Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

Books written about research in education tend to follow the pattern of describing a major issue that everyone is already talking about, presenting some statistics that make the problem seem worse, and then describing ways that teachers can, in the classroom, deal with said problem.  Gallagher does not stray from this pattern in even the slightest way.

I like that he presents clear classroom practices that promise to increase students' frequency and quality of independent reading.  I also like that these methods are all things that used to be more common in public schools and that he explains why we have gotten away from them and why we need to go back to them.  I've been talking to teachers in my school about the research Gallagher presents, and will be trying many of his suggestions in the coming school year.

Unfortunately the world needs more than that.

I do not like that this book is written for an audience of only teachers.  If we believe that there are problems in education in America that we can effectively address, we have to also recognize that teachers are no longer the decision makers in education.  We failed to hold on to that power decades ago.  Gallagher briefly describes some ways of talking administrators into supporting more pro-reading policies on a classroom level, but no place does he adress those administrators directly.  We do not need more books written to help teachers manage the shitty reality of our profession.  We need books written to empower teachers to improve the state of education outside of the confines of our classrooms and help policy makers (who are not teachers and do not read education research) and politicians understand what they are doing that is hurting the learning of our children in this country.  Your governor, your local legislature, and probably even your school board does not understand why the policies that they mandate do nothing to improve anything, and this book will not help them in any way.

Preach it, cousin!

My awesome wife just found a blog called Adulting that gets at what I'm trying to get at, only better.  I am now a fan of the words that this person types!

In particular, I recommend this post, which sums up everything of substance that I have ever uttered in front of any student of mine. It is also the lesson that I may never fully learn myself, no matter how hard I try.  I'm getting there, though.

Growing Up Latino edited by Harold Augenbraum and Ilan Stavans

Growing Up Latino is one of the original efforts within the literary realm to combine the works of various Spanish-decent cultures into a single volume.  The introduction clearly states a desire to highlight the commonalities between Chicano, Caribbean, Central, and South American peoples and literary styles under one term: Latino.  It contains works by all of the recent heavy-hitters selected to highlight magical realism, immigrant narratives, and descriptions of latino home life.  Much of this is an enjoyable read, and while the introduction is dated, it does show the progression of literary criticism around these authors when compared with more recent writings.  Enough of the short stories are entertaining outside of the scholarly intent of the collection that I'd suggest this to anyone into short fiction as pleasure reading.

Podcasts: The Second Coming

So last year I tried to get my Contemporary Literature students to record short memoir podcasts and it was largely a failure.  Only one recording (out of students) turned out reasonably well, and that student was very self-conscious about her own voice and did not want to share it with anyone.  *sigh*

I'm still plugging away, though, and this year might be different.  Like last year, the kids get horrified looks on their faces when I suggest that we may be putting some of their voices up on the Internet, but their initial written versions have turned out better.  We spent more time working on them during class, with the bulk of that time spent brainstorming and drafting.  We read and listened to more examples of memoirs before and while writing, so they had more quality models.  I'm also going to try to prep them a bit better before the recording, and have them all do two takes.

If the recordings turn out better and the kids are into it, I'll see about the legalities of posting some of them here.

I Don't Like Back to Basics

As always, Philly's The Notebook is the greatest newspaper to report on public schools ever. Really ever.

Here is an article covering the recent transformation of West Philly High from a regular public to a Promise Academy. For those of you who don't know and did not follow the link, West Philly High has had a really rough decade. Over the past few years, however, teachers, students, administrators, and community members at the school began implementing a progressive, long-term-thinking pedagogy/school-culture that focussed on the real world needs of the students. They worked hard to build connections between the school and the surrounding city and mutual investment. This is tough to do and takes generations to realize. After their test scores stayed low for a year, they were taken over as a Promise Academy.

The school now runs on a rigid, back-to-basics curriculum that stresses nationally tested skills only and specifically does not work with higher order critical thinking skills. Proponents of the plan say that in future years, once the students start performing better, the school will begin to reintroduce critical thinking in the curriculum. I know this is bull pucky. You know this is bull pucky. They know this is bull pucky.

