T Sale's Blog

Phoning It In

2008-04-11T08:46:00.002-06:00

Just came from my first period English 10 class, and in the spirit of the instantaneous pouring forth of thoughts favored by the modern world, I thought I’d share something. On many Fridays, for our warm up, I give the class what I call a poetry song. Today the song was Vertical Horizon’s “Everything You Want,” which I like to use because its ambiguity usually sparks some discussion. Today the class stared at the lyrics mystified for a long time. Nothing. I finally asked, what sort of song is this – is it about politics? Relationships? Sports? A couple of brave souls ventured guesses: yes, it’s about a relationship. Maybe it’s about God. A brief discussion, then more silence. I asked, How could we figure this out? Their answer: Google. Meanwhile, I had a Macbeth assignment for them to work on, so I said, Maybe we can google this later in the class.

And then, from the back of the room came the voice of Steve saying, “I already have.”

Steve had fired up his iPhone or equivalent and searched for the song. He said he only found a couple of comments, and they just seemed to be someone’s opinion, not a definitive answer (such as, say, the band itself revealing what they really meant).

On the way back to the English office, several thoughts populated my mind:
Good thing I didn’t see Steve fiddling with his phone and take it away before he could contribute to class.
I read in one of Howard Gardner’s books about multiple intelligences that he thought the computers and other electronic devices we have access to should be included in our measure of intelligence.
Years ago, a former AHS English teacher found out one of her students had computer software that would actually check his spelling and grammar, and she threw a fit because it was unfair that he had such an advantage over the other students; when he wrote in class his writing was poor to mediocre, but when he wrote at home it was good.
Good for Steve for recognizing right away that the source he found wasn’t necessarily authoritative.
By the time we figure out how to afford laptops in every classroom, all our students may very well have acquired phones with Internet access.
Outside the classroom, students are used to finding answers to what they want to know right now (the operative phrase being “what they want to know”). It must really frustrate them when, in the classroom, we constantly delay satisfaction.
The only Google-proof questions seem to be those that require some sort of personal response.
Karl would be proud: Steve is a staunch Apple guy.

I leave the conclusions to you.

My fastest blog post ever.

What's it all about, Alfie?

2008-04-03T13:41:00.002-06:00

I just read Alfie Kohn’s article “The Trouble with Rubrics,” and while I haven’t decided to what extent I agree or disagree with him, the article has sparked a series of thoughts that began with anger and ended with a rather liberating realization. The anger I felt was similar to that engendered by nutritionists who seem to contradict themselves every few years. (Eat lots of pasta – it’s good for you! Oh, wait, we meant whole grain pasta; that white linguini you’ve been scarfing down for ten years is playing havoc with your blood sugar!) Where was Kohn fifteen years ago, when we all embraced rubrics as a powerful tool for evaluating writing and giving our students feedback? Where was he when the Six Trait Writing boom swept through language arts departments from Bangor to Bakersfield and insinuated itself into the CSAP test evaluation process? Surely it didn’t take Kohn this long to decide that rubrics are bad. Did he decide to sit on this knowledge for a while just to mess with us? The maddening thing is, he makes some good points about how rubrics can limit expression, but why wait until now to point this out? Every time an article like this comes along, I despair of ever seeing educational reform succeed. No wonder parents and politicians don’t trust us; every few years we change our minds, and everything we believed in is debunked. Fifteen years ago LPS embarked upon criterion-based graduation requirements, manifested as Direction 2000 at a certain purple-and-gold sister school. Then, the “back-to-basics” school board assumed power, and Direction 2000 was no more. Now, Governor Ritter is ramming through his own version of criterion-based learning. Plus ca change…

At times I find all this back-and-forth especially frustrating, because I thought that by this point in my career, I would know something, have some things figured out. More and more, 21C sessions and articles like Kohn’s make me think of an old Firesign Theater record I have (yes, record, vinyl record), titled Everything You Know is Wrong. How right they were. (I mean, Pluto used to be a planet.) I have to admit, my first inclination was to say, “A pox on you, Alfie Kohn! Why are you telling me this when I will probably teach only a few more years? Why should I abandon a tool that seems to have served me (and my students) well for so long? I declare myself impervious to change! I’m too close to the end! I can just keep on going with what I have and the momentum will carry me through…”

But…

But some of what Kohn said made sense. The more I think about it, the more I wonder about rubrics. Maybe they have been limiting students’ thinking with their left-brained orderliness. (I can’t help thinking Daniel Pink would love Kohn’s article. Just outsource the rubrics and the essays to India, he’d say, and concentrate on creating more creative writing prompts, or, better yet, get the students to create their own.) Meanwhile, in our PLCs, we’re all about rubrics. We’re all about “common assessments” and fitting students into a slot so we can quantify their learning, so we can collect “data,” so we can modify the rubrics, so we can collect more data, and so it goes. Who would dare to side with Kohn at this point and question the slowly growing beast that fascinates us so on occasional Wednesday mornings? Who would be bold enough not only to stop using rubrics (and argue against their use on common assessments), but also, say, grade assignments on a 9 point scale and, rather than posting overall grades, have students derive and justify their own grades? Who would be willing to acknowledge that the evaluation of an essay is based on his own individual judgment and experience with writing, rather than on a list of “murky” adjectives on a rubric?

And here’s where the liberating thought occurs. If I decide that Kohn is right, what have I got to lose by trying to evaluate writing in a different way? If the goal is truly to re-form education, maybe we need to try some outlandish measures, even at a bastion of excellence such as The University on Dry Creek. And it’s not the young, probationary firebrand who needs to shake the tree of knowledge; it’s the seasoned, soon-to-be-superannuated codger. The best time to try new things is in the evening. What’s the worst that could happen – that they’d ask you to retire and not have to get up at 5:30 every morning?

Everybody's Patron

2008-02-19T13:43:00.002-07:00

The other day Lary K and I were talking about James Joyce (who we’re currently studying in AP Lit) and we agreed that much of his later writing was so weird that he probably never would have gotten published if he hadn’t had some influential patrons interested in his work. Even though many people looked askance at Ulysses and Finnegans Wake when they appeared (even some of Joyce’s friends told him he had gone too far with Finnegans Wake), those novels are today regarded as groundbreaking, profound works of fiction. (Not universally, of course; many still think Joyce was nuts).

Our conversation made me wonder how many innovative, brilliant artists of the past never had their work acknowledged because they didn’t find the right patron, or didn’t luck upon the right slush-pile reader. Do the Mozarts, Picassos, and Joyces always rise to prominence because their talent can’t be ignored, or have we missed some?

And of course, the next question, in a 21st century context, is can the Internet be everybody’s patron? We have had some blog conversations in the past about whether or not the next Shakespeare will arise from cyberspace, and we have been suggesting in our 21C meetings that we should provide our students the opportunity to participate in “global” learning opportunities. Novice writers can post a poem or story on line. Aspiring filmmakers have access to YouTube. Fledgling bands make their songs available on MySpace. The Internet makes it possible for anyone with a creative urge to go public without having to pass the traditional gatekeepers. On the surface that seems like a good thing; the multiplicity of artistic endeavors coupled with unfettered access will guide the “invisible hand” of public opinion to celebrate all the greatest creative works humans have to offer.

But I wonder…

Will we encounter the opposite of stringent gatekeeping? Will the sheer volume of creative expression overwhelm us? Will we miss someone brilliant because we just couldn’t scroll any further that day, or because we didn’t click to follow that one extra link? Will “getting read” depend on how well you position yourself in the search engine maze? (Will Google be the ultimate arbiter of taste?) Will everybody be a star in the brilliant pixel parade?

