May 15, 2008
Yeah, was playing around with my summer goodbye post draft and uploading music files so I wouldn’t have to crank it out while revising twenty plus student literacy profiles in June, and dumped it into the feed accidentally. If you see it, don’t let it confuse you– I’m still around. I’ll put it up with working links in a few weeks. Digital immigrant, indeed.
May 11, 2008
As I get further into A Day No Pigs Would Die I’m discovering, quite by accident (or maybe not), a wealth of nature-related wisdom packed into it. It does take place on a Shaker Vermont farm, after all. So despite my initial woes, not only is Pigs starting to work well as an example of a banned book, but it makes this unit a shoe-in for the one just before The Leopold Education Project next year. We could collect Pigs axioms (I’m already getting kid-generated questions like, “Is it really true that pigs and cows can’t be penned next to each other?”) and research them, while relating them to excerpts from Sand County Almanac. Perfect springtime stuff, perfect high quality literature, perfect dovetail between fiction and non-fiction. I can’t wait.
I’m reflecting on this while my kids and I are wildcrafting in the backyard this evening– this is the absolutely lovely word, I’ve learned, for harvesting uncultivated edible plants. Today we’re hurrying to get four packed cups of violet blossoms before we cut the lawn. We’ll boil them down with sugar into a deep-hued, fragrant syrup, great over pancakes and near heaven with vanilla ice cream. My daughter is tweezing the flowers with her little fingers out of the long grass, singing “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” at the top of her lungs.
We’re doing double-duty by also weeding the garlic mustard that’s spread into the yard. One of the worst spreading non-indigenous plants of New York State, it was originally brought over by European settlers as a fast-growing herb for flavor in stews. My daughter offers to help me pull up the shallow root stocks, which complain by letting loose their characteristic pungent smell.
“But why are we pulling these up? They have pretty white flowers on the top,” she comments.
“Well, we don’t really want them in the yard,” I say gently.
“Why?”
I’m suddenly faced with explaining the concept of invasive species to a five year old. This sort of thing happens a lot.
I hunker down to her level in the grass, try to put it in language she’ll understand. “See how it grows so fast, and goes all over the place? When it does that, it takes the light and the soil away from other plants. It doesn’t want to share.”
She processes this, then nods.
“Oh,” she says solemnly. “It’s like people.”
May 7, 2008
Thanks to Doug Noon for introducing me to all of the following, woven together in a lovely post that summarizes much of what I have been wrestling with this year:
May 2, 2008
This Day No Pigs Would Die unit is driving me nuts.
Amongst my challenges: being politely advised against choosing banned books that are on the high school curriculum for my strongest readers; conversations at school that make me despair of the real protection of free speech; a religious family not allowing their student to *read* anything about pigs, never mind dietary restrictions (a new wrinkle for me which I must treat with great respect– and an entire alternate unit); and the pure psychological agitas that veering off the standard curriculum has caused me as an untenured and inexperienced teacher of mainstream English.
Somewhere I read recently– it may have been the legendary John Gatto– that in order to protect one’s innovations in the classroom (not that I ever thought this unit would be regarded as so “innovative”), it’s helpful to be above reproach in all teaching’s other demands: from your cross-referenced attendance book, to your crystalline lesson plans, to your flawless documentation of parental contact. I’m trying, man, but I sure ain’t there yet, and I feel it. I feel like I’m defending a baby against hungry wolves with a cotton ball.
Maybe that’s a little paranoid.
But anyway, as a result, I don’t know at all if I would suggest my course of action this year to another teacher. Except, of course, for the presence of Billy.
Billy and his class were having an animated discussion over their homework– and perhaps I should put that in italics, since it just dawned on me how amazing that is– having an animated discussion over their homework– the labeling of a graph depicting where books have been banned over the past five years. Billy points out, with characteristic humor, that one of the places listed was a prison library.
“Look at that,” he said. “One. One person challenged a book in a prison library.” He and I look at each other and start to smile.
“Who challenged it?” I wonder out loud.
“The warden? What book was it?” he counters, leaning over to me to whisper. “Hey You {insert epithet here}, I Escaped From Prison: Here’s How”?
I can just see the note home.
