Great Students

I just had the best paper conference with a wonderful student. Dan, if you read this, you'll know it's you, since I'm writing about sixty seconds after our conference, but I'll leave your last name out in case you're embarrassed by my frank description of your awesomeness.

Anyway, Dan's a kid I had last year for 10th grade and again this year for Research & Literature, and he's consistently been the kind of student you want in a class. He's always engaged, always prepared, and always enthusiastic about what he can learn in a class. One key thing that makes Dan great is that he wants to be good at understanding literature and at writing, and he wants good grades to come out of that mastery. He doesn't get confused on and focus on the grade itself.

Dan is already a strong writer, and as he says himself, he's good at structuring a paper and having it make sense. What he's struggling with, as all good writers do, is making a real revelation about a text when he writes an analytical paper. He can make strong, evidence-based points in a clear, structured way, but he doesn't always feel that his insights are deep enough.

He asked to conference this morning about his Death of a Salesman paper, and we talked about changing his approach. Usually, he decides on a direction and pulls quotes into the paper as he writes. Since he's a clear and effective writer, he gets a strong paper with this method, and it's a perfectly good way to write an analytical paper. However, (and here's the great bit of the morning that led me to write this post), he's not satisfied to repeat a moderately successful process over and over. He wants to shake it up and write a paper that's more than strong. He wants it to be clear and effective, to be sure, but he also wants his paper to be deep and insightful.

So, we talked it over, and this time, he's going to start with the direct evidence (the key quotations from his notes on the play) and he's going to try to pull his paper's direction from careful, nuanced reading of the subtleties of character he finds there. I cautioned him that letting the words of the play drive his ideas might make a mess at first, and that even if he has trouble structuring that mess, he should count it as a victory. With his strong skill at organizing his writing, he may be able to pull together deeper, messier insights into a clear structure, but he may also struggle, and he should be very happy if he has serious problems.

Sometimes, in writing, you need to abandon what has worked fairly well in pursuit of something that may work better, and you need to be able to recognize that failures along the way can actually be signals that your new approach is doing what it's supposed to do.

Time 4 Reading

Our colleague Dan has started up his own blog about reading, and my favorite part so far is the way that he describes the feeling of being alone with whatever book he's reading. It reminds me that a passion for reading is primarily about the pleasure a good book brings on so many levels. Dan gives that sensory, tactile experience of reading the book, unlike reviews I've read before, which focus more on the practical. I think Dan's approach makes for better writing on his end and for a better sense of what might motivate you to pick up the particular book and keep your nose in it.

It also doesn't hurt that his most recent entry covers Danny the Champion of the World, one of my favorite childhood books, written by my hands-down favorite childhood author, Roald Dahl.

More Conferencing

As part of my ongoing attempt to evaluate the success of our pilot, I'm pushing myself to post even my little observations so I can build a body of evidence.

One thing I've begun to notice is a sharp uptick in the number of student-initiated conferences in the classes that are doing more drafting, peer review, and self-reflection. This year marks my third round of teaching 10th grade at Staples, and the number of kids conferencing from those 10A classes is definitely far, far higher than it was in the previous two years.

I've also noticed that the increased conference participation seems to be coming from middle-of-the-road kids, not the intense achievement-oriented kids. Those intense kids are still coming for lots of individual help, but there's a huge set of more laid back kids who come and check in. That group's participation encourages me the most when I step back to evaluate what I'm doing this year. They seem to be invested in a way that they haven't been before.

While this change has meant more of my prep time being consumed with one-on-one work with kids, it's a tradeoff I'm willing to make, since a student-initiated conference means a pretty high level of buy-in from a kid and an amazing opportunity to encourage and guide a young writer.

Multimodal Hoosiwhatsit

I just want to plug something I stumbled across and really liked. I'm plugging it here because, despite the fact that it's funny, off-color at times, and not particularly cerebral, it's a great example of a way of presenting stories that is at once completely old fashioned (text and drawings) and only possible because of the new mediums provided by the internet.

