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.