The Line

Ian, my son, has another one of his double ear infections– unshakable fever for three days, general crankiness, etc. We have a walk-in after-hours clinic up the road from us that knows us by name these days, and normally we duck in and out with a sticker and antibiotics. Today, we had to sit on the floor.

All around us were little people in blankets, pajamas, on the laps of grandparents, lying across chairs. Flu, the doctor confirmed when I asked. On our way out, one little girl was being strapped into a portable bed. Two ambulances waited.

It made me think.

I would be surprised if there were an informed person in the country right now who didn’t know how the US stacked up against the top ranking country for health care according to WHO (France). But how about one of the bottom ranking countries– Myanmar?

Myanmar has no reported deaths from H1N1 as of last week. But what is the top cause of childhood death in that country?

Diarrhea. Yes– that stuff we cure with Pepto Bismol. The stuff we don’t die of here in the US– zero reported mortality cases in 2006– simply because we have access to clean water and decent waste disposal.

And if that doesn’t give you pause about the health benefits of living in America, think about this: If Ian and I had lived in Africa, there is a good chance he could have died of complications from his ear infection. 28,000 people did worldwide in 1990. That’s not counting the massive amounts of disability incurred via hearing loss, the top cause of which in developing countries is untreated otitis media. The WHO considers this such a severe problem that they have developed a worldwide health program specifically to address it.

Imagine. Imagine that your child gets diarrhea, and knowing that he might die from it. Imagine that your son gets a double ear infection, and knowing he might go deaf– because there is not a walk-in after hours clinic five minutes’ drive from your house, or a Target with over-the-counter medication at your fingertips, but a single traveling doctor you can walk to– if you’re lucky– once every few months.

Our current national debate about universal coverage, while absolutely essential, is also a privileged one. There’s no other way to remember it– except to remember it.

Try remembering it this way.

Aw, come on, Bill. Don’t I have enough to do?

My true fear would be that quantity diminishes quality. I don’t usually post until something really moves me, and then it often takes  me an hour or more to put the post together. I’m aware that this  does differ from other edu-bloggers, who take a more Tweet-y approach– but then again, our articulated purposes for blogging are different.

I’m also aware that you are putting forth advice for a collective student blog, versus adult singletons. But here too, do we wish to encourage flash posting? I’m not so sure.  Does gratifying a “digital” audience trump thoughtfulness? You say yourself that kids will struggle to post meaningfully. Why not work within their limits?

And more to the point– why isn’t student analysis of the purpose of the blog (newsy updates, reflective writing, or aesthetic publishing) driving the amount of posts?

What do you think, readers? How often do you post to your blogs, and why?

The first REM song I ever heard. I forgot how good it is. Throw Thoreau and rearrange… I suppose that’s a good chunk of reading and writing workshop, right there.

I don’t have a think tank. I’d like one. Filled with multi-colored fish and waving seaweed. A micro-ecology, at which I can smile with pleasure while I push it gently on its sturdy rollers to entirely block my classroom door. While doing this, perhaps one of the rollers would accidentally sever the phone cord, which summoned me from my classroom duties– during class– five times in one period yesterday. And perhaps behind that barricade of blue, where the water burbles wordlessly we trust you, I could invite some other colleagues to come in and create that second, more common level of understanding that is a think tank.

A delusion, I know. Yet I’d like to share the idea of the think tank with the gentleman sitting across the table from me, also yesterday, at a sub-committee meeting on a new school we’re trying to start in the community. He seemed like a stellar educator– smart, committed– but had some critical things to say about how teachers do not want to get their hands dirty with actually writing creative curricula. “They just don’t want to go there,” he sighed, and expressed relief that our alternative school model would cull the wheat from the chaff in that regard.

His words haunt and nag at me. Because, you see, in a given day I’ve heard more brilliant, fun, fascinating ideas from my colleagues– and from my own head– than in the best brain-storming session at TED.

Yet there’s the handwritten attendance sheets, the academic goal spreadsheets, the minutes from team meeting, the hundreds of photocopies, the IEP goal documentation, the phone calls to every kind of parent and guardian, shopping trips out of our own pockets for the supplies schools cannot provide– never mind the ever-enlarging crush of students packed into a room. To pretend that the daily demands of the minutia of a school setting do not outstrip every other kind of organizational model, in both amount and lack of resources, is its own kind of delusion.

