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.
Monday, September 10, 2012
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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