The Line

Yep– so I could still sing this song for just about every professional and personal challenge of 07-08: John Doe of X fame, backed up by the beautiful Kathleen Edwards, to be played very, very loud.

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And the appropriate closing poem, below.

Have a wonderful summer, everyone.

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A Place With Promise

Sometimes my affection for this place wavers.
I am poised between a vague ambition
and loyalty to what I’ve always loved,
kedged along inside my slow boat
by warp and anchor drag. But if I imagine

seeing this for the last time…
then I think I could not bear to go,
would grab any stump or tree limb
and hold on for dear life…

Why can’t we hold this landscape in our arms?
The nettle-tangled orchards given up on,
the broken fence posts with their tags
of wire, burdock taking over uncut fields,
the rusted tipples and the mills.
Sometimes I think it’s possible
to wash the slag dust from the leaves
of sycamores and make them green, the way
as a child, after lesson and punishment,
I used to begin my life again.
I’d say a little “start” to myself
like the referees at races, then
on the same old scratchy car seat,
with the same parents on the same road,
I could live beyond damage and reproach,
in a place with such promise,
like any of the small farms among the wooded hills,
like any of the small towns starting up along the rivers.

~ Maggie Anderson

Honestly, the last thing I thought I’d be doing this week is posting in every spare moment on technology and its influences on literacy. Help me.

Or humor me. The mysterious commenter Dave (at dave@dave.dave, apparently) kindly provides this fast and super fun article at Slate from just last week, on the actual means by which we read on line differently from paper text. Michael Agger, who has won my heart with his snarky use of Net-bold type alone:

Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an “information scent.” We move on if there doesn’t seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)

Also, I’m probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Take or leave his wordplay, but I’m going to be be thinking all summer about the ramifications of the Net reading meta-approach this discusses. Could it be– could it– treated as a new genre of reading, unto itself?

Had a couple of comments on the Google article that got my brain fired up. Primarily, I don’t think it does us any good to start defining the Web 2.0 conversation with “No, it’s not THIS that’s the issue with Web 2.0, it’s really THIS” premises.

I think there’s three issues in intertwining, simultaneous play here, particularly when it comes to our kids.

One: How Web 2.0 changes the way we actually process information.

I mean, yeah, I can accept the idea that Google isn’t actually making us dumber, per se, particularly if you’re feeling weird about the elitist feel of Carr’s judging the Internet by Socrates. But I don’t think anyone can argue with the article’s thesis on its bare bones: we are reading differently– judging the truth, falsity, and relation of information differently– because of Web 2.0.

Are we simply teaching kids how to use Voicethread and Facebook and Skype? Or are we talking in equal measure about (for only one example) how the increasing loss of face to face contact changes how we judge another person in our very consciousness? How much more fundamental can the evaluation of information get?

Two: How Web 2.0 increases the amount of information to which we have access.

We’re talking about 1:1 laptops for third world countries in Africa, and yet not giving kids solid tools to whittle down an information load which is completely unmanageable to adults. I’ve yet to see a rubric, flowchart, or set of guidelines for tech “sifting” which receives a fifth of the attention the two mobile labs do in my building.

Three: How Web 2.0 changes the quality of the information itself.

The democratization of the Internet may be a glorious thing, and yet bloggers on Crooked Timber are also bemoaning the loss of a sense of authority in the world of ideas. Who is trained? Who can be an expert? Who can we trust to guide us through the Web 2.0 thicket, where, as Joe says in the comments, because everything is important, nothing is important?

Andrew Sullivan solves this problem by invoking the Greeks, the bread and butter rules of logic and rhetoric which, while time-tested and true, are no longer standard fare in our schools—if they ever were.

Similarly, folks I know and trust rely on the scientific method, but I know of few educators, if any, who meaningfully extrapolate its rigor beyond the lab.

Additionally the rules of slide and web design may be Dan’s bailiwick, but who’s teaching our kids why Comic Sans makes users judge its content differently than Times New Roman, except in some AP Art class in suburban Connecticut?

And I know of virtually no one who gives any kind of airtime in their classrooms to the ideas of David Abram and Chet Bowers—that there is also useful, personal, powerful knowledge which is neither Western, scientific, nor rational.

What’s the larger point here?

