Wonderful colleague posts this question to the universe: Calling ALL opinions: students are reading below grade level (anywhere from 5 to 1 year behind) and I want to do a book study to meet some CORE standards. Can I use one that isn’t at grade level? Or is that just making it too easy? Is it OK to use any book as long as it is higher than their current level of performance? Weigh in…and not just teachers!
My quick response:I have a lot to say about this, but Lucy Calkins said it well: “I want to know when I am about to ski down the black diamond slope.” In other words, make the reading levels AND the student’s current reading abilities as transparent as possible, with the key ingredient: Once they know, teach the hell out of how they can improve. I have “let go” so much regarding levels as far as what they “should” be reading – I encourage ANY kind of reading–comic books, picture books, fairy tales, graphic novels, cereal boxes, video game quest logs, you name it. In fact, on the MSP there is a place for “functional” reading–which I agree with. Being able to read a functional document means a functional adult (or a greatly improved chance). I stress, stress, stress to my students if you don’t understand it and can’t talk about it, you’re not “reading” –you’re faking it. So, encourage them if they want to read something higher than their “level” but let them know they are going to have to approach it a bit differently. And, they can get deep meaning out of any narrative or information they find interesting and meaningful to them.
So, here’s what I’m thinking: In order to get my own head on straight for this upcoming, topsy-turvy year, this week I will do a series all about reading, and my reflections on its process, purpose, and perpetuating the pursuit.
I would love any guest bloggers to engage with their philosophies, strategies, and reflections on this as well — what have you tried that worked with the majority of your students, and what have you tried that worked with the minority of your students?
Diagon Alley - Where Harry Shops for Back-to-Hogwarts Supplies!
This summer, I checked out–mentally, physically, and work-ethically. (Didn’t abandon emotions or ethics, but overall, have been really lazy. And I consider “lazy” to be a four-letter word. Well, it is, but you know what I mean.)
ANYWAY….the drips and drabbles of the looming school year start to seep in under the doorjamb. Teachers post things about getting ready, and the classrooms are scrubbed by dutiful and conscientious janitors, and all is made shiny and new again. This year the first day of school is September 1. In the olden days, my husband remembers that school never started until after Labor Day, and got out much sooner than we do. I informed him that since the days of No Child Left Behind, a Federal law enacted in the 90s that required teachers receive ‘professional development’ to be considered ‘highly qualified.’ (Those quotation marks are not intended as sarcastic air quotes, but a demarcation of jargon. I am still fuzzy on the whole highly qualified thing, although I am sure I am, and have the evidence/data to back it up.) So, because teachers need more time to receive professional development time, the school year has been expanded to accommodate when teachers are otherwise engaged in their own learning. This is not inherently a bad or good thing, it just is. The goodness comes from when professional development is desired, and choice is given. I have thrived in classes and workshops of my choosing, of my interests. And, the quality of the presentations plays a huge role, too. Not all teachers are meant to be “teachers of teachers.” And that’s okay. But if they’re not going to take on any sort of leadership, or better said, a ‘collaborative, creative workshop’ of sharing ideas and strengths, then perhaps they need to look at who they are as “students:” Teachers act just like students do, too. There are the teachers who constantly raise their hand, interrupting, challenging, arguing, and blurting. (I’m not talking about a respectful exchange of ideas, or challenging falsehoods, but arguing for the sake of arguing.) There are the teachers who sit, distracted by checking emails and other job listings, looking to gnaw their way out. There are teachers, who after one has poured their blood, sweat and tears into a presentation sit back and say they got nothing out of it, that they are beyond everything just presented. (Yes, those have been my tears…) I have come down from the mountaintop only to find the good folks dancing around golden calves and getting into the metaphorical liquor cabinet. All the great information we learn that helps us become better teachers, so in turn, our struggling students can become the cricial thinkers with background knowledge, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension, and resourcefulness we all desire gets broken over heads, like clay tablets. And turned to dust.
But still, August passes. I go to Target and snatch up as many .25 cent, now .50 cent composition books as I can (the price will rise steadily the closer it gets to the first day of school, which I find wholly unfair). Yes, we are heavy into tech, but went the ‘Net is down, and we just need some time to review without electricity or the hum of the machine, compositon books are, for me, a great way to spend school supply money. (My children ask me why I don’t ‘make’ my students buy them–many reasons, not for this post.) But I imagine what would be different if I made a journey to Diagon Alley to buy school supplies. Would there be less of a hullaballo from colleagues over textbooks if the titles were, gee, perhaps Monsters: A Compendium or Anthology of Wizarding Writers’ Workshops: Quills and Quagmires of the Ages?
Not sure why I don’t want to think about this next year (but here I am, thinking nonetheless). Perhaps it is as my older son said, that this year may be like Harry Potter’s fifth year – long, boring, but an important expository turning point. In the fifth year, Dumbledore is otherwise incapacitated, and a bureaucratic, fascist pink-suited meanie takes over, Dolores Umbridge. She is as cruel as her devotion to cats.