I used to work in a middle school that used a Back to Basics model (similar to the one used at the Promise Academies). After I moved to a different school (this time a high school), I had a student who had graduated from my old middle school with all kinds of academic honors. In the few years between the 8th and 11th grades, she had retained very few of these "basics" skills and had had to overcome huge gaps in her critical thinking ability. But, boy could she pick multiple-choice answers!

The amount of time it takes to teach a child to pick multiple-choice answers makes it nearly impossible to address critical thinking (please read "meaningful to the real world") skills in her education. Had the school backed off even a little, her scores would not have been as high. Within that logic set, teaching critical thinking equals failure.

Students who leave school with very few useful academic schools, and memories of their education being horribly boring and unrelated to their real lives outside of school will not pass on anything academic to their children. That means future generations to pass through West Philly High will come with the same lack of reading and math. To do well on tests, they will have to receive intensive training in picking multiple-choice answers. This will keep them from being able to get any time working on critical thinking questions. Anyone else see the pattern?

Education reform takes generations worth of work. It is hard to help people value education. Those involved don't see much progress within one cycle of students. The progress is realized when the children and grandchildren of the students who began the effort show up to school already loving books, already using basic logic, already playing a sport, and already producing independent art. The first step is building a trust and a love of education.

You can't do that by "taking over" schools and stuffing students into disconnected test-taking programs that do very little to help their chances of seeing any benefit from their schooling.

I want to believe that the goal of all people involved in education is to improve the state of all of our communities, but education reform efforts will clearly fail at this, and those implementing them must see this. What the hell is their goal, and why are they doing this to us?

SWBAT Forget Stuff

This year in my classes we will learn how to forget things.

As a teacher, I get to fight the loss of certain useful skills.  My students live in a world where every single text message they ever send, every picture they ever take, and every tap of the *enter* key is saved forever and generally in public.  Nothing is forgotten anymore!

Without the ability to forget we cannot move on in our lives.  We cannot forgive if we cannot forget.  Minor details continue to nag for months after they should have faded into the background noise of living.

So this year, we are forgetting things.  That graphic novel excerpt that we gave an honest shot, but couldn't quite work out as a class?  It's gone.  I'll never mention it again.  The introduction writing activity that yielded forced blather?  I've never even heard of it.  I can't even imagine what it must have been like.

From this point forward, the good stays in our memory as long as we can hold it, and the rest hits the recycling bin, never to bother us again.  We need the space for something better.  Useful thoughts will stay with us.  Fascinating texts will come back monthly.  Fun new words will pepper our speech.  Excellent writing will get more honed as we constantly return to it.  Nothing else can have our time, energy, or precious attention.

Take that, Internet!

On Going Pass/Fail

The new school year approacheth! This time around my Junior Seminar class goes from a letter-graded course to pass/fail. In past years we found that some of our students who tend to get Cs and Ds were failing their seminar class (at my school, this is the one that is meant to give extra support and move students up to grade level in reading). Not good. Students (especially English language learners of which we have many) found this frustrating. Something needed to change. 

The idea behind the switch to pass/fail is to allow for more fluid grading.

 Using grading as a barrier to entry is an exclusionary act. It keeps out students who perform differently than (notice that I did not type "below") an arbitrarily determined standard. This does not fit my goals for the class.

 Alternatively we can think of grading as a communicative act, a way of telling a student whether or not they used an activity to demonstrate some predetermined form of progress. This way, students get to use a grade to determine where they are improving and where they can focus future efforts. They set their own standard as a byproduct of past performance and can then use this self-determined standard to gage improvement.