To me—and perhaps this is my ten-ton, wicked, white-elephant problem with tech in the classroom— we simply don’t have the right metaphor in place for Web 2.0 . Our narrative— the story we tell in our classrooms about technology, the story which makes it navigable, meaningful, and useful to kids— is ridiculously weak. And it’s going to get us in trouble.

Most educators and ed tech specialists tell the story of Web 2.0 as if it is nothing more than another version of a bookbag. An amazing, engaging, bottomless, world-holding, lightning-fast bookbag, to be sure, and one that has a ton of fancy buckles, buttons, and combination locks that require some significant (and fun! and well paying!) training.

But the thing about a bookbag is that, in the end, it just holds things. That’s all it does.

It does not fundamentally metamorphosize either what’s inside it— or who’s looking into it.

Who’s talking about the Internet like that?

Think about it. Think about the conversations you’ve had recently about technology. Just this week. Are they bookbag conversations?

Think about how cautiously you would approach a bookbag, if you knew that opening it would change its books into fruit bats.

And then rearrange your face.

Yeah, Stephen Krashen says in our Web 2.0 world we’re actually reading more than ever, and so does Bill. Can’t argue with that. But what kind of reading is it?

Check this out for an intriguing and disturbing take. I’ll be thinking hard about its questions this summer, as as I mull over when, where, and how to incorporate more– or less?– technology into my classroom next year. As a lowly public servant I can’t always afford a hard copy of The Atlantic, but luckily I saw this one in my doctor’s office, where at least they don’t have tabletops full of Kindles. Yet.

So where do we get off, really, thinking that we are beyond the accountability measures we impose on our own kids? Seriously. If they get a quarterly review, then that’s the least we can ask of ourselves.

I’m also tired of waiting for my employers to walk in here– be that a supervisor, a principal, a superintendent, or a parent– and ask me questions about my practice that I am unprepared to answer because my implementation is generally solid, but my documentation stinks. Bill Ferriter talks a bit about the disconnect between his own sense of accountability and that of his district’s here.

I want a TEACHER REPORT CARD. Something I can pull out next year and say, with confidence, “This is a snapshot of me as a professional at this moment.” And since this thing does not exist, as my last major thinking for the 07-08 year, I’m going to draft my own.

Here’s my top ten items, in I’m-just-blathering-order. And I’m going all out here. The idea is to make things as sexy as possible at first, and cut them down to manageable size later.

1) Observations, one per quarter in my class. My two scheduled observations next year count– and then I’ll go two more. Two additional observations, I undertake of other classrooms. One should be out of district.

2) Professional Development. New York State requires me to complete 175 hours of this every five years. The district’s supposed to keep a record of this for me, but it’s probably a good idea to keep a tally of this myself.

2a) Membership. Somewhere. (Well, maybe not here.) Unions don’t count. NCTE has served me quite well. ASCD rocks too (and not just because they employed me this year). AERA is good for hard-core geekiness.

3) Reading. A periodical subscription or at least one professional book per year. Inspired by Slate Magazine, in 08-09 I’m contemplating blogging the Handbook for Adolescent Psychology. Yeah, yeah, I’m a nutjob. Leave it in the comments.

3) An independent evaluation of the quality of my written Plans. Not the daily attack, the six-box-to-a-three-inch-line that couldn’t be deciphered by a Navaho windtalker, but something that shows in black and white these four things (heavily influenced by The Science and Art of Teaching, Robert Marzano): a) one or two overarching academic goals per unit, grounded in the power state standards, b) differentiation up and down, c) an assessment, formative or summative, tied directly to every goal, d) a plan for what the heck I do for every goal not achieved the first time around.

3a) Reflection on those plans. Again, in writing. Yes, this worked. No, this stunk. What I will keep, what I will change.

Someone of note should be an independent reviewer for 3 and 3a. Since theoretically we’ll be filling this report card out four times, it could be a rotation through my principal, a mentor teacher, the Literacy Coach for our building, and the English director for the district.

4) Hard evidence of learning. I should be collecting this, in a systematic manner, for every unit I undertake. For the report card, though, I think this ideally should involve three small snapshots:an academically talented kid, a middle of the road kid, and a kid who struggles. What would the snapshots be? It could be a quiz taken a few times, a packet of revisions to an essay, a hard data growth chart on 10 minute weekly homework identifying parts of speech, running reading records. Lots of possibilities.