And, I am terrified of working with her, or worse–becoming her.
There will be a lot of new people to get to know: new teammates, new administration, new curriculum, new resources, and most importantly, new students.
But the new students will come with their own perceptions of being clever, unique, and the same old tricks will deceptively seem fresh and untried. Alas, dear students – you are not all that clever, at least in many ways. Your trips to the bathroom, getting a drink, including sitting in the bathroom for a few class periods “just talking” will seem like it’s the first time those fabrications have been tried on a teacher. You will test the boundaries of trust and respect. You may even steal from me. All this is true. BUT…it does not make me jaded. Because I know for every lie a student tells, there are a millions sweet truths. I will be honest with you, trust and respect you, because we all deserve a fresh start. And a new composition book.
"I have never surfed. But my inner surfer always feels this way, like a sad Beach Boys song, in August..."
Every August, for years, I felt that something ritualistic or noteworthy was missing to mark the occasion of summer’s end. The perfumed, yet sulferic combination of back-to-school supplies and popsicles doesn’t buff up the mojo as I would wish. Since becoming a teacher, I straddle both worlds, between anticipating the school year for myself, my students, as well as balancing emotions for my own children. And, yes, even for my own personal expectations.
What did I want to accomplish? Did I “relax” enough? (And in asking, that feels stressful in itself.)
When I tally up what I did this summer, some of it will feel less like a harvest, and more like a molting. I chose to do nothing this summer, or at least the bare minimum. No conferences, no workshops, no professional development, no classes, and no thinking, really. I went to one day-long seminar to hear John Medina, author of Brain Rules, speak, at Seattle Pacific University. He had some golden nuggets to relate, but it was just as if not more valuable to catch up with some of my colleagues and talk with teachers and business people from around the state/country.
The only thing I have to do is finish up a unit, including incorporating the new common national standards, and making sure it makes sense to others. Sometimes a work of art makes a lot of sense to the artist, but not to the audience.
My musings take me to wonder, though, does the word “lammas” give us the word “lament?” Lament means to grieve, or a grief. There is always that long shadow cast over me this time of year, the end of summer. Maybe some Halloween candy will do the trick to ease the pain.
I am sure it’s helped me in teaching writing. Showing so many examples of writing, sharing my own writing, and using it to model/demonstrate workshop behaviors and protocol has been effective in allowing my students to find their own voices.
But with everything, if it’s the novelty that’s drawing students only, we all know how quickly that wears off. Tricks are fun, but quickly they see the man behind the curtain. Good teaching is just that — no matter the delivery.
But not only that, consider the world that’s brought to their doors, so they can find inspiration in their ideas.
Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next. If a language is a healthy language, this is happening all the time. Parents pass their language on to their children, who pass it on to their children … and the language lives on.
Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they’re used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world’s languages aren’t in such a healthy state. They’re used by very few people. The children aren’t learning them from their parents. And as a result the languages are in real danger of dying out.
No matter who you are, your ability to read is so important to making who you are. I have spent hours myself, reading about my burning question of “Why should we read?” and its sister question, “How do we read?”
So, why should you?
The reasons for reading are as many as there are words on a page.
When I read, I feel that I am allowed access to a space that is unlike any other. I read other people’s voices on the page, screen, or cereal box. It doesn’t matter. I am a strong reader. And because I am a strong reader, I am a strong thinker.
I want you all to be strong thinkers, too.
Now, how do you read? Please do not continue your bad habits of saying you understood something when you didn’t. Please continue our good habits we’ve spent a year building of questioning the text, writing notes, considering and using new vocabulary, and if you feel that something has sparked you, even a little, do a little more investigation: for example, I reading a book called Arabat by Clive Barker. A student, a brilliant, beautiful, charming student, recommended it to me. I remember thinking Clive Barker was the man who directed the Freddy/Nightmare series a long time ago. But that wasn’t right – he did the Hellraiser movies. (How did I learn that? By reading.)
Arabat is an amazing book. Every time I read it, I feel as if I’m stepping into another world–that’s such a cliche to say, but Barker’s writing style creates a visual and textual world that I literally can almost reach out and touch. The salt air, fear, flying, hope, courage, and barnacles are so perfectly paced, described, and not overdone; I could only aspire to write such as he. His original illustrations leave me in awe. His villains are complex, cruel, and like all good villains (nice oxymoron, eh?) they want to destroy the light: one with creating a perpetual midnight, the other with creating a world of mindless purchasing and consuming zombies.
Whew. That was a ramble.
How did I go from admonishing you to read to writing a brief review of Arabat?
I guess the real question is, how would I not?
P.S. This book is out of print now. My quest? To seek as many copies I can.
