Today, as a formative assessment, I started class with the request that students draw Bryon's big decision from Chapter 10. In the chapter, Bryon discovered that his best friend was currently a drug dealer. This happens at the heels of rescuing another friend from a drug den of a hippie house who was on a bad LSD trip. The friend happened to be the younger brother of Bryon's new girlfriend. The results of the activity were interesting.
In college we learned that everyone has schema, prior knowledge and history, and that schema colors the way we interpret information. The novel, That Was Then, This Is Now, is set in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even after students conducted webquests about these eras and reported back to me about trends of that era in technology, many students still drew Bryon using a cell phone to call the police or a pushutton wall unit phone. I was tickled to see that on so many students' papers.
The message I gleaned from that is that students still see the world, past or present, as it is today. This means that we educators have to work harder to help students understand the time period we are teaching and what anachronisms are.The "how" is the big question.
Once, many years ago, when they were in their late 50s, I invited my parents to visit my class as guest speakers about life as an African American in the 1960s. The experience was powerful for my students, my parents and even for me. The power of having visitors speak to students about an era they were studying as witnesses to history was very strong. I cannot put my parents through that each year, but it does give me an idea--- skype? Video interviews. Live show n tell? I am getting an idea for a very cool lesson and project... stay tuned.
Wednesday, September 26, 2012
Monday, September 24, 2012
Why Are We Here?
Today's post title sounds like a metaphysical question of deep import, or a sarcastic rhetorical rant. I don't mean it to be either. It's a straight question. Why do we teach? Why do we teach where we do? Is it because there were no jobs any where else? Is it because there was nothing else to do with our lives or is it because we were called to it? Were you called to your profession? To your school district? To your grade?
I've been getting that message quite a bit lately indirectly. I am reminded that when I was a teen, my dad used to tell me: "Boy, if you never want to work a day in your life, do something you love. You won't believe people are paying you to do it." Yesterday I was listening to TD Jakes who said that if you are doing what you have been called to do, you will not be chasing money to do it, money will be chasing you. That resonated with me.
Not only do I do what I love, but opportunities to do more and get paid for it chase after me to the point where I now have to think about whether I have the time or the inclination to make more money as a coach, professor, tutor, or teacher. Naively (yeah, at 45, one can still be naive) I expect everyone to approach their job as their life's work. I think the responsibility to lay a strong academic foundation for a student's success to be an enormous responsibility. So when our adminstration encouraged us to embrace the idea of rigor in our classrooms, I smiled inside. Finally. I had not heard this message that clearly from administrators since I left NJ in 2004.
Dr. Downs put it this way: "Joel, the taxpayers of this district pay you a hefty salary to teach their students well. Make sure you give them their money's worth." At the time, while understanding the intent of the message, there was a part of me internally refuting the money part since I had a friend who was a high school dropout with a GED who was working as head mechanic of a medium sized Ford dealership for 25K more salary than I earned with an ivy league master's degree. But when he pointed out to me that teachers that create a rigorous learning environment for their students will often receive friction from parents who do not want their kids to struggle, he warned me: "Don't you dare give in." I got the message. High expectations, partnered with proper scaffolding is my job. That is how we help students grow from one grade to another.
It has taken me many years to find the balance between strong expectations, proper scaffolding, and manageable work load. I have found it through raising the bar for the product but lowering the workload to obtain the bar through more time on task in class with teacher guidance and less homework. Homework is not the great Satan that some parents have made it to be, but the instructional value is reflective. Homework should be practice of what you taught in class, not a place to attempt to learn new information independently. The instruction and exercises are not the final product, but the enduring understanding that the student gains from the endeavor is.
I had to shake the chains of time limits, grade grubbing, and close-ended lessons to get to the point where what is learned is more important than how long it took to complete the assignment. I first heard about curriculum that is a mile long and an inch deep at the beginning of the new millenia. That concept made sense, but I did not see the connection between that and trying to make a lesson always fit with closure when the bell rings or with writing projects being completed with in a fixed amount of time. Even the state writing tests are no longer timed because they got the message: quality takes time.
I was approached to become an adjunct professor after only 8 years of teaching because an elder teacher noticed that I already embraced rigor. I didn't really understand what the fuss was about how I operated. My directions were clear, and my expectations were that if a child earned an "A," it was because they had produced quality work. I took pains to spell out what quality looked like for each assignment by creating rubrics, distributing them in advance, and explaining them well in advance of deadlines. I didn't think that marked much notice, it was just what I learned to be best practices in pedagogy classes as a student teacher.
Unfortunately many did give into parent demands that a student receive the highest grade without earning it. That was as much of a revelation to me as learning that completing a project assigned by my upline at DuPont, a day ahead of schedule, was worthy of earning a plaque, a food processor, a reception in my honor, and a parking space just steps from the entry door. Is this the culture we live in as Americans in 2012?
I remember the re-runs of Star Trek I watched in the 1970s as a kid where Scottie, the engineer, would always overstate how long it would take to fix the starship so that he would come out a hero when he beat his own manufactured deadline. When did the bar of expectations get lowered so low that simply doing what was asked was outstanding work?
My attitude about state minimum proficiency exams was that I should expect more than what was necessary to pass from my students and that my student's goal should be excellence. On the PSSA's, that means advanced proficient. Passing should be a given, if I have taught my students well, because they should understand where the bar is for excellence. Legibility and quantity do not equal quality but the quality of that quantity can be measured.
When I write a rubric I look at my assignment and chunk my expectations into content, GUMS (Grammar, Usage, Mechanics, and Spelling) and whatever parameters were spelled out in the directions. For an essay, that could mean I was looking for a quality thesis, quality organization, quality supporting evidence, a quality introduction and a quality conclusion. I would ask myself what does an "A" look like and what does an "F" look like. Fleshing out the "B," the "C," and the "D" were always the tough part. Fs and As are easy to recognize.
I used to think everybody did this, but I find that there are still teachers who simply slap a grade on a paper with empty praise or commendation like "good job" or "please see me..." I thought the days of counting misspelled words died with the Gerri curl, parachute pants, and Wham UK. Some say rubrics are time-consuming. They can be, but after a while they become second nature-- like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. The practice keeps the dentist away and the rubric practice makes grade inquiries with parents easier to deal with. Ususally when an irate parent is face to face with the grading requirements that were distributed to their child at the beginning of an assignment, and shown where the student failed to measure up, the conversation changes its color.
There are generations of educators and adults who were students before rubrics. Grading was either arbitrary or a mystery. I remember having to guess with my classmates what the difference between a B+ and an A- was. Often it was the difference between whether your teacher liked you and took pity on you. I didn't want to be that teacher.
My bottom line is that I want to bring my students further, push them to achieving excellence, and empower them to achieve more than they believed was possible.
I've been getting that message quite a bit lately indirectly. I am reminded that when I was a teen, my dad used to tell me: "Boy, if you never want to work a day in your life, do something you love. You won't believe people are paying you to do it." Yesterday I was listening to TD Jakes who said that if you are doing what you have been called to do, you will not be chasing money to do it, money will be chasing you. That resonated with me.
Not only do I do what I love, but opportunities to do more and get paid for it chase after me to the point where I now have to think about whether I have the time or the inclination to make more money as a coach, professor, tutor, or teacher. Naively (yeah, at 45, one can still be naive) I expect everyone to approach their job as their life's work. I think the responsibility to lay a strong academic foundation for a student's success to be an enormous responsibility. So when our adminstration encouraged us to embrace the idea of rigor in our classrooms, I smiled inside. Finally. I had not heard this message that clearly from administrators since I left NJ in 2004.
Dr. Downs put it this way: "Joel, the taxpayers of this district pay you a hefty salary to teach their students well. Make sure you give them their money's worth." At the time, while understanding the intent of the message, there was a part of me internally refuting the money part since I had a friend who was a high school dropout with a GED who was working as head mechanic of a medium sized Ford dealership for 25K more salary than I earned with an ivy league master's degree. But when he pointed out to me that teachers that create a rigorous learning environment for their students will often receive friction from parents who do not want their kids to struggle, he warned me: "Don't you dare give in." I got the message. High expectations, partnered with proper scaffolding is my job. That is how we help students grow from one grade to another.
It has taken me many years to find the balance between strong expectations, proper scaffolding, and manageable work load. I have found it through raising the bar for the product but lowering the workload to obtain the bar through more time on task in class with teacher guidance and less homework. Homework is not the great Satan that some parents have made it to be, but the instructional value is reflective. Homework should be practice of what you taught in class, not a place to attempt to learn new information independently. The instruction and exercises are not the final product, but the enduring understanding that the student gains from the endeavor is.
I had to shake the chains of time limits, grade grubbing, and close-ended lessons to get to the point where what is learned is more important than how long it took to complete the assignment. I first heard about curriculum that is a mile long and an inch deep at the beginning of the new millenia. That concept made sense, but I did not see the connection between that and trying to make a lesson always fit with closure when the bell rings or with writing projects being completed with in a fixed amount of time. Even the state writing tests are no longer timed because they got the message: quality takes time.