5) Collaboration. Participation yearly in at least one major academic-based project between me and other teachers in the building/on the grade level. I’ve been batting around the idea of a poetry slam run simultaneously with a teacher in the other middle school in our district. Stay tuned.

6) Autonomy. Deliberately vague, for the moment, while I continue to experiment with autonomy in the classroom. But I want to be able to show how I involve kids in at least one instance of substantive investment, direction, and evaluation of their own learning. I think one of the best and simplest ways to do this is some kind of quarterly course evaluation from the kids, with tallied ratings. Working on what questions I might ask.

6a) Care and Feeding. How I make a concerted, documentable effort to honor a child as an individual, celebrating her successes and supporting her in her challenges.

7) Evidence of supporting literacy as a citizen. Volunteering at another school. Helping out at the public library. Keeping up the blog. Writing and publishing on education. You get the idea.

8 ) Home involvement. At base, this would be a detailed log of regular phone calls, emails, and conferences. At best?…well, I continue to attempt to convince my team that we should do regular home visits with our neediest kids. In between could be any number of things.

9) Getting stuff. By this I mean acquiring bit by bit, by grants, organized events, slyly worded and well timed budget requests, garage sales or begging, the items on the wish list that every teacher keeps somewhere in their head. In mine is two more laptops for editing, about 2000 book titles for a decent classroom library, and a hot chocolate machine. But I’ll be happy with the dozen or so subscriptions to kid-friendly magazines for my room next year, if that goes through.

10) And the usual vanilla icing: showing up to meetings on time, turning papers back within a week, returning messages within 24 hours, fulfilling my extraneous administrative duties in an organized and timely fashion, blah blah blah, and not allowing my desperately fidgety kids to run a race in the sunshine on the front lawn directly after their torturous two hour Social Studies test block, in full view of about eight classrooms. Oh, sorry– that was three days ago. Oops.

So what am I missing? Tear it up, people.

UPDATE: I was going to put this in another post, but decided against beating a dead horse, although the question is worth addressing: how would I rank these ten items? I think I’d stick to something a little more graphically oriented, like concentric circles. Plans, Reflection, Evidence, Autonomy, and Home Involvement seem to me to be the solid heart, something which then Observations, Reading, and Professional Development/Membership nurture and inform.  Stuff and Collaboration can be more readily expected of teachers with a little more experience, while Vanilla Icing, like spelling and punctuation in writing, should be emphasized in all things, yet unto itself is the least important aspect of the ten– certainly not the make-and-break of tenure that it can be.

We’re outlining our final writing assignment for A Day No Pigs Would Die. I’m asking the kids to take either the role of a parent who wants to ban the book from our library, or a student who is defending its presence. We’re using the persuasion map from the NCTE Read, Write, Think website (a GOLD MINE– not kidding) as our guide; the American Library Association’s banned categories for our vocabulary; and somehow everything is, miraculously, coming together. Their arguments are solid, nuanced, metacognitive. You experimental souls will understand my bemused joy when I say I’m not really sure how this happened.

I had a student four years ago who was this kind of thinking crystallized– it flew out of her mouth like birds. A brilliant, passionate, headstrong Afghani refugee, she had risen above her every circumstance, mastered English in three years, and earned a full scholarship to a local college. The last time I saw her, just before she graduated last year, she had taken her head scarf off, and flew at me from the doorway of her house to give me a huge hug.

I learned yesterday that a few weeks ago she came home and was stabbed several times by her older brother, in what appears to be a shame retribution. She survived, barely.

I kneel next to a student who is still working on her Pigs outline. “Tell me more about what you mean when you say, ‘This book teaches you about the real world’.”

She thinks. “You know. Like, there’s death, like Pinky dies.”

“Yes,” I encourage her. “That’s an incredibly important theme. Life is beautiful, but there’s death and suffering, too. That’s just a part of it all.”

And I suddenly have to close my eyes, bite my lip, and walk away.

Chris Lehmann at The Faculty Room writes on Cheektowaga Middle School up the road from me, profiled in the New York Times for its hard-line disciplinary tactics.