“Dear Billy’s Mother:
Billy made a deeply inappropriate joke in class today that demonstrated that he has absorbed, synthesized, and engaged in all the material in our unit of study to this point. Please sign this note so that he can skip the quiz on Wednesday. Thank you.”
April 28, 2008
I’m sitting at lunch with one of the worst slackers in my entire team of students—he’s in to make up a quiz from three months ago. Bright, gangly; often out of school during the first day of any given hunting season. The words “You’re so gay” are about as prevalent in his vocabulary as, well, nouns.
He has a kind and ironic sense of humor, though, and it is this that has me laughing like an idiot about a story he’s relating about a sub, who apparently cemented his power structure in the class by introducing himself as “King Johnson.”
“And then we started talking about rainbow t-shirts, you know, tie-dye,” says my student, “and then I said I didn’t like them, and he called me homophobic.”
He pauses.
“Like, what does that MEAN, Ms. S?”
I have struggled with nearly every aspect of teaching in this first mainstream year, but one of the things I can manage to do with kids is navigate fairly sensitive topics. We start a very matter of fact conversation about what people mean these days when they say colloquially that someone is homophobic. I wait for the putdown, the expected profession of revulsion, the unthinking spitback of adult conservatism. Silently I start marshalling my defense of treating everyone with dignity, regardless of whether one agrees with their choices.
My kid pauses again, now for a long time.
“But one of my family members is gay,” he says. “And some of my neighbors. And they’re fine.”
And now it’s my turn to pause.
“Then you’re not homophobic, Jack,” I finally tell him.
He squares his shoulders. Shakes his hair out of his eyes. Looks at me.
“No,” he says. “I’m not.”
April 25, 2008
I got two emails today, hard on each other’s heels, from Ph.Ds I’ve been badgering for information communicating with on classroom issues that have come up.
Harry Brighouse sends a sneak preview of a chapter in an upcoming edited collection of essays– see the attached file controversial-issues.doc– on the topic of navigating controversial philosophical topics in class. I’ve only skimmed it but it reminds me right away of a dialectic classroom approach which hasn’t gotten nearly enough press called The Paideia Seminar.
Sue Sing of the Open University U.K. sends her views, based on her dissertation research, on whether we can legitimately expect adolescents to know how to use apostrophes. This is thanks to Nigel Hall, whom I mention here. It’s worth quoting at length.
“In the UK, children begin to learn about punctuation at
school during the primary years. They are taught the omissive
apostrophe in Year 3 (aged 7), though they are highly likely to have
encountered it much sooner than this through their reading. In Year 4,
children then learn about the possessive apostrophe. Two years later,
by the end of primary education they are expected to be able to use the
mark for both its functions, easily and competently. However, as you
have found with your students this is often rarely the case.
Through my analysis, I learnt that while some children may appear to use
the apostrophe correctly (for either or both functions), they may not
always be using it for the right reasons. However, without exploring
children’s thinking behind their punctuation decisions this fact will
simply go unrealised and therefore what may appear as sound knowledge
and usage in fact disguises a host of uncertainties and confusions. In
addition, children draw on a range of information sources to help them
decide where to use punctuation marks - some of these being
linguistic-based but equally, some being for non-linguistic reasons.
This is not to say that children are not able to understand how to use
such marks; on the contrary, through our research it became quite
evident that our participants were thinking deeply and intensely about
the subject and were really working hard to try to work out what mark to
write and why.”
These guys are great.
I suppose you could put such generosity down to my excellent criteria in choosing Ph.Ds to badger (snort), but the same thing happened several years ago while I was looking for someone– anyone– to give me a crash course in Haitian Creole for an ESL kid who was coming into the district. I got someone on the phone from a midwestern university and we talked for near an hour.
I think there’s a message here to be had about vertical alignment, that lovely educational buzzphrase that usually means the woefully prosaic “we shouldn’t teach the same material seven years in a row,” but should mean “Let’s make it an institutional priority to talk on an ongoing basis to any university researcher who can help us teach better.” Maybe I should have titled this post “They Don’t Bite.”
You’ll note that I choose the words “institutional priority” with great care. I can call every professor at Harvard until their Nobel Prizes come home, but until intellectual partnerships between school practitioners and university researchers are institutionally supported, they will remain the myopic crazy email fun and pet projects of, well, geeks like me.