 Letter grades have been swiped by the barrier to entry crowd. Student grades become GPAs which are used to keep them out of prestigious institutions. They denote some form of standard that can be assumed to be constant across schools. Again, this does not work for me. Progress looks different from student to student. A seventeen-year-old who comes to me from a family that has surrounded her with books and a private school education may not have to work very hard to earn an A. No effort means no improvement. By giving her an A I am not encouraging her education. A student who recently came to the US from a farm in the Dominican Republic with limited English and an inconsistant education may struggle heroically and still get an F. Heroic struggle means improvement. By giving her an F I am not encouraging her education. However, if I have a fluid pass/fail system I can mark the first student's paper with a "fail" and ask her to try again, this time challenging herself in ways that she and I can determine ahead of time, and mark the second student's paper with a "pass" and highlight what progress she has made since her last attempt and what efforts she can make the next time around. This encourages education.

 If I really want inquisitive students who will work from intrinsic motivation to learn new, exciting things about the world, then the pass/fail system works better for my class.

 The added bonus here is the situation in which students may want to contest their grade. Letter grades are generally based on a rubric. If a student comes to me with a concern about a letter grade all I do is point at the rubric and say, "You didn't do these things, so I didn't give you these points, so you got this grade." That's not exactly communication. All I did was point to something that the student could have read on his own. If the same student comes to me with a concern about a pass/fail grade then I have to actually defend my grading decision. The only evidence that I can reasonably use is past performance vs. current performance. The student can counter my evidence, and we can have an actual conversation about the assignment. He might prove me wrong. I might be able to use the situation to further highlight areas where the student can improve and doubly encourage that improvement. All kinds of messy situations could occur. It's gonna be a good year.

Dr. Ackerman leaves Philly district and takes a lot of useful money with her.

Here's the article.

I don't like to think about how long it will take me to earn $905K teaching in the Philly district. If Ackerman cared so much about the students she'd agree to sever her contract w/out legal action so we don't have to pay her for work she didn't do. Also I'm not into the "at least she'd gone" argument. We don't know who will be chosen to replace her. Philly's track record isn't great in that department.

Feed by M. T. Anderson

Amazon link

I can't wait to teach Feed this coming school year. This book is one of those examples of fiction that leaves the reader off-kilter and a little unhinged at the end. Very powerful, very visceral, and very well attuned to popular concerns about American culture. I look forward to seeing whether actual young adults respond to this young adult novel. This old fogey thought it was pretty excellent!

Yeah, YA dystopias!

Teaching as if Life Matters by Christopher Uhl with Dana L. Stuchul

Amazon link

I am a sucker for hubris, especially when it concerns thing about which I care a lot. Christopher Uhl would like to suggest some foundational changes in the way that we educate each other as a species. He does this so that we can have a new paradigm in the very way that we conceive of ourselves and the cosmos around us. Also, he has some practical suggestions about how this work can be started in our classrooms today.

Uhl does a wonderful job engaging teachers where they are at philosophically and then taking commonly held principals (like encouraging students to ask questions) and taking them to the utmost logical extreme (like restructuring the way that information is gathered and spread in a classroom that has questioned the teacher's authority and found it insufficient) where many of us are no longer comfortable. Pretty heavy stuff, but an honest look at why many teachers believe in democratic processes, but do not enact them in classrooms. Uhl presents ways thinking and practicing that will make these democratic processes more attainable for the teacher, and less confusing for the student.

At no point does Uhl shy away from his political agenda. While I do not agree with the dude 100%, I respect the hell out of an education theorist who has the courage to admit that he or she has opinions and that those opinions do effect the way they think. Most of them pretend to be aloof, lying to themselves and their audience, and generally causing me to toss their book aside. Uhl admits it from the outset and reminds the reader of it at regular intervals. Nice work!

This is a refreshing bit of work with a bibliography that I plan on mining for further reading. I don't know whether or not it will change the human race and the universe in a fundamental way, but it has already changed the way that I do some things in my classroom. That's good enough for me.

Further Reporting on Standardized Tests and Cheating Rates

The New York Times published an article in reference to the article to which I made reference a few posts ago.