I was approached to become an adjunct professor after only 8 years of teaching because an elder teacher noticed that I already embraced rigor. I didn't really understand what the fuss was about how I operated. My directions were clear, and my expectations were that if a child earned an "A," it was because they had produced quality work. I took pains to spell out what quality looked like for each assignment by creating rubrics, distributing them in advance, and explaining them well in advance of deadlines. I didn't think that marked much notice, it was just what I learned to be best practices in pedagogy classes as a student teacher.
Unfortunately many did give into parent demands that a student receive the highest grade without earning it. That was as much of a revelation to me as learning that completing a project assigned by my upline at DuPont, a day ahead of schedule, was worthy of earning a plaque, a food processor, a reception in my honor, and a parking space just steps from the entry door. Is this the culture we live in as Americans in 2012?
I remember the re-runs of Star Trek I watched in the 1970s as a kid where Scottie, the engineer, would always overstate how long it would take to fix the starship so that he would come out a hero when he beat his own manufactured deadline. When did the bar of expectations get lowered so low that simply doing what was asked was outstanding work?
My attitude about state minimum proficiency exams was that I should expect more than what was necessary to pass from my students and that my student's goal should be excellence. On the PSSA's, that means advanced proficient. Passing should be a given, if I have taught my students well, because they should understand where the bar is for excellence. Legibility and quantity do not equal quality but the quality of that quantity can be measured.
When I write a rubric I look at my assignment and chunk my expectations into content, GUMS (Grammar, Usage, Mechanics, and Spelling) and whatever parameters were spelled out in the directions. For an essay, that could mean I was looking for a quality thesis, quality organization, quality supporting evidence, a quality introduction and a quality conclusion. I would ask myself what does an "A" look like and what does an "F" look like. Fleshing out the "B," the "C," and the "D" were always the tough part. Fs and As are easy to recognize.
I used to think everybody did this, but I find that there are still teachers who simply slap a grade on a paper with empty praise or commendation like "good job" or "please see me..." I thought the days of counting misspelled words died with the Gerri curl, parachute pants, and Wham UK. Some say rubrics are time-consuming. They can be, but after a while they become second nature-- like brushing your teeth before you go to bed. The practice keeps the dentist away and the rubric practice makes grade inquiries with parents easier to deal with. Ususally when an irate parent is face to face with the grading requirements that were distributed to their child at the beginning of an assignment, and shown where the student failed to measure up, the conversation changes its color.
There are generations of educators and adults who were students before rubrics. Grading was either arbitrary or a mystery. I remember having to guess with my classmates what the difference between a B+ and an A- was. Often it was the difference between whether your teacher liked you and took pity on you. I didn't want to be that teacher.
My bottom line is that I want to bring my students further, push them to achieving excellence, and empower them to achieve more than they believed was possible.
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Drum Roll Please
Bless me blogger, it has been five days since my last post. These past five days have been busy ones. The weekend was packed with coaching, training, lifting, cleaning, shopping, and cooking-- typical weekend for me. The week has been equally challenging but finally I have an unexpected moment to write, so I'm taking it.
Last week I talked about some pretty cool stuff and grades. I am happy to report that focusing upon novelty and formative assessment has had the desired affect upon my students' performance on summative assessments. Grades are due this week and Tuesday was the first summative assessment I gave my students. The results were very encouraging.
Before focussing upon formative assessment and incorporating novelty in the classroom, students would routinely crash and burn on Monday morning 10-point quizzes. The class averages would at best be 6/10 and at worst 5/10. This isn't even a bell curve. Tuesday's quiz was however a 25 point quiz that asked students to demonstrate vocabulary recall of ten Greek roots, to demonstrate comprehension and recall of specific events in their novel by answering fifteen multiple choice questions about the plot of the first half of the novel, and to identify 5 prepositions from an excerpted paragraph in the novel.
The results are in. When I announced the class average for each class, after returning the graded quizzes, I encouraged my students to act like eigth graders. They gave me a drum-roll on their desks. Most of them did. First period averaged 85.7%, Second period 88.6%, Fourth period 87.7%, Fifth period 97.9% and Sixth period 84%. The average grade for all five sections, 88.78%. As anyone who works with averages knows, this does not mean that all my students performed well, but obvioiusly most of them did.
The best comment I received from a student, "That was an easy test, I knew all the answers." I smiled, thinking to myself: "All my tests are easy when you are prepared." I prepared them. Everything I had them do was calculated to make sure they had the recall and ownership of the material to perform well. The pictures reinforced the plot, the articles we read in the computer lab looking for root words reinforced the root words. Scouring a chapter for examples of prepositions reinfoced their ability to recognize prepositions.
Last week, I wrote that if this stuff was working, the kids grades should not sllip once we began formative assessments. I guess its working but my new goal is to see my classes average over 90 percent on the next assessment, the quiz about the second half of the novel next week.
Just like my dog Juggernaut, this old dog is learning new tricks.
Last week I talked about some pretty cool stuff and grades. I am happy to report that focusing upon novelty and formative assessment has had the desired affect upon my students' performance on summative assessments. Grades are due this week and Tuesday was the first summative assessment I gave my students. The results were very encouraging.
Before focussing upon formative assessment and incorporating novelty in the classroom, students would routinely crash and burn on Monday morning 10-point quizzes. The class averages would at best be 6/10 and at worst 5/10. This isn't even a bell curve. Tuesday's quiz was however a 25 point quiz that asked students to demonstrate vocabulary recall of ten Greek roots, to demonstrate comprehension and recall of specific events in their novel by answering fifteen multiple choice questions about the plot of the first half of the novel, and to identify 5 prepositions from an excerpted paragraph in the novel.
The results are in. When I announced the class average for each class, after returning the graded quizzes, I encouraged my students to act like eigth graders. They gave me a drum-roll on their desks. Most of them did. First period averaged 85.7%, Second period 88.6%, Fourth period 87.7%, Fifth period 97.9% and Sixth period 84%. The average grade for all five sections, 88.78%. As anyone who works with averages knows, this does not mean that all my students performed well, but obvioiusly most of them did.
The best comment I received from a student, "That was an easy test, I knew all the answers." I smiled, thinking to myself: "All my tests are easy when you are prepared." I prepared them. Everything I had them do was calculated to make sure they had the recall and ownership of the material to perform well. The pictures reinforced the plot, the articles we read in the computer lab looking for root words reinforced the root words. Scouring a chapter for examples of prepositions reinfoced their ability to recognize prepositions.
Last week, I wrote that if this stuff was working, the kids grades should not sllip once we began formative assessments. I guess its working but my new goal is to see my classes average over 90 percent on the next assessment, the quiz about the second half of the novel next week.
Just like my dog Juggernaut, this old dog is learning new tricks.
Friday, September 14, 2012
Fun?
Last year in our district formative assessment committee, we examined, experimented with, and critically analyzed a variety of new tricks of the trade to gauge student readiness to learn, student acquisition of knowledge, student schema, and generally some cool stuff (LOVE using illegal words!) The most enduring revelation I received from all of it effective feedback. I have always commented on papers--- sometimes I have more comments about my students writing than the actual writing they produced. I learned that some of what I was doing for years may not be that helpful to learning after all.
The hardest thing I had to learn (and now continue) was asking questions rather than pointing out mistakes. I did what every English teacher has been trained to do. I took out my marking pin and made editing suggestions to their work. Bad idea. Why? I was doing all the work, thus making my students dependent upon my editing and not responsible for their own.
The new strategy was to ask questions rather than point out grammar errors, misspellings, fragments and gaffes in fluency. So I'm taking a break after plowing through half of last class's Write Your Think. We just finished chapter 5 of That Was Then, This Is Now with five minutes left of the class period. Rather than talk about our reactions to Charlie's murder, I asked the question: "Whose fault is it that Charlie is dead?" Students wrote paragraph-long responses to the prompt.
It is getting easier to ask rather than direct. Everytime I saw a proper noun that needed capitalization, I underlined it and drew a line from the word to the margin where I wrote "What must we always do with the first letter in a specific name?" Where students neglected apostrophe "s" I asked: "How do we show possession when we write a person's name?" For incomplete sentences I asked: "How could you make this a complete thought?" For misspelled words or misused homonyms I would ask : "Is this the correct spelling of the word for this sentence?" There is a pragmatic benefit to this paradigm shift.
After writing the same questions over and over again, I received a direct message from my students. "Mr. Logan, we need to be reminded how to capitalize proper nouns. We need a refresher about how to show possessive in our writing. We need to keep a log of the words we misspell frequently so we know to pay attention to them. We need to look at how to writing complete sentences." See? Now I know what writing issues to focus upon next week to complement their reading assignments.