Adam is a comic artist who uses Blogger to tell stories from his life with text and comic-style drawings. The result is not a short story, not a memoir, not a comic, and not really a blog. It is, however,  a hilarious and a unique way to tell a story. For example:

Now, doesn't that make you want to read the text and learn the rest of the story?

So, without further ado, here's Books of Adam. Be aware that there is infrequent profanity and the occasional adult theme. I'd rate it somewhere around PG-13.

Dark, Standardized Days Ahead

Yesterday, I read Kelly Gallagher's November 12 article in Education Week. I'll start with the salient point:

A study published in the journal Science Education in December 2008 looked at two sets of high school science students. One set “sprinted”; the other set had teachers who slowed down, went deeper, and did not cover as much material. The results? The first group of students actually scored higher on the state tests at the end of the year. This is not surprising, as their teachers covered more of the test material. I am sure it made their parents, teachers, and administrators happy. What is more interesting, however, is that the students who learned through the slower, in-depth approach actually earned higher grades once they made it to college. This, too, is not surprising. These students were taught to think critically.

The study in question, from the journal Science Education, underscores my deep concerns about our continued emphasis on standardized testing as a comprehensive measure of students' learning and our increasing emphasis on it as a measure of teachers' skills. Because the test standards focus on content knowledge and the tests themselves contain an essentially random subset of that content knowledge, in order to squeak our students' scores up, we're encouraged to try to cover as many of the topics as possible.

The result is higher scores, for sure. Not much higher, since the fundamental skills necessary to ace a test are taught over a series of years, not in a few months, but measurably higher. Failure to create this little bump or worse, turning up in the numbers as a teacher whose students' gains are lower than average, can be a problem in your career, and that's only going to get worse as the emphasis on "value-added teaching" increases.

So, in order to be seen externally as a good teacher, you have to engage in crappy teaching. Spend too much time teaching your kids to think critically and reflectively, and you'll get identified by your district as a poor teacher. Your kids will do better in college and in life, but you'll sacrifice yourself in the process.

And they wonder why good teachers often don't feel like they can teach capably and authentically within our system. What really, really stinks is that our highest risk districts are going to feel the brunt of this misplacement of priorities.

Picking up the pieces of a blown mind

Here's some evidence that our pilot is working as we thought it might, presented as a "Prezi," the software Ally wrote about in her blog last week. You'll probably want to watch it fullscreen as some of the text will be a little small if you try to see it in the embed box.

Make Some Fiction About Your Fiction

Here's today's writing assignment for my 10A classes:

Create a character with your name, and put him or her at Staples. Tell us a true story, but don't worry about sticking to the actual things that happened. Mine your life for something true, real, and meaningful, and change all the details around until your story really gives us the truth of it.

Put a disclaimer at the top of your story that goes something like the one from the front pages to The Things They Carried:  "This is a work of fiction. Except for a few details regarding the author's own life, all the incidents, names, and characters are imaginary."

Is the first follower the real leader?

"The first follower is what transforms a loan nut into a leader."

When Schools Ruin a Good Thing

I've been looking for ways to integrate different communication skills into the curriculum, and the TED talks stand out to me as a great example of powerful communication in multiple media, so I've been watching some of the popular ones. The talk below, entitled "Schools Kill Creativity" makes no use of digital tools other than the microphone, but it's a wonderful example of effective personal presentation. Ken Robinson uses humor as a fundamental piece of his presentation style, but his comments are deadly serious.



You can download a podcast of the talk or a transcript by navigating to its page.

I listened to this talk at my desk, and I listened to it twice more as a podcast on my way home from work that day. I was absolutely startled to find a 2006 talk that so neatly pierced the heart of one of the issues I struggle with. I wrote on this topic back in July, and Robinson takes the concept a whole step further.

Here, I think, is the salient passage:

What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. If you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this. He said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

If we accept that the premise here is true and that we stigmatize mistakes all the way through our educational system, and that we crush the creativity out of many (clearly not all) of our students, we have a massive task to engage in. Instead of testing kids constantly and punishing their teachers and schools, we ought to be considering a fundamental reinvention of the way we structure education.