I am interested in seeing where this is headed. The pressure for schools to demonstrate continually higher scores on standardized tests from year to year from their students his done nothing but increase since NCLB became the law of the land. Yes, I agree that schools in general and teachers in particular should neither fix statistics, nor help their students cheat. Yes, I agree that accountability to the public helps to ensure a higher quality of service from a school. I just think that we are going about this the wrong way. In Pennsylvania the state standardized tests are created by a private company that is in no way held accountable to the public (yeah, yeah, I know the state government could not renew their contract but that does not happen in practice and they have a de facto monopoly anyway).

The tests do not necessarily reflect anything that is actually taught in any classroom in the state. They do not report on the amount of information learned by individual students as they progress (scores for each grade are compared to scores from the same grade from previos years, not the same students as they advance). The PA state standardized tests do not assess what their creators say they assess and public policy creates situations where cheating is easy, easy to get away with, and very beneficial. Going after "these teachers" who cheat will not fix this problem as they will simply be replaced by more teachers who will be similarly encouraged to become more of "these teachers." If the policy does not change, the problem will persist.

What if we trusted continually trained and licensed professionals to create assessments tailored to determine whether the students learned the presented material? What if we did this on a local level? What if we reported the outcome of these assessments on a bimonthly basis directly to the parents of the students? What if we set time aside for parents to come in and speak directly to these trained professionals? What if parents could contact these trained professionals via phone or email whenever they wanted? The system exists. We've had public schools, quizzes, report cards, parent/teacher conferences, and open sharing of teacher contact information for many decades. It would only require trusting us teachers to do the thing that the public already trusts us to do.

You should read this article. Seriously.

"Confession of a cheating teacher" from Philly's own The Notebook

Great journalism that I hope will shed some light on where we are failing in education in this country. The culture of standardized testing does not work and is not sustainable. It will not reach any of its goals no matter how low those goals are gradually moved. I say that as a dedicated and informed high school classroom teacher.

Reader Response Pairing

This summer I am working on expanding the collection of memoirs and personal essays that I teach in my two classes. High school students respond particularly well to personal essays, and I find that they tend to generally enjoy writing about themselves and their lives. Personal essays are a good way for teachers to encourage self-reflection and journaling practices among their students.

I picked up a copy of Growing Up Latino and have been reading through it to find useful texts. Jesús Colón's "Kipling and I" (The link is a PDF copy that I found on the Montclair University website. The copy also includes Kipling's poem "If . . ." and some critical thinking questions. Nerdy teacher stuff.) is particularly intriguing as it provides a nice bridge between personal essays and reader response essays. Colón writes about the effects of a work of literature on his young life, directly referencing lines from the poem and explaining how his perceptions of its message change as he gains life experiences.

Colón provides a nice model that students can use in their own writing. I hope to try this out with some of my classes in the coming semester. We'll take a look at this example and then find poems (or song lyrics) of our own and connect them to our life experiences. I can see this working to bridge personal writing to writing about what we have read. My hopes are that the students will begin to understand reading as a personal connection between an author and a group of readers where ideas are exchanged, manipulated, re-interpreted, and put back into the public sphere for the process to continue.

Gahhhh! Summer! Ugh!

I have been on summer vacation for three days now and have already heard four different people tell me that the three months that take place during the hottest part of the year are the part of the teaching profession that they envy most. Whenever anyone realizes that I am somewhere close to the beginning of this long, forced vacation (at some jobs the call it a furlough) they start demanding that I provide a list of exciting things that I have planned to fill the empty hours. When I say, "No plans," they fix me with accusing gazes and wax poetic about how nice it must be. I'm sorry, people, they don't make summer camp for adults. When I was a kid my friends had summer break with me. Now my friends work and fix me with withering gazes. One day I'll have children and then I'll be back to having plans that other people think are exciting.

So here, this is what I mean when I say, "No plans."

