The Line

Just a postcard from the back porch while I shuck corn, drive many miles, and do laundry for everyone. I can’t say it’s been a restful summer exactly, but I am grateful for all the circumstances which allow me to get real about the love, grace, and challenges of family. It can only come to good.

And lest that sound way too oblique and mysterious, I’ll share this clip from Jib Jab on other issues dominating our discourse at home. This tickles me mightily on a multitude of levels– Dylan would be turning over in his grave (if he were in his grave). Leno debuted it and thus I’m probably late on the popular media bandwagon here (as usual), but I think it deserves a little more publicity in the blog’s “maybe not up at 12:30 AM digital immigrant” demographic.

It had me at the unicorn.

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.

All This Weight: Sarah Borges

Thanks to Kate Olson for bringing this to my attention: Barbara Kingsolver’s commencement address this year at Duke, the eminent author of The Poisonwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I am as grateful for this speech as if I was in my cap and gown in the audience: it addresses nearly everything that has been nesting in my brain this year, and nestling its way ever so slowly into my concepts for English curriculum.

Quote:

As you leave here, remember what you loved most in this place. Not Orgo 2, I’m guessing, or the crazed squirrels or even the bulk cereal in the Freshman Marketplace. I mean the way you lived, in close and continuous contact. This is an ancient human social construct that once was common in this land. We called it a community. We lived among our villagers, depending on them for what we needed. If we had a problem, we did not discuss it over the phone with someone in Bubaneshwar. We went to a neighbor. We acquired food from farmers. We listened to music in groups, in churches or on front porches. We danced. We participated. Even when there was no money in it. Community is our native state. You play hardest for a hometown crowd. You become your best self. You know joy. This is not a guess, there is evidence. The scholars who study social well-being can put it on charts and graphs. In the last 30 years our material wealth has increased in this country, but our self-described happiness has steadily declined. Elsewhere, the people who consider themselves very happy are not in the very poorest nations, as you might guess, nor in the very richest. The winners are Mexico, Ireland, Puerto Rico, the kinds of places we identify with extended family, noisy villages, a lot of dancing. The happiest people are the ones with the most community.”

Read it. Read every glowing word.

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.

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.”