Students pick their own books

A few weeks ago our freshman English sub-department discussed which texts to read for next year. A first-timer in such a discussion, I was dumbstruck to discover that such a small group of adults could so radically impact the lives of 425 fourteen year-olds.

This year all freshman had to read:
The Odyssey (Fagles translation)
The Woman Warrior
The Catcher in the Rye
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Together, seven teachers chucked The Woman Warrior for being "difficult to identify with" and had a quiet moment for the passing of The Odyssey and then cut it. In a way, we catered to the market. Students began to "misplace" their books about 200 pages into The Odyssey; The Woman Warrior led to more heads slumped on desks than is prudent to admit.

Should students only read books they like from the first page? Isn't it the teacher's job to help them through books that push their reading comprehension level? What if they love it by the end? If they don't read The Odyssey at school, then where? Does it really matter that they read that book over another?

Last week a colleague suggested to me that it doesn't matter what they read as much as how they read it. In other words, you can teach reading skills with any five books you want. If practicing reading skills is the paramount goal, small wars should not be waged over which texts to assign. And assigned texts seem to invariably lead to the uncomfortable "did you do the reading?" / "No, because I hate this book" struggles.

As a student I had to chug coffee to choke down many assigned readings--and I love to read! Something about being told what to read takes some of the fun out of it and turns a pleasure into a chore.

So why not let the students choose? (Radical I know). Let the freshman sub-department make a list of fifteen recommend books and students read a new book every three weeks. A few students will read the same book to create discussion groups and they can report their findings to the class. They will practice speaking articulately about what they read and presenting themes to a larger audience. Placing the choice in student's hands mitigates their sense of being forced to read and opens up more interesting conversations about connections between books.

Why teachers should visit other schools

A friend of mine who works construction told me that his profession shifted his world-view.

"Now when I look around a room I don't think of the walls a barriers; everything can be moved. If you don't like the wall, we can knock it down, or cut a hole in it, or put a door there. Nothing is static—paint it, bevel it, hammer it—there really aren't any boundaries."

Today I visited another high school down the block from mine and received a similar reminder that everything is transitory. The teachers at University of Hawaii Lab School ask themselves the same questions I ask myself daily (should I prioritize skill over content? Should I seat friends together or separate them with a seating arrangement? What is the best thing I can do to help my students gain proficiency in writing? Should I wear this skirt with those shoes?) yet they answered them differently.

What I saw:

-Music class with 7th grades belting out traditional Hawaiian songs.
-A social studies class re-enacting the French revolution with all of the peasants sitting on the floor to show their status.
-A fifth grade class studying algebraic principles.
-A thirty-student orchestra practicing the string section in a satellite building with shiny new violas.
-Students waving "Hi Mr. Bricket!" to the principal as we walked the campus.

What a wonderful reminder of just how much we have to play with in this profession. We should all pop our heads in other school buildings once in a while and remember that the walls aren't a constant after all.

I Expected Resistance

Alan November visited on curriculum day and filled our heads with possibilities for the laptop in each freshman's bookbag. November modeled examples of different student-type jobs; this was the strongest aspect of his presentation. Many say our task as teachers is to prepare students for an unimaginable job market of the future and to teach them to head companies who services are not yet needed. November's list below trains students in skills of communication and information management--both are right-brain talents (see Daniel Pink).

1. Lesson review team. Students write, edit, and direct a podcast of past lessons they have learned (when to use the semi-colon, how to do long division for example).
2. Student-teachers. Students write lesson plans for the class and, as they present, record it with a screencast device (jing works) to make a movie of their lesson. Paste it on the class website for regular viewing later.
3. Daily class recorder or "scribe." One person takes scrupulous notes for the class. (I personally can never trust someone else to take notes for me because I learn as I write, but that's just me.)
4. Communal note review. All the class notes taken by the rotating scribe are pasted into google.docs. In or outside of class students edit (and elaborate on) the notes so they become incredibly complete.
5. Global community teams. Social network with other classrooms around the world using skype, wikis, del.icio.us. (Would my students benefit from reading The Catcher in the Rye along with a class in Tokyo and discussing it with them? Why not just talk to the person next to you? I have some doubts on this one.)
6. Research managers. Teach students how to research the backers of websites and find viable sources, then feed those sites (using RSS feeds) to their homepages so they get the latest updates on their research topics.

No teacher alive currently coordinates all six jobs.

The day after November's visit I tried some of the simpler techniques in class. I think I expected a fight—some kind of "who are you to mix things up?" attitude from the students.
"So I went to this talk and basically you guys are responsible for your own education and I'm going to get out of the way now…ok?" (rough pitch I realize…I don't know what I was thinking).
They blinked at me.
I turned to student A near the corner of the room. Student A has wide eyes and lips which turn down at the edges, like a bug flew into her mouth and she holds it there courteously until class ends.
"Student A, you are going to be our scribe for this class. Could you take notes for us on google.docs?"
She swallowed the bug.
"Sure." She typed away, engaged for the first time in a while.

The next day I tried a larger leap into the world of uncertainty.

"Today you guys are going to teach one another mini-grammar lessons and we will record them. Can you be ready in fifteen minutes?"

