renaming, rethinking, and revising

So “Building Comprehension Word-by-Word” became “Focusing Reader Response Through Vocabulary Analysis.” And other than that, there has been no writing. There has been gathering. I needed to get a head start on the Ideas section for next week’s Inbox, so I gathered all the articles Thursday and Friday. I may need to find some lesson plans to go with the articles. We’ll see.

I got some feedback on the various proposals that I turned in a couple weeks ago. The response is generally good, but one of the proposals seems to have grown from a 20 to 30 page, single-spaced document to a much larger endeavor. Good, but scary. Now I’m rethinking the resources that I gathered and looking at restructuring everything. Here I thought I knew exactly what I was doing, and now I’m back at the beginning again. I think I’ve gone through and rejected several dozen books. Nothing seems both current enough and approachable enough. Anything practical is dated before it gets printed it seems.

I have lesson plans to write too. I was working on a lesson on profiling a technology. The idea was that you worked through a heuristic to interrogate a technology–who uses it, how, why, and so on. Could be a technology that the student uses/sees used or it could be a technology in novel/short story. I can’t get the thing going though. I have the heruistic all done, but it feels gimmicky. I’m not quite sure how it relates properly to English classes. Maybe I could turn it into a tech writing activity of a sort. But that doesn’t feel quite right either. I guess I need to play with it a lot more, but instead, I watched Starsky and Hutch on TV.

School Mistakes Huge Burrito for a Weapon

“The drama ended two hours later when the suspicious item was identified as a 30-inch burrito filled with steak, guacamole, lettuce, salsa and jalapenos and wrapped inside tin foil and a white T-shirt.”

The higher the SAT scores, the more the house is worth | csmonitor.com

But will anyone realize that what this really tells us is how unfair the tests are to the economically-disadvantaged in the society?

Wal-Mart whips student’s parody site, from eSchool News

I’m not quite sure what I think about the situation reported in eSchool News’ article “Wal-Mart whips student’s parody site.”

Okay, sure, Wal-Mart sucks with evil unparalleled; but can you just take graphics without changing them and call it parody? Parody should change the original, no? Seems to me Wal-Mart may (sadly) be right.

Does sound like a fun assignment though—you gotta understand the site and coding to do a parody. I wish they had included links to the other parodies. Teasing me with McDonald’s and the 700 Club! Tsk, tsk!

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

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

Tags: digital divide |
literacy |
technological literacy |
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.