Novelty is a message I latched onto from an in-service last year. I have a tendency to be a goof or overly dramatic in class. I have fun in class, nearly every day. How-- try being a goof with 8th graders and watch their faces. Priceless. From that point, you have their cooperation and attention-- they want to know what other crazy stuff you're going to do. I once told a friend that what I like about teaching is that it takes everything I have and asks for more. In elementary school, junior high, high school, and college, I was a singer and actor. I now use those skills when I teach.
Sorry Justin Timberlake, you might be bringing "Sexy Back," but I'm bringing "Grammar Back." Smiles, eye rolls, rib jabbing, perplexed stares and mild amusements that crawl across their faces. Priceless. Some parents come to parent teacher conferences singing my versions of pop songs that thair kids sing to them on the way to soccer practice or whatever. You never know what lingers with kids or what they are taking home. Do you know: "Two types of nouns/Only Capitalize One/Proper, proper, proper nouns please?" I'd probably be in trouble with Lady Gaga if she knew my students know my lyrics better than hers.... Fun with grammar. What a concept.
Not really. Sister Eleanor Grace Spirodozzi, at Saint Mary's School in Baldwinsville, NY, used to host spelling relays every Friday. She would divide the class into two groups. We would get in line at one end of the room. The middle of the room was cleared so we could do the relay. Someone would keep score while we played. Sister would call the spelling word from our list and we would try to beat our opposing runner to the chalk board on the other side of the room and spell the word correctly. The person who spelled it correctly first earned her team a point but then she had to run back to the end of the line so the next word could be called and the teams were literally off and running again. How fun is it for kids? I still remember it 34 years later... and I can spell.
The hardest thing I had to learn (and now continue) was asking questions rather than pointing out mistakes. I did what every English teacher has been trained to do. I took out my marking pin and made editing suggestions to their work. Bad idea. Why? I was doing all the work, thus making my students dependent upon my editing and not responsible for their own.
The new strategy was to ask questions rather than point out grammar errors, misspellings, fragments and gaffes in fluency. So I'm taking a break after plowing through half of last class's Write Your Think. We just finished chapter 5 of That Was Then, This Is Now with five minutes left of the class period. Rather than talk about our reactions to Charlie's murder, I asked the question: "Whose fault is it that Charlie is dead?" Students wrote paragraph-long responses to the prompt.
It is getting easier to ask rather than direct. Everytime I saw a proper noun that needed capitalization, I underlined it and drew a line from the word to the margin where I wrote "What must we always do with the first letter in a specific name?" Where students neglected apostrophe "s" I asked: "How do we show possession when we write a person's name?" For incomplete sentences I asked: "How could you make this a complete thought?" For misspelled words or misused homonyms I would ask : "Is this the correct spelling of the word for this sentence?" There is a pragmatic benefit to this paradigm shift.
After writing the same questions over and over again, I received a direct message from my students. "Mr. Logan, we need to be reminded how to capitalize proper nouns. We need a refresher about how to show possessive in our writing. We need to keep a log of the words we misspell frequently so we know to pay attention to them. We need to look at how to writing complete sentences." See? Now I know what writing issues to focus upon next week to complement their reading assignments.
Novelty is a message I latched onto from an in-service last year. I have a tendency to be a goof or overly dramatic in class. I have fun in class, nearly every day. How-- try being a goof with 8th graders and watch their faces. Priceless. From that point, you have their cooperation and attention-- they want to know what other crazy stuff you're going to do. I once told a friend that what I like about teaching is that it takes everything I have and asks for more. In elementary school, junior high, high school, and college, I was a singer and actor. I now use those skills when I teach.
Sorry Justin Timberlake, you might be bringing "Sexy Back," but I'm bringing "Grammar Back." Smiles, eye rolls, rib jabbing, perplexed stares and mild amusements that crawl across their faces. Priceless. Some parents come to parent teacher conferences singing my versions of pop songs that thair kids sing to them on the way to soccer practice or whatever. You never know what lingers with kids or what they are taking home. Do you know: "Two types of nouns/Only Capitalize One/Proper, proper, proper nouns please?" I'd probably be in trouble with Lady Gaga if she knew my students know my lyrics better than hers.... Fun with grammar. What a concept.
Not really. Sister Eleanor Grace Spirodozzi, at Saint Mary's School in Baldwinsville, NY, used to host spelling relays every Friday. She would divide the class into two groups. We would get in line at one end of the room. The middle of the room was cleared so we could do the relay. Someone would keep score while we played. Sister would call the spelling word from our list and we would try to beat our opposing runner to the chalk board on the other side of the room and spell the word correctly. The person who spelled it correctly first earned her team a point but then she had to run back to the end of the line so the next word could be called and the teams were literally off and running again. How fun is it for kids? I still remember it 34 years later... and I can spell.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Borrowed Cars and Discovery Learning
It maybe because I was trained to think about research qualitatively as an ethnographer instead of quantitatively as a statistician, but I think when talking about students, letting their words do the talking is more powerful than insightful commentary. And that is how I want to begin this blog, with the kids speaking:
Dear Mr. Terch,
We are reading That Was Then, This Is Now in English class with Mr. Logan. Have you read it? Well there is a part in the book where Mark takes the principal's car somewhere but brings it back. The principal wasn't mad. He actually thought it was funny. How wouild you feel if I stole your car sometime? I debated with the class that you would be fine with it. Well anyway. I'm gonna go.
Bye
McKenzie R
Dear Mr. terch
Could I borrow your car to run to the York County prison to go sing to the inmates. LOL
From: Julie M.
Dear Mr.Church terch -
I think i could hotwire your car is ok i would give it back ok
Dear, love
Charles
OK editing mistakes should be ignored. I typed the notes to our principal exactly as they wrote them to maintain their integrity. There is a lot to learn here from my students in this 3 quick notes. I learned how they view the world, what writing issues we need to conquer this year, and some insight to their personalities.
Where'd all this come from? Like McKenzie wrote to our principal, we were discussing chapter 4 of That Was Then, This Is Now and I was attempting to connect the story to their own lives by asking the question: how do you think Mr. Terch would react if he discovered one of you driving his car into his parking space after frantically looking for it. Several students wanted to argue that our principal would have been "fine with it." I encouraged them to write to him. The above were their responses.
Finally, I was able to incorporate the text from the novel for my grammar mini-lesson today. I called it a Preposition Quest. The students were supposed to work in their groups to find a sentence from chapter 4 that features a preposition and another sentence featuring a compound preposition. I reminded them that, since I had already instructed them to put the definitions of each into their notebooks, they should be able to find the definition in their notebook.
Do you remember I told you I was a Murphy's Law kind of guy? I left a copy of our writing and grammar text on each desk, just in case. You see, just because they wrote the definitions in their notebook is no guarantee they remembered to bring the notebook to class. Sometimes they bring the wrong notebook, come with no notebook, or were absent the day of the lesson. No problem. I encouraged them to use the texts if they neeed to and also reminded them how to find discreet information in a textbook. Use the index. We also discussed that if there was a chapter about prepositions, whether the index would list the chapter by a single page or a range of pages. Some kids still went to the single page reference that only obliquely referenced a prepositional phrase without defining it.
I remember having a new teacher I was charged with mentoring a few years back. He'd be irritated about something a middle schooler did and demand I explain the unexplainable: "Why'd he do that?" The answer was simple: "He's 13." My answer to everything. The mantra achieves calm for middle school teachers and it works for both sexes and all middle school ages. Repeat after me. "She's twelve." "He's fourteen" "They're eigth graders." After years of fighting the natural behaviors of early adolescents, somewhere around year 8 I figured out that instead of fighting it, I should accept it and redirect it. That's the year I traded rows for pods and silence for an unquiet pedagogy (yes, I read that book in grad school too.)
A chattering class focused on a task and slipping in references to last night's game or the latest middle school gossip is a healthy one. It was fun to bounce around the room eavesdropping on kids arguing whether the sentences fit the bill of a compound preposition while trying to slip in some off-topic conversation. You know what's funny about teachers who are obsessed with off-task dialogue? They are the exact same people who irritate me when I'm trying to listen to directions from our administrators in faculty meetings and in-service meetings. If they can do it what makes them think their kids can't? I trust my students to meet or at least attempt to meet my expectations. Ironically, I cannot carry on a conversation and listen to instructions simultaneously, so I appear to be a model audience member in those situations. Unlike their teachers, students have a tendency to police themselves when they're focused on the task. Often before I have a chance to redirect, the kids themselves remind each other "We gotta get this done!"
I can't decide which I enjoyed more today-- the letters to Mr. Terch or the 4 panel comic depicting Mark's car story. Supposedly, there is a way to embed photos onto the blog articles themselves. I am going to see Mr. Terch and Mrs. Spangenberger to investigate how to do it. Some of the cartoons were pretty cool. The lingering future assignment kept students motivated to finish the grammar assignment. My kids like drawing this year. I heard many "We gotta get this done so we can draw!" numerous times today."