As usual, more questions than answers.

Batter Up

2008-01-17T21:16:00.000-07:00

I listened with interest the other day to Mr. Booth’s comparison of our educational pursuits to the Rockies baseball team. He compared the statistics compiled about the players to the data we will be collecting about our students, and spring training to the interventions that might be necessary if students don’t demonstrate their mastery of essential learnings. I like sports analogies, so I thought it might be interesting to extend this one a bit. Let’s see, the players who surpass expectations are rewarded monetarily and often have the chance to choose the next venue where they will take their skills. That’s true of outstanding students, too. When the team as a whole fails to make adequate yearly progress, it’s the manager and coaches who get blamed and replaced; yeah, that fits. The Rockies demonstrate their skills for a nationwide TV audience; well, some of our students are having their blogs read by people all over the world. And any guy who walks into Coors Field is welcomed to the team, no matter how good or bad he was at minor league or high school ball, and even if a player hits below the Mendoza Line year after year, or misplays routine ground balls even after extra help from a coach, the team isn’t allowed to send him to another club or simply tell him that he can’t play for the Rockies any more, and the coaches typically work with up to 35 players at a time when they are doing drills; some of the players have special contracts that say they don’t have to be able to hit curve balls or sliders, and others can “opt out” of conditioning drills if they feel that the drills might be offensive….

It’s hard to apply analogies to what we do, because it’s a unique professional situation. We’re not running a corporation, or a factory, or a baseball team. But it would be nice if we were able to draw more parallels between schools and baseball, if all our players came to us with the skills necessary to succeed, and our job was to take them to greater heights, not reteach the fundamentals; if there were a minor league where we could send students to polish their game until they were ready for The Show; if we were responsible for fewer players so that each one could get more reps on every practice day; if the community built us a new stadium with state-of-the-art amenities as a reward for consistent excellence; if people at Sports Authority were buying official MLB jerseys bearing the names of students who were rated advanced on the CSAP test….

Even then, I imagine that the players would be driving fancier cars than the coaches.

I Sing The Body Electric, Part 2

2008-01-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

I’m here to sing the praises of some of the technical innovations that I first learned about in 21C but which have since become more important to me for personal reasons. My daughter left January 1 for a year of study in France. Since she has been there, I have talked to and seen her on Skype, used Google Earth to look at the neighborhood where she’s living and the school she’ll be attending (Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris), and viewed some of the pictures she’s taken on Photo Bucket. It made me think about “just in case” versus “just in time” learning. I learned about the existence of Skype and Google Earth and played with them during 21C sessions, and though they were fascinating, they were never that important to me until I had a reason to use them. It made me realize all over again why students often seem disinterested by the “just in case” learning we traditionally foist on them. Whether it’s technology or literature or any other skill or knowledge, the real challenge is to give the students a reason to use it – a real reason, not just an exercise to see if they can. I find this realization daunting because, to me, it makes planning a lesson so much more uncertain and complicated. I’m used to trying to convince students that they should read literature, for example, but I’m not so practiced at showing them why they need to read literature.

Grading Redux

2007-11-16T09:52:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year (in my posts of August 31 and October 3) I mentioned that I was trying out a grading style which involved a 4-point scale. At the twelve week mark I solicited feedback from the students in my sophomore classes, and you can read the comments for both first and fifth hours. While some students embraced the new system, the majority were uncomfortable with it. Their three main concerns were (1) it was too hard to determine their overall grades from a series of 4s, 3s, 2s and 1s, (2) it was frustrating that Infinite Campus reported the grades based on pure percentages rather than what they were supposed to be (for instance, a grade of Proficient or 3 appeared as a 75% rather than the equivalent of a B), and (3) with only 4 grades, there was too much of a gap between grades; they only knew that they were “Proficient,” not how close to being “Advanced” they were (apparently the extensive comments I write on each essay do not explain this clearly…).

I’m not so concerned over item #1; part of my hope was that students would dwell more on the quality of each assignment rather than on the overall grade, so it’s OK with me if they really have to think about what their grades should be, based on the quality of their work. But I actually have shared their concerns over items #2 and #3. I think a grading system should give useful feedback, and I had already started “cheating” on the 4-point scale by using plusses and minuses. To solve the Infinite Campus problem, I have changed the grades to simple percentages so that IC can do its calculations. I still plan just to write “Advanced” and “Proficient” and so forth on the assignments, along with explanatory comments. My hope is that students will ponder this feedback a bit before they rush to their computers.

So far, I feel that I have been largely unsuccessful in conveying the idea that learning is more important than grades. My students seem less interested in improving the quality of their work than in accumulating points. Maybe next semester…

Ready, Set, Write

2007-10-18T07:56:00.000-06:00

In the last couple of years I’ve noticed an increasing trend in my English classes: students asking for more than the allotted class time for essay tests. In the past, my answer has always been no; an essay test is a controlled measure of your knowledge and it would be unfair to give you more time than other students. But I’m changing my mind about this.

For one thing, more accommodations allowing extra time on tests are mandated by IEPs and 504s, and it seems there’s always at least one student who has been granted extra time. The AP Literature test requires three essays to be written in two hours, so for years we have prepared students by having them write a weekly in-class essay with a 40 minute time limit. Recently I have had a few AP students who have asked for extra time, one of whom has a 504 that will grant extra time on the actual test.

But perhaps more compelling is the idea that truly assessing a student’s knowledge should not be time-dependent. I point out to my students that timed writings are a particularly academic pursuit. Where else in the real world, except perhaps as a journalist, would you have to pound out an essay in a certain amount of time with no chance to revise and polish it? (I’m probably wrong about this too, as I seem to be about so many things lately. In the fast-paced world of blogs and wikis, maybe rapid, on-the spot-writing is becoming more the norm. It would be interesting to ask some engineers and lawyers and corporate wonks if this is true.) Given that most of my essay “tests” (really in-class writings) are open book and don’t depend on memorization, is it unfair to let a student who has a lot to say finish the writing in an off hour the next day? Will the extra time to think about the question give her an advantage over the students who said all they had to say in 58 minutes?

I’d be interested to hear what people think about this.

Grade Reflections

2007-10-03T21:19:00.000-06:00

On the occasion of “six week grades” I found myself reflecting on how insidious computer grade books like Infinite Campus can be. It’s so easy to plug in points and let the program calculate totals and percentages and tell you what the students’ grades are. So many times in recent years I’ve found myself madly entering grades to meet an arbitrary deadline and then immediately publishing those grades, without really considering what the numbers mean. The program says a student’s grade calculates to a B+, so that’s the grade. Like the students, I think we get caught up in tallying points without considering the circumstances of the work the students do, or the point in time (early or late in the semester) that the work was completed, or whether, even though the student’s average says that she earned a C, the fact is that by the end of the semester she was consistently doing B work, suggesting that that is her current level of achievement. I am experimenting with a 4-point scale that actually hearkens back to the days when we (people of a certain age) used to write A’s, B’s, and C’s in the grade book and really look at them when it came time to assign a semester grade, considering relative difficulty of assignments and looking for trends. (To see my explanation of how the 4-point scale is supposed to work, look at the Class Overview linked from my English 10 web page.) It’s much less convenient, not letting the computer do the number crunching, but it makes me think about what those numbers mean.

In Honor of the Great Harlan Ellison®, Whose Inimitably Titled Stories Include “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream”

2007-09-10T20:19:00.000-06:00

I see we are going to use “butcher paper” at our next PLC meeting.

And I must scream.