That, however, is a topic for another day. What I'm interested in today is how much damage I can undo in my own classroom, while still operating within the curricular and conventional guidelines prescribed by my job.

This whole blogging project with my 10th graders seems like a good start. They can speak freely and theorize without fear of punishment or having the wrong answer. They're judged entirely on their level of engagement with the prompt and process of each post. Still, I find the students have a very, very hard time being truly creative in their approach to a topic or a task. That fear of mistakes runs very, very deep, and it's hard to really convince them that experimentation and engagement are more important than right answers and grades. They'll agree with that if you ask them, but their behavior belies a real terror of being wrong and getting bad grades.

I wonder if I can do more than simply stop reinforcing wrong-answer-avoidance and nurture creativity. I wonder if there's something truly subversive I can engage in here.

"...a natural urge to hide..."

I took the opening address from the Frost Workshop that I mentioned in my last post, and I integrated it into a reflective assignment that I asked my students to put on their blogs. We spent all last week working on each other's papers in pieces: theses on Tuesday, intros on Wednesday, and body paragraphs on Thursday. Then, Friday, I asked them to look back on the workshops to try to reflect on what they might have learned about writing, reading, or their own approach to the process.

The results were very cool. Some students were focused on cataloging some of the basic elements of workshopping, learning what kinds of errors are common in others' work and then looking for it in your own, and weren't so incisively introspective when it came to their own process and feelings, but even that level of understanding is helpful, and we're still rather early in the process.

Some students took things much, much further. For example, Professor Sheehan talks about "a natural urge to hide: a swarm of anxieties, both our own and others' that we pick up on," and one of my students, Max, wrote about his experience with that urge by saying "All I could think about were the negative comments I might get and how I thought people would not like my writing."  But, by the end of his post, he went on to say that "being afraid of what others will say about your work is irrational as if it is being seen by a community of intellectuals there will be no harsh words."

He even embedded a YouTube video of the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin at the end of his post.

Another student, Ashley, wrote something similar:

I also have wanted to hide when I, myself, would have to comment on my peer's work. I was deathly afraid that the person would criticize my criticism and say that my ideas were either not helpful, stupid, or just plain dumb. But now I realize that there is no such this as unhelpful criticism. Any form of friendly criticism will somehow help to improve my friends work, and help them to become a better writer.

Ashley recognized the complexity of the nervousness with which we approach even the act of writing our input for others. That itself is a kind of personal, intellectual writing that might cause us to feel insecure. What Ashley's and Max's comments crystalize for me, though, is the emerging sense my students have that they're part of a group of intellectuals with a common goal, and that the more we engage with each other, the more fun we'll have, the more success we'll have, and the more real learning we'll see.

A Friend Remembered

This morning, Kristin and I were discussing self-reflective writing and the idea of drafts, and I remembered something that Donald Sheehan, my poetry professor from Dartmouth, had passed on to us from a conversation with the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt: "Honey, it's all draft 'til you die." Variations on this quote appear here and there in the wide digital world.

I tried to search my computer for the original reference to that quote and failed, so I searched for it online, and in the course of my wanderings, I learned that Professor Sheehan had died. He and I hadn't spoken in a couple of years, though he did write a recommendation for me when I applied to Middlebury's Bread Loaf School of English in 2005, and he helped me get the credit for his Dartmouth class transferred to Middlebury soon after that.

I wrote the best poetry of my life for his seminar in 2003, and I still feel a deep, deep gratitude for having known him and his generosity of spirit. In reading some tributes written by his friends, I came across his opening statement for the Frost Festival Workshop at The Frost Place, which he served for decades:

The heart of the conference is the workshop. Thus, you will need to work from the heart. There is a natural urge to hide: a swarm of anxieties, both our own and others' that we pick up on. Above all, there is an overwhelming 'need'—a false hunger—to be praised, coupled with a hair-trigger impulse to envy anyone else whose work seems immediately praiseworthy. Thus you are likely to find yourself whipsawed between the hunger to be admired and the impulse to envy those who are admirable.

