use Crtl+F on various Web sites to find material on a page! Also F7 is spellcheck and thesaurus! F8 allows block select! [she didn’t name it, just says it’s for convenient copying when you want to take an entire review from Amazon and prepare for class] Combine with arrows!!! “(Works on Word, but not everything)” Print Screen is invaluable! She doesn’t like having to look at the directory of a disk, so she has students pull up A:\ drive and take a screen shot for an inventory of what’s on the disk!!!!!! Though it’s really “copy screen” not print screen. o_O Various lesson ideas and what not she mentions: The Whole Pop Catalog: The Berkely Pop Culture Project. Provides definitions and details. Looks useful. It’s 1991 though, so quite dated. Building a case file for a character. Star Wars as inspiration. Provide lots of books for students to use. Classic Questions and Contemporary Film mcgraw hill. Actually a philosophy text, but uses films to frame discussion. One of the new issues for students to deal with is filtering information. The problem is no longer finding enough information, but separating the nuggets of truth from the trash. [I really disagree with this assertion. There was always a lot of information out there. Teachers, librarians, and libraries provided filters for them. As research becomes more student-centered on the Internet, they must learn to create their own filters.] Assignment: Give each student a bag, and ask students to fill it with case info found in a room where the character has been. Can begin with making a list of things that would be in the file. Putting together the file is better than just writing the list, though she doesn’t say why. Jackdaw company puts together simulation kits that she uses such as primary source replications of the Holocaust for Night. Examples included requistion for cannisters for gas for the gas chambers. A hard copy of something that is real and more “concrete”, more “in the moment” than just a list. Night. You are an inspector in the prison camps. Your job is to investigate for inhumane conditions and submit a report in memo format to the Geneva Convention. Use quotations from the book as examples. Then can move to formal lit if desired. They will already have the quotations from the book located. Exploring search engines. Do an search for search engines. Do same search in small groups with different engines. Then ask students to compare the results and how they differ to evaluate the +/- of the engines. Organization. Yellow foods. How many foods are yellow? Name them. Get list on the board. Groups look at the sheet, and divide foods into 3 categories. Every food must fit in one, but can’t fit in two. To teach classification and creativity. Yellow foods that can be kicked 10 feet. Yellow foods that would hurt if you stepped on them in the dark. Yellow foods that squish through your fingers. Alternately, brainstorm a list of TV shows and do same project. Analysis. Pull out case file students have assembled or the Jackdaw simulation. What can you deduce from the information included in it? What info is there? What does it look like? and so forth. Focus on detailing. Synthesis. Make a comment on a character in a play. Is character evil? forced to do what was done? motivated by selfishness? Ask students to figure it out and prove it to the jury. Must open with statement of intent: ladies and gentlemen of the jury, i will prove to you that…. provide details in the argument… end with conclusion: you have seen [whatever was argued] and then the provide a summary of the evidence that has been presented. Groups in the classroom. Always put no more than 4 in a group. Roles: presenter, recorder, encourager, manager (who keeps the group on task). Form groups with 4 roles, and evaluate each person on scale of 1 to 5. Can’t give everyone a 5. “They know the system and can use math to be sure they get an A. Unless you have someone who is sluffing off.” [Why is this a good thing? Why is it okay to manipulate the system? Why is it okay for assessment to rely on tricks?] We have to count off and form groups. I am a one. I hate this woman. I don’t want to do this. Topic is to go through the materials and formulate one activity you are trying to obtain in your English classroom. (Using the Star Wars books). She uses Performance Learning Techniques management, and some of the assignments came from there. She interrupts our disscussion to demo this model. o_O The class, er, I mean conference attendees share examples. I am apparently a very bad student. One of our group members tells me so. I so hate this kind of stuff. I just wanted to gather ideas, not to have to move around into groups and share and blah blah blah. She ends, with “you should find something that you are passionate about and teach what you love. Whatever it is. Use it as a springboard to whatever you want to accomplish. You should never teach a book you hate.” [Umm. No. What matters is students’ interests if we’re going to foreground something. And what often has to be foregrounded is neither. There are tests, expectations, requirements that mean we sometimes teach things that we aren’t thrilled with. This is life. And why should we ever deny students a text because we don’t like it anyway?] Good grief. She ended the session by saying we can come up and look at the books and stuff she has spread all over the room and then said, “And now I’m that I’m done with it, I’m selling all this on ebay.” What a way to undercut the whole thing. Oh well…There were good ideas here. They just need drawn out a bit.

Tags: English language arts |
IATE Conference

After Bob Probst’s talk, Lisa and I dumped some heavier stuff off in the room. My room is amazingly located. In some ways, I know it’s a true disadvantage to have a room that backs up to the big banquet hall; but it’s been convenient because it’s so close to most of the sessions. I can come back between every session. It’s an unusual room with two doors: one to the hallway, the kind you normally expect in a hotel; and the other to the banquet hall which is a big open space.

