Writing is a gift–and perhaps if students of writing see themselves, their words, as gifts to themselves and others we can reshape how they feel about writing (which isn’t always positive).
Creative constraints provide necessary restrictions for all of us who wish to create productively. It may seem counter-intuitive, but creative constraints produce better focus and creativity, not less.
Your neck tingles. You feel the hot breath, tinted with salmon bones and gooseberries, mingle in your cheaply-shampooed hair; feeling unprotected, vulnerable, and instinctually aware, you know someone just played the research card, and it feels like a bear attack–wild, demobilizing and terrifying. How do you survive?
Remember that word ‘collaboration’ we’re so fond of? Well, this is where it’s put to the test. When our personalities and teaching styles clash with others, and deductive reasoning paints us in a pedagogical corner, we’re left with few other options than to go to the research well and find other credible experts who support our own teacher-action research and experience. Sometimes it seems our own knowledge and experience aren’t worth the certificate paper it’s printed on. Conversely, when we are convinced of our methods, so sure that our approaches are the best and right, we do so at our peril and ignore a balanced approach. In other words, we’re all trying to do our best, but what if others don’t see our best as credible?
The specific controversy is about independent reading time. There are hundreds more in education. Here are the links to the authors:
Strategic, solid teachers are constantly striving to hone their craft, and honor their own life experience. Shanahan argues that independent reading time is a waste of time. I claim trying to make teachers into robotic close-reading drones is worse. Far, far worse.
After reading the key points, I condensed these ideas:
Asking anyone to sit for twenty minutes with a book/text of their choice and independent reading level feels hollow and difficult. If you use it for babysitting time while you check e-mails, etc. students quickly grasp the hypocrisy. When they read, you read.
Make your shared text time as meaningful and enlightening as possible in order for students to return to their independent reading time armed with confidence and courage. This is THEIR time, their passion, which leads me to the next point:
And ELA teachers: there is no question we have it tough, but our work has never been more important. My observations and anecdotal data collection includes the increased amount of time students, especially of poverty, spend consuming media and not creating.The struggle to convince students into having faith in me, that we’ll get to use their laptops for creative ends, and bear with me while we do forumulaic mandates. But yes, I’ve seen good close-reading lessons, controversial discussions and working through big thematic, enduring understandings fill their minds with good stuff.
This blog post by John Spencer sums it up for me, and something I hold dear: “Should Schools Be More Confusing?” Yes. And teachers should allow each other to practice research and ask the tough, inquisitive questions, too.
“We’re developing a new citizenry. One that will be very selective about cereals and automobiles, but won’t be able to think.” –Rod Serling
Is it just me or does one become a veteran teacher far too soon in one’s journey? Meaning, how did I get so old?! Well, as scary as that is, it’s better than the alternative, right Poe?
Allow me to present the context: through December I have a student teacher, and boy oh boy am I happy to know her. She’s going to be a fantastic teacher, wants to do well and jump right in. This has been an especially chaotic start to the new school year for me: our administration takes great care and time to balance the master schedule, so it’s had to change multiple times to get it right. When one considers how many of our students need what is called “Essentials” in our district (it’s probably called that other places, too), it changes the dynamic quite a bit. To the point, for me personally I gave up my planning period and will be teaching six periods a day, so having an eager student teacher/intern will be enormously helpful.
One of the requirements of her program is a three-day scoped lesson, and since she and I are both enthusiastic fans of all things macabre and October, we sat down to discuss a possible text. One of the first short stories I planned on handing over to her was The Monkey’s Paw. I’ve used this story for many years and add the Vimeo film, too. It’s accessible in terms of understanding themes/tropes (be careful what you wish for! Magic has a cost! Be grateful for what you have!) and is grand, classic fun.
And that was the problem.
As I am describing the story, written in 1902, with its archaic language and cultural tropes (exotic foreign lands! Grand Fakir! Seargent Major in the grand India wars….!) her eyes seemed to glaze over, not in boredom, but in overwhelmed fear: these old stories are not this generation’s stories. She’s two years older than my oldest son, and if I may make one sweeping generalization about millennials it’s not that they haven’t read the classics, but perhaps have rejected them because they are not multicultural or diverse. Coming from my old white lady perspective, many of my beloved stories are from a narrow Victorian smelling salts place of overly tight corsets and ladies locked in boxes/towers/coffins.
The Monkey’s Paw is not a place to start when you’re a 23-year-old student teacher.