My colleague Joe Henderson suggested a post on it, in light of some stuff I talk up regularly on the blog in regards to the massive and irreplaceable value of intrinsic motivation in school. I thought I would respectfully request the originator of Self-Determination Theory himself, Dr. Ed Deci, to comment instead.

Dr. Deci, in case you don’t know, is the author or co-author of much of the motivation research used by major education experts in the field, including Alfie Kohn and Robert Marzano. Very kindly, he agreed to help out.

I pitched to him three possible arguments for the idea that Cheektowaga Middle School is taking the appropriate approach to their problems. Here’s his responses.

Statement: A highly disruptive and dysfunctional situation such as the one at Cheektowaga requires initial Draconian measures. Once order is restored, then perhaps a more autonomous approach can be adopted, but not before.

Dr. Deci: A highly disruptive and dysfunctional situation is a tough one to deal with, that is true. But my inclination is to avoid Draconian controls. They are most likely to exacerbate rather than help. In troubled situations, it is necessary to reach students, and it may take “big measures” but control and force are not the methods most likely to work. How about some restructuring that allows teachers and students to interact
in more meaningful ways, for example. I agree it is not easy, but it is important to try to understand the students’ perspectives in order to work with them toward meaningful change. The Cheektowaga situation is one where students’ perspectives seem to be being run over rather than understood and acknowledged.

Statement: Middle schoolers, and children in general, do not have the developmental maturity to handle an autonomous management approach. Because of their youth, they require “carrots and sticks” to facilitate the internalization of societal values.

Dr. Deci: This is utter nonsense. It is possible to have elementary students who are relatively autonomous in their self-regulation and who do not require carrots and sticks to any significant degree, so to say middle school students are not old enough (or mature enough) to be autonomous is inaccurate ideology.

Statement: The minority population of the school (35% Latino and African-American) would respond positively to authoritarian, teacher-centered management, as this is a cultural norm for them (as Lisa Delpit argues).

Dr. Deci: First, I doubt that that minority students respond positively to authoritarian approaches. If that is what they are getting at home and elsewhere, and if they were responding positively to it, there would not be the problems that are apparently being faced in Cheektowaga.

Second, whenever we have looked at our data in terms of differences in majority vs. minority participants, we have not seen meaningful differences in how they respond to autonomy support. It has positive effects for minority participants and for low-income participants just as it does for “majority” participants. Autonomy support works for females as well as males (some people say it is a male thing); autonomy support works for eastern cultures as well as western (some say it is a western thing); and it works for low-income individuals as well as high-income individuals (some say it is only a high-income thing). So, there is no solid empirical basis for the Delpit view that I have ever seen.

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Thoughts, readers?

My union’s gearing up. Without getting into details, I am ambivalent.

Unions are indispensible (check this out for what they’re doing for the service workers in Las Vegas– fascinating stuff.)

And, I believe there is credence to the argument that educational unionization as it now stands has contributed to the deprofessionalism of teaching.

Unions do the dirty work– negotiations, protection, grievances– and they do it well.

And, I’ve been concerned from the beginning about the fact that should I or any of my colleagues choose not to join the union for considered, thoughtful reason, in New York and 18 other states one is legally forced to pay them nonetheless. Additionally one is therefore tied, however indirectly, to union involvement in politics, which may or may not have anything to do with one’s own personal political convictions. (Try this for a thought-provoking criticism of teacher unions.)

Yet there is no power for justice, whisper Gandhi and ML King Jr on my one shoulder, unless it is the power of the unified.

And, I sleep at night with Thoreau and the Sierra Leone Refugee All Stars whispering on the other.

watch?v=eWcQFrJeEOc&feature=related

Why the All Stars?

One of my first ESL students was a tiny girl from Sierra Leone. And frankly, once you’ve met a kid who’s lucky to not have had her limbs macheted off, you can’t help but place the increasingly and inexplicably fraught contractual negotiations of your First World union and privileged school district next to the message of the All Stars: peace, in the face of arguably some of the worst violations of human rights on the planet. It makes you think hard about what real “diplomacy” is.

So yes, I’ll listen carefully to my union. But there is a deeper reality I must honor first, deeper than unified stances, worker’s rights, or socialist utopia: the human being’s inalienable right to think for herself. I’ll be thinking of this.

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The whole All Stars documentary (and related lesson plans) are available here.