The bottom line? My colleagues and I are not automatons. We’re just tired. And no standard of excellence in teaching can be expected to be achieved in any widespread manner without first creating the working conditions under which that excellence may flourish.

Long live the think tank.

Nancie Atwell leaves a detailed and thoughtful comment on her school. My response is below. (NB: revised from a 6 PM post, as I kept thinking and thinking about it tonight.)

Dear Dina,

Your blog has left me both inspired and confused – inspired by the accomplishments and engagement of your students and your own obvious success as a workshop teacher, and confused by the distortion of conditions for teaching and learning at my current school, CTL, and in my previous classroom at Boothbay Elementary.

To set the record straight:

- At Boothbay Elementary, I, too, took just five or six weeks – usually by Columbus Day – to help my seventy-five students learn workshop procedures and expectations.

- At CTL, I teach Monday through Thursday, in an 85-minute language arts block. (I also teach history, and I run the school.)

- I assign my students to write for a total of one hour for weekend homework; this is because I believe Thursday-Monday is too long for them to go without writing, momentum-wise.

- I assign students to read for half an hour every night, seven nights a week. My book The Reading Zone provides the practical details for this assignment and requirements and conditions of my reading workshop today.

- CTL students are not “standard.” On our website, we state that we cannot offer a special education program separate from the classroom; however, we work happily and continuously with mainstreamed students with special needs, including ADHD, dyslexia, and other visual processing disorders.

- CTL’s “detailed application process” is a one-page form, followed by a child visiting the school for a morning.

- The “substantial parent involvement” is is a requirement of two hours of labor each year, which helps us lessen maintenance expenses and keep tuition low.

- Tuition fees cover about 60% of school costs at CTL, which means that I fundraise twelve months a year in order to keep alive a non-profit lab school where faculty develop and refine methods that we hope will make a positive impact in public school classrooms. That’s our mission.

- Finally, in any given year at CTL, I’ve dealt with more problems with parents than in my entire previous public school career combined.

I am impressed with your commitment to your students and to reading and writing workshop; the rubrics you and they develpoed are terrific and likely to be helpful to other teachers. The kids you teach are fortunate; clearly, the work you’re doing will influence them for a lifetime. But I am mystified as to why your accounts of your teaching need me as a straw woman.

Sincerely yours,

Nancie

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Nancie,

First of all, I thank you deeply for visiting the blog and taking the time to write. I am delighted and honored.

No straw woman arguments or distortions are intended by my comments on CTL, and I apologize front and center for any factual errors that I made in my post.

That being said, I still have questions about how the private standing and entrance requirements of CTL affect the diversity and challenges of its student population. I am certain CTL entrance and enrollment requirements are minimal, fair, and well-supported, as you state. However, it still seems to me that it’s impossible to get around the fact that even with the lightest administrative touch, the absence of a special ed program (or ESL program?), the necessary charging of tuition, required parental involvement, and even a required physical visit at CTL all self-select for families and students who are already predisposed to succeed at workshop.   

Most importantly, though, I want to make clear that I bring this up not to malign the school or the workshop model– Lord knows, if I were Queen of Education, I’d have every school look like CTL. I mean only to point out that acknowledging the differences between CTL and, say, Edison High School in Washington DC, is necessary– and not a good enough reason to dismiss workshop as unsustainable.  (I’m sure you’ve encountered that argument before.) In fact it’s exactly because the public schools are not CTL that our need for the joys and strengths of the workshop approach is desperate.  I hope that’s a little clearer.

I do want to quote in In The Middle in regards to how long it took you at Boothbay to teach procedures at workshop, because it’s important that we in the public schools on a quarter system understand it correctly. In your chapter on evaluation (page 225), you state “At the end of the first quarter I couldn’t base grades on progress towards goals because there hadn’t yet been time or an occasion to set them,” and then go on to explain that you based that first round of grades on “good faith participation in workshop.” I took this to mean that the majority of the quarter was spent teaching and practicing the various procedures the children needed to succeed independently in the workshop model. Did I misinterpret?

Again, I appreciate your visit very much. I will hold onto your kind comments for encouragement.

Very sincerely,

Dina

The secure link to this file is below. Take, tweak, share. The categories were my invention, but all other wording you see here is the production of group draft on a digital projector while I edited and typed according to class input. This was not purely democratic– I chose a day where I saw all my classes, ran the first class’ draft through the second class, the second class’ draft through the third, and so on, calling it a day by the end of school at 3:30 PM– but it worked. What you see here, then, is a pure kid take on what they believed successful behavior looked like in each of the arenas I wanted to assess.

