dwalker

I am down here in New Jersey visiting Will, and those of you know him know how bonkers he is about all things tech. He is a proudly self-professed geek. Being around him is a little intoxicating. I get swept up in things I just barely wrap my head around; it’s a fingernail kind of thing!? But it is captivating. When I got here, he said, “Hey, I’ll interview on you on weblogg-ed tv!!” “Huh? Ah, no thanks!” Spoken like a true unbeliever. A couple of hours later, of course, we were sitting in front of his little mac laptop, talking about how we might use ustream and twitter in the classroom. Admittedly this is new technology, and much of the conversation was about making this video conversation a bit more interactive. One of the really interesting things about it was the number of people who joined the conversation. There were those interested in ustream, those who are looking for other schools with whom to partner on web-based projects, those talking about using literature to encourage authentic voice in writing. The energy and excitement were palpable, and typical of my early blogging experience, I was fascinated and not holding my own. I got lost early with the terms and technology Will was using, but what I do know is that this experience is all about the doing. Last year at this time I teaching other teachers how to go onto edublogs and start blogging, but they were apprehensive, partially because there is a natural reticence that occurs in this medium. We think of journaling as personal. We’re not supposed to share it with the rest of the world. Ironically, this journaling is probably our most authentic writing. My students prove it time and again. So the greatest challenge is to get teachers writing personal blogs to see how they feel, what it is like to publish. With the publishing comes the possibility of an audience, which for me was probably the scariest part. Several years ago I the invitational institute through the Connecticut Writing Project. It was a month long intensive where we explored teaching writing. The cornerstone of the program was our own writing. Just about immediately, I got it. I understood what it felt like to be a student again - the uncertainty, the second-guessing, the exposure, the sharing with others. It was hard. It was also the most amazing educational experience I had ever had. I discovered that I am a writer, that I write all the time, in many different ways. I am a writer in the same way I am a husband and a father and a friend and a son and a brother and a teacher. I write assignments and lists and reflections and poetry and stories and many more assignments. And because I do write, with all its uncertainties, I try to blog. Blogging reminds me what writing is like for my students. And blogging, in addition to being shanghaied by Will, reminds me that there is more out there to try. I need to cultivate the same sort of restlessness that is my teaching - always looking for a more effective, engaging way to do the work-in my use of what is out there on the web.

I have been tagged by Jeff. I’ll give it a go.

First, the Rules:

1) Post these rules before you give your facts

2) List 8 random facts about yourself

3) At the end of your post, choose (tag) 8 people and list their names, linking to them

4) Leave a comment on their blog, letting them know they’ve been tagged.

Now to the randomness:

1) I am crazy about babies, particularly 10-18 mo.s.

2) I have a 1967 Gibson J40.

3) When my wife and I were in China in 1982 (we weren’t married yet) she had a wicked case of the hiccups. I turned to her and said , “I love you”, and hiccups vanished!

4) I love getting my hands dirty in the garden.

5) I just learned how to make really good granola.

6) Everyone in my family loves books.

7) I am still working on a machine into which I can feed my students’ essays, and they will come out assessed. Then I plug it into my brain and it downloads all the pertinent stuff I need to have conferences. It’s nearly finished. I’ll let you know.

8)  The History Boys has really got me thinking about what makes for good education.

I am at that precarious point in the summer where I generally lose my perspective. I am way into planning for the fall. I love this part of teaching, particularly in light of what I have learned from Grant Wiggin and Jay McTighe. My ninth grade is taking on an exciting shape. We’ll be exploring the story and storytelling and how they inform our lives, not only as readers/audience but as friends, students and teacher, members of families, and members of communities. There are myth reading and myth writing. There is personal narrative. There are Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies and Much Ado about Nothing and Antigone and poetry, to name a few. There are Big Fish and City of Joy and maybe even The Lords of Dogtown. And I am thrilled!

The chances are better than good, however, and I usually forget this in my ecstasy of planning, that that my new ninth graders are not thrilled. They like summer, and they do not want to come back to school. They generally do not like to read, and very few of them consider themselves writers. They would rather be anywhere else. It’s the simple truth, and I make a huge mistake if I expect them to come into my class bubbly and delighted. I had never really thought of myself as a salesman until one of my colleagues suggested that reason Lord of the Flies went so well with her ninth grade is that she sold it well. She convinced them before they got started that they were going to love it. It worked! The challenge is leading them to availabitiy, showing them that there is a lot they can do with literature, art, and film. The other thing is showing them that they are being heard, that the meaning that they make, whatever it is, is relevant and important.

I suppose a lot of this thiniking is obvious, but I need to remember that kids are kids, and resistance is part of what they do. I can either fret about it or make some sort of use of it.

