Month: December 2009

DAY: Commenting on Student Writing

Article HL

Patrick Higgins tweeted this article from the National Writing Project on commenting on student writing.

This section stuck to my ribs:

When I was younger and more naïve, that would be the juncture where I would say, “Comments?” and look at a circle of staring faces. No hands would shoot skyward; instead, everyone would carry the look of a prisoner about to be shot.

As my students embark on the 09-10 Change the World project and begin researching and blogging about the causes of the issues they’ve chosen, I needed something that would help avoid the online manifestation of comment impotence.

Mostly, I appreciate the article for its ease of access. Surely, there’s someone out there who’s written or tempted to write a tome on the online writers’ workshop. Slusher’s piece gives me the three pages I would need from such a book and lets me work out the rest. Nice teaching.

We’re reading excerpts of the article tomorrow.

21 Ways: (4) Freedom Writers Foundation

Last year, I cut back on the stuff I gave for Christmas. While my younger siblings still got books, other family members got gift certificates to various charities in lieu of gifts. Thus, this. Each day from here to 2010, I’ll be posting one charity, NGO or non-profit I can get behind in the spirit of giving.

I’ve been connected with the Freedom Writers Foundation in some way or another for almost 4 years now.

I met Erin Gruwell when she came to speak at our Back-to-School keynote in SRQ. Afterward, we welcomed Erin and Freedom Writer Sonia to our school for a lunch reception. We talked for maybe five minutes, and that was it. A year later, Erin e-mailed me and asked me to fly out to Long Beach, CA as part of a pilot program the Foundation was working on to educate and connect teachers across the country.

I went.

An organization created to collect and award scholarships from the sales of The Freedom Writers Diary, the FWF expanded a few years ago to train and connect educators.

Eventually, I got to work with the Foundation during the summer to help with successive groups of teachers going through the program. Being able to participate and watch from the outside has given me a unique perspective. No matter what criticisms are lobbed, the Freedom Writers Institute is amazing. Solely through donations, teachers are flown to Long Beach, CA for 5 days of training, all expenses paid. I don’t have to explain how rare this kind of generosity in PD is for teachers.

With educators (it’s not just classroom teachers) from every state, several Canadian provinces and a couple territories, the program has connected me in a close-knit way to 200+ people working to help kids learn in every environment imaginable.

While I’m fortunate enough to work with a faculty at SLA who are tremendously supportive and collaborative, not all of the FWT have the same luck. Through the implementation of MOODLE, the FWF maintains a networking, resource-sharing tool that keeps the FWT connected.

The Freedom Writers Institute connected me to veteran and navice educators from all over North America.

Like many non-profit organizations, the FWF has been hit hard economically. The skeleton crew that keeps it going are working fairly creatively to pull together the funds necessary to continue helping teachers.

If you’re interested in helping, buy The Freedom Writers Diary by The Freedom Writers or Teaching Hope by The Freedom Writer Teachers (including me) and gift it. If you’re interested in being more direct, donations are accepted here.

21 Ways: (3) GoodSearch

Last year, I cut back on the stuff I gave for Christmas. While my younger siblings still got books, other family members got gift certificates to various charities in leiu of gifts. Thus, this. Each day from here to 2010, I’ll be posting one charity, NGO or non-profit I can get behind in the spirit of giving.


GoodSearch: You Search...We Give!According to GoodSearch’s homepage, “86,000+ nonprofits are now on board and 100 more are joining daily.”
GoodSearch is one of those ideas you hear about and wish you’d had.

Here’s the skinny:

GoodSearch is a search engine which donates 50-percent of its revenue to the charities and schools designated by its users. It’s a simple and compelling concept. You use GoodSearch exactly as you would any other search engine. Because it’s powered by Yahoo!, you get proven search results. The money GoodSearch donates to your cause comes from its advertisers — the users and the organizations do not spend a dime!

