Classy: Modeling Marking Texts

As the Grade 11 students are reading books of choice for the most part this year, I’ve been working to incorporate types of texts outside of novels into our reading. This has taken the form of long form journalism pieces, op-eds, short stories or anything else. Part of what we’re working toward is endurance in reading. Part of what we’re working toward is reading as a social experience.

I’ve known about the Think Aloud as a reading strategy for a few years. I’ve tried to stay away from it for the sheer boredom of it. It doesn’t ask much of my strongest readers and can feel as though I’m patronizing those students reading at lower levels.

I decided to take my voice out of it. Here’s how it worked:

  1. I posted the link to this article on moodle along with four questions:
    1. What is the purpose of this article?
    2. What is the evidence the author uses to support his claims?
    3. What do you think the future of paper as a medium for transmitting writing is?
    4. How does this article shape your understanding of the world?
  2. Students had time in class to begin reading and thinking. What they didn’t finish became homework.
  3. When they entered class the next day, I handed them printed copies of the piece with the notes that came to mind as I was reading.
  4. The students had approximately 7 minutes to mark up the text with any thinking they had and wanted to add to my notes.
  5. We gathered in a circle where I set ground rules such as, “If we get off topic, ask a question,” “Tie it to the text,” and “Challenge thoughts you don’t understand or agree with.”
  6. Conversation began with each speaker calling on the next.

What happened was a great reminder of the kind of conversation our students are capable of. It’s what they were hoping for when we went to the Town Hall Meeting. At one point, it occurred to me we could benefit from adding our school librarian’s voice to the mix. I called and invited him.

Matt, a grad student completing some observations in our class, commented afterward on how the students had kept the conversation moving even when I was on the phone. I’m hoping it’s because they owned the conversation and I didn’t. In fact, the rules within discussion are that I too must raise my hand and wait to be called on when I want to contribute.

That was classy. What do you think?

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.