That's my story. Lesson learned today--- don't let the kids know which car is yours-- they might borrow it. <grin>
Dear Mr. Terch,
We are reading That Was Then, This Is Now in English class with Mr. Logan. Have you read it? Well there is a part in the book where Mark takes the principal's car somewhere but brings it back. The principal wasn't mad. He actually thought it was funny. How wouild you feel if I stole your car sometime? I debated with the class that you would be fine with it. Well anyway. I'm gonna go.
Bye
McKenzie R
Dear Mr. terch
Could I borrow your car to run to the York County prison to go sing to the inmates. LOL
From: Julie M.
Dear Mr.
I think i could hotwire your car is ok i would give it back ok
Dear, love
Charles
OK editing mistakes should be ignored. I typed the notes to our principal exactly as they wrote them to maintain their integrity. There is a lot to learn here from my students in this 3 quick notes. I learned how they view the world, what writing issues we need to conquer this year, and some insight to their personalities.
Where'd all this come from? Like McKenzie wrote to our principal, we were discussing chapter 4 of That Was Then, This Is Now and I was attempting to connect the story to their own lives by asking the question: how do you think Mr. Terch would react if he discovered one of you driving his car into his parking space after frantically looking for it. Several students wanted to argue that our principal would have been "fine with it." I encouraged them to write to him. The above were their responses.
Finally, I was able to incorporate the text from the novel for my grammar mini-lesson today. I called it a Preposition Quest. The students were supposed to work in their groups to find a sentence from chapter 4 that features a preposition and another sentence featuring a compound preposition. I reminded them that, since I had already instructed them to put the definitions of each into their notebooks, they should be able to find the definition in their notebook.
Do you remember I told you I was a Murphy's Law kind of guy? I left a copy of our writing and grammar text on each desk, just in case. You see, just because they wrote the definitions in their notebook is no guarantee they remembered to bring the notebook to class. Sometimes they bring the wrong notebook, come with no notebook, or were absent the day of the lesson. No problem. I encouraged them to use the texts if they neeed to and also reminded them how to find discreet information in a textbook. Use the index. We also discussed that if there was a chapter about prepositions, whether the index would list the chapter by a single page or a range of pages. Some kids still went to the single page reference that only obliquely referenced a prepositional phrase without defining it.
I remember having a new teacher I was charged with mentoring a few years back. He'd be irritated about something a middle schooler did and demand I explain the unexplainable: "Why'd he do that?" The answer was simple: "He's 13." My answer to everything. The mantra achieves calm for middle school teachers and it works for both sexes and all middle school ages. Repeat after me. "She's twelve." "He's fourteen" "They're eigth graders." After years of fighting the natural behaviors of early adolescents, somewhere around year 8 I figured out that instead of fighting it, I should accept it and redirect it. That's the year I traded rows for pods and silence for an unquiet pedagogy (yes, I read that book in grad school too.)
A chattering class focused on a task and slipping in references to last night's game or the latest middle school gossip is a healthy one. It was fun to bounce around the room eavesdropping on kids arguing whether the sentences fit the bill of a compound preposition while trying to slip in some off-topic conversation. You know what's funny about teachers who are obsessed with off-task dialogue? They are the exact same people who irritate me when I'm trying to listen to directions from our administrators in faculty meetings and in-service meetings. If they can do it what makes them think their kids can't? I trust my students to meet or at least attempt to meet my expectations. Ironically, I cannot carry on a conversation and listen to instructions simultaneously, so I appear to be a model audience member in those situations. Unlike their teachers, students have a tendency to police themselves when they're focused on the task. Often before I have a chance to redirect, the kids themselves remind each other "We gotta get this done!"
I can't decide which I enjoyed more today-- the letters to Mr. Terch or the 4 panel comic depicting Mark's car story. Supposedly, there is a way to embed photos onto the blog articles themselves. I am going to see Mr. Terch and Mrs. Spangenberger to investigate how to do it. Some of the cartoons were pretty cool. The lingering future assignment kept students motivated to finish the grammar assignment. My kids like drawing this year. I heard many "We gotta get this done so we can draw!" numerous times today."
That's my story. Lesson learned today--- don't let the kids know which car is yours-- they might borrow it. <grin>
Floppy-eared Children
Yesterday was a hectic afternoon, Hannah, my adorable four and a half month old yellow labrador retriever, had her second vet visit at 4:15pm after school. School dismissal for teachers was at 2:50pm and I live about 15 to 20 minutes away from school. Plenty of time right? You'd think that if you also believe that all things are equal and plans always turn out the way you expect.
That's not my experience at all. I'm kinda a Murphy's Law guy. The vet wanted a stool sample. Hannah wouldn't produce one for me yesterday morning which meant I had to hope she didn't make when she was let out that afternoon before I came home--- I used to think dog poop was gross, now neither the smell, shape or consistency bothers me-- it's just part of being a doggy's daddy. Skewering a fresh poop pile with a discreet little green plastic device didn't bother me at all. How did that happen?
Did Hannah give me the stool sample I needed? Eventually. My mother warned me that Hannah was her own person and had her own head before I even met her this summer. Hannah wanted to play. The clock was ticking. She had been in her crate all morning and a few hours that afternoon, so I gave in and let her play. All the while, I was nervously watching the time slip away on my flip phone--- yeah I don't do the smart phone yet. I didn't even have a cellphone until 2004. But I digress.
While Hannah played fetch and keep away with Daddy, Daddy almost wiped out discovering her afternoon stool sample had been hidden between the ivy covered volleyball court bowl and the court border. "Great, she already went this afternoon and I'll have to go to the docs without her stool sample again--- they're going to think I'm an idiot.." The bottoms of my shoes were fragrant with my doggy daughter's deposit but there wasn't enough there for me to scrape off for a sample.
It was 3:45 now and I was getting worried. I really didn't want to show up empty-handed again, but Hannah normally doesn't need to go number 2 in the middle of the day. Resigned to "daddy-epic-fail," I brought my happy panting puppy back inside the house. We walked by her food bowl and her crate and I noticed something. Fortunately, Hannah hadn't finished her breakfast and there were still a few handfuls of it in her bowl. I discovered the hard way that my little girl will leave presents if she eats after a vigorous exercise when I forget to let her out again.
We practiced "sit-ups" using her leftover breakfast. I took the feed by the handful and we practiced sitting, sitting down (like a sphinx,) and sitting up again. Each time she completed the exercise I fed her feed from my hand. When she finished the rest of her breakfast, I changed shoes, put on her car harness and took her for a lap around the house. Bingo! It was 4:10 and the vet's office was 15 minutes away.
Laugh if you want to at my not-so-smartphone, but it has bluetooth and so does my car so I called them from the road letting them know that we were running late. "It's Hannah's daddy's fault, but at least we have a stool sample."
All that and the visit lasted 10 minutes--- She's 35 pounds now-- 5 pound gain from her visit 2 weeks previous. She had another round of shots-- she didn't bark or growl but she didn't like them. The vet said "bee sting" Hannah shot me a look like "Evil trick, Daddy!" Like I said, 10 minutes and it was over.
I'm always exhausted after work. Before Hannah, I could crawl in my bed or lounge on the couch and fall asleep for 30 minutes when I got home. Hannah will sit at the foot of the couch and watch tv with me, but if I fall asleep, she will use her "big girl" voice and bark me awake. The tone is unmistakably insistent like "Hey! You left me home alone all day, you can't fall asleep now. Pay attention to me. Hey!" If I taped her barking rant, you could insert the words for the syllables of her barks. I know-- dog parents are nuts, right?
After dinner, I was awake enough to play with my pup some more. She loves to squirm on her back with her favorite toy in her mouth and playfully push my hands away with her paws as I try to play "Rubdabelly" with her.
It used to be "Rub the belly." If you saw us play--- you would see a grown man on all fours talking baby talk, nuzzling his puppy's neck and rubbing her belly. Hannah eats it up. She just grins and rolls on her back playfully.
When we were finished. Juggernaut, my ten year old English Springer Spaniel, squeezed between Hannah and I, plopped on my foot ,and leaned his head back against my shin-- his not so sublte way of letting me know he wants his neck petted. So I pet him and told him what a good boy he was and he was in doggie nirvanna,
Unfortunately, Hannah is jealous of anyone else getting my attention. She walked back up to us and started kissing Juggernaut's face. He went ballistic. First, he growled and, of course, Hannah paid him no attention and kept trying to get in on the lovefest. He then barked, chased after her, and even when she fell to the ground in supplication, he nipped at her side. She squealed that mournful, heartbreaking yelp that makes puppy-daddies die a little inside.
I was horrorified that he was hurting her. So this voice I did not recognized erupted from me. "No! No!No!No!Nonononono!" Juggernaut got off her and the baby scurried between my legs, shielding herself from her brother-turned-Cujo.
