Author: Kelly Love

What did I just read?

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Note: I’m posting a few thoughts today. This blog is my pensieve. I’m struggling with writing today. This post is just a note.

This post feels like a fairy tale: not too long ago I was looking around for ways to engage my students in reading. Not just “more,” but — at all. Over the years I’ve witnessed increasing disengagement with reading. Or decreasing engagement with reading. Not sure which sounds better or is more accurate.

But reading is all I seem to do now– I read and listen to as many headlines, articles, tweets, posts, speeches, police scanners and news updates my brain can hold in a day. My skills at detecting lies, bad faith, trolling, racism, etc., have become more finely tuned and accurate. And maybe that’s why my teenage students aren’t reading as much as they used to. It’s one reason. I can point to skills-based instruction and state standardized tests that display an excerpt of text to be autopsied and dissected with no joy or meaning. Only the skills of being able to “cite evidence” or choose the best multiple choice answer. Reading, in its current state, is either boring, irrelevant, or horrifying. Because when we actually read what is under the headline, the subheads and subtexts, we find nothing of substance or nightmare fuel.

When Jennifer Binis (a fantastic writer and educational historian) said something about The Highwayman (an allusion) I became very excited. I taught that poem for years when I taught 7th grade– my husband and I were watching a Led Zeppelin concert that was filmed in 2012 and streamed this past Saturday (not sure how that wormhole of entertainment works), and “No Quarter” reminds me of The Highwayman. What I love about her comment is thinking back this may have inspired her love of close reading.

Think about this: what was the text that made you blush, take notice, think you discovered some titillating secret? Some bawdy passage or prose on your parents’ bookshelf that made you think there’s more to this reading thing than what school told you? My parents had their share of 70s trashy novels I’m sure I read, and I know my uncle stashed issues of National Lampoon I found hilarious and raunchy.

I’m not suggesting we give R rated periodicals to our students. But I am wondering if, for high school students, we share that one deeper purpose for reading is to connect to our whole self–that novels and stories we love might have romance, sexuality, and gender identities, and love? And maybe take a minute and explain the dime-store detective novel or pulp fiction? I had never heard the term “Penny Dreadful” but when I started watching the series, I looked it up and it made complete sense.

Some quick ideas for reading and writing our own “pulp fiction” — look into Film Noir, penny dreadfuls, chapbooks, etc. and write our own. Any recommendations?

PS Read Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad

Personal Research Project

How to reframe research writing by using oneself as the subject matter.

Repeatedly I see teachers, including myself, complaining of the struggle to teach students how to write and craft solid research papers. From everything to poor organization, to a frequent lack of works cited, students struggle with this form of writing. We’ve provided scaffolding, mentor texts, learning targets and success criteria (which should be called assessment in my opinion, because that’s what success criteria are) and multiple check-points. And yet.

And yet.

What is missing? This is just my wondering, not that teachers aren’t doing this or they are, but I am wondering if we’re still giving enough of the “why” when it comes to research papers. Why do scientists, lawyers, computer scientists, user experience designers (like my husband) nurses, doctors, historians and yes, literature professors write research papers? What is the purpose of research and its twin, citing sources?

Research is to find facts, opinions and truths and balance them out as objectively as possible. And maybe this is the issue: we humans are not objective by nature. We just aren’t wired that way. Even at our most introspective moments our inner views are more fun-house mirror or Narcissus’s pond than clear view. And even when we think we’re seeing our true selves, we’re not, as Caroline McHugh’s TED talk attests.

I came up with this project to serve both as a scaffold to another research project, and a chance for students to study the one subject they want to know most about: themselves: do a research paper on themselves.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1BlT9uy1EXnZauXCHB-PvyzrDAYOcM01BAosG82sBmn4/edit?usp=sharing

https://www.themespark.net/@mrskellylove/rubric/4JOuUNMid

Now, since I like to “dog food” my own projects, I’ll be writing a research paper of my own soon, and add it to this post.

Impulse Boredom

As Told By The Stars

This week has been weird in the life of me. I’m cleaning out my inner thinking and finding some nasty, moldy thoughts in here. And the fact is I’m discovering that I am fairly mundane and average. Mediocre. Ordinary. Run-of-the-mill.