I’m beginning to think that butcher paper has come to represent all that’s wrong with school reform. To wit:

Where does it go? We write on it beautifully with scented markers, inscribing our deepest thoughts about the future of education, and then…what? Probably, because our school no longer has a recycling program, the butcher paper gets wadded up and stuffed in a trashcan. The alternative is equally disheartening: is someone saving all that butcher paper? Do they fold it up and store it somewhere? (I picture the final scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark.) Either way, I wonder, when was the last time that something you wrote on butcher paper affected a student’s learning?

Isn’t writing on big sheets of butcher paper a little outmoded? I’m among the first to lament the loss of low-tech, high-touch means of communicating, but do we need to use butcher paper every time? The 21C group has taught us how to use GoogleDocs and wikis. When I develop norms with my classes

(and by the way, I see we get to talk about norms again, as if we haven’t done so for every new group we start, as if the norms aren’t always the same, as if…)

I have a student type on the computer while his/her classmates contribute their ideas, and we can all see it projected on the screen and then save the brainstorming as a document without having to copy it from butcher paper. We are talking about teaching our students how to use RSS feeds and we’re still writing on butcher paper.

And who else calls it “butcher paper,” anyway? I suspect that only teachers use the term “butcher paper.” When I mentioned our excessive use of “butcher paper” to my wife, who is a 30-year government employee, she looked at me blankly until I compared it to the paper that comes off flip charts; then she nodded. (Every profession has their “butcher paper.”) I bet even butchers don’t call it “butcher paper”; even though, at Sunflower Market, butchers still wrap meat in paper (after first ensconcing it in plastic), I suspect they just call it “paper” (in much the same way people in China probably call Chinese food “food”).

Butcher paper is our security blanket. As long as we have butcher paper, we remain comfortable with the process that we repeat over and over to assure ourselves that, hey, at least we’re doing something. We establish norms, unfurl the butcher paper, report what we did in our turbo meetings, and repeat the process until the next new reform takes hold.

I say, put butcher paper back in the hands of the students, where it can do some good.

(Harlan Ellison®, for those who are still reading, is a short story author who’s so irascible that he copyrighted his own name. He’s usually considered a science fiction author, though he himself denies the label. You can read about him in, of course, Wikipedia. We read “’Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” in my SF class; it’s about a rebel who disrupts a future society that punishes people for being late. “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” is about a self-aware computer that hates humans. Ellison also wrote one of the best original Star Trek episodes ever, The City on the Edge of Tomorrow. I don’t think he used butcher paper.)

Back to School

2007-08-31T10:08:00.000-06:00

Last year, as we discussed ways to reinvent our teaching to better serve students, I mainly mulled things over without making many substantial changes. At the beginning of this 2007-08 school year, I'm "taking the plunge" and hoping I don't end up holding the plunger. A couple of the things I'm trying:

In my English 10 and Science Fiction classes I'm using a 4-point grading scale in an attempt to take the emphasis off point-accumulation and focus the students' thoughts on the quality of their assignments rather than on "how many more points do I need for an A?" I modeled the scale on Tony Winger's rubric that you can see if you look on Infinite Campus: admin--curves--Winger Rubric. I plan to weight the bigger assignments, but for every assignment they do, the students will just see a 4, 3, 2, or 1. I'm trying to couple this with increased self-evaluation by the students, constantly asking them "How well did you do?" and providing feedback.

I have told my English 10 classes that their only homework for now is to read 24/7. They can read anything with text, electronic or print. (One student promptly informed me that he planned to read the closed captioning subtitles on his TV...) They will report on their reading every 2-3 weeks and I will comment and encourage them. We've talked about the idea that the more you work with language, the better you get at expressing yourself, but that if you only read simple stuff you'll only have simple thoughts (I believe the cyber version is GIGO). There are no requirements for time spent reading or pages read, and I plan to grade the readfing reports on their clarity and thoroughness rather than on the quantity or quality of the reading they report. When I shared this with parents at BTS night they looked skeptical. I am too. We'll see what happens.

I let the sophomores choose two literary books to read as a class, rather than basing my lit choices on when books are available in the department. So far they picked Fahrenheit 451 (much to my delight). I'm also trying to give students plenty of choice about writing topics. Helping 15-year-olds find writing topics can be tough. I started by asking them to blog about something that piques their curiosity (you can see the results at tsaleone0708.blogspot.com and tsalefive0708.blogspot.com).

I'm not sure I'm completely ready for this brave new world, but nothing ventured, nothing gained (literary allusion and cliche in the same sentence!).

The Long and the Short of It

2007-04-05T09:29:00.000-06:00

A couple of recent newspaper articles emphasized for me the accelerating pace of society. First, “Board-game Makers Heed Call to Streamline Products” explained how companies like Hasbro, Inc., in response to parent requests, are adapting board games such as Monopoly and Life so that they can be played in 20 minutes or so, because kids won’t sit still for longer time spans. The second article, “The Future of Radio: More Songs in Less Time?”, was about a guy in Dallas who’s been editing popular songs down to two and a half minutes so that more will fit into a two hour radio show. Supposedly, the careful editing retains all the “familiar” parts of the songs so that listeners won’t even realize their favorite songs have been shortened.

Like so many things in the news recently, these tidbits seem anathema to the pace at which I’ve become accustomed to live my life. I fondly remember marathon games of Monopoly that lasted late into the night, until the last desperate opponent was finally bankrupt, and games of Risk that saw little yellow wooden tokens spreading out across the world and then being driven back into some island stronghold, only to gain new strength and repel the green invaders one more time, thus prolonging games not just for hours but for days. And I remember how my friends and I distained the AM radio stations that played shortened versions of songs like “Light My Fire” and “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and sought out the FM stations that not only played the “long versions,” but also played whole album sides while the DJs napped or possibly indulged in some unsanctioned activities. (On a side note, I recently heard a sampling of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” on a TV bank commercial, which was much shorter than 2:30, and “Light My Fire” in the dentist’s office – signs of either the pervasive impact of the baby boomers on society, or of the trivialization of songs we once held sacred, take your pick.)

News about the compression of activities also makes me wonder about the effect on how we teach students. Years ago I adapted my plans for sophomores so that I do no fewer than three activities in a 57 minute class, rather than try to retain their attention for the whole span. Do I need to start planning 5 or 6 activities? I wonder about the sustained concentration on an idea that I have always presumed to be important for deep understanding of a topic. I imagine people like Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein contemplating an apparatus or an equation for hours on end until they had their epiphany of invention. Is the prevalent pace of society making that expectation an impossibility? But maybe I’m misguided; maybe guys like Edison and Einstein were multi-taskers whose minds raced from topic to topic at a breakneck pace, and their accomplishments were the result of thinking and walking and talking and veering from idea to idea. Still, it’s hard for me to shift the paradigm that it’s nearly impossible to understand tough ideas unless you concentrate and stick with it.

I asked myself, do kids today concentrate and persist at anything? The answer, of course, is yes. How long do Halo players sit in front of the tube wielding their joysticks? How long do your kids spend on AOL, chatting with four or five friends at once? How long does it take to watch a dozen YouTube clips in a row? Even in the academic setting, I’ve had classes maintain a discussion for 45 minutes (if the topic is engaging enough, and often as long as it has nothing to do with the subject matter). Of course, while teenagers (and older folks) are enthralled with these activities, they are not doing what English teachers traditionally hope they’ll do – say, read a 400 page novel. What’s the difference between fighting your way through 7 levels of Halo and fighting your way through 200 pages of Fahrenheit 451? You could list all the bells and whistles and popups on the Web, but what I realized is: it’s interactive. If you attend to Halo, you get a response. If you message your friend on AOL, you get an answer. If you offer an idea in discussion, someone has a comeback. You can keep going for a long time if your existence is continually acknowledged.