"Yes!" They all turned to their partner and started drafting lesson plans with enthusiasm.
What? Have I really underestimated them so much? Was I a fool to think they needed to be spoon-fed comma rules when in reality they can just teach one another?
The presentations varied in quality. Some muddied the waters rather than cleared them; some taught the presenter something but not the audience. One pair leapt on the task and offered to go first. Here is the recorded screencast of their presentation:


.


What I would do differently next time:
-Ask them to create a rubric for judging the presentations and give pros and cons to each presentation before and after.
-Visit each presentation beforehand and edit before they get up to present.
-Make sure to give them a small and teachable mini-lesson ("how to choose a good paper topic" was a broad one).

Where psychotherapy, Buddhism, and technology meet

From Thoughts Without a Thinker
Forward by the Dalai Lama

Recently, psychotherapists, with their background in science and medicine, have begun to explore the possibilities of employing Buddhist techniques in a therapeutic context. I feel this is entirely consistent with the aim of overcoming suffering and improving the welfare of all sentient beings. Living experience of Buddhist meditation has given practitioners a profound knowledge of the workings and nature of the mind, an inner science to complement our understanding of the physical world. On its own, no amount of technological development can lead to lasting happiness. What is almost always missing is a corresponding inner development. This is an area in which there is increasing evidence that Buddhist assertions and modern findings have to potential to be valuable to one another.

--December 1994

The school where I teach is currently in the process of choosing new laptops for the academy 1:1 laptop program. As I provide more freedom in my English assignments to take advantage of the laptops versatility, the projects that result are a multi-media extravaganza. These students don't just know how to write descriptively about dead tiger sharks that wash up on the beach; they can email internationally with shark specialists, assemble powerpoint presentations of tiger shark videos borrowed from youtube, or make their own movies based on interviews with marine biologists.

I'm just not sure if they know how to breath.
This concept of the inner development necessary to process the whirl of technological development intrigues me. For me, that processing come with rules about when to shut down the machine and go outside, correcting my work posture, and recognizing when my eyes are growing fatigued from looking at a screen for so long.

Like now.
There are many attitudes technology between the poles of technophobe and automaton. Are students aware of them?

Understanding by Design

Am I the last teacher on the planet to read this book? First printed in 1998, this redefinition of the priorities in lesson-planning took ten years to reach my desk. I am a late bloomer, alas...but better now than next year.

Wiggins and McTighe suggest that knowledge (regurgitation of facts) is distinct from understanding which requires an ability to manipulate information under various circumstances. To set up students for understanding, a teacher ready to lesson-plan must shy away from the temptation to leap for activities and first ask herself:
1. What essential questions does my class attempt to answer?
2. What smaller, more palatable, unit-sized questions can I ask to engage my students into the topic?
3. What kinds of activities will allow students to grapple with various answers to those questions?
4. How will I assess a genuine understanding of those concepts?
5. Will this assessment overly-reward students for 'plugging away' at assignments rather than demonstrating true understanding?

Old-hat to many in the education world, but this really rocked my socks off. This is the scaffolding behind the student-led projects, the reason to the action, the supportive branch to the entertaining tire-swing of a class, the ying to my yang!
Do any of you lesson plan in this way?

Story of Stuff

This is the most simple, illustrated explanation of globalization I have ever seen.
www.storyofstuff.com

I have passed this along to many friends and family, and I am surprised at the extent to which we all respond with the knee-jerk reaction "oh yes, everyone else in this country is wasteful, but not me."
Recognizing our daily roll in this cycle as consumers seems like the first step toward change and improvement in the system.

Waz up! with writing standards?

"Mrs. davis! What is teh homewokr!!!!???""
This is a standard line from a fourteen-year-old English student over AIM.
I support playing with words-- coining them and mushing them together in new ways earns gold stars in my class. However, these quoted lines don't scream 'creative license' to me: they shout sloppy.

A few months ago I was told that the reason students don't respond to my emails about homework is because they rarely check it. "They aren't into email. They are into Facebook and AIM," explained my tech-savvy colleague. Hoping for more frequent communication between teacher and student, I signed up for America's Instant Messenger, made a screen-name, and divulged it to my students.

"YOU have AIM!" they gasped in class; first worried about the overlap of boring school with their social lives, then excited that a teacher wants to be part of their lives.
"THAT is SO COOL!" they squealed, typing away and watching as their comments appeared on my screen projected onto the overhead.

"How r u??" they wrote.
"what r u doing???" they asked.
"I'm questioning your ability to switch between formal and informal writing," I wanted to respond.
Instead I just said "hi."

On the one hand I find it flattering that they are comfortable enough with me to let down their guard. Less stuffy, more open communication blossomed from our on-line banter. They work harder for teachers they respect and relate to, so why not make it easier to relate? However, I distain such extravagance as multiple exclamation points (doesn't one get the job done?) and with automatic spell-checker at their fingertips it seems reasonable to expect written communication to remain formal.

"What iss the dilly 4 tomorrow!!!!!?"

But how can I judge them when I myself slip into this tone with my friends on gchat? The reality is that their sloppyness results from an attempt at speed. It takes longer to make the proper letters into caps and stick a comma in the right spot. Should I, as their teacher, enforce this extra 'umph' or let it slide in our informal communication?