Do we do enough of this? Are we scared to do this? What does this say about how we conceive of ourselves as professionals– and how we hold ourselves accountable for effective practice?
April 23, 2008
Check this out, on the high-philosophy, low-bullshit blog Crooked Timber. Harry Brighouse is one of my heroes– his deceptively slim and devastatingly crystalline book On Education has kept me sane this year. I’m immensely grateful for his link back to The Line, which only happened because of the truly shocking success of this “send your heroes fan letters and ask for feedback” policy I seem to have developed for 07-08. Try it. It works.
More overarchingly, credit for the introduction to Harry Brighouse, and multiple other theorists who are now staples of my educational philosophy, is once again, and rapidly becoming as always, Joe Henderson’s.
April 22, 2008
“The spring over there takes you by the throat, the flowers blooming by the thousands over white walls. If you strolled around for an hour in the hills surrounding my town, you would return with the odor of honey in your clothes.” — Albert Camus
My students know this instinctively, and I’ve been in a bit of awe this week at the teacher-class relationship which has apparently also so blossomed, in spite of my multiple missteps this year, that instead of dragging in and disengaging in favor of honey in their clothes, they throw their cards right on the table: “Ms. S, can we go outside?”
Truthfully, they know they have a sympathetic ear. I try to honor this request whenever I can justify it academically, which is fairly often– one of the joys of teaching English. Nothing like honing the powers of observation while outdoors. Additionally, by happy accident, the novel we are about to embark upon, A Day No Pigs Would Die, begins and ends in April. We are tracking its content under the essential question Why was this novel 17th on the list of Top 100 Books Banned for the decade? as a continuation of our unit on the First Amendment, and going outside is probably good for this reason as well, as I can scout out exit routes on campus when the angry parental mob I dream about at night comes for me with their pitchforks.
This unit is the first in a fairly long range plan of about five years, swapping out lame inherited 7th grade content incrementally until I’ve got September-June full of stuff that actually works. The unit I’ll try next, as it turns out, is going to really offer my throat to Spring: it’ll be based on a workshop I’ll take in August through the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, called the Leopold Education Project.
For more and more I am convinced that this is a fundamental need of children that I am (frankly) morally bound to address immediately: In content, to be able to negotiate decent scientific nonfiction with confidence. In communal responsibility, to understand the finite, fragile, and internconnected nature of our resources. And in plain ol’ to get the hell outside– especially in the face of continued and ever-widening acceptance of physical digital isolation.
Such a unit cannot be solid milk chocolate sunlit meadows and daffodils, though. One of the first “wilderness texts” I read and loved was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and it comes to mind with a vengeance now. Its first image is one of a frog being liquidated from the inside by a preying water bug. Yummy.
I have to square this with the inimitable sense of belonging I can find nowhere else but out in the woods– the same impulse that drives my kids to bombard me with “Can we go outside?”I struggle with it, as Annie does throughout the entirety of Tinker Creek. The late Stephen Jay Gould, the brilliant Harvard biologist, terms this aspect of nature “non-moral” in an essay that uses similar gruesome examples of predator and prey– I don’t know about you, but bugs seem to have cornered this market.
It’s what causes me to balk when folks suggest that a complete moral code, or system of meaning, may be found entirely with nature or nature’s metaphors. Sorry– I can get with cycles and our bodies being made of elements that are only created within stars, but the bugs. You’ve got to explain the bugs. CS Lewis had to write several whole essays on the problem of pain in the animal kingdom to try and do it.
Beyond that, I know damn well that if I break my ankle in the Adirondacks backcountry winter with no survival equipment, the mountains will look upon me in their loveliness, unmoved, as I fade away. Funny, perhaps, that this might also be the source of my sense of peace. The trees will never say anything as mean-spirited or abusive to me as I will to myself. Such as how I overphilosophize about my units.
Anyway. These are the things I will somehow have to repackage for profitable consumption for 7th graders. Maybe in a pill? Nah– someone’s tried it already.
April 17, 2008
2) Why “high flyer” schools that defy poverty might not be doing anything of the sort.
3) Tell me NCLB measures something concrete. Tell me standardized exam scores reflect teacher prowess. And then tell me why New York State gives its English exam in January, smack between two teachers’ interaction with a cohort of kids. Please. Tell me. I’ve been asking for seven years now.