Of course, we try to convince kids that reading is interactive. You should be making pictures in your minds, we tell them. You should write a sticky note when you encounter an interesting idea, we tell them. Be an active reader. Interact with the text. And some do, though when kids do confess to actually reading, they tell me that they hate to do sticky notes because it interrupts the flow of the story. (I love to hear that because (1) it means they are actually reading and (2) their minds must be engaged if they don’t want to stop.) But the truth is that, even for those kids, the book just sits there. We complain that kids have no imagination, that they have no discipline, but can you blame them, when there are so many more stimulating and rewarding alternatives?

But what if…

What if novels were presented in a digital format that allowed readers to truly interact with the text in real time? What if they could literally talk to it and write to it and click on it to make it change color or link to a related web site? And what if the text would respond? What if, when you wondered why an author killed off a certain character, you could click on the scene and the author would tell you in a video clip? What if, when you asked a question about a passage, someone else who had read or was reading the book would respond to you in a previously recorded or real-time comment? What if, when you wondered what would have happened to Montag if Clarisse hadn’t disappeared early in the book, you could embed your ideas into a link in the text and thus make them available to future readers? What if you didn’t have to turn away from the text to peel off a sticky note?

Naturally, the technology to achieve all these “what ifs” exists now and has existed for a while; it just hasn’t been applied to many fictional or “literary” texts. I have no doubt the day will come. Reading, which has always been a solitary activity, could well become a communal one. Authors might enjoy the kind of feedback enjoyed by storytellers of yore. One imagines 21st century groundlings throwing digital tomatoes at some modern Shakespeare. Perhaps when this is possible on a regular basis, teenagers, who are used to being connected and interactive, will rediscover the joy of reading.

Still, I can’t help thinking there’s something to be said for staring off into space after you read an especially descriptive or thought provoking passage and letting your solitary mind play with the words and images. There’s merit to having to mull over a difficult idea on your own, rather than having the answer at your fingertips. There’s a special creative genesis that occurs when the scraps you’ve collected gestate in the primordial cauldron of your mind. But maybe that’s just me. Maybe constant stimulation with no quarter is a better environment for creative thought. Maybe ten different pop songs will ring more bells than a 20 minute Jimmy Page guitar solo. Maybe more short Monopoly games will give me a better chance to be a winner.

Yesterday's Magic

2007-03-21T14:53:00.001-06:00

Noted science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke made the famous pronouncement that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Over the past couple of days it occurred to me how many times I’ve used some form of “advanced” technology for my classes, and how some of it still seems magic to me, and some not so much. In AP Lit, we spent time in class using Audacity to record some pieces for podcasts, while on my unscheduled hours I was grading essays on GoogleDocs, thus completing our first paperless in-class writing/workshop/grading project. Both podcasting and working on GoogleDocs still have the aura of magic about them for me, through even in the few days I’ve used them, they already have become more familiar and comfortable. I thought to myself, wow, I’m really incorporating technology into my teaching, because in both cases I made a conscious effort to try something new. And then I realized that in the past couple of days I have also: asked my students to blog about their class discussion, carried sound files from one computer to another using a flash drive, used the projectors in both my classroom and the LMC lab to show instructions and examples saved on my file server folder, had my sophomores go online and find an article from one of the subscription services, recorded attendance on Infinite Campus, and, oh yeah, wheeled in a TV/DVD player on a cart when a student’s project wouldn’t play through the classroom computer. This last list seems like anything but magic; it seems like a typical part of what we do. But not long ago (a matter of months, in some cases) these activities would have been pure magic. It makes me thankful that the 21C group has encouraged us to pick up the wand.

Electric Endymion

2007-03-13T21:48:00.000-06:00

Recently I read a commentary by Cory Doctorow in the March edition of Locus magazine titled “You Do Like to Read Off a Computer Screen,” and it rekindled in my mind an old debate I have with myself about teaching language arts. (Ironically, the article doesn't seem to be online yet.) The thrust of Doctorow’s article was that technology determines the packaging of media, and therefore drives how we read or listen to material. The part of the article that struck me most was:

Basically, what I do on the computer is pleasure-reading. But it’s a fundamentally more scattered, splintered kind of pleasure. Computers have their own cognitive style, and it’s not much like the cognitive style invented with the first modern novel (one sec, let me google that and confirm it), Don Quixote, some 400 years ago. The novel is an invention, one that was engendered by technological changes in information display, reproduction, and distribution. The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive style of the novel.

It took a long time and the influence of many factors (the invention of the printing press, the rise of the middle class that made it OK for ordinary people to become literate) to move society from an oral tradition to a print tradition. I imagine it won’t take nearly as long to shift from a print tradition to a digital tradition; the factors are already in place (the rising cost and declining availability of paper, the universal availability of computers), and the shift has begun. (Witness the report on last Sunday’s Sunday Morning show on CBS, which explained how some newspapers are ceasing publication and some are moving to primarily digital publication.)

All this got me thinking about the fact that most of our language arts classes center around literature in books. Traditionally, we require our students to read and pretend to appreciate stories and novels. Yet the novel, along with being an “invention,” as Doctorow suggests, is an art form. We don’t require all students to take art appreciation classes, or study music theory, or attend the ballet. But aren’t those forms as viable and important as literature? I tout novels as explorations of the human condition and windows into other eras and cultures…but don’t paintings and operas and films do that too? Is reading The Kite Runner any more enlightening than watching Babel? And if the goal is an understanding of universal human nature, how does an hour of reading a novel compare with an hour of reading off a computer that’s connected to Google, YouTube, and The Fischbowl? If you want to get a glimpse of medieval Scotland and Elizabethan England, and at the same time contemplate the dangers of unbridled ambition and the possibility of supernatural influences in the world, you could read Macbeth, at an uncomfortable desk in a white-walled classroom, or you could spend some time on the computer looking at colorful, moving images and text. It usually takes my sophomore class six weeks of class time – 30 hours – to thoroughly read, study and discuss Macbeth. Imagine what a 16-year-old could learn about witches, regicide, poetry, betrayal, King James I, loss, and the effects of violence if she spent 30 hours on the Internet, or even 20 hours on the Internet and ten hours discussing what she found with classmates.

Well, whoa. Do we really believe that students can google “ambition” and get the same depth of understanding as they would by experiencing Macbeth’s bloody, tortured, hallucinogenic, poetic journey from acclaim to perdition? Of course not. Don Quixote was a pretty auspicious debut for the “invention” of the novel. I don’t think the Internet has spawned its Miguel de Cervantes yet (though if Karl Fisch keeps going the way he is…). The novel has been around for 400 years (Don Quixote was published in 1604, about the same year Hamlet was written), and for close to that long our paradigm has been that books are the repository of our best thinking and use of language. But if Doctorow is right – and I suspect he is – we may well see the Guttenberg Age transmogrify into the Google Age in our lifetimes, and instead of dragging our feet and griping a la the “What If?” presentation (“Kids never just sit and listen to the bards any more, they’re all off sitting alone, reading those ‘books’”) we need to prepare.

In the language arts area, it may be time to shift our paradigm from literature-centered classes to reading-centered classes, and to acknowledge that much of the material on the Internet is still text-based. Right now, our only college prep classes for “regular” students are American Lit (juniors) and English Lit (seniors). But perhaps literary study should be like Music Theory or Watercolor or C++ Programming – available to those who are interested, but not the mainstream expectation for college bound students. We should still expose kids to the wonders of literature in their 9th and 10th grade years, and show them what the best of literature has to offer, but as they segue into higher education, we need to give them other options.