I am guilty of expecting the student to meet me where I am. I guess it is my training. In my undergraduate education training nearly thirty years ago, the focus was, at least implicitly, teacher as expert, teacher as authority on the subject. In fact that essential conviction is what guided my graduate work, which was, for the most part, strictly literary. Despite the learner-centered pedagogy I have read over the last several years, which I believe strongly in, I find myself deferring to old habits in a pinch. I think there are two essential reasons for this reversion. The first is the way I plan, and the second is that I do not let my students tell me where they are and where they want to go. I do believe that students, given the respectful opportunity and a few simple guidelines, are an excellent resource for planning. They, for example, can tell me a great deal I do not know about on line journalling, its purposes, its audience, its networks. What they tell me will undoubtedly inform how we plan the use of weblogs in our class. It is only they who can tell me what they understand about storytelling - how they tell stories, to whom, for what purpose; how they hear stories, from whom, and for what purpose. My planning needs to involve my students, which brings me to the second reason why old habits die hard. I have just finished reading Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTique, which is a helpful guide to lesson planning. They suggest that we plan backwards, that we begin with what we want kids to understand and apply in the end. And we must engage students by encouraging them to give us their take as we begin and as we move through the lesson or unit or what have you. I seem to have latched on to a sort of coda over the last several weeks: meet the students where they are first and let them tell you all about it; they may be more willing to go along with you as a result.

I begin every year with a question to my ninth graders: “How many of you call yourselves writers?” As you might guess only two or three hands go up. They say they write poetry or short story. There’s the occasional novelist . I point up the fact that they are all writers, have been since the first grade. I don’t think I really understood what I meant until now, with this blog work I am doing with Kim and Jeff. My own conception of writing has been fanciful and romantic all this time. Writers are novelists or poets or playwrights, probably essayists, maybe journalists….and that’s it. I have never thought of myself as a writer, even though I write all the time, for school and for myself. So, I am a writer, and I need to practice. Will Richardson says we need to show our students that we write regularly, and maintaining a blog is the most immediate way to do that.
Another apprehension that writing a blog seems to be kicking up is some odd sense of false modesty, which all my students struggle with. “Who cares what I think?” But I have read enough blogs about blogging over the last several days to know that if you have something thoughtful to say about an idea that you care about, someone is going to be interested. In our teaching blogging we need to show that blogs are not personal profiles or journals of our daily lives. They are our considerations on Billy Collins or skateboarding or French soccer or Chinese cooking or Chicago Blues. Blogs have a center from which our thoughts, our interests, our questions eminate. They are measured and considered at the same time that they are free form or at the very least formed to the occasion. They require concise, clear, engaging voice and craft if you want to maintain an audience.

So here’s a medium that is immediate and gives every student the experience of being published. And teacher bloggers suggest that being published encourages students to be more careful about clarity and correctness than they might be otherwise. And here is a medium that educators are very reticent about. Will also says, “The biggest shift is not the technology, not the practice, not even the implementation. It’s the cultural, social shift that moves us from the idea that we must prevent our kids from seeing and engaging with this “stuff” to the idea that says, look…it’s a different world…they’re going to find sex and porn and bad stuff and bad people no matter how hard we try to keep them from it, but when we weigh that fact against the incredible learning potential that the Web provides, we’re going to choose to educate rather try to block and filter it all.”

I think part of educating about the web is to be honest with students about what is out there. They want to see that we are not afraid of the web or its contents and that we can provide respectful guidance to help them decide how they want to negatiate their world. They really want our help.

I’ve been reading “The Long Goodbye”, and I have been struck by how many of the class have written about “active” reading, that sort of reading where we engage with the work, in effect converse with it in order to make sense of it. Many of the class suggested that most of their high school English career has been passive, to one degree or another. It has been a sort of waiting for the text to speak, the way a shy or apparently disinterested person waits to be asked to dance. The fact is we need to figure out what to ask the text and then go after the answer. We must not be apprehensive or disinterested. We need to be forward and insistent. At the end of the day, we can all agree that there are more questions than we could have possibly imagined, and the answers lead us to all kinds of meaning. We need to remember that meaning is personal, too, that what is true for me is not necessarily true for you. What is most important is that meaning be rooted in and supported by the literature. As long as you can trace back to the poem, your expression will have integrity. So what about the questions? What do we ask the text? Where do we begin, particularly if the literature is difficult? Begin with the words. Which surprise or shock or lull or cradle you? Why? What do they mean to you? What place and import do they have in poem? It sounds simple, rudimentary, but simple is usually the best way to build a lasting impression/meaning. Poetic language is concerned with compression. The poet looks for words that are compact with emotion and power, and it is likely that the words you land on will be potent. Consider their emotional import. Ask about the images as well. What are they saying to you? What are the essential comparisons? Why this comparison? Understanding/feeling the parts may lead you to a stronger sense of the whole image. As you get of feel for the diction of the piece look to style as well. How does the poem build tension? Repetition? meter? the stacking of verbs or adjectives or longer images? structure? syntax? allusion? We can usually see all these on the page. We need to ask them what they are doing there, what they hope to accomplish. More often than not they are ready to have that conversation with you. They will lead you to meaning.

C and D, Here’s the plan. C is reading Billy Collins, and D is reading Pablo Neruda. As you continue on keep an eye out for poems to which you want to respond in your blog - you should do three a week. When you are ready, get on your weblog and respond/discuss. Your posts should include analysis (diction, syntax, figurative language, etc.) and response.

In addition to your regular posts, you need to include some biographical highlights, author style (be comprehensive here), and at least three links to sites devoted to the writer.

As we have discussed, some of this stuff we will do together, particularly the more research oriented stuff. For now, post three times a week.