I’ll acknowledge circumstances of privilege: I’m privileged by race, middle class, and educational status because my parents had the means and will to provide me and my sisters our undergraduate degrees. I have my master’s on my own, and am still struggling to pay the monthly $450 fee. I’ve had this student loan for over a decade, and because of multiple financial set backs, have been unable to pay it off, and now we have our sons’ loans, too. My husband is self-taught computer guru, but his industry has been hit hard at different times in our lives, and he’s been laid off many times. I became a teacher for many reasons, but a pragmatic one was so I could be home in the summer with our sons, and it would be a steady, consistent paycheck. I know that’s not the “I want to help children!” performance many expect, but I am a pragmatist. And I’m not a savior. I’m sufficiently selfish.

And I suppose this current state of ennui is caused by simple realizations:

  • I am a one-off creator. Whether it’s making a meal, writing curriculum, or creating some art or craft, I do it once and then move on.*
  • I am not great with the steady patience required for weeding, exercise, or flossing.
  • I am a hoarder of potential creativity

When school is “normal” and the year is winding down, I start to imagine how I will spend my summers: I’ll write that book! Lose that weight! Recreate myself to be a better version–regain some youthful countenance and fit into my clothes. And…write that book. Yes, write that book. Write. That. Book. I will somehow end my process addictions to games and social media and find a path to create.

This is going to take some next-level will power. I hate that phrase, “will power.” It feels like a deficiency of character, and bumps up against my depression and anxiety like a nagging fishwife. It smells, and I know she’s right.

via GIPHY

I told my husband last night, if we had won the lottery and things were under the cover of a pandemic now, what would I be doing? What would my day look like? I often said I would continue teaching, and if it had been two or one year ago I would have run out that building so fast it would have made people’s heads spin. The last two buildings were unimaginably toxic. But this year — this year I love my job, students, colleagues, and admin team. The district is not only functional but healthy and delightful. Friends told me I should move to this district years ago, but I am not sure I would have appreciated it as much unless I had the prior years’ experiences and harsh lessons.

I feel like an imposter now.

And maybe that’s what makes this so hard right now: I’m not getting a choice. I make curriculum no one sees or cares about. I make plans no one needs. I can’t create when I am worried about my and others health right now. And I am deeply worried. All. The. Time. Things feel pointless right now, and that may be the worst of the “less” suffixes. Although ‘hopeless’ is pretty bad, too.

Every Thursday I’ve decided is ‘writing day.’ That’s it. Just write. Surely I have enough will to do this, for one day a week, don’t I? And if yes, who sees the victory, or the results? I need to remember there were decades of my life where no one witnessed my work or said ‘thatta girl.’ Doing this for myself must be enough now. And I just don’t feel like enough.

*Postscript: Now is not the time or allowance for one-offs. We must plan the week, plan meals, plan ahead more than I’m accustomed to.

Shadow Teaching

To distract us, many teachers created virtual classrooms

The lingering, nagging question during our PLC this morning was: “Are you feeling like you’re really teaching during this time?” and my mind flipped to reframe the question: what are students learning? Because that is what the question should be, always. And acknowledging that what we’re teaching is different in other content areas with more strict guidelines and assessment accountability, too. One teacher who runs the local native tribe’s school who is an important voice in our PLC spoke up about how her students are learning many life skills and contributing to the community. She even pushed back on the notion, her words, “Euro-centric content.” I could have hugged her. Because when she speaks, we listen.

It occurred to me, and I hadn’t given this a voice before, that what I miss is what my students provide to the conversation.This one-way interaction gives me a deeper appreciation and love for what they say and their thinking, when they offer it. I’ve done the best I can with my messages in the bottles, the weekly question and the curated materials to help launch their thinking. It’s like sending a do-it-yourself model kit to them and hoping they make something cool, but after I manufacture the pieces and plans it’s up to them whether or not they construct something of substance. They’re not going to Google Meets for a variety of reasons, and reasons I respect and understand. But it’s not the same, anyway.

But I keep checking the intangible nooks and crannies to see if they’re getting my messages, and though I just put out this survey this morning, already one student replied:

Yes!

So, I’m off to my book stashes and will find some things she might want to read. She can keep whatever I send, of course. We have five more weeks of school. The weird school. The abstract school. The shadow school, where I puppeteer avatars and ventriloquist myself in quick videos. And keep finding ways to make meaning for myself, and continue to rediscover purpose.

reimaginginginginging

//www.instagram.com/embed.js

How Moderate Teachers Perpetuate Educational Oppression

This is one of the most critical think pieces on education I’ve read in a long time, published in Medium by Lisa Kelly.

A moderate teacher often uses the rhetoric of maintaining high standards without interrogating themselves —holding students to high standards of what? As my comrade G.T. Reyes wrote, “Educators …if you’re still asking about how to “hold students accountable,” I would suggest you first ask yourself — accountable to what? This might sound crazy to some of you, but maybe you are wanting students to be accountable to learn their place within white supremacist, capitalist schooling.” Many credentialing programs teach that it is racist to expect that black and brown children are less capable than white children, which is absolutely true. However, this doesn’t mean that the solution is to expect any student to reproduce capitalism or whiteness.

