The Line

Pay attention. For better or worse, this means us.

Chicago Tribune Report, 1/20/10: Media use by teens, tweens grows to 53 hours a week

I’ll be printing this out and reading it with my classes.

The Line makes Jay Matthews’ list for top education blogs 2010 at the Washington Post. He lets me know that The Line arrived on his radar because of the amount of readers who nominated the blog for his attention.

You folks are the best. Drop a line if you’re one of the culpable, so I can thank you personally.

S. is on the brink of retirement, after having taught for almost 35 years. A hulking, soft-spoken, African-American giant, he sits by himself in faculty meetings and silently observes the world– that is, until you are working in the copy room together.

He knows I have a tiny window into his secret life, where in stark contrast to his easygoing demeanor, he is dedicated and endlessly working or coaching his innumerable sports teams– we often run into each other on Saturday mornings when no one else is in the building. In tacit payment for my discretion in this matter, I get his stories.

He laughs and shrugs when the conversation wends to the flap over Harry Reid’s comments on Obama’s skin tone and accent.

“Look. The black community has been talking about those things for years. Reid didn’t say anything we don’t already know,” he adds. (Juan Williams of NPR agrees.)

It would be hard for me, although not impossible, to conduct a conversation on dialect and ebonics in my classroom. I’ve got the knowledge and material from my work in ESL, and a master model in Obama, who shuffles dialects on and off like he’s in vaudeville. It’s called code-switching, and acknowledgement of the phenomenon in studies of linguistics is neither racist nor bigoted, but simply accepted. Reid may have been “inelegant,” as Williams phrased it on yesterday morning’s radio, but he was also essentially correct.

S.  is wary, though, no doubt having waded through enough racial sensitivity in his lifetime. He even makes sure to explain to his teams the genesis of his term for his non-listening players– “yo-yos”– so it isn’t mistakenly regarded as some kind of epithet.

“It’s when I was a teenager,” S. tells me. “I’d walk into this crowded deli in New York City and walk right back out again, because I didn’t get the counter guy’s attention.

“Finally they told me, “Look. Just say ‘Yo! Yo! Corned beef on rye!’ We’ll get you fed.”

Every-so-slightly salty language at the 0:30 mark– and don’t drink milk while watching or it will come out of your nose, warns the Delaware State Division of Libraries.

Update: And apparently, according to the spam comment on this post I received this morning, reading also reduces cellulite.

“Dehumanized,” by Mark Slouka out of Harper’s Magazine.

I haven’t come across a more comprehensive and articulate piece of writing that captures my concerns on the current direction of American education– a direction most notably demonstrated through the current draft of the National E/LA Standards. Even Slouka’s argument against the tyranny of math and science, which I think is faulty, still holds provocative bell tones of truth.

It’s long (and as Tom points out in the comments, rambles just a touch at times from K-12 education.) Who cares. Skim it. Take thirty seconds and skip to the end. Whatever. Read it. And then tell me what you think.

Yep. I’ve been using Poetry 180 as the source of a new opening activity, ripped unapologetically from Nancie Atwell (as a great many things I do these days are), called Poem of the Day– or the P.O.D., as the kids call it, which I believe they think sounds a little more like a rapper, and therefore more worthy.

Twice now we’ve read through a kick-ass poem and the kids have been burning with questions at the end. Who’s the speaker? What does this line mean? And always: where did this poem come from? They want to eat its genesis, its reality, in the same way they gobble up the “real lives” of their favorite stars. Ah, who doesn’t want to know, in their heart of hearts, what David Foster Wallace had for breakfast?

“Do you want to email the poet and ask your questions?” I say nonchalantly, banking on what has now become the expected class-wide whooping answer: “YEAH.”

I model– no– I conduct, real-time– our search, over the digital projector: Googling the author’s name, searching the poet’s biographies, looking up websites. We find an email address, pull up my school account, write the email together, and send it, having conversations about such things as why adding “P.S.– YOU ROCK!” at the bottom is kind, but not quite the tone we’re looking to strike.

Laurel Blossom, author of “Radio,” answered our email within six hours today, and asked us to send her poems. Dorianne Laux, author of “Break,” was located at North Carolina State University, and is currently figuring out a conference call with my sixth period class so they can ask her their questions in person.

These are not magical emails. We don’t write and re-write them, add gratuitous appeals to pity, or include money. We send them out into the world sailing on nothing but the feather-light breeze of tween curiosity; and what returns, seems to do so ten-fold.

What things my kids are learning through this exercise cannot be found in any state or national E/LA standard– and yet I am beginning to wonder if this is in fact the litmus test for the most important things kids do learn. My kids are learning that poets will write back to a class of polite seventh graders, and write back with alacrity and delight. They are learning that wordsmiths out there in world are not only generous with their words, but with their time and attention.

They are learning a different meaning of celebrity– the root of which, I found out today, is the Latin celeber: Frequented. Populous.

Community.

This chapter’s about discipline. I think it misses the mark, disppointingly so, for what is overall a solid teacher reference.

For the past 24 hours I have been staring constantly at my feet. This is the result of a gift certificate to a local spa I used this week.  My husband gave it to me for Christmas. Christmas 2008, that is. This is fairly indicative of the comparative frequency with which I interact with spas.

The nice young woman who trimmed my nails, massaged my insteps, and kindly said nothing about my hiking calluses, also gave me my choice of nail polish color. And so here I have been, puttering around sockless with the cosmetic memory of a goldfish, literally startling myself every time I catch a glimpse of my twinkling digits, painted the blue of a moonless midnight summer sky. 

Wow. Look at that. These cannot be my feet.

In two weeks I will be running my kids through their second round of self-reflection and monitoring for reading and writing workshop, involving the qualitative (three personal literacy goals) and the qualitative (bar graphing of books read, writing pieces completed, and number of personal goals achieved). It will be the first time they can square their information against their initial measurements in Quarter One– the first time they will be able to detect patterns, see their challenges, discover growth.  This is my faulty, but flowering, answer to the educational measurement craze: longitudinal, multiple, mixed methods, and defined and measured by the kids. (Data? Let them eat data.)

I’ll be sharing my templates and (hopefully) with kid permission, some samples of their work. I am excited. I’m nervous. I want them to stare at their portfolios, their soaring graphs, the same way I am staring at my nail polish– with a repeated small shock of amazement, a slow dawning of glee.

Wow. Look at that. That cannot be my learning.

P. has got nothing to spare. His family doesn’t have phone service or the flashy clothes the affluent kids wear. His single Scholastic book order this year is for one item, paid for in small wrinkled bills.

His singular point of pride is the thick clump of tickets he has received in our schoolwide good behavior program, which kids can turn in for prizes. He wraps them in a dirty rubber band and stores them in his pocket like a wad of mafia cash. He keeps tally, out loud, to anyone who will listen. He was upwards of 30 the last time he checked in.

TA DA, he announces to me the day before break, hands behind his back.

This usually heralds the gift of one of his Day-Glo robot drawings, but today is different. He pulls out a little goldenrod card and lays it in my hand. It’s good for a McDonald’s hamburger and French fries, courtesy of the PTA.

I smile at him questioningly.

Merry Christmas, he says proudly. It took me fifteen of my good behavior tickets to get that from the bookstore.

This is our joint blog on the Atwell approach to reading workshop, co-authored by Doug Noon. Go, subscribe, comment. It’s been too quiet over there lately.

http://workshop.teacher-researcher.net/2009/12/12/never-stop-questioning/