I put the word out on the Notice and Note page:
I’m going to the well once again — 🙂 I have a great student teacher, and many of the classic horror stories are not in her wheelhouse. We’re thinking of her three-day filmed lessons of doing RL8.3 and a scary story. Things like The Monkey’s Paw or The Raven are not comfortable for her necessarily, so was wondering if anyone knows of poetry or short story horror that’s more contemporary? The guiding question is ‘what do we know as readers that the character(s) don’t know?’ among others. Please and thank you–
To all of you: you honor me with your amazing resources and suggestions. What I think we all struggled with though was at the heart of my question: something more contemporary. I should have just flat-out said: diverse. Multicultural. Not Dead White Guy. Not that there’s a darn thing wrong with dead white guys. Those are some of my favorite guys.
From Notice and Note Educator Experts:
But these are wonderful pieces of literature, and though I’ve used most of them extensively, have some new ones to check out:
I want to thank you all for your suggestions and insights: it reminds me again that we cannot do this alone. It’s up to my student teacher to poke around and find one that feels comfortable for her now, just like all of us have and had to do. She’s going to craft and curate her own stories to tell — and I can’t wait to hear them!
We can’t see the stars any longer because of light pollution. But as the lady says, “The night is dark and full of terrors,” so we humans master the monsters and use all the power we can to dispel the darkness. But we don’t see things as we once did, or learn from the larger spaces and infinite wonderful universe.
And perhaps — this is just an idea — we have overlooked the other toxic detriment to learning: noise pollution.
“Hearing new words in fluent speech without a lot of background noise before trying to learn what objects the new words corresponded to may help very young children master new vocabulary,” Saffran said in a statement.
That’s a helpful tip for parents and teachers, but overall, the study highlights yet another cognitive obstacle facing low-income children. Not only do poor children hear fewer words than rich ones—the gap is estimated to reach 30 million words by age 3—they are more likely to live in loud environments, as McMillan and Saffran write. Their homes are more crowded, their schools are closer to highways, and they spend more time watching TV. (This phenomenon would help explain why children living in urban poverty have lower verbal working-memory scores than those in rural environments.
I would add another noise factor, too, and that is digital noise. Right now I am on overload because of the conventions, the news media, Twitter, Facebook, news outlets, sources, opinions, etc. I am obsessed with politics right now, and cannot seem to break away. Like many educators, I sense I am not alone in this compelling urgency to believe that learning and knowledge can triumph and rescue this historical moment. So I keep reading. I keep analyzing. And the curse of close reading is making my head hurt.
But this — all this — is a luxury, a privilege, of being a reader and thinker. Of growing up in a household, modest to be sure, but where quiet ruled. Where we were allowed to read as long as chores were done, and have mercy on our souls if we woke our mom up from a nap. Being alone and having space in one’s own head was a given growing up. Now I see it not as there wasn’t much else to do, but a gift.
Last year I had two semesters of Computer Skills for my elective. Though technology for publication and communication have always been the standards I’ve employed in my classrooms, this particular elective provided the chance to focus on some newer technologies not attached to content. One project was a podcast. Well, this exercise reminded me of the noise pollution in many homes. (It’s not relegated to homes in poverty, either. Some houses always have a television on, or music playing.) A diligent and creative student came to me in frustration because while she was trying to record her podcast at home she found it near impossible due to everyone else’s level of noise and interruptions. And though we have a room in our building intended for podcasting and filming, it’s been taken over with junk and other things, and proves inhospitable to recording. (I’m going to ask admin if this can be resolved next year, or at least clean out a space of our own for recording.) This is the question: how to make school/classrooms have those quiet/sacred places and times in the day?
This hearkens back to a great discussion on Notice and Note about homework. Not all students have a quiet place to read, practice, etc. I have homeless students. I have students who sleep on mattresses without sheets or blankets. I have students who have disabled siblings that require all the energy and care their parents can provide, leaving them to their own. There is not judgment here, only pragmatism. If I am aware as a teacher that some students face staggering challenges at home, isn’t it my direct purpose to provide reason and solace in the classroom? To explain and make transparent I am not asking for quiet because it makes life better for me, but a gift for them? And trust me — this is one of the most challenging things to do–getting students to be comfortable in their own heads. One student experienced such deep trauma, and was able to share with me that when it was quiet she was not in control of her thoughts just yet. Be aware of this, too, and come up with alternatives.
Middle school students, and probably high school ones, too, fight against all research and reason about multi-tasking. Perhaps it’s time to reframe the conversation and tell them what noise pollution damaged, and how to change habits.
Big talk coming from someone who can’t stop reading.
Okay — I’ll take the dog for a walk. Maybe I won’t even try to catch Pokemon, either.