Here’s how it works:

Charity or School Size Number of Supporters Average Searches Per Day Estimated Revenue/Year
Small 100 2 $730
Medium 1,000 2 $7,300
Large 10,000 2 $73,000

Two years ago, SLA became a GoodSearch charity.

Imagine if every school in the country signed up and parents convinced their employers to install the toolbar as part of the image of every machine in every office.

It’s a fantastic way to support a non-profit by doing something you’d do anyway. Even if your local school isn’t participating in GoodSearch (and it should be), you’re bound to find something worth your support.

If worse comes to worst, you could always search for SLA.

21 Ways: (2) Kiva.org

Last year, I cut back on the stuff I gave for Christmas. While my younger siblings still got books, other family members got gift certificates to various charities in leiu of gifts. Thus, this. Each day from here to 2010, I’ll be posting one charity, NGO or non-profit I can get behind in the spirit of giving.

Kiva - loans that change livesKarl Fisch is all over this one. Still, it’s one of my favorites, so I’m keeping it.

Kiva founders Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley hatched it idea after a trip to East Africa led them to three realizations:

  • We are more connected than we realize.
  • The poor are very entrepreneurial.
  • Stories connect people in a powerful way.

These realizations led them to one of the most prosperous P2P microcredit institutions in the world. Similar to the Grameen Bank Kiva lets lenders loan amounts of $25 or more to those applicants in developing nations working to better their stations in life and their communities. What’s different about Kiva is that it acts as a network, making connections between lenders and microcredit institutions around the world. Here’s a down and dirty on how Kiva works.

According to Kiva’s most recent newsletter, after 50 months of operation, the org has raised $105,968,360 for 260,967 entrepreneurs in 173 countries.

Most astounding for me is Kiva’s 98% repayment rate.

As the loans are repaid, many of the entrepreneurs will blog about the effect the money and how their ventures are progressing. As a classroom tool, this is a way to help kids get in touch with other parts of the world and build global citizenship.

I keep at least $75 in Kiva loans.

As soon as a payment is made by an entrepreneur, I’m given the option of re-investing, donating to Kiva’s operations or withdrawing my money. I can’t imagine withdrawing my money.

Like Donors Choose, Kiva offers a gift certificate option that makes for a spiffy gift.

21 Ways: (1) Donors Choose

Last year, I cut back on the stuff I gave for Christmas. While my younger siblings still got books, other family members got gift certificates to various charities in leiu of gifts. Thus, this. Each day from here to 2010, I’ll be posting one charity, NGO or non-profit I can get behind in the spirit of giving.

Be No. 1... Give to Public Schools in Need! - Go to DonorsChoose.org
Starting off easy, today with Donors Choose.

I speak first-hand about the help Donors Choose can provide when funds for supplies are low.

Launched in 2000 and sprouting from a Bronx high school, Donors Choose operates as a community grant funding organization built specifically to help classroom teachers. Though the majority of the proposals are for classroom supplies, Donors Choose also hosts proposals to help with field trips, furniture and the like.

Donors can search for projects close to their heart, a certain type of school, or geographic location. Donations can be of any amount. If a project you’ve donated to is only partially funded by the deadline, Donors Choose will send you an e-mail asking you to choose one of these options:

  1. You choose a project to support. This option lets you browse through the many wonderful projects at DonorsChoose.org and find one that inspires you.
  2. We choose a project that’s in urgent need of funding on your behalf. This option is quick and easy, and gets resources into a high need classroom.
  3. The teacher chooses a new project. This option is the best way to ensure that your donation is used by the same teacher and classroom you originally supported.

Once a project’s fully funded, Donors Choose handles all the messy work of purchasing and shipping the materials. Teachers never handle the money, so there’s no accounting accountability over their heads.

The process doesn’t end once a project is funded. Classrooms are held accountable by Donors Choose and asked to complete a Thank You Packet including photos of students using the purchased materials, thank-you cards from students and a letter of impact from the teacher.

After the successful submission of the Thank You Packet, teachers are awarded points that allow them to post more and / or larger proposals. Failure to submit a Thank You Packet can result in a teacher’s removal from Donors Choose. From what I’ve seen, this means a certain level of quality is maintained.