From school uniforms to accountability, how white teachers continue to uphold white supremacy and colonialism comes in wave after wave. During this time of emergency remote learning and teaching, the number of teachers who are aghast at students turning in blank documents (they did this before, by the way), terrified of students cheating, not being accountable, on and on and on…ladies: you are exhausting. And students continue to act like, well, students. The cat and mouse game of “gotcha” is part of the teacher-student dynamic: but does it have to be?

The first answer that comes to my mind would be — schooling that is centered on relationships. Not relationships that are about getting kids to like you enough to want to produce for you. But relationships built on understanding the unique humanity and the community that each child brings to education.

Every year, sometimes at several check points, I give students surveys to express and provide confidential opinions on my teaching, what they liked, what they wish would change, etc. And overarching themes emerge: they want to wear what they want, and learn about things that will empower them in the moment, in an unknown future, and that feel relevant and worth their time. (Gee, almost like this generation understands existential crisis or something.)

As I continue to grow as an educator, I am mindful that I will always need to push against racist ideas and bias. I am fortunate to have a spot on the Wednesday webinars with Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi on their collaborative book, Stamped. I am going to ask my admin if we can use this as a book study for next year: if not the entire staff, then perhaps my immediate ELA colleagues would be interested.The essential piece of all this is as we’re reimagining schools, beware of who’s trying to hold teachers “accountable” and who is building authentic relationships. Those people service in complicity to hold teachers and students accountable, too. Look for those who include teachers’ and students’ voices, who have experience in making those connections. We cannot underestimate the danger we’re in right now. And personally I am struggling to hold onto hope. As the person said in Samantha Bee’s video, I now consider myself to be, as Meehan Crist quotes, an “Undefeated Despair.”

Keep focused: what brings us to teaching, what brings children to learning, and what are the most critical things to teach? That’s it. I am thinking about entire semester of simply reading critically for argument and bias, and how to have fluency and accuracy in detecting bias and agendas. Looking forward to digging into this resource, too: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/qanon-nothing-can-stop-what-is-coming/610567/

PS Something that popped up from the past — it’s a charter school, but am wondering–you know–https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/47694/to-engage-students-and-teachers-treat-core-subjects-like-extracurriculars

blender

Why we need to take another look at blended learning

@misterflattery

Told a student I’d make a TikTok if he did his work. ##teachers ##teacherlife ##teachersoftiktok ##onlinelearning ##studentsbelike ##mathteacher

♬ original sound – misterflattery
https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js

I know, I know — this is a snarky TikTok, but it did give me a chuckle. I call myself a ‘digital pioneer’ — been steeped in tech and all its magic since the 1990s, and my husband even longer than that: I mention this because I realized when students tried to use technology to learn, create, complete assignments, etc., it’s not easy for them: just because they often know how to use VPNs and play games on the laptops, open multiple screens and tab out quickly when you’re checking in on them doesn’t mean they instinctively know how to use UX/UI designed by mostly, well, engineers, to turn in their work.

Many teachers don’t know how to use technology well. And before you imagine some 60-something woman fumbling over her Outlook settings and Reply-Alls, I’ve known many teachers in their 20s who admit to not liking or using technology. And when I say “well” I mean to have some sense of how technology is designed (user interface/user experience) to promote smooth communication experiences. Because what is school for anyway, if not to help us become clear communicators and thinkers? There is no end point to this – we are never going to be perfectly clear–we’re designed to be muddy, seeking clarity and love. Our language acquisition is the language of being social and learning. If we’re a parent, we remember our children’s first words that aren’t related to mom and da: (“seaplane” and “moon”).

Teaching students how to use a LMS (learning management system) such as Google Classrooms or my personal favorite, Canvas, takes time. But more importantly, it takes time for teachers to learn how to use these systems well. I have often said we expect children, elementary to secondary, to think like little business people, when really we should be teaching how to think like creators and designers. Tech is a tool: it serves the needs of the creator.

One thing I’ve heard repeatedly from teachers after the school closures due to COVID19 is this attempt to maintain the curriculum in its current state, just put it ‘online.’ Teachers will get defensive when it’s suggested that they pare it down now. But trust me: please–take whatever you’re asking your students to do and divide it by half, and if you’re still at eight things, get it down to four at the most. And even that might be too much.