You will need to recognize and acknowledge all of this—in order to reach the key that unlocks all truth: taking very great and very deliberate care with each other.

This taking-care, which is a form of love, increases the quality of the intelligence. If you must make a flash choice between sympathy and intelligence, choose sympathy. Usually these fall apart—sympathy becoming a mindless 'being nice' to everyone, while intelligence becomes an exercise in contempt. But here's the great fact of this Festival, for twenty-seven years now: as you come deliberately to care about another person's art (and not your own), then your own art mysteriously gets better.

Thus, your work at this conference is to make the art of at least one other person better and stronger by giving—in love—all your art to them.

That was the philosophy that defined his poetry seminar, and it continues to inform my teaching, though I have little idea how to imitate the calm gentleness of Professor Sheehan's spirit. I love the idea that by investing in the work of others, we become better ourselves. There's a poetic rightness to the idea that we receive through our giving. I'll take some liberty here and say that I don't believe he was mystified that we got better by examining each other's work, but rather that it is one of the beautiful mysteries of life that by giving away love, caring, and truly deliberate attention to others, we somehow find more of these things in ourselves.

I think he would have appreciated that his care towards me continues to multiply outwards, and while I do plan to reinvigorate my students' workshops with these thoughts, for right now I think I'll just miss him and remember him for a few minutes.

Critiquing

As part of their work on Lord of the Flies, I had my students pick quotes that contained an important image from a climactic scene late in the text and then go back to look for an appearance of that same image earlier in the text. The idea is to get them to see that images in a good book are interconnected throughout the story, and that as the image evolves, so to do the ideas that it represents. Whether that image is a full on symbol (the conch, the glasses, etc.) or more of an emblematic detail (creepers), they should be learning that a critical reader needs to develop the intuition necessary to recognize these details early and the note-taking skills to keep track of these details as a story evolves.

In the absence of having kids read a book twice (and what a world we would live in if there were time and curricular space for that!), it's an effective way to teach the skill and underline its importance.

I had the students post a 300 word prewrite on their insights, and today in class they read each other's posts and responded. I asked them to respond by either agreeing with and extending an idea they saw or by disagreeing and providing evidence (or a little of both). What struck me was the difficulty students had in moving past safe criticism of a concrete problem (incorrectly formatted citations, incorrect grammar) and into an actual intellectual dialogue.

Generally, the posts and responses were fantastic, but I was struck by the particular difficulty some kids had in making an intellectual contribution instead of a concrete criticism. It makes me think that we really have taught them that improving writing is more about error elimination than about depth of statement.

It concerns me, then, that as part of this collaborative, process-focused work that I'm going to do a highly traditional product-focused grading of these papers at the end. Does it send the message that I'm simply talking a touchy-feely game, but my real message (as evinced by what's getting the actual grade and contributing the most to the quarter average) is business as usual?

Standardize This

Susan Engel directs Williams College's teaching program, and in an Op-Ed in Sunday's Times, she made quite a compelling case against the worship of the standardized test.

As someone who's always thought the obsession over standardized test scores was a real betrayal of the core principles of a good education, I was at once gratified to hear such a bigwig pointing out the problems with standardized testing and also demoralized about the possibility that there's any chance of convincing the movers and the shakers that standardized test scores do not accurately measure real learning.

As it stands, we actually have to take time off from the business of teaching kids to read, write, and think so we can make sure that they get the bump in test scores that comes from becoming familiar with the format and the arcane writing medium—one that exists nowhere else in nature—of the CAPT test. The CAPT provides some useful metrics of English learning, to be sure, but it does not at all measure the total picture of the things we teach in a good English class.

For example, one of last year's "editing and revising" section questions asked kids which of four choices reflected the accurate spelling of the word "occurred." When, pray tell does one teach this particular skill in a curriculum, and how does a right or wrong answer on that test actually reflect a student's learning in the 10th grade?