Let’s pretend we live in a world where no students are ever tardy, there are no altered schedules (no joke: last year there were no fewer* than eight to ten different schedules depending on whether or not it was a morning assembly, afternoon, late start, etc.) The class period is 50 minutes long, after a four-minute passing period, where all students have hydrated, taken care of bathroom necessities, and enter the classroom, crossing the threshold to a new adventure. That’s the dream. The reality is students, and teachers, are…humans. The school day feels less like a nurtured, creative maze and more like a gauntlet. The big question on the Notice & Note site is a pragmatic and all-too-real scenario: just how do we teachers use our time with students to maximize learning, growth, and engagement? Perhaps this is the only pedagogical question worth asking.
Last year I had the pleasure of having block classes: I taught Humanities, and at that my 75 minutes was squeezed. Whereas a science or a math teacher has the science and math standards, which are abundant and demanding, ELA/SS has a complex web of standards, so ‘two content areas in one.’ I loved it, though, and knew when I let go of that teaching assignment to return to 8th grade, that was a teaching luxury that proves to be difficult to relinquish. But I did it for years, and can figure out how to refine it and make it work again.
If a student’s day is their personal journey of the hero, then the first step is to get them to cross that threshold. I try to create and embed routines, as well as design and decorate my classroom so it feels ‘other worldly.’ And like the flight attendant speech we’ve all learned to ignore after years of travel, I don’t hesitate to remind and refresh students about those routines.
When planning the scope/sequence of the year, I go big picture/thematic to monthly, to weekly, to daily. For years, I tried this:
Write It Right Wednesdays: focus on a writing skill, genre, concepts –mini lessons. I try to write every single class period.
Thematic Thursdays: this one is less constrained — perhaps a concept discussion, literary elements, big question/burning question concepts, read aloud, connect with film for Film Friday, other texts that connect, media pairings, etc.
Film Fridays (Friday Fives are also due on Friday –five vocabulary words) Film Fridays are not guaranteed, but usually a short film from Vimeo, StoryCorp, TedTalk, etc. I have a list of tens of short films and am shark-like in my never sleeping hunt for great little shorts. For these films, often I’ll use a Levels of Questions graphic organizer or What It Says graphic organizer; sometimes, *shrug* I just let us enjoy the film.
One big change for this year is instead of a standard entry task, which isn’t time-cost beneficial, I’m switching to ten minutes of reading. How we as a class will manage and use that ten minutes for The Book Whisperer’s challenge is to be determined.
A caution: one year, someone from the district needed me to change my and my students’ routine based on her scheduling needs, and I realize I must have seemed inflexible. The thing is, though, especially for a high-impact, high-poverty school, is that many students have too much chaos in their lives, and the routines of school are safe and necessary.Never apologize if your classroom timeframe is what’s best for students. Ever. I just saw a student who’s just graduated from college, and I asked him what he remembers, and he was clear: how I made them feel supported. I was honest and supported them emotionally.
I guess the point is — and the only wobbly advice — it’s your job/life — how do you want to construct your day? How do you want to feel after every class? And before the next one? I’ve adjusted my time talking, and when I do need to impart information, make it very clear on how long I’ll talk, and keep my word. (No pun intended.) Like backwards design, consider what are the essential elements you want your students to keep and sustain their learning? The answers on how to schedule your, and their time, will become clearer. I have to pack a lot into those 50 minutes: I don’t assign homework but try to do flipped lessons that don’t depend on internet service, as many of my students don’t have access. I’m going to have to get real creative and resourceful this next year, and I’ll share this challenge with my students. The more they see that I’m thinking about them, respecting their time, and honoring their commitment to learning, the more it fosters engagement.
Like ‘backward design,’ consider what are the essential elements you want your students to keep and sustain their learning? The answers on how to schedule your, and their time, will become clearer. I have to pack a lot into those 50 minutes: I don’t assign homework but try to do flipped lessons that don’t depend on internet service, as many of my students don’t have access. I’m going to have to get real creative and resourceful this next year, and I’ll share this challenge with my students. The more they see that I’m thinking about them, respecting their time, and honoring their commitment to learning, the more it fosters engagement.
Here is my attempt to help students using the Notice and Note strategies for one of my favorite short stories, ‘Chivalry‘ by Neil Gaiman.
Or:
Wait, you know what? I think you might enjoy doing this yourself. I don’t want to spoil the story for you.
I believe there is an example of every signpost in this story. Read it out loud to your students in your best English accent (if you don’t have one already). Enjoy.