I spent the next 30 minutes cradling my puppy in my arms, petting her, assuring her she was safe, and that Daddy would not let anything happen to her. I noticed she avoided Juggernaut when we walked back in the room. I could not put her to bed yet.
We have a flea issue with Juggernaut, so all the linens and towels were being washed. This included the Hannah's bed linens. MamaDear made Hannah a mattress out of batting and boat cover material. She made a mattress linen for her with leftover material from curtains for the living room. I was not going to put the puppy in the crate to rest on a metal floor after she had become accostomed to more luxurious accomodations.
TV night was spent watchfully monitoring Hannah's interaction with Juggernaut. When the load was finally dry, I made my little girl's bed, placed her chew toys inside, and set her down. When I finally retired to bed at 11, I thought I would sleep til 5:00am as always. Wishful thinking.
At 12am Hannah started her whinebark. For those of you without dogs, its the whine that starts like a yawn and drawls until the pup is nearly out of breath and ends in an insistent bark. I remembered my mother warning me not to jump out of bed everytime Hannah called me and that I had to remain in control. I also had to get to sleep. After an hour and a half of attempting to ignore her intermittent pleading, I roused myself out of bed and went into the great room to see about her.
I took her out. She had to urinate but nothing else. She obediently got back into her crate and I went back to bed after saying good night. This time it was straight out barking from about 1:20 to 2am. I couldn't take anymore, so I went to see about her again. Did she urgently need to pass a stool sample? I took her out again and all she wanted to do was play "keep away." Heck no. Not at 2am! I squashed her keep-away fun, tackled her, wrestled her back into her crate, and told her: "Good night, Hannah Chase. Daddy needs his sleep!"
Again with the barking. What the heck? Finally I took her out of her crate at 4am, lay clean blankets and a couple of her chew toys on the floor in my room beside my bed. Peace. One hour of sleep. Awesome.
Funny thing about all that. The day turned out to be ok. We were in the library. Mrs. H. booktalked some new books and let the kids know about some free kindle downloads available that they may want to investigate. We used today's meet to post answers to my grammar question: "What is the difference between a preposition and a compound preposition?"
I received the feedback I needed about last week's lesson. I know. There was no qualitative or quantitative grade to put in my gradebook, but I got the information I needed. Isn't that what counts? Grades have to be uploaded on the 20th of September for mid-marking period reports. To satisfy the grade grubbing, I am giving a quiz on prepositions and the first three chapters of our novel on Tuesday.
If all this formative assessment and progressive feedback I have been working with works. The kids grades should remain relatively unchanged. Most kids have As at this point. They are doing their homework, they are productive in class and they seem to have a grasp on what is happening so far. Does every class always have to generate a bell-curve to be challenging and rigorous? I used to think that, but not anymore. Isn't the goal to see everyone successful?
Or is that the lack of sleep talking?
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Now That Was Some Cool Stuff!
The title is not my own, it's a canned message that our librarian, Mrs. H., used with the video production team for daily announcements a few years back. The announcer reminded me of Max Headroom (am I the only one who remembers that virtual reporter?) Anyway, it sums up the morning I'm having. Gotta love a morning that starts well.
At the end of the 2011-2012 school year, I lost a close friend and mentor to another building assignment. You see, I spent ten years teaching Reading/Literature. I was still an English teacher, but my focus was on comprehension, extending literature to student's lives, literary terms, and decoding words. The LA teacher focused on grammar and writing. I never considered myself too much of a grammarian. There were stellar people in my building who fit that bill much better than me. Then, the curriculum changed and I was teaching writing and reading (yikes!)
As a student, grammar was never a focus of instruction except in 6th and seventh grade. In high school, I found myself in classes with other students who "wrote naturally." They also grew up in households where both parents owned degrees and experienced at least some post baccalaureate studies. In teacher-speak, we all came from literature rich environments, so its probably not true that we wrote naturally or just understood grammar by osmosis. We grew up in homes where mispeaking grammatically, and making writing errors were instantly corrected. --any wonder we were in honors and accelerated English classes?
When I came to South Eastern, I was hired as "Communication Arts" teacher. That meant teaching writing, reading, speaking and listening skills. Fortunately I had Mr. H. as my friend and unofficial mentor to run to with questions about gerunds, participles, infinitives, and other technical bumps in the road. I used to tease him with the dictate that he wasn't allowed to retire until I learned all I could from him. I was kidding, but a far greater part of myself meant that than I would let on.
Well, today I was greeted with an email from a former students who is now at the high school:
Dear Mr. Logan,
Good morning,
The clause in question is an adverb clause because it is describing how Frank stepped to the microphone. You made my morning. It is nice to know former students still think of me when they have a grammar conundrum. I hope you are having a great beginning of the school year. Are you a sophomore this year? Am I keeping the years straight in my head?
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Mr. Logan
Robert Burns wrote a poem I fell in love with in Mrs. Dixon's Junior Honors English class, "To A Louse." Funny title, right? Even better was this line from it:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Rough translation: I would like the power as a gift he'd give us [God] to see ourselves as others see us!
The message has become even more poignant to me the further I get in my career and the older I become. My former student did not know that, in order for me to teach grammar to her at such an explicit and discreet level, I had to take the books home and teach myself what I was never taught in school. She did not know that I ran to my mentoring friends for help with understanding enough the future pluperfect tense well enough to explain it to a group of 13 and 14 year olds who, only the year before, were vaguely understanding the difference between nouns and verbs. She saw me as an authority whose learned opinion she trusted. What a powerful responsibility to uphold. That was the first gem of cool stuff to start off my day.
The second piece of cool stuff was today's formative assessment. After writing the journal entries yesterday about Connie and the video, I asked my teams (the class is set up in 6 tables of students consisting of 4-6 students) to brainstorm a skit showing how they believe Mike should have dealt with his friends in drug store. As impromptu skits have the tendency, the results were comical, informative, and insight-provoking. One group had Mike sock his buddy who would not stop harassing Connie. Another group chose to have Mike stop his friends just when they announced their intent to bother her. Still another group had Mike pontificate like a hip-hop Messiah about not being a gang and "That's not who we are!"
The kids had fun with the activity and gave some feedback to the groups that performed. This is the teacher I want to be, one with kids engaged, having fun and while learning in unconventional lesson. It's fun to come back to my roots. We concluded the exercise with talking about how hard it is to go against your friends sometimes. I offered my own thought to linger in their minds--- "If your friends don't repect you enough to listen to you when you disagree, are they really your friends? Adults say friends are the family you choose. Why would you spend time with friends who would bully you into silence?" I didn't script it, the words just came to me. Teaching is awesome.
The third piece of cool stuff? Students learned in an article written shortly after Rosa Parks death in 2005, "Kids on The Bus: The Overlooked Role of Teenagers in the Civil-Rights Era," by Jeffrey Zaslow, that she was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat in Birmingham. The kids learned a new name, Claudette Colvin. She was 15 and she "refused to give up her seat and was arrested" (http://www.sites.si.edu/press/Montgomery%20Bus%20Boycott_Wall%20Street%20Journal.pdf) nine months before Mrs. Rosa Parks. Zaslow told my students that the movement did not rally around Colvin because she was a teen and because she became pregnant. The leaders feared that those who opposed them would attack her moral character and make that the focus, taking away exposure to the injustice of Jim Crow. We talked about the fairness of all of that.
We also talked about the revolutionary nature of being an a young person. The article talked about the civil rights movement being a "story of teenage revolt." When we recounted the video clips of the protestors and others in the Civil Rights Movement, I reminded them how many of those faces belonged to young. We remembered the college students who gave their lives for the cause as martyrs.
The technology boom is this generation's teen revolt. I'm a liberal arts geek and math stopped being a strength academically when I ran into Algebra I, but even though I'm the son of an electrical engineer, the digital clocks on the stove, VCR, and microwave blinked until I came home from college. My parents marvelled at how quickly I could reset the clocks and navigate the layered functions. It just made sense to me and it baffled me that they found something so simple so complex.
Now its my turn. Texting, blogging, social networking, tweeting--- all were Greek to me only about 5 years ago. I asked if students ever had to teach their parents how to upload a video or post a picture online. Many grinning heads nodded at me. I pointed out to them that just like the youth of the 1950s and 1960s changed the racial landscape of the US, they (as a generation) are changing how the world interacts with itself. They loved that message of empowerment--- think I'm overstating?
Could you have read my teachers' daily professional diary entries online in 1981 when I was an 8th grader? As a matter of fact, could you have read my online blog in 1993 when I was a student-teacher, and keeping a diary was a requirement for my ethnological research at UPENN? Who made that possible, ladies and gentleman? The revolution continues and that is some cool stuff.
At the end of the 2011-2012 school year, I lost a close friend and mentor to another building assignment. You see, I spent ten years teaching Reading/Literature. I was still an English teacher, but my focus was on comprehension, extending literature to student's lives, literary terms, and decoding words. The LA teacher focused on grammar and writing. I never considered myself too much of a grammarian. There were stellar people in my building who fit that bill much better than me. Then, the curriculum changed and I was teaching writing and reading (yikes!)