What would those other options be? Doctorow suggests what future reading and writing will look like:

But I know what you mean. You don’t like reading long-form works off of a computer screen. I understand perfectly – in the ten minutes since I typed the first word in the paragraph above, I’ve checked my mail, deleted two spams, checked an image-sharing community I like, downloaded a YouTube clip of Stephen Colbert complaining about the iPhone (pausing my MP3 player first), cleared out my RSS reader, and then returned to write this paragraph.

I derive from this that instead of being handed a long, unified text, future readers will have to piece together ideas and information from a variety of “texts.” There’s a wealth of info out there, but it has to be selected and synthesized. Right now we emphasize analysis in our lit classes, and according to Bloom’s Taxonomy synthesis is a higher level of thinking than analysis. Assembling disparate pieces into a coherent whole (i.e., synthesis) requires a certain amount of creativity. It also requires discriminating between valuable material and junk. Right now the language arts paradigm is: “Here’s a great novel. Study it so you can explain to me why it’s great.” We need to shift to: “Go find some great things. Assemble them into something greater.” Literature has a place in that pursuit. Before you can find or make great things, you have to understand what great things look like. But right now, we tend not even to ask our students to recognize great things – we tell them what’s great and stop there.

Within the next few years we need a class for juniors that’s a viable alternative to American Lit. It should involve reading and writing and discussing, as all language arts classes do, but it should also involve scanning a variety of poetry blogs and justifying why this one is great and that one is tripe; finding five different video clips that portray obstacles to achieving the American Dream and adding an audio commentary that links them; writing a critique of a web site that connects to a theme under class discussion. And our 9th and 10th grade classes must help students develop the skills that will lead them to this new class. I don’t know if I will learn enough about electronic media to develop such a class before I retire, but there are language arts teachers at AHS right now with enough computer savvy to rewrite the Pathfinder.

Meanwhile, classes like American Lit will and must survive, because the multifarious playground of the Internet hasn’t learned to be profound. It’s a fount of information and opinions and video clips, but it hasn’t engendered its Cervantes yet, let alone its Shakespeare. We always invoke the name of Shakespeare as if he’s the only profound author we can think of, but there are a number of living authors who offer poetic, deeply felt insights into society, metaphysics, and the human condition: Toni Morrison, T.C. Boyle, Margaret Atwood, Michael Chabon….Until someone like that decides to use the cyber world as his or her primary medium, the Internet will be just a communication tool and lite entertainment medium. But some day, a wired John Keats will create his electric “Endymion.” It will be interactive and multimedia; it will use sound bites and text files and embedded video clips; it will be linked to 50 other creations on the web; you will download it to your iPhone; it will make your heart pound with wonder whenever you play it. Maybe that 21st century Keats is sitting in one of our classrooms right now. We need to give him the tools to be wonderful.

As for me, I’ll be happy to teach the old fashioned lit class (especially now that it will be filled with book lovers like me). I’m happy turning the pages of my books, and no YouTubing, blogging, skyping, podcasting, IMing wikiphile is going to change that. But neither can I change the multitasking mind of next year’s teenager by telling her to read a book.

Exposed

2007-02-05T19:31:00.000-07:00

Today a student of mine made an offhanded comment that I found rather disconcerting, though still interesting. My English 10 students have been reading some King Arthur tales and are currently working on their own original tales. One student informed me, “Mr. Sale, you’re going to be the villain in our story.” This wasn’t what I found disconcerting; I’ve been the villain or hero in a number of student productions. But the student went on to say, “I got some pictures of you dancing from Steph’s Facebook.”

Now I don’t make a habit of dancing for my students. I’m not brave enough to strut my stuff amidst the other faculty dancers at the winter assembly. However…when I introduce Oedipus Rex and Greek drama to my AP Lit students, I have them form the shape of a Greek theater with their desks, and I explain how the chorus used to dance in the area called the orchestra (which in Greek means “the dancing place”), and I walk around in what I guess you could call a minimalist version of the chorus’s dance. When my 10th grader mentioned the pictures, I remembered that Steph (one of my AP students) did have her camera that day and took some pictures. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I guess I’m still living in the round world, rather than the flat one, and it never occurred to me that pictures of me in class would turn up on the Internet.

Of course, one of my first thoughts was of that infamous teacher from Overland whose student surreptitiously recorded his lecture. I thought about how you establish a level of trust with your different classes, a trust that can easily vary depending on the maturity and sophistication of the class. It struck me as a bit of a violation of my…well, not privacy, but of my person, that pictures of me could be published online without my permission. After all, I’m not Lindsay Lohan, and I never worry about the paparazzi. Is turnabout fair play? What if I took pictures of my students and put them on this blog? Sounds like a ticket to early retirement to me.

On the other hand, this is probably the logical next step to student gossip. I know that comments I’ve made to one class, thinking I was talking only to that particular audience, get repeated to me by students in other classes, in other grades. Besides, this could be a new avenue to educational reform: let all the kids have their cell phone cameras out all the time and record and post online everything we as teachers do. Wouldn’t that keep us honest. It would be like a daily “drive by” evaluation by your favorite administrator. If everything we did in class was available for public scrutiny, wouldn’t we make sure everything we did was meaningful and relevant? Would we ever use sarcasm or belittling remarks on a student? Would we ever waste time chatting with them or sharing our own political views when we should be teaching them? Would we ever feel free to be spontaneous or experimental?

Of course I’m getting ahead of my self. I don’t even know if what my 10th grader said was true (guess I’ll find out when I see his project later this week); I wouldn't be able to look at Steph’s Facebook unless she “friended” me (there’s another ugly neologism; isn’t the word “befriended”?). It’s just that I don’t know if I’m ready to have my picture all over the Internet. Especially because I’m not a very good dancer.

Blogging About Group Projects

2007-01-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

I thought of a way to use the blog to solve an age old problem with doing group work in class. Students always complain that one or two members of the group do all the work, or that one group member slacks off yet gets credit for the work that the rest do. Right now both my English 10 and Science Fiction classes are working on group projects, and I’m having them blog about their progress. They can either rotate the responsibility for reporting the group’s work, or the members of the group can each report their progress individually. With the record of what each student says they have done there for all to see, students can monitor one another and comment on the blog if they feel the report of their work is inaccurate. The instructions I’ve given the students (somewhat different for each class) are posted on the class blogs at sale5th.blogspot.com and salesf.blogspot.com.

Doing the Compliance Dance

2007-01-16T14:15:00.000-07:00

As we belatedly polish off fall semester and begin spring semester, I keep realizing how mired I still am in giving assignments and asking questions oriented more toward compliance than toward understanding. Just today in my English 10 class, we spent 20 minutes discussing the literal events of a story, and just the last two minutes talking about the meaning behind the events. In part, it was me asking questions designed to “catch” students who hadn’t read the story (and I did catch some), and in part it was starting with simple questions to get the discussion rolling and then keeping on that track too long. I’m trying to shift the balance from “check for (literal) understanding” to “check for (deep) understanding.” It would help if there were some kind of implant we could install in students when they arrive at AHS that would make them care about every story I teach; I’m still struggling with finding just the right questions to ask to spark interest. I think it’s the hardest part of constructivist teaching.

By the way, for each student I “caught” having not read the story we were discussing, I asked why he/she didn’t read it. The typical answers were “I forgot” or “I left the story at school.” I wonder: are there questions or other “anticipatory sets” powerful enough to eliminate those excuses?