This summer, like every summer, I'm going to read as many books as I can. I'm going to play my way through a couple of video games that I never got to beat. I'm going to finish recording the demos for the two bands in which I play (then I'll use those demos to get to play more local shows in bars and warehouses and people's basements). I'm going to watch as many horror movies as I can stomach. I'm going to putter around my house, painting here, fixing there, tidying as much as I can. I'm going to cook my wife dinner as often as she wants. I'm going to get together with some friends and play Dungeons and Dragons at last once. I might do some yoga. I might do some pushups. I might drink some beers. My step-brother died a few days ago, so I'm going to continue being sad and angry about that for a while. Then I'll move on and just have nice memories. I'm going to go over the curriculum plans for the classes I teach and make them more effective at meeting important educational goals and more engaging for my students. Lastly I'm going to do my damnedest to keep as much loud, angry music blaring from as many speakers in my house at a time as I can.

It's not a bad way to spend three months with no plans.

Quick post on upcoming podcasts!

About half of my Contemporary Literature class have recorded podcasts of their short memoirs! So far the process has been very valuable, at least to me as a teacher. I like having the one-on-one time with students, explaining a novel process to them, and helping them to tell their stories (or at least part of their stories) in a way that feels more natural to them than writing. Not all of the podcasts have gone as well as I've expected. I am particularly disappointed with one student's lack of effort, but was surprised with the quality of three other students' recordings. I am not yet fully happy with the process, but we ex-Catholics are good at being self-critical and obsessively trying to be all perfect and stuff. The Moth is a wonderful resource that I have found invaluable for examples. Those guys kick ass, and you should listen to them and give them a little bit of your money.

I am still having trouble finding a reliably available blogging tool for my students (my school is going through some technology growing pains that will hopefully settle down next year) so they will not be creating the blogs that I had hoped they might this semester. If the powers that be let me teach the class next year, this will be the first addition that I will make. No blogs for the kids means that they do not all have a good place to post their podcasts. My plan is to, once all are recorded, ask for permission to post them here. I will not be censoring or selecting them in any way. Whoever wants theirs up will see theirs go up. Updates will follow.

A Hypothetical, Unedited Mixtape for My Students

Mp3s may have killed the mixtape, but they do make it so I can just publish a list of songs and let everyone else break copyright laws. My students only actually get to hear some of this stuff. I'd actually make this mix, but I'm a wimp and am worried that my musical tastes are too offensive to share in their entirety.

Here we go, my hypothetical, unedited mixtape for my students that I am too wimpy to actually make (OK, maybe one day . . . ):

1. "Love in Vein" - Skinny Puppy - The best opening track in recorded music. I could never make a mixtape without Skinny Puppy. Just ask my poor wife.

2. "In Bloom" - Nirvana - Grunge! I want everyone to love this song as much as I do.

3. "Time Does Not Heal" - Dark Angel - Thrash metal. Your life does not improve without your action.

4. "Man the Ramparts" - Botch - Hardcore! The world may very well not be on your side, and that is just fine.

5. "Bring Back the Apocalypse" - Sleepytime Gorilla Museum - Art metal. You may very well not be on the world's side, and that is just fine.

6. "Mind's Mirrors" - Meshuggah - Tech-metal. "The struggle to free yourself from restraints / becomes the very shackles"

7. "Wanderlust King" - Gogol Bordello - Joyous, rollicking punk. Everything that everyone does is awesome all the time.

8. "Doin' It" - Herbie Hancock - Did Herbie invent funk? Does it matter? Keep on truckin' kiddies!

9. "Draconian Crackdown" - Rasputina - Cello rock? - Fight the power!

10. "No Quarter" - Led Zeppelin - Rock'n'Roll! The approach I would like my students to take towards life

11. "Swollen Tongue Bums" - Dalek - Angry, noisy hip-hop! You cannot run from your human responsibility.

12. "Watchfire" - Neurosis - Face-melting post-metal. Humanity cannot escape you or your influence.

13. "Death Is Not the End" - Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Folk rock! Nothing is ever actually over.

Son of Contemporary Lit

A week-and-a-half in and I am starting to get a pretty good sense of where these kids are ability-wise. My ESL kids speak and write well, and struggle mostly with English idioms and figurative language in general. The students who receive special education services are pretty well all over the place. I sprung the first longer writing assignment on a bit too early. I would like for them to write a short memoir-style piece, but we began before I did any mini-writing activities. Scaffolding FAIL!!! I'm currently trying to work out the best way of backpedaling out of the assignment.

