classroom activities

You’ll Like This Grammar Lesson Alot :)

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Yes, I really mean “alot” and not “a lot.” As the website Hyperbole and a Half explains:

The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my compulsive need to correct other people’s grammar. It kind of looks like a cross between a bear, a yak and a pug, and it has provided hours of entertainment for me in a situation where I’d normally be left feeling angry and disillusioned with the world.

If you have students making the dreaded alot spelling error, this imaginary creature is bound to be a memorable solution. Besides, who wouldn’t love this cute creature alot!

[Found via @craniac]

American Lit, classroom activities, Literature

Video Interview of Author Tim O’Brien

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Vietnam War Soldier Helmet, CC Flickr photo by MattsipIf you’re teaching Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, be sure to take a look at Big Think’s video interview with the author.

In addition to talking about his novel, O’Brien talks about the process of writing and the role that literature plays in our lives. Having just written an Inbox blog on making personal connections to the texts that we read, I was especially taken by O’Brien’s story about how his writing had touched one specific reader. He concludes by noting that “Literature does touch people; it’s not just to be read in English classes.”

The video interview is accompanied by a text transcript, so you can read excerpts to your classes if you do not have the equipment to play the video itself in the classroom.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by Mattsip]

classroom activities, NCTE Inbox

Helping Readers See Themselves in a Text (NCTE Inbox Blog)

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Girl reading, CC Flickr photo by SanJoseLibraryAs a young reader, I wanted stories about young girls, about their accomplishments as women, and about the journeys they took from child to adult. I didn’t want to be bothered with stories of boys becoming apprentices, men fighting battles, or chopping their way through forests. I wanted to see people who were like me. I wanted to read about people who were like the person I wanted to become. Read more in my Inbox blog and learn how helping readers make personal connections to texts is related to El día de los niños/El día de los libros (Children’s Day/Book Day) on April 30.

[Creative Commons licensed Flickr photo by SanJoseLibrary]

Personal Journal

Two Bottles of Cough Syrup Later

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I’m finally digging out from the cold or flu (not sure which) that has had me buried under blankets for the last five days. Tuesday and Wednesday I couldn’t speak above a whisper. Thursday I was so gone that I didn’t even realize it was evening until someone else told me. I thought it was still mid-morning.

Two bottles of cough syrup and a box of Nyquil later, I’m feeling a bit better, but realizing just how much work has piled up. To catch up, I’m going to focus on posting only the most significant 3 or 4 news stories from the past few days. I’ll then start fresh today with the daily reports. Seems like the best course when there are over 1000 stories piled up in Google Reader.

After that, it’s on to some Bedford blog entries and other work that’s piled up while I was sniffling and coughing. So bear with me. I’ll have things back in order soon!

classroom activities, Teaching with Digital Tools

Why You Should Try Twitter in the Classroom

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If you’re even slightly interested in how you might use Twitter in the classroom, take a look at William M. Ferriter’s essay “Why Teachers Should Try Twitter” from Educational Leadership.

The article explains, “For educators who use this tool to build a network of people whose Twitter messages connect to their work, Twitter becomes a constant source of new ideas to explore.” It includes some tips and how-to’s as well as a personal story on how the experience affected the author’s understanding of differentiated instruction.

classroom activities

Change Your Metaphor

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No more plug and play education. It’s time for more blossom and grow! Okay, so the metaphors aren’t really parallel. I guess it should be plant and grow, but that’s not as catchy. The difference between the two metaphors, though, it spot on for what we need to pursue for effective instruction.

I wrote about educational metaphors for NCTE’s Inbox blog this week. I wasn’t really thinking about the different ways of thinking about education until I read the PDF of Chapter One from Rebecca Bowers Sipe’s Adolescent Literacy at Risk? The Impact of Standards.

The agrarian metaphor for the educational system that Sipe outlines suddenly clicked perfectly with the “growth mindset” that I read about last fall in the article“The Truth about Grit,” published in The Boston Globe. (You can read more about that article in one of my Bedford Bits blogs from last October.)

The words we use always matter. In the case of metaphors, they can matter more than we may realize. The industrial metaphor for education has brought us a classroom where the strategies and information can be uniform. There’s no accounting for the differentiation of the students. Every student is the same. Teachers just plug in the units, and students are ready to go.

Course, in the real classroom, every student is different. That’s why plug and play strategies don’t work—and why we need to shift the way we think about education back to a more agrarian model that relies on strategies that help students blossom and grow.