The Shape of Things

2006-12-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

I just observed Jared Rottschafer’s 6th period Geometry class, and it has inspired me to end my (unintentional) hiatus from my personal blog. Jared taught what seemed to me a wonderful constructivist lesson, in which he had students derive the definitions that differentiated a parallelogram from a rectangle and a rhombus. He also had students derive a definition of a kite shape using geometric terms. During the class it occurred to me that I took Geometry 40 years ago! Looks like the shapes and the definitions are the same, but the teaching method Jared employed showed how different teaching can be. He was allowing students to discover ideas. They never even opened a textbook. He even did his homework check mentally (which seemed to freak out some students, but in a good way; freaking out students seems part and parcel of constructivism to me). His comment half way through class that “We have to hurry up because we have more to cover” pointed out yet again that constructivist teaching takes time; you have to let the students explore and make mistakes and self-correct and question. I forget sometimes that I’m lucky to teach English because we don’t have to “cover” material the same way a math or science or history teacher has to; we basically do the same thing over and over again (read, write, read some more, write some more). [Of course the ”sometimes” when I forget how lucky I am is when I have a stack of essays to grade, but that’s another story, though a story related to why I haven’t written on my blog for a while…but enough stories.] Anyway, I got the sense that the students would retain what Jared was teaching them because he was taking the time. Thanks, Jared, for allowing me to see you in action.

Homework From England

2006-10-23T20:44:00.000-06:00

Every three weeks my English 10 students do a reading reflection to discuss how reading of all kinds has affected them. I wanted to share one -- not the reflection itself, but the note at the end, from a student I haven't seen in person for two weeks because her family is traveling:

sorry its late did not have internet access since the 14th so could not do this till i was in heathrow airport in london sorry.

Obviously we still have to work on checking writing before publishing, but I got a kick out of this nevertheless. I've never received homework from overseas before....

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

2006-10-12T18:55:00.000-06:00

I don’t really have any earthshaking revelations or insights this week, but I wanted to note a couple of modifications I’ve made due to some reflection and trial-and-error.

When I started my English 10 classes on blogging this year, I gave them a couple of ongoing assignments – three, actually. One was to write weekly about their independent reading (SSR) books, just a 5 minute writing in response to some prompts I provided. The second was to do 4 ten-minute freewritings on a variety of topics (which, again, I provided, and if that doesn’t sound constructivist, my experience is that sophomores benefit from topic suggestions; they still get to choose from over 40 prompts). The third assignment was to do a weekly vocab word on our class blog. The vocab assignment worked fine, but I didn’t have them do enough with it. They generated 24 words every week (and to the students’ credit, they were good words), but the list just sat there. Now, I’m having one third of the students provide words, and we’re going to use that list each week as our list to study. The freewritings (they finished 2 of them) were adequate, but not very exciting, and the SSR responses – well, they were writing weekly, but they were writing weakly; they just repeatedly wrote brief summaries of the books they were reading. These last two blogging assignments just didn’t interest the students very much, and they bored me to death. So, we scrapped those assignments. For now, the class is divided into thirds. Each week, one third of the class does the vocab word, and another third of the class does a Reading Response. In the reading response, they just reflect on all the reading they’ve done in the past 3 weeks, from all their classes and from their own independent reading, commenting on what grabbed their interest and what was worthwhile for them. I’m hoping this will serve as a meta-cognitive avenue to some deeper thinking. The final third of the class gets the week off from blogging. Then, every week the groups rotate. These are just the ongoing assignments; we’re still using the blog for occasional on-line discussions. Not only with blogs, but also with traditional written assignments, I’m striving to have fewer assignments and make each one more meaningful.

21C Session 10-3-06

2006-10-03T20:15:00.000-06:00

I found both parts of today’s 21C session interesting and useful. Our meetings always make me wish that every teacher could have the time that we do to share ideas and think about our teaching. It’s so valuable to get a little reanimating jolt so that our bodies can be out roaming the land terrorizing the villagers rather than just lying on a slab in the laboratory. (Got a little carried away with the Frankenstein allusion there, but it’s October and Halloween is coming up.) Anyway, if this is the kind of interaction that our PLC time will allow, I’m all for it.

Every discussion we have about constructivism is helpful, and today was no exception. We explored a pretty good range of concerns, from assessment to accountability to the definition of rigor. It does feel at this point as if we’ve been introduced to constructivism over and over again. The article we discussed seemed to define constructivism by pointing out what it’s not, and our discussion sometimes circled the topic like timid warriors trying to count coup but not quite making contact. I’m craving some solid examples of good constructivist lessons, something definite to hang on to. But maybe constructivism is a sort of Zen pursuit: if you have to ask what it is, you haven’t yet constructed the understanding necessary to approach it.

The grading discussion with Tony Winger was also interesting. Having been a part of the grading project last year, I expected Tony’s talk to be pretty much a review, but this was Winger 2.0; he’s evolved. The simplified grading categories of understanding, knowledge, skills, and learning support seemed elegant to me, especially after the complicated systems some of us invented last year. The discussion reinforced for me the most important aspect of the grading discussion – not what the categories should be, but the idea that whenever you make an assignment, you need to ask yourself “Why am I having my students do this? How will this assignment allow them to show what they’ve learned?”

I’m looking forward to reading the articles we received.

Reading, However

2006-09-27T20:43:00.000-06:00

After wading my way through a number of blog entries (e.g., I read 90 comments from my AP Lit class, about King Henry IV, Part 1, every week), I began to wonder just how much reading our students do online, aside from what they have to read for school assignments. When I was a student teacher in California in 1975, I asked my sophomore students how many of them would have read a book in the last year if they hadn’t been assigned one for class. Only a couple raised their hands. Ever since then I’ve assumed that (1) unless they’re required to, high school students (on the average) don’t read very much, and (2) with all the added distractions in the last 30 years, students probably read even less now than those kids I talked to in 1975. (And I guess I’m also assuming that, as those 1975 sophomores are now about 45 years old, adult reading has declined, too.) But it occurred to me that kids might read more now than ever before, even if they’re not reading books. With the advent of email, text messaging, and blogs, I wouldn’t be surprised if teenagers actually read more text every day than their parents or grandparents did. I’m not sure how one would check this (though the text messaging section of my own kids’ Verizon bill would certainly support the idea). I’m thinking about discussing this up with my students.

I was thinking about this along with the English department’s current discussion about how to spend our curriculum money. (Those who have visited Maura’s blog will have seen some of the discussion. In one department meeting Kristin and I jokingly dubbed the debate “Books versus Laptops: The Final Battle.”) Like Kristin, I don’t think this is necessarily an either-or debate. I do think that buying books gives us more bang for the buck (if the money would provide for no more than one classroom set of laptops), but my bigger concern is that we maintain a focus on reading literature, whether it’s on the printed page or online. And here’s why…

(But first a digression that will further complicate the book buying issue: I became curious how much literature was actually available online, and in 20 minutes I found literally a hundred sites that offered FREE literature downloads, and not just fan fiction written by some disaffected loner sitting in his/her basement. Check out Bartleby.com, where I found the complete text of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. What if we bought a bunch of laptops and never had to buy print books again, because students could read them online? Of course, that would require reading everything on a computer screen, at least until the invention of SmartPaper, and that would drive me to retirement in a remote location.)

The reason I think that teaching literature is more important than ever is that, if indeed kids are reading more than ever online, what they’re reading is probably short and fragmented. (I was about to add “shallow,” but that’s my inner fuddy-duddy speaking {and I’d like to note that Spell Check actually recognized the word “fuddy-duddy,” for what that’s worth}.) I believe the world would be a better place if people spent more time in quiet, slow contemplation and thought, like they do when they really sit down to read a novel. Ok, Ok, the history of the world before the Internet, before TV, when people still read three-volume novels, was full of war and conflict. But when I read The World is Flat (slowly), the message seemed to be that the modern world is all about commerce and efficiency (e.g., turbo meetings) and making money and beating other nations in the realm of science. I didn’t see much about enriching your soul with beautiful language and the wonder of an original insight about human nature.