Yesterday we read Sandra Cisneros's A House of My Own and I had the students use it as a model to express their desires for the future. They shocked me first by really enjoying the short poem and then by really working on the modeling activity. I saw teenagers smiling proudly over their writing and really struggling to get the words right on the paper. I almost never get to see that. In a few days I'm going to try a similar short writing activity with students sharing their writing in small groups and talk with them about ways to read their own writing out loud. I want to know what they like about the assignments and see about doing it more with longer assignments later in the semester. We're getting to the bottom of this "Mister, I like this writing thing" thing.

Contemporary Literature: The Saga Begins

Each year I teach the only section of a Junior/Senior class that started out being called "Science-Fiction Survey." The idea was that there were a handfull of students at our school that were not fully served by regular English classes. They were not intrinsically motivated enough to do well in their regular senior year English class and were not students for whom special education classes were appropriate. So well pulled together some resources for teaching a class with higher interest reading materials, doing more hands-on work, but still getting at the skills needed for senior English. This plan began to erode almost immediately.

My first group contained some students who were also taking the regular senior English class. They were doing fine in this class and did not need any extra services. The second year's group also contained some students who were additionally taking special educational English classes. The third year, many of the students signed up for the class without meeting any of the stated prerequisites at all. All three years over half of each class had no interest in science-fiction in the least. So, like any good adult presented with an impossible task, I did my best to change my goals.

The class is now called "Contemporary Literature" and the oldest piece of writing that I am teaching is Stephen King's The Shining. We will read at least one graphic novel as a class. My textbook is the last few year's The Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. We are going to read investigative journalism and listen to The Moth podcasts. When we are done they will recognize Frank McCourt, Nikki Giovanni, and Billy Collins as the badasses that they are. They are going to creative write their backsides off. I am friggin' terrified.

This year I am looking at a roster of incredibly disperate students. They are all either high school Juniors or Seniors. There are nineteen of them. About five receive special education services. One has never taken a single mainstreamed English course. I know that at least two are listed as English Language Learners. Two of them I have had previously in an honors level class that I also teach. Five have been suggested for honors level classes. Seven have not met the prerequisites for the class. This is going to be a hard group.

We are two days away from starting class. I'm still reading through a book on developing effective group work strategies because I know that pulling these kids together as a cohesive social whole is the only way this class is going to not crash and burn. I'll spend this semester trying to post at least weekly about how things are going.

Why I am not teaching The Catcher in the Rye ever again

I have an important confession to make. I've seen others make this confession and it seems to have been a very cathartic experience for them. So I join the chorus: I hate The Catcher in the Rye. The book is (excuse my use of my students' slang) ass. I am aware that people find Salinger's description of the inner minds of children to be particularly compelling. I am aware that some folks relate to his characters. However, even at 16 when I first read Catcher, I wanted to punch Holden Caulfield in his whiny, over-privileged face.

It is easy to see why this book is so often taught. We can point it out as an example of a book that people have tried to censor (a topic that too many teachers spend too much time discussing). We can use it as a prime example of symbolism and motif. We can use it to let our hair down and have the word "fuck" spoken aloud within our otherwise well-ordered classroom. And since we remember kids liking it when we were younger, we can use it as a way to show our students that "literature isn't always boring."

But it just doesn't live up to its own hype.

Holden is a frustrated child in a relatively decent world. This does not resonate with today's youth. Kids today see plenty of reason to be pissed off and can direct their anger at real world issues. While it is nice for those who have lost a loved one to read a character who is also grieving, most of my students see much in the world that deserves their anger and frustration. Their angst is generally leveled at actual problems that may be solvable.

Even Holden's issues with connecting to his peers do not resonate well any more. Our students, no matter how boxed up they seem in school, are much better at finding like-minded peers than we were. Sure, there are still some that are totally disconnected from others their age, but these students are few and far between. For them, I will keep a few copies of Catcher in my classroom for them to stumble across. For everyone else, it is not the quality of their peers, or even the compatibility of their peers that is the issue. It is managing their image with their peers and trying to sustain meaningful interactions. These are not Holden's problems.