If you’re looking to donate directly to a project, head to the Donors Choose page. If you’re looking to gift a donation, head here.

There’s a grammar war in my brain

The Gist:

  • There are pedants and anti-pedants.
  • I don’t know which one I am.
  • I see value in both.
  • It makes being an English teacher difficult.

The Whole Story:

One of my favorite courses in college was Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammars with Professor Gerry Balls. I like thinking about how words work. Semantics, grammar and all the conventions that go along make up the calculus of language.

This is why I’ve been watching closely as discussion has been brewing about David Foster Wallace acolyte Amy McDaniel’s posting of the text of a worksheet from Wallace’s class. Saturday, my brain moved more with Chris Potts’ announcement of a challenge to McDaniel’s post by Jason Kottke who scored a 0 / 10 on Wallace’s quiz:

Kottke is a thoughtful, creative English prose stylist, and Wallace thought that these questions were basic ones that should be taught in any undergraduate class. Kottke seems to think the problem lies with him. I take a different view: this test is useless.

Here’s where I step back. I don’t know where I stand on this issue. I’ve read Wallace and Safire for years. My grandparents wouldn’t stand a story about “me and him” at the dinner table. I like it when my students ask if they may go to the bathroom.

But it makes me feel false and a little dirty.

In reality, I’m not a pedant.

Sure, I have pedantic tendencies, but it hurts to hold those ideas in hand with the knowledge we speak and write a living language. It’s alive and changing faster than I can follow given the accelerant of the ease of communication.

More than once, I’ve paused when a student’s sentence ended with a preposition. Do I push him to the right to walk the path of my grandparents, or do I make Professor Balls proud and accept the kid’s disregard for an ancient and archaic rule?

Thinking of grammar as the calculus of language offers me a sense of security and set way to think and talk about the world. It also prevents me from speaking the same language as those we’ll be leaving the world to. I’m not sure which one I value most.

In her explanation of the thinking behind the quiz, McDaniel writes, “Probably the most important reason is to avoid ambiguity. We want to make our meaning clear.” I can get behind that. I’m just not sure rules get us there.

Blame “Rock of Love” on English teachers

The Gist:

  • We’re dedicated to teaching the whole book, but not the whole video.
  • This does a disservice to our kids.
  • They don’t know how to read NBC.

The Whole Story:

I’ve been using Ma Vie en Rose as we examine childhood and narrative in Sexuality and Society in Literature. It’s accompanying our reading of Peter Pan.

In Shakespeare, we’re looking at Elizabeth.

In Grade 11, the kids watched pieces of The Taming of the Shrew and Deliver Us from Eva in their study of the print version of The Taming of the Shrew.

As such, I’ve been looking for resources.

I found this.

It says loads of things, but this is what got me thinking:

There is no rule that says a video must be shown from start to finish. While some films have valuable content throughout and are good to show completely, sometimes individual scenes are all that are needed to achieve the goal.

Take out “video” and “shown” and all the rest and make it apply to books.

My students are reading / assigned to read each of the book-based texts in their entirety. We look at arc, language, character change, etc. The temptation, though is to watch clips of the films as though they are lacking for arc, language and character change.

Over the last few weeks, students have asked if we’re going to finish the films. They’ve never asked the same of books. Now, this might be because they’ve conditioned into believing they will always read a book from cover to cover. I’d argue they don’t care as much.

For Ma Vie en Rose and Elizabeth, I’ve decided to show the full films. Grade 11 is on a new unit and so Shrew won’t fit.

My great-aunt Barbara recently commented that it wasn’t until recently that she realized she didn’t need to finish every book she started. She’s in her 70s and has decided she’s not wasting any more time on books she doesn’t like. She got that belief in finishing every book from somewhere. If they’d had video to use in her classroom when she was little, I don’t imagine she’d have gotten the same message.