Well, this Take 5 has gotten out of control. Sandi Boldman will probably feel a chill run up her spine when I post this, and I’m not even considering the “to be” verbs. But I don’t think I’ll go back and edit this much, because I’ve been writing from the right side of my brain, Lary, and here I’ve gone and done it, I’ve created the kind of rambling blog entry that I accuse the blogosphere of fostering.

Anyway. I wonder, with the availability of the Internet, are today’s students post-literate, or ultra-literate?

451: The Temperature at Which Minds Burn...?

2006-09-20T21:34:00.000-06:00

I had a hard time deciding what to write about for my Take 5 this week. It didn’t help that I read Karl’s eloquent post titled “What If?” (complete with attached PowerPoint and Media Player files) and realized that I didn’t have anything nearly as thoughtful to offer. I toyed with writing about the PowerPoint we received in an email today, the one we’re going to see at the inservice this Friday (apparently we’re going to have Turbo meetings, which will not only determine our GAN but also help us reach our SIP, while teaching us how to hold efficient PLC meetings), but I decided to reserve judgment until Friday. Finally I thought about the book circles I’m starting in my English 10 Basic Skills class.

For you non-language arts teachers, a book circle is basically just what it sounds like – a student version of a grown up book club, where you get to choose the book you read and decide what you want to talk about as you read it. Very constructivist, no? To an English teacher book clubs are a little scary, because there are so many symbols and motifs in these books that we want our students to recognize and appreciate, and what if they just want to talk about what jerks the protagonist’s parents are? Nevertheless, with a little guidance, book clubs can be a great way to get students to take ownership of a book.

But in my basic skills class it isn’t the book circles themselves that I’m wondering about; it’s one of the selections I’ve decided to offer. Originally I lined up Of Mice and Men and The Pearl, both by John Steinbeck, and both pretty accessible for struggling readers, along with The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, a little tougher read, but a beautiful book and one I’ve used successfully in my skills class before. And then, one student mentioned that a friend of his (who happens to be in my “regular” English 10 class) was reading Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and that it sounded interesting. Now, in my experience, Fahrenheit 451 can be a challenging read for even “regular” 10th grade students (though the payoff is great once they wade through it). The vocabulary, the metaphorical language, and the tendency towards long, explanatory speeches by some of the characters can be daunting. I’ve never even considered trying Fahrenheit 451 with my skills class before. After all, “research says…” that if students try to read texts that are more than two grade levels above their reading level, they’ll only get frustrated and become more negative about reading.

Still…

When we previewed the books this week, several students choose Fahrenheit 451 as the book they wanted to read. I did warn them that it was the most difficult of the four selections, but let’s face it, a book about firemen who burn books sounds much more intriguing than the story of two men trying to make their way during the depression (“Mr. Sale, was this the sequel to Brokeback Mountain?”) or the trials of a poor Mexican pearl diver. We’ll see how it goes.

This has made me think, in more general terms, about this question: Where do we draw the line between student choice (which might just lead in a direction of greater interest, and therefore greater involvement), and giving students “what’s good for them?” Am I being irresponsible by letting students try to read a book that’s probably going to frustrate them? And if they are successful reading the book, is it OK if they miss all the deep symbolism, as long as they keep reading and find something to discuss?

And what if they don’t have time to voice all their thoughts in a 20 minute Turbo meeting?

Thinking About Thinking

2006-09-13T20:26:00.000-06:00

Last year, when I was a member of Tony Winger’s grading project, I decided to realign my grading categories to more closely reflect what my students were actually doing in class. One of the decisions I made was to have a “Thinking Skills” category, because I believe that pushing students to develop higher level thinking should be a part of every class. This is the description of that category on my class guidelines for my English 10 class:

Thinking Skills (18%)
1. Apply higher level thinking skills to reading, writing, speaking, and listening:
• synthesize and evaluate information
• make inferences and draw thoughtful conclusions
• use accurate, relevant details from text to support generalizations
• analyze for themes in literature
• judge quality based on a set of criteria

(The wording for all these goals is taken directly from the LPS district language arts curriculum.)

And ever since I established that category, it’s been driving me crazy. Do I record two grades for every assignment, a completion grade and a thinking grade? Do I design tasks that I will grade purely on thinking skills, without worrying about things like mechanics? Am I better off assuming that every assignment has a higher level thinking component, and that to get an “A” on any given assignment the student has to display higher level thinking?

I tried to prepare my students by introducing Bloom’s Taxonomy, asking them higher level questions about “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” (How are the bears in the story different from bears in the zoo? [analysis]; How would the story be different if it were “Goldilocks and the Three Fish? [synthesis]; Was Goldilocks a victim of circumstance, or a vicious little homewrecker? [evaluation]). On a couple of assignments I gave the students a completion grade, plus feedback on the level of thinking their questions represented. I showed the class examples of their classmates’ good thinking on the classroom projector. But I still wasn’t sure how I was going to record all this fine thinking they were going to be doing.

Finally, as we began our Fahrenheit 451 unit, I took another look at my grading criteria, and an idea occurred to me. Why not keep a separate running record of the thinking the students displayed for any activity or assignment we did while reading the book. Whether it was discussion, a reading journal, a sticky note, or a blog entry, when a student showed higher level thinking, I would make note of it, and give them the feedback that they had “hit the mark.” I wouldn’t necessarily record a grade for every student every time, but only for those who showed good inferential thinking, suggested creative alternatives to story lines, or reached profound conclusions. Suppose I were to use a nine point scale to rate good thinking – a 4 or 5 for some pretty good analysis, a 6 or 7 for posing and then answering a probing “what if?” question, an 8 or 9 for a knock-your-socks-off, original insight. When we finish the unit, I could look back over my notes and determine an overall thinking grade. Maybe Student A consistently logged 6s and 7s, showing good thinking on virtually every task; meanwhile, Student B only spoke up in discussion three times, but every time was a mind-boggling 9; perhaps Student C never said anything in discussion, but then went home, thought about it, and wrote several killer blog entries – all three might be deserving of a good thinking grade for the unit. Of course, it will be my job to provide the students plenty of opportunities to display their thinking skills, and to encourage those who aren’t thinking deeply to stretch themselves.

I introduced this idea to the students this week, so we’ll see how it goes. And this post is getting pretty long, so I’m going to sign off and grade some essays now. Your suggestions are appreciated.

Blog First, Ask Questions Later

2006-09-05T19:41:00.000-06:00

This week I realized that I’ve been guilty of something I always warn my students against. I always tell my science fiction students that they must guard against treating an elective class as so low a priority that they never get around to it. Likewise, I tell my sophomores that they need to treat a reading assignment with importance equal to their other assignments, that it isn’t something they do only if they “get around to it.” As the beginning of the semester has transmuted into the usual stacks of essays and other day-to-day assignments to grade, into planning the next unit and requesting Xerox copies, into answering (or deleting) emails and recording attendance and grades, I find myself saving my blogging activities until I “get around to it,” and I've gotten around to it less and less with each week that has passed. It occurred to me that I was still thinking of blogging as something extra, rather than an integral part of my teaching. Yet my sophomore students have a weekly blog assignment that replaces the numerous shredded and mangled papers on which they used to do freewriting and reading responses, and my AP students are set up to do their reading journals on the class blog. It’s not so much that I can’t see the keyboard in the dusk anymore without the overhead light glaring, not that I never learned to touch type (there’s a 20th century throwback) and so have to hunt-and-peck my way through every one of my blog entries, not even that I much prefer sitting in the Laz-E-Boy with a stack of papers to sitting hunched in front of the computer. I like blogging, like the way it puts ideas out there for all to see, like getting comments on my posts, like the way it empowers students to publish just as if they were college professors. It’s just that…there’s so much to do. And due to that (unalterable) reality, my blogging has lagged.