As we’re all daydreaming and reimagining schools and our society, it might be helpful to look to the past few years and educational technology decisions and focus a mission on what worked and what didn’t. No one can sit in a Google Meeting or Zoom all day. Perhaps we just need a ‘report back’ idea: provide an experience for students and allow them the means to report back what they learned. I’m thinking a lot about things I always thought a lot about: how to balance direct instruction with richer, creative projects? The direct instruction piece (grammar, spelling, punctuation, sentence construction, reading literacy and comprehension, etc.) enables the richer projects to happen. But I also know it’s not a flat, forward path: language and communication circles, spirals, flexes and weaves.

Apologies for my abstract-randomness: let me talk to my inner concrete-sequential: plan it out before you tackle a tech project. Think about what your goal is, and the old axiom, KISS (keep it simple, stupid) applies.

Some resources to help:

https://catlintucker.com/

https://www.teachthought.com/technology/37-blended-learning-resources-you-can-use-tomorrow/

https://www.edutopia.org/blended-learning-resources

Cult of Pedagogy

And– even me. I’m happy to help with a project or find a resource to help you with yours.

WIHWT: The Bread

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/05/07/fuck-the-bread-the-bread-is-over/
Link to Sabrina Orah Mark’s Writing

It’s Friday afternoon, and I’m in an allostatic-load haze, catching myself staring into nothing at an angle. Perusing through the drafts folder, I found some gems. I hesitate to post this one because I’m trying to keep swear words under the blog rug, but this piece by Sabrina Orah Mark from the Paris Review, May 7, 2020, deserves to be read and shared, damn the words. Sometimes we just need to say it. It’s in my “Wish I Had Written That” category for obvious reasons. I am a lover of magic, fairy tales, and any reprieve from reality, and her use of fable woven in with current realities is some word spinning into gold.

I like it here. I feel like I’m in Gertrude Stein territory, where the buttons are so tender they’ve come undone. The whole kingdom is spilling out of itself. There are holes everywhere. To the east, a pile of impossible tasks of my own making. To the west, a mountain of broken crowns I will melt and recast into a machete. “This is so nice,” writes Gertrude Stein, “and sweet and yet there comes the change, there comes the time to press more air. This does not mean the same as disappearance.” It’s day sixty of homeschooling. Eli asks me to remind him how to make an aleph. I take a pencil, and draw it for him very carefully. “It’s like a branch,” I say, “with two little twigs attached.”  “You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet.

aleph

Since March 13, I am wondering what I can teach my own sons, now that I’m attempting to teach from home. They’re 25 and 22, long past the age of whimsy and requiring my entertainment. I sense mothers of young adults all over the nation are muting their true concerns now. Feeling guilty for hollow promises and all the damn pushing. I don’t know if everything’s going to be okay. I don’t know what “okay” is going to be, or what it should be. I’ve enveloped them in equal parts of love and anxiety. But I’ve also been honest, and shown how to give and receive grace. Let’s hope that’s enough.

Favorite Digital Tools

Some of my favorite digital tools, and some I’d like to try.

One of my favorite digital tools and also most frustrating is Thinglink.com. Favorite because it enriches and uses imagery and media to create an interactive experience; frustrating because I’ve haven’t seem attract many students to its wonders. I am not sure why. Before our building closed, things and digital instructional methods that I was “going to do” came to an abrupt halt.

I’ve determined a few things: for the next seven weeks of school, I’m going to ask only one essential question a week, but leave the last week for a wrap-up.

Six Questions

Each question will have one to two short texts to read, a short film, and a discussion question. My goal today is to curate the short film for each question. For the first one regarding beauty was a simple and clear choice:

Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.

I’ve been enjoying Google Sites, and learning more about how to use Google Docs, etc., for instruction. Screencast-O-Matic has updated its features and is wonderful, and I am going to dig back into VideoScribe and Prezi, too.

But with all of these gorgeous digital tools, ready and kindly waiting for me to create, one thing that has reached all but one of my students: letters sent in the mail.

I am facing the hard truth that these next seven weeks may be filled with me yelling down the wishing well, and getting few echoes back. I’ll have created six mini units with no clear knowledge if my students used them, learned from them, or helped them. I’m not concerned about their grades–that’s the last thing we’re worried about. I only want them and their families to stay healthy, and bluntly: alive.

Seattle Times

While I sit motionless, working from a keyboard and pen to continue to reach out to students, working on these mini units keeps me busy. I will provide my content curation over this next week. If you have something you think would be appropriate for my units, please pass it along.

I am glad you’re here.