As long as we rate learning by the ability the fill in bubbles with a number two pencil, and as long as we worship at the feet of the gods of flawed data, we do kids a real disservice.

Metablognition

Right now, my students are all writing a little piece of reflection about their reading process. We're almost halfway through Lord of the Flies, and I thought it would be a great opportunity for them to engage in a little metacognition. In the continuing spirit of putting my own mental money where my own proverbial mouth is, I'm metacognating too.

My 10th graders are, for the most part, at or above state standard reading goals for their year. They tend to be just fine when it comes to reading a 20th century text and figuring out what's going on. However, reading comprehension is only one piece of real reading. Figuring out who said what and who did what to whom is the first hurdle of really engaging with a text, but a real reader has to do much, much more.

For example, when we read the first chapter of Lord of the Flies, I asked the class to model the kinds of things a strong reader might do. I wrote character names on the board, and the students took turns naming physical and personal details associated with each character. Ralph is consistently described as having fair hair; Piggy is described in terms of his fat or his glasses; Jack is skinny and prone to violent outbursts.

An active reader is able to form a mental image of each character's looks and personality, and then when additional description and dialogue takes place, those pieces are continuously added to that catalytic first impression. An active reader is less likely to get two chapters in, see a name, and have trouble remembering which character is associated with that name or that hair color.

Character study is just one tool in a whole box of techniques that an active reader brings to the job. It's one of the tools that can turn an alienating reading experience into an enjoyable and successful one.


UPDATED:
I had a chance to read some of the posts from class and some of the comments, and I'm quite enthralled to hear my students really giving this book a fair shake and trying to use the techniques of character study and visualization that we talked about. Some students are writing "I agree, good point" sort of vague, friendly comments, but some kids really seem to be stepping back and examining their thought process and reading habits, and it's exciting to see. This first little exercise succeeded a bit beyond what I had hoped already, and there's more work to be done.

Tiptorial #1

I'm playing around with creating some tutorials of the procedural web stuff so teachers can learn it in advance and students can get it done at home if they miss a class or have computer trouble.

With that in mind, here's a video of my first "Tiptorial," which walks you through creating a Gmail account. It's pretty straightforward and perhaps doesn't need a tutorial, but it was good practice. Since I'm using the free version of "ScreenFlow," the screen recording tool from Apple, the video is watermarked, but it still seems pretty usable to me.

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous blog

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
     Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
     For promised joy.
          -Robert Burns
          "To a Mouse"

Today was day two of blog setup with my tenth graders, and I think my experience will be quite instructive to those who will try something similar in the coming days. If you want to skip over the story of the trials and tribulations and simply read the lessons, scroll down a bit. They're in bold.

First of all, Google's tools contain many layers of protection to ensure that scammers and software "bots" can't sign up for thousands of fake accounts. When twenty-five students in a class all try to sign up for Gmail accounts at the same time from the same place, these protections kick in. So, the first thing that happened on Friday was that about a third of my kids couldn't create accounts. The next layer kicked in when the kids all tried to create blogs at the same time. Google's software asked them to verify that they were, in fact, real humans. Students could verify this by giving a phone number and receiving a confirmation code via text message, but that obviously doesn't really work in a classroom setting.

Ultimately, I had to assign the creation of Gmail accounts and Blogger blogs as "homework." When the kids are working from their home computers, Google no longer sees them as potential bots and allows them to create accounts.

Wrinkle number two (three?): today we tried to configure all the blog settings so they're viewable only by invited guests. That meant collecting all the students' new Gmail addresses (easy), e-mailing a list of those e-mails to all the students (relatively easy), and then having the students paste those lists into the invitation box in the blog settings (still not so hard).

Then, the students each began to receive twenty-four e-mails from their classmates, each bearing an invitation link. Students have to click those links, accept the invitations by entering their Google password each time, view the blogs, click "follow," and then click "follow this blog" again in the popup window (complicated).