As a student, grammar was never a focus of instruction except in 6th and seventh grade. In high school, I found myself in classes with other students who "wrote naturally." They also grew up in households where both parents owned degrees and experienced at least some post baccalaureate studies. In teacher-speak, we all came from literature rich environments, so its probably not true that we wrote naturally or just understood grammar by osmosis. We grew up in homes where mispeaking grammatically, and making writing errors were instantly corrected. --any wonder we were in honors and accelerated English classes?
When I came to South Eastern, I was hired as "Communication Arts" teacher. That meant teaching writing, reading, speaking and listening skills. Fortunately I had Mr. H. as my friend and unofficial mentor to run to with questions about gerunds, participles, infinitives, and other technical bumps in the road. I used to tease him with the dictate that he wasn't allowed to retire until I learned all I could from him. I was kidding, but a far greater part of myself meant that than I would let on.
Well, today I was greeted with an email from a former students who is now at the high school:
Dear Mr. Logan,
Today in English class, we came across a sentence that my teacher and I did not agree on so I was wondering if you could help. In the sentence, "Without any hesitation, Frank stepped to the microphone.", what is "Without any hesitation" modifying? Is it an adjective clause or an adverb clause, and why?
Thanks,
H.H. (identity protected)
I wrote her back:
Good morning,
The clause in question is an adverb clause because it is describing how Frank stepped to the microphone. You made my morning. It is nice to know former students still think of me when they have a grammar conundrum. I hope you are having a great beginning of the school year. Are you a sophomore this year? Am I keeping the years straight in my head?
Have a great day!
Sincerely,
Mr. Logan
Robert Burns wrote a poem I fell in love with in Mrs. Dixon's Junior Honors English class, "To A Louse." Funny title, right? Even better was this line from it:
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
Rough translation: I would like the power as a gift he'd give us [God] to see ourselves as others see us!
The message has become even more poignant to me the further I get in my career and the older I become. My former student did not know that, in order for me to teach grammar to her at such an explicit and discreet level, I had to take the books home and teach myself what I was never taught in school. She did not know that I ran to my mentoring friends for help with understanding enough the future pluperfect tense well enough to explain it to a group of 13 and 14 year olds who, only the year before, were vaguely understanding the difference between nouns and verbs. She saw me as an authority whose learned opinion she trusted. What a powerful responsibility to uphold. That was the first gem of cool stuff to start off my day.
The second piece of cool stuff was today's formative assessment. After writing the journal entries yesterday about Connie and the video, I asked my teams (the class is set up in 6 tables of students consisting of 4-6 students) to brainstorm a skit showing how they believe Mike should have dealt with his friends in drug store. As impromptu skits have the tendency, the results were comical, informative, and insight-provoking. One group had Mike sock his buddy who would not stop harassing Connie. Another group chose to have Mike stop his friends just when they announced their intent to bother her. Still another group had Mike pontificate like a hip-hop Messiah about not being a gang and "That's not who we are!"
The kids had fun with the activity and gave some feedback to the groups that performed. This is the teacher I want to be, one with kids engaged, having fun and while learning in unconventional lesson. It's fun to come back to my roots. We concluded the exercise with talking about how hard it is to go against your friends sometimes. I offered my own thought to linger in their minds--- "If your friends don't repect you enough to listen to you when you disagree, are they really your friends? Adults say friends are the family you choose. Why would you spend time with friends who would bully you into silence?" I didn't script it, the words just came to me. Teaching is awesome.
The third piece of cool stuff? Students learned in an article written shortly after Rosa Parks death in 2005, "Kids on The Bus: The Overlooked Role of Teenagers in the Civil-Rights Era," by Jeffrey Zaslow, that she was not the first black woman to refuse to give up her seat in Birmingham. The kids learned a new name, Claudette Colvin. She was 15 and she "refused to give up her seat and was arrested" (http://www.sites.si.edu/press/Montgomery%20Bus%20Boycott_Wall%20Street%20Journal.pdf) nine months before Mrs. Rosa Parks. Zaslow told my students that the movement did not rally around Colvin because she was a teen and because she became pregnant. The leaders feared that those who opposed them would attack her moral character and make that the focus, taking away exposure to the injustice of Jim Crow. We talked about the fairness of all of that.
We also talked about the revolutionary nature of being an a young person. The article talked about the civil rights movement being a "story of teenage revolt." When we recounted the video clips of the protestors and others in the Civil Rights Movement, I reminded them how many of those faces belonged to young. We remembered the college students who gave their lives for the cause as martyrs.
The technology boom is this generation's teen revolt. I'm a liberal arts geek and math stopped being a strength academically when I ran into Algebra I, but even though I'm the son of an electrical engineer, the digital clocks on the stove, VCR, and microwave blinked until I came home from college. My parents marvelled at how quickly I could reset the clocks and navigate the layered functions. It just made sense to me and it baffled me that they found something so simple so complex.
Now its my turn. Texting, blogging, social networking, tweeting--- all were Greek to me only about 5 years ago. I asked if students ever had to teach their parents how to upload a video or post a picture online. Many grinning heads nodded at me. I pointed out to them that just like the youth of the 1950s and 1960s changed the racial landscape of the US, they (as a generation) are changing how the world interacts with itself. They loved that message of empowerment--- think I'm overstating?
Could you have read my teachers' daily professional diary entries online in 1981 when I was an 8th grader? As a matter of fact, could you have read my online blog in 1993 when I was a student-teacher, and keeping a diary was a requirement for my ethnological research at UPENN? Who made that possible, ladies and gentleman? The revolution continues and that is some cool stuff.
Monday, September 10, 2012
Does It Have to Have Holes in It When You Use the Whole Thing?
There are quite a few things going through this mind of mine today. A nephew's birthday. Shakespeare was right about the passage of time, these days time is beginning to gallup. The profile picture of me with two of my teachers was first grade in 1974, 38 years ago. That was also the first year I bowled in a league. 38 years knocking down tenpins, 21 years coaching bowling... One thing good about being around long enough to remember with clarity events that occured nearly 40 years ago is that the distance gives perspective, the jury's out about the wisdom I'm getting from that perspective, but it made me look at whole language instruction in a new way.
I need to out myself. I am a 1994 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. That means I was trained to teach English using whole language. The knock on whole language is that it has holes in it-- too many practitioners threw the baby out with the bath water because it was expedient to do so. Consequently, we have a generation of learners who have no clue how to "sound it out" because they were not taught phonics. We have students who do not know how to spell because linguists pointed out that more than 75% of English vocabulary does not follow the spelling rules we taught. Instead, students were given "sight words," a list of words to memorize and know on sight without receiving the benefit ofthe tools to see the relationships between these rules.
I am glad I was born earlier enough to have been taught the "old way." I love words because of it. I even love the craziness of a language that has 85% of its words imported from other languages. Recognizing the cognates for me is like having the code list to use my decoder ring I bought in the back of a comic book. Many of my students were not given the tools to decode. As 8th graders, they will be called to task by the state in PSSAs and Keystone exams that presume these students will be able to decode vocabulary. What's an eigth grader to do? Moreover, how does their 8th grade English teacher help fill the gaps?
Driving home from obedience school Saturday, it came to me. Be who you are. Teach the grammar using the text, the textbook, and other resources. Haven't I already been doing that? To an extent yes, but the delivery was disjointed. Grammar out of the grammar text only. Reading comprehension using only the novels and stories. There is an intersection and it came running to me while navigating traffic down I83.
The first part of speech I am teaching 8th graders about is the preposition. Although in That Was Then, This Is Now, Bryon does not use a strong vocabulary, he does use prepositions. It is almost impossible to construct paragraphs without them. He doesn't use compound prepositions very often because his sentence structure is simple and compound prepositions convey complex thoughts. Show the students that. Better yet, have them find that on their own by setting them to that task.
So another "aha" moment struck me. This marking period, I want to improve students' knowledge of prepositions, decrease their pronoun-antecedent errors, encourage them to use more complicated sentence structures, and begin to recognize cognates for vocabulary building and reading decoding skills. Whole language can help us get there using the novel.
Bryon frequently makes pronoun-antecedent errors and this is SE Hinton's design. It makes him sound like a teen. Sometimes the verbs and subjects do not agree in the dialogue. Bryon's sentence structure is simple and needs more complexity. Why not use examples from the chapters to have students analyze with the new information they were given about effective written communication? Moreover, why not give the unit test with sections of Bryon's writing to revise to increase complexity, identify the parts of speech investigated this marking period and dialogue to fix the grammar errors in pronoun-antecedent and subject-verb agreement?