But no more.

Tonight I’m writing this before I pick up the stack of 29 AP essays. I just won’t get as many done tonight. The comments those students have posted on line are just as important. Tonight, I sing the body electric.

Blog Potpourri for the Future

2006-09-02T15:56:00.000-06:00

For this week’s Five for the Future, a collection of thoughts:

1. My students and I have been frustrated by how often Blogger decides that their blogs are spam and locks them (one of mine suffered the same fate). Most of the students got their blogs unlocked when they sent the request, but some are still locked out after 3 or 4 days. I’ve been wondering what we need to do to prevent the blogs from being locked – more posts at the start? A certain kind of content or key words in the first couple of posts? As I’m typing this, I realize I should send this query to Blogger, so maybe I’ll do that when I’m done here.

2. Speaking of the students’ individual blogs, I have realized how ineffectively I handled these last year. I had students post things like reading logs, freewritings, and learning reflections on their personal blogs, and then I’d go comment and give them feedback. But the individual student and I were the only ones looking at their blogs. This year I want to have the students in my English 10 classes visit one another’s individual blogs and add their comments. My next step is to put the links to the individual blogs on the class blog. Pretty simple concept, but it took be a year to realize what I really needed to do. Guess paradigm shift can be a slow process.

3. Cheryl’s, Lary’s and my AP Lit students will soon be blogging their fingers off as we read Shakespeare’s King Henry IV, Part 1. They’ll be doing a reading blog on the class blogs and commenting on one another’s ideas. At some point they’ll be cross-blogging with the other classes. When I explained the assignment, some of them seemed a little daunted, but as many seemed interested and excited. We’ll see how it goes.

SF Update Redux

2006-08-24T20:37:00.000-06:00

Just a follow up on my post of August 15. When I showed my SF students the second part of the SF history slide show, I asked them to just watch the slides and then write for 5 minutes about what they found interesting or important, or what they connected to. Though some students responded with a borng list of topics, most of them did exactly what I'd hoped -- they connected with the show in some way, expressing an interest and, in some cases, some profound insights about the purpose of SF. The responses were much more fun and satisfynig to read than their answers to a test.

Blogging Vocab

2006-08-22T20:51:00.000-06:00

Last year Karl wisely advised me not to use blogs to add work to my classes, but rather to adapt existing assignments and activities that might fit into the blogosphere. In that spirit, I'm having my English 10 students use the class blog to post vocabulary words. I have a requirement that, in the course of their reading or perusing other media, they each find one new word a week. They post the word, the original sentence in which it appeared, the source, and a definition written in their own words. They're also required to post a word that hasn't already been posted, so they have to read the previous posts, and if they all learn the word "mitosis" in biology that week, only the fastest student can use that word. Once the words are posted, we can use them to generate a vocabulary list for the class, or, better yet, have each student choose X number of words to add to his/her personal vocabulary.

It occurred to me there might be other occasions when I want students each to generate a unique idea, and having them post it on the blog could prevent me from getting a parade of repetitive answers to a writing prompt.

Reading Recommendations

2006-08-15T20:43:00.000-06:00

For those of you intrigued by the startling statistics in The World is Flat and shaken by the factoids n our own Karl Fisch’s Did You Know, I’d like to recommend a couple of excellent science fiction books that explore the same kinds of ideas and play with the possibilities of things like the artificial intelligence (AI) more advanced than the human brain.

Accelerando, by Charles Stross, explores the Singularity, that point at which technology is advancing so fast that it’s impossible to even predict what’s next; by the time you predict it, it’s already happened. The book starts in the near future, when people wear glasses that constantly stream information from the Web into their eyes and ears, so that they’re literally wired (or I guess wireless) wherever they go. By the end of the book we’re watching AIs gradually demolishing the inner planets of the solar system to provide raw materials for a vast computer that stretches to the orbit of Jupiter.

River of Gods, by Ian McDonald, takes place in India in 2047, the centennial of India’s formation as a country. In this future world, Krishna Kops use electronic avatars of gods such as Vishnu and Siva to hunt rouge AIs, and the most popular entertainment in India is a soap opera called Town and Country. On this soap opera, not only are the characters computer generated, but the actors who play the characters are virtual as well. Programmers create not only the drama seen on TV, but also the virtual life of the computer actors. (Apparently even the Lindsay Lohans and Mel Gibsons of the world got too tame.)

These books’ future events seem outrageous, but with the Singularity fast approaching, they’ll soon qualify as historical novels.

Making Science Fiction Up To Date

2006-08-15T20:42:00.000-06:00

Thinking about constructivist teaching has prompted me to change something I’ve done in my Science Fiction class for a long time. I started teaching SF when I first came to AHS in 1985, and I inherited a three-part slide show of the history of SF. The slides are in carousel trays, and the audio is on both cassette tape and vinyl records, complete with the “beep” to tell you when to change the slides. (Lately I’ve been using the records because they have better sound quality than the old cassettes.) Now here’s the thing: I’m not planning on abandoning the slide show. I have to supplement it more and more because it was made in 1974, and it’s a little corny in spots, but it has good information on the roots of SF, and it’s narrated by the great Rod Serling (creator of The Twilight Zone, for those of you too young to remember). And using such retro gear in a class about the future appeals to my sense of irony. It’s my own little tradition. However, here’s what I plan to change. In the past, I’ve always given the students a set of fill-in-the-blank notes, and later an objective test. This year I want to give them…blank paper. I want the students to really watch the show (instead of madly scribbling notes) and jot down 2 or 3 details that interest them – perhaps an image from one of the slides, or a detail about an author. Along with that, they’re going to express some of the questions they have about science fiction tropes like time travel, aliens, robots, and the future. I hope to get the kids asking about science fiction, instead of feeding them the knowledge that I think they should know. Later, as a little project, I’m going to have them research some of the authors and trends of the eighties, nineties, and aughties, and create their own update in artistic form.

Flat World Thoughts

2006-08-07T10:57:00.000-06:00

I had mixed feelings about The World is Flat. On the one hand, I found all the history and explanation of the digital revolution interesting (somehow I wasn’t getting it all first hand when it was happening), and I liked the forward-looking nature of the book because I’ve always been a science fiction fan. At other times I got a little tired of the repetitive nature of Friedman’s examples – here comes yet another story of how someone makes a lot of money, followed by another example of how the Chinese are preparing to conquer the world.

There were a few things that struck me as important to education. The section on Wikipedia, and in particular the experience of John Seigenthaler, Sr., brought to mind one of the big shifts that’s taken place in research and the very nature of fact and fiction. I remember when we spent several days showing students how to access information. Now they can find more information than they’d ever need in a few seconds on the Web. But as the finding of information got easier, we didn’t think about the quality of the information. We still need to make a shift over to teaching kids how to judge what they find on line and differentiate what’s fact and what’s hooey. To me this is an important component of modern education because these days we get our information “through a fire hose” (as Friedman says) and much of that water is polluted. We need to give students the means to filter what they see in the media.

The horizontal interconnectivity of information is also something we as educators could use to better advantage. We see any given student for 56 minutes per day, and some students who struggle could benefit from all their teachers comparing notes from time to time. We might be able to alter some behaviors if the math, English, science and history teachers all focused on the same thing for the student.