Another wrinkle: the school laptops run Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7. What that means is that the box on the blogs that shows followers and displays the "follow this blog" link may not load for all students. I believe this is because IE 7 doesn't handle Java so well. Kids who brought their own laptops had no issues. We're not scheduled for an upgrade to Windows 7 and the newest version of IE until next summer, so this whole year we're stuck.

By the end of the short period, all kids were invited to all blogs and most blogs were being followed by most kids (each blog has about 18 of the 25 potential followers). Despite the wrinkles, it was a relatively successful period, and they certainly got their collaborating on as they helped each other out and taught each other how to set up the blogs and follow each other.

So, the lessons?
1. Have students create Gmail accounts as homework, not during class.
2. Have students create the blogs as homework, not during class.
3. Be aware that students may not be able to "follow" each other's blogs right away if they're working on a school laptop.

Safety

As I drafted the instructions for creating and configuring student blogs, I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to reflect on the reasons we've chosen this particular configuration.

Our setup closes the blogs to the public. Only invited folks (other students in the class and the teacher) can see it. If students and their parents decide to open up the blogs beyond that, more power to them, but the default for our purposes is a closed system. However, even though the blogs are technically restricted to class members, we have to be really careful that we don't fool ourselves into thinking that online privacy truly exists. Whatever is read by a class full of students can be passed by mouth, by paper, or by digital copying.

Configuring the blog to auto-email the teacher adds another layer of protection. Posts and comments will be archived in the school's e-mail system in accordance with federal law, and they'll be retrievable in case of problems. Again, though, we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that we've found a technological answer for what is essentially a community issue.

Bullying, harassment, and other kinds of bad choices existed before the computer, and they will continue to exist no matter what kind of technological measures we put in place to catch the offenders. The real answer isn't catching at all, though. The answer is to create a culture that views nastiness for what it truly is: unacceptable. Kids need to have the opportunity to exercise their voice and to moderate it. They need to learn to give criticism constructively and to take it maturely. They need to learn how to conduct and protect themselves in an increasingly interconnected world. And what better way to learn than by doing it in a supportive environment with a teacher to guide the way?

We need to have conversations, online and in person, about how to act, just the same we as we set expectations for classroom behavior by discussing it and managing it when it happens. Punishing a student after the fact is not nearly as effective as giving him a chance to make a good choice up front.

Education and Opinion

I was struck this morning by some of the data in a New York Times poll and article on the Islamic center that may be built at 45 Park Place in NYC on the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory. Yes, tempers are high and it's a contentious issue, but fear not: I have no intent to comment on its legality or appropriateness right now.

However, since this is an education blog, I thought it might be useful to highlight the following section of the Times data. Be aware that this is a telephone poll of "892 adults throughout New York City" with a margin of error of +/- 3%.

[. . .]

Now, I'm not foolish enough to conflate progress through higher education with intelligence or even with what I would call being truly educated. However, I would guess that there's some correspondence between educational progress and the ability to critically research and assess an issue. So I was absolutely struck at the mathematical rigor with which education level and opinion match up here.

Whatever your personal opinion on the building of an Islamic center, this kind of polling data should indicate that our education level does seem to correspond strongly to our opinions on certain kinds of highly charged issues.

My Shiny New Syllabus

Instead of editing a previous syllabus for my 10A kids this year, I wrote one from scratch over the course of a couple of days. I've tried to pull together my new way of thinking about the deepest, most significant skills I want kids to develop over the course of a year with me, and I wanted the language to reflect a more collaborative, inquiry-based model of learning.

We should be, as the Staples mission statement says, "a community of learners." Even minor work in English should be part of a class-wide conversation about reading and thinking and writing and meaning. We should read a book and immediately try to employ critical skills to understanding it and trying to get at the heart of what it might say to us, and we should be excited to share discoveries with the people around us. Then, when I try to teach a new critical skill, the student should be ready for it, even starving for it so he can get deeper or express his discovery more effectively.