None of the sessions during this time were screaming my name, so I took a mini-tour of the books exhibit. Mini-tour is about the best you could do. It was very small, but nice for a conference of this size. I picked up a number of free things—some scope and sequence books, free poster, etc. And of course, I gave in to the lure of books for sale. I bought a handful of young adult books that looked interesting:

• The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, which may be officially an adult book, but it looked interesting.
• You Remind Me of You by Eireann Corrigan, a verse novel
• Don’t You Dare Read This, Mrs. Dunphrey by Margaret Peterson Haddix, done in journal entries.

It was nice to browse a rack of YA books and know so many of them, to have read so many of them. I don’t think I could have said the same last fall.

I also bought some pedagogical books from a Heinneman reseller:

• Writing a Life: Teaching Memoir to Sharpen Insight, Shape Meaning—and Triumph Over Tests by Katherine Bomer, which I was interested in because I was thinking my bloggish things are frequently memoirs in a way. I didn’t even notice the testing bit in the title until I was typing it in. It may be too “young” for what I was thinking, but it’s probably still a good book.
• Subjects Matter: Every Teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading by Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman, because I have the other two Daniels and Zemelman books so I needed the third, right?
• The new 3rd Edition of Daniels, Zemelman, and Hyde’s Best Practices, which I really resisted buying because I have the 2nd edition. But I decided that since I’m quoting from it in my assignments book manuscript I needed to quote from the newer edition. I can keep the old ed in the office and the new one at home (where I’m working on the book).

Lunch was the next session, and it was nicely located right outside my door. I learned that in Decatur grilled cheese sandwiches are called “cheese toasties,” and Claire Lamonica shared a nice quote, “There are no bad papers. Only unfinished ones.” I didn’t catch the source.

Tags: English language arts |
IATE Conference

So here I am in the MLK Ballroom of the Decatur Holiday Inn blogging. I feel so hip and cool. I could be a political pundit what with this ability to blog during important events. I guess that to prove that claim, however, I really need to talk a bit less about me and a bit more about the conference.

NOTE: I’ve tried to indicate the phrases that Probst spoke with quotation marks. That said, this is not a transcript of the presentation, but a rough paraphrase, typed as he talked.

Bob Probst is speaking now, after an amazing tag team introduction by two past presidents who made reference to dear old Bob’s problems with the FBI. Bob says that the rumors are unfounded. He’s moved smoothly into a discussion of reading and how we read, with an amazingly smooth and lovely reading voice I might add. His presentation is focusing on an extended comparison to diving. Before he moved to the Florida Keys, his expereience was very grounded in specific, detailed rules. As a diving instructor, he insisted upon drills and skills and absolute adherence to rules. After his move, he found that all that deteriorated. That there was “a disconnect between what he thought, what he knew, and what he was actually doing.” He then went onto take a class on diesel mechanics. And again, the reading in the text, the instructions, fell short of what he actually found himself doing. To connect to the teaching of English, he emphasizes that though there is perhaps a disconnect between what we teach and what we learn in the classroom, it has to do with how the situation of the classroom transfers (or doesn’t) to the “real world.” “We teach kids to deal with things like metaphor” he says. “It’s an utter waste of time,” Probst says. “We want students to go out into the world and see an image or hear a song and have it ‘work’; not to spend all their time trying to decide whether a particular image is a metaphor or a simile.” Another example of a soldier returning from Iraq comparing his work to being in the superbowl. And yet, there are “very sharp distinctions between football and blowing up cities.” “Bombing over Baghdad people died.” “The soldier’s metaphor, as wonderful as it was in some ways, failed in other. There are differences, subtleties, that are missing.” More examples of “disconnects.” Letting metaphor go unexamined, unconsidered. “We need to ask more questions and explore things more closely, and it is our job as English teachers to help students develop the intellectual predisposition to look at what the metaphor reveals and what it hides.” We must teach students to read closely. War has a variety of definitions. War as a conflict between states. War as a social agenda. Although there are similarities, there are very important differences. These differences are what we need students to realize. If students confuse these two terms “we really screw things up.” If we conduct a war on poverty by bombing East St. Louis, we really make a lot of people unhappy.” When we talk about a war on terrorism, we are making a mistake. Another example: “mission accomplished”—”there are a number of questions that even a competent 6th graders should be able to raise about such a statement. A well-trained student, we must hope, wouldn’t let such a phrase just hang there.” When s/he does, become “a victim. Become people who have been victimized by language.” Exploration of connections to Rosenblatt’s work. “If we don’t teach kids to read texts responSIVEly [his emphasis], if we let them forget about metaphors and what they do, if we don’t explore language and raise questions, democracy is in jeopardy.” The real job of an English teacher over the next years is to teach kids to understand how language works, not how a specific poem works. We must teach students to ask questions, to not let language go by unexplored and unchallenged. The critical thing we need to be working for is to develop the habits of mind.