Even though I was trained to do this, it has taken 5 seasons of reading the novel aloud to some classes and re-reading on my own to revise plans to see the opportunities. In the meantime, my students have met the standards for annual yearly progress on the PSSAs, my reputation as an educator has been strongly positive, and parents have been happy to have me as their child's teacher. I am not satisfied with any of that because I know I can do more and go further. What about the teachers who have not had years to mull over the text and see the opportunities?
Why bother? When students study grammar and vocabulary in a vacuum, they tend to believe that it only matters on a worksheet or grammar book exercise. They don't see the connection to the "real world" of what they read on the internet, e-books, novels, textbooks, etc. For the most part, this novel is popular with my students. Showing kids how the writing of this novel works technically, hopefully will help them connect the lessons to their own writing. The motivated learner were already there. Hopefully this will help the rest find their way to the same place. Hopefully--- we shall see.
I need to out myself. I am a 1994 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. That means I was trained to teach English using whole language. The knock on whole language is that it has holes in it-- too many practitioners threw the baby out with the bath water because it was expedient to do so. Consequently, we have a generation of learners who have no clue how to "sound it out" because they were not taught phonics. We have students who do not know how to spell because linguists pointed out that more than 75% of English vocabulary does not follow the spelling rules we taught. Instead, students were given "sight words," a list of words to memorize and know on sight without receiving the benefit ofthe tools to see the relationships between these rules.
I am glad I was born earlier enough to have been taught the "old way." I love words because of it. I even love the craziness of a language that has 85% of its words imported from other languages. Recognizing the cognates for me is like having the code list to use my decoder ring I bought in the back of a comic book. Many of my students were not given the tools to decode. As 8th graders, they will be called to task by the state in PSSAs and Keystone exams that presume these students will be able to decode vocabulary. What's an eigth grader to do? Moreover, how does their 8th grade English teacher help fill the gaps?
Driving home from obedience school Saturday, it came to me. Be who you are. Teach the grammar using the text, the textbook, and other resources. Haven't I already been doing that? To an extent yes, but the delivery was disjointed. Grammar out of the grammar text only. Reading comprehension using only the novels and stories. There is an intersection and it came running to me while navigating traffic down I83.
The first part of speech I am teaching 8th graders about is the preposition. Although in That Was Then, This Is Now, Bryon does not use a strong vocabulary, he does use prepositions. It is almost impossible to construct paragraphs without them. He doesn't use compound prepositions very often because his sentence structure is simple and compound prepositions convey complex thoughts. Show the students that. Better yet, have them find that on their own by setting them to that task.
So another "aha" moment struck me. This marking period, I want to improve students' knowledge of prepositions, decrease their pronoun-antecedent errors, encourage them to use more complicated sentence structures, and begin to recognize cognates for vocabulary building and reading decoding skills. Whole language can help us get there using the novel.
Bryon frequently makes pronoun-antecedent errors and this is SE Hinton's design. It makes him sound like a teen. Sometimes the verbs and subjects do not agree in the dialogue. Bryon's sentence structure is simple and needs more complexity. Why not use examples from the chapters to have students analyze with the new information they were given about effective written communication? Moreover, why not give the unit test with sections of Bryon's writing to revise to increase complexity, identify the parts of speech investigated this marking period and dialogue to fix the grammar errors in pronoun-antecedent and subject-verb agreement?
Even though I was trained to do this, it has taken 5 seasons of reading the novel aloud to some classes and re-reading on my own to revise plans to see the opportunities. In the meantime, my students have met the standards for annual yearly progress on the PSSAs, my reputation as an educator has been strongly positive, and parents have been happy to have me as their child's teacher. I am not satisfied with any of that because I know I can do more and go further. What about the teachers who have not had years to mull over the text and see the opportunities?
Why bother? When students study grammar and vocabulary in a vacuum, they tend to believe that it only matters on a worksheet or grammar book exercise. They don't see the connection to the "real world" of what they read on the internet, e-books, novels, textbooks, etc. For the most part, this novel is popular with my students. Showing kids how the writing of this novel works technically, hopefully will help them connect the lessons to their own writing. The motivated learner were already there. Hopefully this will help the rest find their way to the same place. Hopefully--- we shall see.
Friday, September 7, 2012
Like A Glass of Orange Juice With A Gallon of Water Added to It
It's third period, my prep at school. After two classes of teaching That Was Then, This Is Now, I have a minute to wrap my mind around how my students are reacting to chapter 2. In this passage, Connie, an African-American teen, was harassed by a group of boys in a segregated part of town. One of them, Mike Chambers, decides his friends have gone too far with the girl and gets them to stop. Mike ultimately gives the teen a ride home and ends up getting beaten severely enough by her family and neighbors that he ends up in the hospital. That's where our protagonist meets him and hears his story.
My students had a variety of opinions and reactions to this part of the story. First period came to class with the chapter read, and they were not quite awake enough to have a lively discussion, so we briefly discussed what the 60s had in common with our reality: war. They believed that racism was still a problem in this country but they knew it was an even bigger issue in the 60s. Only a few students had ever heard of Malcom X, a few more knew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and nobody had heard of Medgar Evers. Some students wanted to argue that, since racism is still an issue today, Connie had no excuse. I agreed with them that racism is still an issue but I put forth the argument that to compare the degree racism of that time to what we witness and experience now, is like a glass of orange juice with a gallon of water added to it. The taste is still there but not nearly the same as the original. I told them we would have more to talk about after the video and instructed students to keep notes of their reactions to the video as I played it. I hoped they would understand what I meant at the end.
The video, A Time for Justice: America's Civil Rights Movement, produced by the Teaching Tolerance project, is 38 minutes long. It starts at the grave of Jimmy Lee Jackson and then flashes back to the brutal murder of Emmet Till, a teen boy who came from Chicago to visit his uncle in Money, Mississippi. He flirted verbally with a white shop owner's wife and was beaten and killed for it. The video ends with the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Monday's formative assessment is an entrance pass in the form of a writing prompt:
My students had a variety of opinions and reactions to this part of the story. First period came to class with the chapter read, and they were not quite awake enough to have a lively discussion, so we briefly discussed what the 60s had in common with our reality: war. They believed that racism was still a problem in this country but they knew it was an even bigger issue in the 60s. Only a few students had ever heard of Malcom X, a few more knew Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and nobody had heard of Medgar Evers. Some students wanted to argue that, since racism is still an issue today, Connie had no excuse. I agreed with them that racism is still an issue but I put forth the argument that to compare the degree racism of that time to what we witness and experience now, is like a glass of orange juice with a gallon of water added to it. The taste is still there but not nearly the same as the original. I told them we would have more to talk about after the video and instructed students to keep notes of their reactions to the video as I played it. I hoped they would understand what I meant at the end.
The video, A Time for Justice: America's Civil Rights Movement, produced by the Teaching Tolerance project, is 38 minutes long. It starts at the grave of Jimmy Lee Jackson and then flashes back to the brutal murder of Emmet Till, a teen boy who came from Chicago to visit his uncle in Money, Mississippi. He flirted verbally with a white shop owner's wife and was beaten and killed for it. The video ends with the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Monday's formative assessment is an entrance pass in the form of a writing prompt:
I can't wait to see what the kids come up with. Some students were visibly shaken by what they witnessed. The video pulls no punches. It is graphic and the dialogue has not been sterilized for a PG audience.
Half of my classes are only finishing chapter 2 today, so either we won't get to the video or we will not finish it today. I teach in the middle in a number of ways. That's where the title of this blog came from. For the past ten years, I have taught an interdisciplinary college course called "Race, Class and Gender" to college freshman. In the college environment, my tongue is untied and my resources are unrestricted by curricular concerns-- my syllabus is my curriculum. There we break down a macroscopic view of oppression and subordination through analysis and interpretation of primary documents like the "South Carolina 1712 Act of the Better Ordering and Governing of Negroes and Slaves." These students are five years older, and that matters. They have had more opportunities to learn about the Civil Rights Era. Some actually took electives in high school about the era, or wrote term papers that were evidence of an indepent study about events or figures from this time period. I have to be far more careful, as a middle school level educator, about how I talk about these issues in class.
I am caught in the middle in many ways. I help students bridge the achievement gap between high school and college expectations during the summers. I have empathy for my students, for Connie, and for the other characters in the novel. I am in the middle because I was raised by parents born during the Great Depression, who grew up with Jim Crow in rural Ohio. My siblings are baby-boomers who remember the civil rights era with the perspective of children and what we now refer to as "tweens," yet I have no memory of any of it because I was born in 1967-- a member of the once reviled Generation X, a generation that has produced our current president and the republican vice-president nominee.
So, how do I help the students gain empathy for the situation, honor their perspective, and find peace in believing I simplified the era's issues to make them accessible to my students without trivializing these issues? Fortunately, the middle school's anti-bullying program gives us both an on-ramp to meeting each other half-way. I asked who are the four types of people involved in a bullying situation: victims, bullies, by-standers, and advocates. Was Connie bullied? Why did she want revenge? Was Mike really an advocate and was he completely innocent?