So here's the syllabus in its entirety, including the Natalie Dee comic I'm putting at the end of all my syllabi this year:

Reading Goals

This year, our goal is for you to learn to read more accurately, actively, and deeply. Nobody should go through life feeling intimidated by a challenging book, so we'll be working on the skills you need to:

• take effective notes

• manage your time in order to keep up with the assigned reading

• use your time efficiently by developing strong ideas about a book right from the start

• rely on more than plot to shape your impression of a book and its meaning

• use your imagination to help you enjoy a book more and learn more about it

• find something to love about a book

This course tries to strike a balance between letting you pick great books you're already interested in and giving you a great education by getting you interested in challenging, influential English literature. While text selection will be influenced to some extent by your thoughts, we'll probably hit most of the following: William Golding's Lord of the Flies, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, and William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

Writing Goals

Our goal is to use writing as a way of thinking more deeply about complex issues and then to express those discoveries clearly and persuasively to others. To that end, you'll work on:

• the skills of grammar and mechanics you need to construct a sentence that expresses your ideas clearly

• the techniques necessary to base ideas on evidence

• the structures of a cohesive piece of writing

• the sense of voice and tone that give writing personality and force

• the time-management skills necessary to turn in a piece of writing on time

We'll write all kinds of pieces in this class. Analytical, evidence-based essays are the core writing of this course, but we'll also write meditative pieces, brainstorming exercises, self-reflective work on process and writing, criticism of others' work and our own, personal narratives, etc. We'll write at two major, revised, polished pieces each quarter, and you will be strongly encouraged (and at times required) to meet with me for conferences on your written assignments.

Collaborative Skills Goals

Very few of life's great exploits take place in a vacuum. Part of being well educated in English is being able to influence and lead others and to work with them towards a common goal. Collaboration can take place in a classroom discussion, on a project outside of class, or online, and since you'll be doing it your whole lives, you should get good at:

• respectfully agreeing and disagreeing

• giving and taking constructive criticism

• listening carefully to others' ideas and building on them

• taking responsibility for your part of a larger task

• loving to be wrong so you can learn something instead of just "winning" an argument

• conferencing with peers and with your teacher

• taking effective notes on ideas you hear or read

• expressing yourself effectively in writing, speaking, and all kinds of alternate media

Whether or not you're "good at" English, like it, or would rather be hung by your toenails over a pit of burning boogers than have to read Shakespeare, you have to come to class and do some work, or you'll get in huge trouble.  So, while you're here, why not learn to enjoy the material and succeed in the subject?

comic from www.nataliedee.com

Anybody have some thoughts for me?

Teaching Creativity

In this July 10 Newsweek article, entitled "The Creativity Crisis," Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman address a concept that's central to the work we're doing in reforming Staples' educational mission. One of the unintended consequences of our test-based, correct-answer-seeking curriculum is that we teach kids to figure out what we want them to say, what fact they should be pulling from their notes or their textbooks.

When we get obsessed with test scores, we may lose sight of the crucial creative aspect of problem solving and ethical, expressive living. If kids are walked through a derivation or an essay format, they can learn to reproduce it for us, often very accurately and effectively. However, when we teach them that this learning of formulae is real learning, we push kids away from creativity and ownership of their learning and towards parrothood.

This walkthrough model may have a doubly damning effect when it's applied to the wrong kind of "scaffolding" for lower performing kids. Kids in lower level classes are often trailing their peers partly—or largely—because they don't engage in creative, durable problem solving. A successful kid attacks a problem from multiple angles, enjoying the challenge with no fear of failure, either because he is confident or because the problem is presented in a context that allows responsible risk taking.

An unsuccessful kid gives up because the solution has not been previously presented, and he lacks either the skill to come at the problem multiple times from multiple angles or the will to do so. That will can be sapped by a series of perceived failures (I'm bad at math), a lack of engagement for personal reasons, or a lack of creative ability.