Sharon mentioned yesterday that Probst was doing work on the rhetoric of war. The topic came up because we were talking about Night, which I taught in a FYC class that focused on the special topic “Rhetoric of War.” It seemed interesting yesterday when Sharon mentioned it; but now I see how the topic is connecting to his thinking. His discussion drew many of the various threads together for me. He might say that he took those “disconnects” in my thinking and connected them in meaningful ways.

Without a doubt, I knew that there were important questions about the ways that we talk about “war,” and I think that realization is clear in my List of Ten on the Rhetoric of War. I’ve tried to ask students to explore language and how it works in several lists actually. But I don’t think that I had mentally woven the connections between that kind of thinking and general teaching strategies for how we teach students to read the world.

I’m not completely sure that I can explain the connections completely right now. But I felt like I understood an important connection. I still do. I just don’t have the words for it yet.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
IATE Conference

Woohoo! I’m caught up! This epic evening of blog postings has been brought to you from my hotel room in Decatur. It was only a week of notes to write up, but it felt like a month. I’m in Decatur for the Illinois Association of Teachers of English conference, which begins bright and early in the morning (first sessions at 8, which are a challenge for a non-morning girl like me).

I’m at the conference as a treat to myself. I’m not going to do
anything—I don’t have to present, chair, record, nothing. I decided that the conference was really pretty cheap comparatively speaking to my other professional development options, and I could treat myself to a couple days off. I have no idea if I’ll know anyone here. Lisa will actually be here tomorrow to do some recruiting for ReadWriteThink, so I will have her during part of the day tomorrow. I joined in on the informal dinner this evening. It was primarily people who were headed to the IATE executive committee meeting after eating. I spoke to a few people about ReadWriteThink who were interested in using the site themselves, especially with preservice teachers. I have a pile of handouts to put in the Idea Exchange, so I’m hoping we’ll find some more people who are interested in the site.

I’m hoping the conference will be a fertile place for writing. The hotel has wireless, so I’m hopeful that I can carry a laptop around to the sessions and blog and write. If I’m going to make that first session though, I need to get to bed.

BBC NEWS | UK | Education | English ‘must reflect technology’

According to this BBC article, “English in schools must adapt to reflect the use of text messaging and communication via new technologies, a report says.” Additionally, the report notes, “English needed to take account of the higher profile of the oral language in society. Speaking and listening skills are vital at work and should no longer be given second place.”

After much chatting with Lisa, I finally decided to do what needed to be done. I went with my gut instinct and turned the evil lesson into a 9-12 lesson plan. It feels so much better. More appropriate. I’m still very, very, very tired of Abraham, but I’m satisfied with the lesson. It is Myth and Truth: The Gettysburg Address—you know the he didn’t really write it on the back of an envelope on a train, right???

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
ReadWriteThink

Busy day. Gettysburg has been put in the incubator. I just had to work on something else. So I finished redoing and marking up Using Student-Centered Comprehension Strategies with Elie Wiesel’s Night, a 9-12 lesson plan that uses reciprocal teaching.

The Ideas section for this week’s Inbox focuses on nonfiction, in celebration of Teen Read Week. Even though the topic was inspired by the teen event, it was one of the nice focuses that worked nicely for all teaching levels.

The highlight of the day, though, was probably a very nice response to last week’s Ideas section from the President of NCTE’s Gay Straight Education Association. The supportive letters are so much better.

Tags: English language arts |
K12 instruction |
lesson plans |
NCTE Inbox |
ReadWriteThink

You know the only thing I really remember about the Gettysburg Address is that we had to memorize it. That experience has not helped me in any way at any point in my life. It’s funny what I actually remember about my K-12 education. In 5th grade, we had to memorize those 200-some words. I didn’t have a clue how people were supposed to do that. I still don’t know what memorizing something like that is supposed to do for your educationally.

Of course, this means that I’m still working on this Gettysburg lesson plan. I found a demo from a software company, which I think is useful for vocabulary. Makes finding the definitions very easy.

Other than that, it may not have been my best day. I seemed to crash or mess up every computer I touched. I got locked out of Outlook and the office network because my old laptop wouldn’t let me login. I eventually figured out that the problem was the keyboard on the machine. It sometimes just stops working properly, and you have to press down on it with your flat, full hand. I know. That sounds crazy. As I said, not my best day.

I hate Abe Lincoln. I realize that making that statement in Illinois means that I will be deported, but at the moment this is how I feel. I have multiple problems, and they all stem from the Gettysburg lesson. First, I think the resources that I have gathered may be far over the heads of your typical 3-5 audience. Second, I don’t know how much basic explantation I need to do. Would a teacher typically have discussion questions and definitions on hand in textbooks? Who knows? The whole thing feels foreign and wrong.

At least there is still left over soup, and I have pancetti to crumble on top.