Tomorrow I’m scheduled to take a really big test. To say it’s stressing me out would be a $2950 understatement. It’s a really important test, and weighs heavily against my total “grade,” and in my opinion, a bit disproportionally. I know exactly how our students feel every time they take a high-stakes assessment:
1. Even though I was provided “standards,” the list reads like a manual for a Millennium Falcon (and that’s not a Ford product, kids)
2. Even though they’ve given me a practice test, some of the subtleties of the test procedure were confusing, even to a technologically sophisticate such as myself, so I hope I don’t panic and spontaneously combust.
3. Even though they have given me “sample prompts,” they are general, vague, and inexplicable in nature.
Hmmmm. Sound familiar?
The parallels cannot be denied.
But I will do my best. I have been working on this assessment my entire teaching career. And failure does not mean I am a bad teacher.
Right?
Right. Just like not passing any high stakes test means one is a “bad” anything.
Wish me luck. Because brains ain’t going to cut this one.
Teaching middle school students stirs up so much goop. It is at this time of the year, I tap deep into inner reserves. Deep. Not oil-rig-explosion-and-we-can’t-cap-it deep, but into some murky areas.
Someday, when I have time, I might do a research project on the incidence of lying and academic achievement. I would probably find there is no correlation; students who are academically pressured by parents, class status, peers, to achieve academically may cheat, lie, and plagiarism. Student who are not pressured by parents, status, peers (and indeed peers cheer them at when they don’t achieve), also lie.
Everyone lies.
I have been lied to approximately 3 times in the past 8 school hours:
*One incident shall remain just an “incident.”
*One lie came in a stream of lies by a practiced liar
*One lie came in the form of this student having a doppelganger and “it wasn’t him/her.” (Another student quietly confirmed that yes, it was.) This student was here, was tardy, but their doppelganger was outside the building. Weird.
These lies pester me. They feel like little gremlins, walking underfoot, passing gas, giggling maniacally–no one else sees them but me. Not even the liar.
I wish they could see how exhausting and smelly these lies make the fresh air.
I don’t know why this one took me by surprise–I mean, I knew the national standards were in the works months ago, but what was unknown was that they were in the works at all. Wait. That’s confusing. I didn’t know they were going to be developed. And when I learned that they were, they were already halfway down the road.
And as far as should or shouldn’t they even exist at all is something I’m not prepared to think about right now; on one hand, nationwide standards may help everyone finally get “on the same page,’ which is paradoxically its downside as well. Meaning: the more we tighten our grip on education standards the narrower the scope and sequence of creating the critical thinkers we so desperately want and need for our world’s future.
I have always been in support of my state’s educational standards, and even the state test. As far as Language Arts, the test, in my opinion, assesses reading skills every capable and willing child should know and demonstrate. (Here that students? Yes, you do need to read for your lives.)
I’ll look over the standards as soon as I can. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy watching my students group together for their end-of-year projects, talk to each creatively, and with enthusiasm. And prepare them as much as I can to launch them into young adulthood. I’m sure they’ll measure up.
You all know I write this blog for my students and myself, right? That I just need to write, and extend, modify, or add another dimension to the classroom box we’re in all day together – manipulating the boundaries of learning time and space is what I’m all about.
It didn’t really dawn on my until I received a most appreciated nod of “Hey, check this out” from what folks are now acronymically calling PLNs. PLNS are “Professional Learning Networks,” a virtual realm of collaboration, dialogue, exchanges, and interests. How cool is that!? And you thought social networking was only allowed if you’re under twenty-five.
What’s really intriguing to me is the power of words. Think about it: through these folks’ words and thoughts have I gotten to know them, and appreciate their perspectives. I have never personally met Mr. Cummings, the educator who put my in his post, but I do follow his Tweets, and really enjoy reading his thoughts, too.
Here are the rules of “Blogs to Watch” Award:
Copy and display the picture of the award given to you; (check–see above)
Student Blogs: One big success my students had was feeling safe enough to share their personal blogs with me. I’ll keep those to myself for a while.
Blogs I look at off-shore through heavy lenses:
http://www.itsnotallflowersandsausages.blogspot.com/: I really like this blog. I can’t read it anymore though, because sometimes it brings out the cranky side in me. She’s a smart, funny writer, who is not shy about being successful in her endeavors. You go, girl! But, I’ll watch from the sidelines for awhile.
http://www.joebower.org/: Joe Bower is brilliant. A very powerful thinker, progressive philosopher, reformer, and he scares me a bit. I think he would think he scares me because his ideas are so radical. Actually, I don’t think he’s necessarily right all the time, and I noticed a trend that he would never respond to any comment or question I asked; so, for all the important beliefs about being part of a larger dialogue, I felt left out. I’m not disgruntled, just thought I should spend my energies on actually making change, helping students, etc. I check in from time to time, because he is a good writer.
Teaching middle school students stirs up so much goop. It is at this time of the year, I tap deep into inner reserves. Deep. Not oil-rig-explosion-and-we-can’t-cap-it deep, but into some murky areas.