I use the following scenario to illustrate this point with my students: take two students of equal ability in math, and give them a test with ten questions, each progressively more difficult. Question one is easy, and both students are sure to get it. Question ten is very difficult, and it's extremely unlikely that either student will be equipped to answer it. Tell student A the following: "I'm giving you ten questions, each more difficult than the last. I expect that you'll find them too difficult after about question four. Don't worry; just do your best." Tell student B this: "I'm giving you ten questions, each more difficult than the last. They get harder and harder, but I bet you can figure them all out if you really think about it and try a bunch of different ideas."

Which student do you think will get further along? Which student will learn more? Over time, if Student A internalizes the message "You're only about this good at math" and Student B internalizes "you can figure all of these out if you try," you'll have produced one student who's "bad at math" and one student who loves it. Obviously, there are more factors that come into play in a student's development in a discipline, but I think a message that encourages problem solving and taking creative, responsible risks will create more "good at math" kids.

As a teacher of writing, I cannot count the number of times I've had a smart, hardworking student whose growth was chilled by repeated attempts to fine tune a previously successful format, when what he needed to be doing was making repeated attempts to creatively reinvent his writing. The kid learns a standard essay format in the eighth grade and is moderately successful in retreading and refining that format in the ninth grade. Since we typically teach writing by making kids write and then pointing out their errors, he learns that excellence in writing is following through on a format without errors.

Then, in tenth grade, I ask him to find something textual and honest to say, and he's lost. He wants a three-part thesis he can prove in five paragraphs, and since he's been successful in that format, he believes that continuing to grow as a writer means continuing to hunt down errors. The message that is often lost is that good writing is about the depth, significance, and form of what you have to say. It's what's in there that makes it great writing; it's not what errors you took out.

So here's my favorite quote from the article, and the one I think that best crystallizes its relevance to our work: "When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel."

Our teaching model needs to move away from rows of desks at which children sit and pursue correct answers based on the material they read and the things we say. Our model needs to create a safe space—both geographically in the classroom and metaphysically in our assignments—for kids to be spectacularly wrong. We need to teach through inquiry, not explanation. Our scaffolding needs to encourage creativity by presenting kids with problems they have to solve; it cannot simply help them reconstruct a formula.

Those traditional formats and genres—the geometrical proof, the analytical essay—are not necessarily flawed themselves; rather, our teaching of them is flawed when it asks kids to arrive at a predetermined starting point by following the rules we tell them. You can't blame the teachers: it's simply more feasible to grade correct answers and teach rules when you have to meet state standards in oversized classes. Creative teaching is often as scary to outsiders and even the teacher himself as creative thinking is to kids who've learned that success involves figuring out what the adult is asking you to write down.

The Tension in Cultural Sharing

I was reading this article from Seed Magazine, and I think it elegantly frames one of the downsides of our increasingly global lives: that in trade for our interconnectedness, we're rapidly losing the diversity of ideas, languages, stories, histories, and biologies that exist on our planet. It mentions the death of Marie Smith Jones, the "last fluent speaker of the Eyak language," and I was reminded of my time talking to Nora Marks Dauenhauer, a Tlingit storyteller who belongs to a culture not far from Smith Jones's in geography, but vastly different nonetheless.

The Tlingits are more numerous than the Eyak ever were, and the Tlingit culture is currently being actively preserved by scholars and members of the Tlingit people. However, even within "the Tlingit people" is a multitude of subcultures, each with their own stories, philosophies, and practices.

Eyak is now only preserved in books; nobody speaks it, argues in it, or asks anyone to pass the salt. What we do have of it was preserved mostly from the mind of one individual. Imagine if all we knew of English language and Western culture was what I could come up from my head. I'd hardly consider the resulting textbook to be encyclopedic.

So where does that leave us? Had I not traveled to Alaska, I would not have met Dauenhauer and heard her stories. I wouldn't know Tlingit from Colonel Klink. But does that selfsame traveling and sharing slowly smooth out what's unique about our culture, or, more accurately, does it gradually wear away at Tlingit in favor of the megaculture of America?

Here we go

Today was the first meeting of our interdisciplinary crew of mythic heroes. Our homework: get a blogger account up and running so we can model the methods and skills we'll try to emphasize this year.