I am caught in the middle in many ways. I help students bridge the achievement gap between high school and college expectations during the summers. I have empathy for my students, for Connie, and for the other characters in the novel. I am in the middle because I was raised by parents born during the Great Depression, who grew up with Jim Crow in rural Ohio. My siblings are baby-boomers who remember the civil rights era with the perspective of children and what we now refer to as "tweens," yet I have no memory of any of it because I was born in 1967-- a member of the once reviled Generation X, a generation that has produced our current president and the republican vice-president nominee.
So, how do I help the students gain empathy for the situation, honor their perspective, and find peace in believing I simplified the era's issues to make them accessible to my students without trivializing these issues? Fortunately, the middle school's anti-bullying program gives us both an on-ramp to meeting each other half-way. I asked who are the four types of people involved in a bullying situation: victims, bullies, by-standers, and advocates. Was Connie bullied? Why did she want revenge? Was Mike really an advocate and was he completely innocent?
While viewing the video, I made a list of allusions made to events and prominent figures in the Civil Rights era. They are as follows: Emmett Till; Rosa Parks; Jim Crow; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Birmingham Bus Boycott, "Letter from A Birmingham Jail;" The Little Rock Nine; lynching; Brown v Board of Education; Lunch Counter Sit-ins; Ku Klux Klan, The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham; Voting Rights Act; Jimmy Lee Jackson; the March to Birmingham, Bloody Sunday.
Some of my classes started the video in the middle of class so they were not able to finish. My formative assessment for them was a simple exit ticket from old xeroxes and cut into quarters. They identified at least 5 things they learned, were surprised by, or that they know is going to linger with them. Here are some of their reactions. I have made no attempt to fix their grammar because I wanted to share their voices, as is, 3 weeks into 8th grade.
Some of my classes started the video in the middle of class so they were not able to finish. My formative assessment for them was a simple exit ticket from old xeroxes and cut into quarters. They identified at least 5 things they learned, were surprised by, or that they know is going to linger with them. Here are some of their reactions. I have made no attempt to fix their grammar because I wanted to share their voices, as is, 3 weeks into 8th grade.
- I didn't know that even their [blacks] graveyards were segregated.
- A black boy was killed for talking to a white man's wife.
- Men admitted to killing the boy and still were found not guilty
- Jury was all-white and biased
- Blacks had to be guarded to get them into that school
- The average income of an African American man was $700 a year
- Graves [of blacks] were in swamps and abandoned areas
- Blacks were in slavery for 300 years
- Each and every day when a colored kid wanted to go to school, adults stood outside and harassed them
- In 1954 slavery was already gone for almost a century
- A bus was set on fire because there were black people in it
- How the blacks got treated in the diner
- 9 black students inspired college students to fight segregation laws
- That Rosa Parks refused to giver her seat to a white man and was arrested
- There were signs saying whites only.
- Whites didn't get into troube.
- In 1956 they banned bus segregation.
Thursday, September 6, 2012
“We cannot direct the wind…but we can adjust the sails.” --Unknown
So last term, I spent a year with colleagues from SEMS East and Kennard Dale working on a district formative assessment committee. We learned more about formative assessment, tried new strategies, visited each others classrooms, shared successes and failures and generally collaborated with the goal of improving and increasing our use of this pedagogical tool. The lasting messages I take with me into this year are how to achieve 100% class participation, ways to monitor learning as it is acquired, schema mining, and progressive feedback.
This year, our principal asked our staff to come up with their own self-improvement goal. I truly learned a great deal about what I was doing well, what I should do more of and what I wasn't doing at all, so the goal plan was easy to come up with. In New Jersey, we called them PIPs (Personal Improvement Plans). No brainer-- I am going to work to be more intentional in my implementation of formative assessment by intentionally embedding formative assessments at least twice a week into my lesson plans.
To that end, I gave myself permission to think out of the box. Today, we were in the computer lab for the purpose of reading international and national news stories on the districts online newspaper subscription. I expose students to 3-5 root words per six-day cycle, and today, students were to read articles and see if the pros were using any vocabulary that used any of our roots.
I learned a few things that, upon reflection, just make sense--- newspapers do not follow my lesson plan -- it actually is possible that students could read more than one article that did not use ANY of my vocabulary. I'm a middle school teacher, after 18 years of teaching --- I'm not surprised when things go awry. Now in year 19, I just try to figure out what will go wrong before it does.
So the formative assessment I intended to use had a twist. I intended to use the back channel, todaysmeet.com, to ask my anticipatory set questions. I wanted all students to be able to show me what they knew without worrying about my calling on them. Todaysmeet allows kids to instant message me or create a chatroom that only includes our class. The idea was cool but the execution needed some work.
Problem one-- I had access to the back channel but the student's access was blocked.
Solution - call tech support and have them unblock the site to the kids.
Problem two - kids misspelled my name or words in the room name
Solution - teachable moment-- even in the 21st Century spelling accuracy counts, matters, and the computer will not self-correct everything. I guess I'm not going to be obsolete afterall. :-)
I feel sorry for my first period class because they always help me get the "bugs" out of a lesson, especially when technology is involved. But it's ok, they learn I'm not perfect and don't expect them to be. We also work daily on problem-solving skills. We're learning this technology thing together.
Period 2 I had my act together better. The site was opened, I used a PowerPoint page to broadcast the web address prominently, and included logging-in instructions. Kids answered the prompt and then I had them log in to the online newspaper.
The only real "fail" in the lesson today was that the YDR is written on an 8th grade reading level or lower and none of the roots appeared in the articles the students read. I used my speed reading skills on about 6 articles and discovered the kids were correct.
I did what I always do when things go awry. Improvised. Finding evidence of our root words for the cycle in their own free-reading became extra credit and I used the blunders as connecting schema for the quote of the day:
This year, our principal asked our staff to come up with their own self-improvement goal. I truly learned a great deal about what I was doing well, what I should do more of and what I wasn't doing at all, so the goal plan was easy to come up with. In New Jersey, we called them PIPs (Personal Improvement Plans). No brainer-- I am going to work to be more intentional in my implementation of formative assessment by intentionally embedding formative assessments at least twice a week into my lesson plans.
To that end, I gave myself permission to think out of the box. Today, we were in the computer lab for the purpose of reading international and national news stories on the districts online newspaper subscription. I expose students to 3-5 root words per six-day cycle, and today, students were to read articles and see if the pros were using any vocabulary that used any of our roots.
I learned a few things that, upon reflection, just make sense--- newspapers do not follow my lesson plan -- it actually is possible that students could read more than one article that did not use ANY of my vocabulary. I'm a middle school teacher, after 18 years of teaching --- I'm not surprised when things go awry. Now in year 19, I just try to figure out what will go wrong before it does.
So the formative assessment I intended to use had a twist. I intended to use the back channel, todaysmeet.com, to ask my anticipatory set questions. I wanted all students to be able to show me what they knew without worrying about my calling on them. Todaysmeet allows kids to instant message me or create a chatroom that only includes our class. The idea was cool but the execution needed some work.
Problem one-- I had access to the back channel but the student's access was blocked.
Solution - call tech support and have them unblock the site to the kids.
Problem two - kids misspelled my name or words in the room name
Solution - teachable moment-- even in the 21st Century spelling accuracy counts, matters, and the computer will not self-correct everything. I guess I'm not going to be obsolete afterall. :-)
I feel sorry for my first period class because they always help me get the "bugs" out of a lesson, especially when technology is involved. But it's ok, they learn I'm not perfect and don't expect them to be. We also work daily on problem-solving skills. We're learning this technology thing together.
Period 2 I had my act together better. The site was opened, I used a PowerPoint page to broadcast the web address prominently, and included logging-in instructions. Kids answered the prompt and then I had them log in to the online newspaper.
The only real "fail" in the lesson today was that the YDR is written on an 8th grade reading level or lower and none of the roots appeared in the articles the students read. I used my speed reading skills on about 6 articles and discovered the kids were correct.
I did what I always do when things go awry. Improvised. Finding evidence of our root words for the cycle in their own free-reading became extra credit and I used the blunders as connecting schema for the quote of the day:
“We cannot direct the wind…but we can adjust the sails.” --Unknown
Joel Logan, Stewartstown, PA
I am also an African American male who grew up a corporate brat (GE-- we bring good things to life...) in Western MA, Central NY, and Tidewater VA. I now teach in a rural school district in Southern York County, Pa. Prior to this teaching position, I taught in Mercer County, NJ near Princeton. I just finished my 10th year as an adjunct professor in the EOF program at The College of New Jersey in Ewing, NJ.
I know I'm going to go off topic with stories of raising an adorable yellow lab puppy named Hannah. Don't be surprised if I break teacher talk with bowling news (I'm a member of the PBA,) family news, random musings etc.. but hey--- it's my blog and I can digress if I want to, right?
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