The Line

A marvelous, synthesizing article on current research and thoughts surrounding how literacy is changing in our digital age from The New Atlantis. (I am kicking around doing my doctoral work on these questions.) It’s longish, but worth every educator’s time.

Christine Rosen, the author, is interviewed by NPR here on the Facebook phenomenon, which I’ve blogged about (skeptically) recently.

Looking forward to what you think. Comment liberally. My thinking is incomplete, to quote Bill Ferriter.

Karl Weick:

Argue as if you’re right. Listen as if you’re wrong.

Cheers to Don Burkins for linking to this in the comments.

I taught immigrant students for eight years, and boy, does this gladden my ESL heart. Enjoy.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2009/01/obama-speaks-ve.html

Far more important to me than the inauguration of our first African-American president, we had our state E/LA exam this week; which– excuse me while I spit up some blood here– did not seem so bad.

In particular every consecutive year, barring the usual one or two mortifyingly badly written multiple choice questions, there seems to be one more move towards background-appropriate text. Is someone over at McGraw-Hill finally listening to E.D. Hirsch?

Or are the tests merely being “dumbed down”, as stats guru Eduwonkette wonders last year, writing in response to our state’s astronomical gains from 2007 to 2008? (Having done an unofficial scoring of the multiple choice, I’ll wager something similar will pop up this year.)

Not that I actually know what “dumbing down” a state exam means, really, in a world where it would take 22 years to cover the national average of 274 (often developmentally inappropriate) benchmarks in E/LA. Perhaps this year’s exam only covers 86 of those.

On the desert island where I can be wrecked with only three other justifications for my concerns about standardized exams, you’d find the following stashed in my flotation device.

1) Their treatment as hard science due to our culture’s Nine 1/2-Weeks-type love affair with numbers, when in fact they are anything but. Read this fascinating tidbit from the NYTimes. (Gosh. Maybe the inauguration is important.)

Similarly, James Popham does a lovely job here and here of summarizing for the lay person how standardized exams do very little other than measure students’ socio-economic status, as well as talking more graciously about my flippant-but-true 86-standards remark (thanks, James).

2) If you have a few more moments, check out Andrew Ho’s video on how easy it is to manipulate standardized exam data. While you digest that, keep in mind that 14 out of 50 states require teachers to take a course in educational testing; 2 out of 50 for administrators.

3) And finally, a microcosmic statement on the macrocosm: consider the ridiculousness, in New York State, of administering the exam which is supposed to measure my students’ grasp of (and my ability to teach) our 7th grade E/LA content– in January. Isn’t this all I have to say?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  There are better and worse standardized exams out there, as there are better and worses uses and interpretations for their data. Nothing perturbs my sense of fair play more than hopping on the bandwagon of knee-jerk vilification.

But for the record, I do think I am riding on a unicycle a few miles back.

A little shameless self-promotion: The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), the kind folks who sent me to New Orleans last year, have lost their minds again and hired me to blog my hard and soft impressions of using Robert Marzano’s latest, The Art and Science of Teaching, in my classroom for the next few months. First post’s up today.

Go, read, comment. Dr. Marzano’s writing there too. (The ASCD people call him “Bob,” but I can’t bring myself to do that just yet. Maybe in May.)

Enjoy. It’s a good day.

05-the-believer

Just feeling this today, with the afternoon sun turning the snowfall gold. Enjoy the other three on the podcast as well. Rose Cousins is a lovely person, as you will be able to hear. She grew up down the road from the Lake of Shining Waters, on Prince Edward Island.

Dan had a bit about Facebook up this week, and it coincides exactly with several days of holiday-induced pleading from old college friends and colleagues I love to please, get a frickin’ page up, would you, what is your problem?

I’m not exaggerating when I say it hurts to say no. Anyone who knows me will tell you that friendships to me are like priceless orchids on an untouched Micronesian archipelago, deserving of the greatest respect and nurturing. Facebook can help, no question. (And never mind the slow seeping feeling of Facebook being the party everyone’s being invited to, but you’ve got to babysit your Aunt Fran’s budgie.)

I’ve been trying to put them off gently with the statement that there are people out there I’d rather not hear from on a social-networking site, my students among them, but here’s the rebuttal: that you can set your page to private, that people can only “request” for you to be “friended” (and as an English teacher I love that mangling of a noun, let me tell you).

To me, though, this feels a bit like saying that it really doesn’t matter if the axe murderer has left a note in your mailbox; he didn’t go in your house, did he?

I exaggerate. But it doesn’t matter. Because the real reason I don’t do Facebook is this: I am a storyteller.

Storytellers know that the universe is made of stories, not atoms (Muriel Rukeyser); we see the big themes, the metaphors, the threads of gold; and if all goes well, if we are teachers, we can open up a glimpse of those things for our students.

But storytellers also struggle with being scrupulously honest. The pedestrian truth bores us. The daily routines, the struggles, the dirt and grime and mistakes– it’s easy to try and gloss over those in our stories, or to polish them up, spin ourselves, cast them and ourselves in a different light. Brass does look an awful lot like gold.

Facebook encourages this kind of storytelling, the kind that often crosses over into the territory of just plain lying. Indeed, it thrives on it. Sociologists call it “ego-casting” (don’t just take my word for it). And so, while I know that my friends– and maybe even most people– are most likely of sufficient internal strength to handle such a technological tool, I suspect I am not. I even had to be coerced into blogging.

So sorry, guys. It’s the storyteller’s curse.

I write about this fairly personal take on Facebook primarily because I think it encapsulates well my case of the heebie jeebies about technology in the classroom. I have to wonder, again, about the blind acceptance/encouragement of the use of social media with our kids– especially as our students are, de facto, only beginning to explore who they are.

Seems to me we should be ensuring that they spend their energy on deciding whether they believe in fate, or God, or socialism– whether they work better with their hands or their mathematics– defining their egos for themselves– before allowing things like Facebook to do it for them.

After all, aren’t our kids the most vulnerable storytellers of all?

The roshi (Zen master) who is taking us through our day-long Zen workshop today is warm, smart, sharp, has no problem using some choice profanity, trained in pyschology, and incredibly kind. And then he says this, with the unequivocal conviction of someone with over 35 years’ practice under his belt:

“When you sit in meditation, you still the body, which in turn stills the mind, because the mind and the body are really indivisible. You learn how to really concentrate. Which means, of course, that you then learn how to concentrate in your daily living. You become better at anything you do.”

Put this up against a very different workshop I attended not too long ago, the title of which might have been “101 Ways to Help Students Fart Around While Still Being Productive.”

We talked about using pipe cleaners as “fiddle sticks” for our tactile kids, allowing our kinesthetic kids to pace, teaching our musical kids to tap the pad of cartilage in front of their ear canal to make a soundless drum for themselves. I bought in. I still do.

And now I’m stuck.

You could argue with me about the suggestion that we should teach kids to meditate (although people have, with success). But no one’s going to argue that kids in school need to concentrate. So if, as Roshi suggests, the best means to concentration–  true, genuine, concentration, with the focus of a lazer– is to focus and quiet the body, then are we doing these kids any favors by teaching them what may amount to a bucketful of ways to better suck their thumbs?

Thoughts, anyone?