Then and Now: what poets can teach us

I asked the question: was there a scholar who wrote about the 1917 pandemic with wisdom and guidance? I am ashamed that I looked in the wrong place, and should have been looking for a poet.

I asked the question: was there a scholar who wrote about the 1918 pandemic with wisdom and guidance? I am ashamed that I looked in the wrong place, and should have been looking for a poet.

Kyrie by Ellen Bryant Voigt

From Blackbird Archive, read the curated content: https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v17n2/gallery/1918/intro_page.shtml

Soon it was a farmer in the field—

someone’s brother, someone’s father—

left the mule in its traces and went home.

Then the mason, the miller at his wheel,

from deep in the forest the hunter, the logger,

and the sun still up everywhere in the kingdom.

     ―Ellen Bryant Voigt, Kyrie

https://blackbird.vcu.edu/v17n2/gallery/1918/intro_page.shtml

It’s a hard thing to acknowledge, that the country’s current administration (executive branch) is killing us. This is not hyperbole. At every turn, the executive branch failed and exacerbated the crisis. We could be so much better. We could do so much better. My hope is hanging on by a thread. We need to fight this on so many fronts: the media must do better. We must rethink capitalism. We need to strengthen our communities and love for one another. I do not share Ms. O’Meara’s optimism at this writing, but you might:

In the Time of Pandemic

And the people stayed home.

And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still.

And they listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. 

Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed.

—Kitty O’Meara

Other resources and readings:

“Invisible Bullets”

9 Ways Schools Will Look Different When (And If) They Reopen

Little birds.

Whereby I make the Internet angry.

Again.

Well, that was a hefty miscalculation on my part. For many reasons, others on Twitter took my tweet to mean I think journaling is bad. But Twitter is the telephone game x1000, and between my hyperbolic phrasing, and perhaps the exhaustion on my and others’ behalves, we’re just all on edge. And as Joe pointed out, my “all caps” is classless. His response may be “man code” for “watch yourself, young missy,” questioning my teaching credentials and all. I was reminded of David Spade’s recurring receptionist character on SNL, “and YOU are?” And my response to this educator, and others whom I upset, is Emily Dickinson’s poem:

I’m nobody. A frog croaking. A bird singing. Just thinking about stuff and worried about my students.

And my colleagues: you are more than welcome to tell me you don’t agree with me. I just asked us to think and reflect, but I didn’t say it ‘nicely.’ My mother’s philosophy is “never apologize, never explain,” so I’m going to try that now. I tend to be a people pleaser to ease my anxiety, so while I try to buck up and find some courage, not sure how successful I’ll be.

We all come from a wide variety of teaching experiences. We all have something to offer. And who we are for our students may not translate or scale to what we need to be for each other. If I am not the colleague who want to converse or exchange ideas with, that’s completely cool. Often, I don’t have a lot of patience or time for you, either–and that’s okay.

Many teaching practices we did before our buildings closed down were brilliant, creative, rich, meaningful and nuanced. And many of our teaching practices will continue to sparkle and connect.

But many weren’t. There were, and are, inequities, bigotry, racism, poverty, classism, political domestic threats toward some immigrant students and families, lax oversight and accountability, bad faith ed reformers, poor practices and shaky scripted curriculum. Oh, and that state standardized testing, which as it turn out, was an educational albatross.

And I had this random thought, that maybe, just maybe, in our exuberance of trying to stay enthusiastic, engaged, and hopeful, that assigning journaling about the pandemic wasn’t a good idea. To quote, the “WORST.” And I did apologize for my hyperbole. As a choice, ungraded, an idea, no, it’s not a bad idea at all. Helping student writers frame their daily journaling is a great boost. What we may be grieving for, however, is much broader and painful than we care to admit.

We are not physically “there” to catch the body language, emotion, or stress our students are feeling right now. We’re not. And as much as we can duplicate some learning experiences or catch them before they fall, we are just not there. That is a big part to why teaching is emotional and psychologically exhausting — we are aware and watchful for our students’ responses. So now we are bereft of that role, and have a new exhausting role. And he’s right — we are all just trying to do the best we can. That does not excuse us from bad practices or lack of reflection, before the pandemic and now. Nor after.

If we assign something to be graded that may cause additional stress or trauma we are doing harm. And no justification, teacher ego, or defensiveness will change that.

Many people in the thread came to the conversation with breathtaking ideas, kindness, gentle pushback, questions, thoughts, and those are the next focus. Like this wonderful teacher:

Keep journaling, keep thinking. And allow writers to have their thoughts. I’ll have a talk with my inner editor next time.