This was the rubric I then gave back to them on the following Monday, asking them to both rate themselves and give themselves percentages.  The latter was for the sake of our rubric-unfriendly report card, otherwise I would not have included it.

You will find some small errors in it, as I did, too late– I think the production of it drained my editing energy– but nothing that changes the essential meaning of the document. You’ll also note that is purely behavioral. This is deliberate. In the workshop model, it is essential to frontload procedures and behaviors, so that the kids can be “set free” to work productively later while you then add in content mini-lessons and conferences. Nancie Atwell managed to take an entire quarter to focus on procedural knowledge when she pioneered workshop at Boothbay Elementary in Maine. I get five weeks max, or important people start to question my rigor. I do the best I can. It seems to be working. More on that later, perhaps, when I get a chance to think about the perfect “Workshop Procedures in Five Weeks.”

The kids invariably found better and more precise wording for a number of things on the rubric, including my favorite: that “2″ level effort on “Writing Workshop” could include someone dealing with interruptions with good intentions, but “unnecessary actions.” I can see that kid clear as day, can’t you? “Dude, you HAVE TO BE QUIET, OK? It’s WRITING WORKSHOP! GEEZ!”

Enjoy.

http://www.box.net/shared/3efkxtqz8c

My first response to Doug on our joint reading workshop blog, Reading Free. Text below; original can be found here. We’d love your comments here or there. We like green eggs and ham.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear Doug,

Finally– in so, so many ways. First “finally”: finally climbing out of the thicket of familial and school challenges to get back to blogging in general. Second “finally”: finally answering your first post here, Doug, and once again, thank you for agreeing to this exciting joint venture. Third “finally”: I think it speaks to the inherent quality of the workshop model that even with the craziness of the last few weeks going on, I finally feel like I am doing something worthwhile with my students’ precious time.

Precious, as you know, because our classrooms are not the delightful white and yolk cradled so carefully by Nancie Atwell’s own school, where she has designed the schedule around the model, and not vice-versa. Consider, for example, that she sees her students– no more than nineteen– for at least 90 minutes every single day for language arts instruction. Consider also something that I just learned from our literacy coach, who studied with Nancie in 2008: kids have Friday, Saturday, AND Sunday to complete substantial reading and writing at home. Consider also that although clearly the Center for Teaching and Learning does not seek out gifted students or discriminate financially, its population still self-selects for involvement, commitment, and “standard” students by a) being a private school that has a detailed application process; b) not having the financial means to address special needs, as they themselves state on their website; and c) requiring substantial parental involvement from the get-go.

So, then– precious, because we see our kids for so much less time. Precious, because our kids leave our rooms and enter a swift, unforgiving current of school culture to the very contrary of the principles we espouse through workshop. Precious, because our kids are so massively diverse in their needs, and so large in their numbers, and so often unsupported even at home.

And this, I would argue, is precisely why workshop is so important in the public schools. A public school does not make workshop unfathomable and unworkable. It makes itself the place where an oasis of personal choice, differentiation, meaningful instruction, and physical comfort like workshop is needed the most of all.

We’re five weeks into the model now, and I had my 100+ students rate themselves on a rubric to assess how successful they felt at the work. I reviewed each rubric with the student, and made adjustments to their self-assigned percentages in conference with them where necessary. I could count on one hand the times I did this. No student rated themselves below a 70% on one or more of the rubric elements, and those students were only a handful.

And I AGREE with them, Doug! They *are* silently sinking into their self-chosen books. They *are* producing 3-5 pages of draft on personally meaningful topics every week. They *are* engaging in daily, lively discussions of poetry. My high-needs IEP kids are working up to snuff. My ESL and former ESL students are indistinguishable from their peers.

Now, all that being said, we are now jumping into the far more instructional (versus procedural) form of workshop, and things may be very different in another five weeks. But I don’t think so. And here’s why: because workshop has let these kids know that their choices matter; that their voices mean something; and that workshop curriculum which is more arbitrarily taught still has a rationale.

In otherwords: workshop has bought their trust. And once you have the kids’ trust, I am discovering you can do nearly anything you like with them.

Could your next post reflect on how workshop and trust intersect in your classroom?