This all leads to the bigger point. We’re doing our students a disservice when we don’t teach them how to watch movies. We’re doing them a disservice when we don’t teach them how to watch TV.

Books are the coin of the realm, for now. That is only because of who is governing the realm.

You want to get a room of adults interested in education on your side? Stand in front of them and bemoan the prevalence of television and hulu and youtube and all other video mediums. Complain about how kids aren’t reading books, but Hollywood is making millions.

I guarantee nodding heads – television’s the devil.

No one taught them how to watch television – certainly not in the same way they were taught to read. Television and movies, for the vast majority, don’t exist as rich, valid texts.

I’ve friends who proudly proclaim they have no television in their house. Oftentimes, these proclamations are met with, “I wish I had that kind of self-control.” Why?

We would be a little weirded out if someone declared they had no books in their house.

Yes, video and the printed word are different and ask the brain to do different things. That’s not a statement of worth. There are good books and bad books. There is good video and bad video. The difference is we spend years teaching students how to refine their tastes and understanding of what are good books and almost no time on video.

Perhaps teachers a few generations decided to take the “ignore it and it will go away” tack in response to the advent of video. It hasn’t worked.

Really? We’re Still on This?

The Gist:

  • It’s not about the tools.
  • We have to stop talking as though it’s about the tools.
  • We need to start talking about what we want to do.

The Whole Story:

I dig the NCTE Inbox. It has lead to some pretty heated debates and it’s one of the most relevant voices I know from a professional organization. That said, yesterday’s post about the need for transformative rather than addative teaching missed the mark for me on one key point:

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we use social networking tools, or Web 2.0, to bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the social media revolution to the classroom (and not simply digitize the sage-on-stage tradition)?

Bud and Bill and I were talking about this at the NWP Digital Is… Conference. Bud summed it up nicely, “Instead of digital storytelling, let’s just call it storytelling.”

Try the paragraph this way:

That’s the question we need to ask in the classroom: How can we bring out new voices and ideas, rather than repeat the same old power struggles and pedagogy? What steps can we take to bring the revolution to the classroom?

One of those is something I’d like to be a part of.

Flash Assignment: History

The Gist:

  • We have 1:1 laptops.
  • I’m using the laptops to have kids jigsaw an understanding of the world in which Henry V exists.
  • It’s putting their research and reference skills to use in a way that will prove valuable in the immediate future.
  • They’re owning the learning (wouldn’t November be proud?).

The Whole Story:

My Shakespeare course just finished up The Tempest. It was fun, they created audio versions of the play which will be posted for other teachers to use soon. (Silly editing process.)

Our next work will be the first Shakespearian history they’ve encountered whilst at SLA. We did a minute of historical interpretation of the other works we’ve looked at so far this semester (King Lear and The Tempest). For Henry V, I want to make sure they leave with a better understanding of what was what during and leading up to Shakespeare’s day. Here’s what we did:

  • One person from each table group came up and pulled a slip of paper from the Coffee Can of Fate.
  • They read the slip of paper aloud and either kept it or gave it up.
  • If they kept it, all was set.
  • If they gave it up, another team would steal it and be set and the team that actually pulled the paper would wait for the next round.

Eventually, everything worked out and each table group had a paper.

The topics:

  1. Theatrical History (1400 A.D. – 1650 A.D.)
  2. The 100 Years War
  3. Social Classes
  4. Daily Life
  5. Henry IV (the plays)
  6. Technology of Warfare
  7. Divine Right of Ascension
  8. Feudalism

They have today to use their laptops to research their respective topics.

Next class, they will teach the class about their topic for approx. 7 minutes. They’ll have to create something that allows the rest of the class to take notes, is a physical handout or is a digital handout. I’m planning of posting what they come up with for anyone to use.

Based on what they present, I’ll make a quiz and incorporate the new knowledge throughout our unit of study.

This assignment would be possible without the laptops, but it’s so much better because of the laptops. It will also be a better class for their uses of multiple platforms to present their lessons than if I were to attempt to put together the same material in a small window of time.