As a child in the early 1950's, Holden feels ignored by adults, and passed over by his culture. His worldview seems vastly different from those around him. In the real world, since the late 1960's youth culture has been central in the general popular American culture. Our students see their values and concerns expressed in media all the time. Even those outliers who do not completely agree with all of the tenants of American culture see people openly expressing disagreement. Our students already understand that they do not have to think like everyone else. This is not a point that we must make, and make, and make.

Perhaps Holden's biggest issue is his lack of a place to acceptably vent his frustration with the world. Thankfully, his bottled up frustration is totally incomprehensible to most of our students. Now we have the Internet, a place where people can and do go to complain. Children (and adults) have the opposite problem today. We complain so much to such like minded people that we don't have anyone left to tell us to clam up from time to time.

I fully respect teachers who wish to continue the mythology of The Catcher in the Rye. If you love it, read it. If you really love it, suggest it to your students. If you respect your students, please, please, please do not teach it. Please, please, please find a more contemporary bildungsroman that more directly addresses the issues actually experienced by our actual students. Find one that uses their language. The word "fuck" twice is not exciting any more. Even better, find many such books and let the students pick the one they want to read. Let them suggest some. Coming-of-age stories are the books that most of your students read a bit on their own anyway. Let's teach something better.

I feel better now.

On sucking at important things

It is time to get done with Grad School. It is also time to start looking like I have a Master's Degree when I am in my classroom. It would also be pretty sweet if my students looked like they had a decent English when they walk out of my room, but that may still be a year or two down the road.

The only outstanding work that separates me from my magical piece of paper that adds those super special initials to the end of my name is a final project. My project is quickly turning into a re-write of my US Literature curriculum in such a way as to vastly beef up the writing component of the class. Much of the work that I have done in getting my Bachelor's Degree and teacher certification has been directed at getting students to view reading and writing as a transformative process. I want them to find and interpret texts in the world and then create their own texts to alter themselves and those around them. The reading part is easy. Kids these days with their texting, and their emailing, and their immersive video games, and their funny trans-media TV shows understand that words mean things. They also understand that the more they look at words the better they understand the world (even the world that is not directly connected to the words, because everything is everything). Such smart little kids these days.

My students still suck at writing, though. The best argument for this is that I still suck as a writing teacher. I've spend the last couple of weeks reading about why that may be. In a week I'll begin working on how to suck less.


There is a three-pronged attack:

1) Work writing in as the focus of my class. The more kids do it, the less they suck at it. The more I teach it, the less I suck at it. See? Win win. Writing is a relic of thought. If I am to determine whether or not the kids are learning something, I need more relics to evaluate. If they aren't writing, I have very little idea of what they are thinking.

2) Create writing groups. My kids rely to heavily on their teachers to revise and edit their writing. Good teachers make themselves irrelivant as quickly as possible. They need to rely on each other, and eventually on themselves to independently seek feedback on their words and know how to translate that feedback into less-sucky writing. Teaching kids to know what to do with feedback is probably going to be the second hardest thing that I will do in my class. The hardest will be getting them to give useful and honest feedback.

3) Help start a reading group among other teachers in my school. Grad school, like college, high school, junior high, elementary school, and Mrs. K's pre-school before it didn't actually make me smarter. Doing shit, recognizing that I suck at doing shit, watching other people do shit, and talking a lot about doing shit has made me better at doing shit. (I guess nothing has really made me smarter. Oh, well.) I would like to have more inteligent conversations about teaching with my fellow teachers about teaching. The best way to start this is to have more intelligent conversations about whatever. I'd like to get together once a month or so with a group of interrested co-workers and talk about books that we suggest to the rest of the group. I bet some people will suggest some neat books. Ideas are dangerous. Teachers are dangerous. We'll see where this goes.


There it is: What I am thinking about right now.