I’d also like to hear about the top major challenge you’ve got going. Actually, maybe we could make this a regular part of our posts back and forth: the workshop Challenge Du Jour. What do you think?

Yours,

Dina

The brother of a dear college friend, Matt Smith, is the Super-Uber-Cataloguer of the Persian Collection at Harvard’s Widener Library. (That’s not his real title.) His recent post on a northeastern private school turning their library collection entirely into Kindles has been kicking around in my head enough for me to finally write about it. This does seem to be the litmus test for worthy posts– whether it survives the mental onslaught of the morning pre-coffee drive to school several days in a row.

Matt’s opinion on the classic “NPR” argument that we all love the way books smell too much to let them die is that this rhetoric is not terribly informed and slightly kinky. It makes me giggle, but it also makes me think that there is a parallel argument to be had about the sensory gratification of technology. My own argument for a long time has been that “literacy tech” dangerously cuts our senses down to two out of five. But I find myself re-evaluating that when I think of a bevy of teens touch-padding their way through Sense and Sensibility on a Kindle, or how my own less privileged ADHD boys beg for laptop work.

I think there’s possibly two factors at play here. One, I wonder if the state of learning via multiple modes of input is still so infantile in our schools that computers actually represent a step UP on the sensory scale.

And two, I wonder if working on a computer is somehow more sensorily captivating than I have been giving it credit for. I’d love to see some studies on this; I don’t know of any. I have tons of questions about it.

Where does that sense of “disappearing”– of time evaporating– on a computer come from?

Is it the same as when you dissolve into a good book, or into a hobby you love– “being in flow”?

Does the limitation of one’s senses on a computer paradoxically help one concentrate on computer-based tasks more, like a person struck with hearing loss compensates with heightened sight and smell?

And what does this all mean in the context of reading and comprehending text?

But all this is not actually the main thrust of Matt’s post. His major concern is that switching a library entirely over to Kindles will necessarily limit the amount of books available to library patrons, restricting them to those relatively few texts that are available through one for-profit corporation.

I suppose my concern is related, but not similar. I mean, eventually, if we decide that Kindles will supplant books the way we decided that books would supplant hand-lettered scrolls, then I’m pretty sure that eventually all 300,000 titles in the world will be on Kindles– and it won’t be any different than selected books being produced by publishing companies.

There’s only one world-shaking difference between this switch and others in the past: the dependence on electric power.

Never before has the physical existence of a text depended entirely on whether you have the capacity to charge your battery. And for me, just like our food, every step that makes the production of a book dependent on something else is one step away from safe– safe from censors, from governments, from book-burners, from dictators.

It’s also why I insist that kids memorize at least The First Amendment and a poem of choice before they leave my classroom. For books, too, despite the safety of their physical presence, can also be destroyed permanently– as well as the knowledge within them. We all know what happened in Alexandria.

But no matter where my kids are in twenty years– in jail, in an abusive relationship, on a hurricane-stricken coast, in a country with no civil rights– no matter what places they find themselves in which others are bent on seeking the destruction of their freedom (and begin by turning off the power)– no matter what, my students will, in all hope, have some piece of inspiration from literature in their minds, glowing like a candle in the dark.

Kindling them, in fact. And isn’t that ironic.

Our extended family just lost a little boy, age 2, in a terrible accident. I push myself into my classroom today, the morning after the funeral, in a haze of exhaustion and heartache. I find what I have come to usually find this first week of school: Eric sitting quietly on the couch, letting loose with stealth snide about politicians with whom he disagrees and hopes that the fourth Aragon book is better than the last. Shena, having such an animated audible conversation with the narrator of the short story I am reading aloud that I have to tell her as gently as possible to settle down. Svetlana, who is debating whether to bring in the thirty page fantasy novel she authored. Josh, who is reading what may perhaps be my favorite independent book this year, Superheroes and Philosophy. And kids in each class, who have only known me for 48 hours, chorusing gently and genuinely that the substitute was terrible and they missed me. Each one, each little life, shining.

Sometimes the country is a state of mind.  Laura Veirs writes a lot of tunes that tap into the repeating meditative patterns of plainsong; sung by the Cedar Hill Choir of “O Brother Where Art Thou?” fame, and recorded in Johnny and June Cash’s cabin, the ending  is transcendent. Enjoy.

Starting school in 48 hours, somehow feeling more prepared and put together than I have yet.  Break a leg, everyone.