TL:DR teacher friends, if you want to discuss how to get inspired again, I’m here for us all.
This afternoon, I am struggling not to fall into cynicism, and I think I’ve found an answer for myself, at least.
It’s not like we teachers haven’t been sounding the alarm for years: trauma, depression, COVID, misinformation, disinformation, and now the frightening political future that was planted decades ago is now reaching its climatic destiny, and its poison apple fruit is ready for picking. (Well, climatic in the sense of this is our generation’s boss fight, and we’ll either go down in history as just another democracy who caved to fascism or we will get it together.)
Here is where some of my hope lives, the well I’m drawing from: I’m a pretty good teacher.
I’m creative, resourceful, and care about students.
It’s been interesting to see how this care and concern now includes parents who believe, with their whole minds and hearts, the lies and disinformation: I am concerned about these students, and also there is nothing I can directly do. If some students, a small minority, but they exist, even get a whiff that I am sharing my personal political views they will go to their parents.
This is where we are now.
And the best advice when one is lost in the woods, or in this case, my own entanglement with events, is to stay put. And staying put means to look over the metaphorical map, and remember what steps worked in the past:
“Dogfooding” the lesson: anything you create or try for students, do it with them. Over winter break, I wrote an essay on To Kill A Mockingbird, kind of hated the process, so I came up with another prompt that is related but much more engaging.
Read and write: notice how it feels, and share with students. I’ve shared that reading has been a struggle for me during times of grief, stress, and distractions, and how I’ve gotten out of my slumps. The reading lesson above is what I created for both my American Lit Juniors and will share with the ELA 9th freshmen.
Angela Stockman recently posted this — she is brilliant. Ask students to document and create their own learning journeys.
This post beckoned me to write my own recommendations of books that are not “teacher” books and have been instrumental in my professional development. These are a mix of non-fiction and fiction.
(And looking over my TBR list, this is a small fraction.)
Oh my goodness, I’ve read so many more and will read. bell hooks, Audre Lorde, re-readings of Octavia Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, too many to name this morning.
What books have influenced you that are not teaching books, but have impacted your teaching practices?
The “Reading Wars” confuses the boogers out of me. I was encouraged to listen to “Sold a Story” by Emily Hanford, and was completely befuddled over…what? Three cueing what? Fountas & Pinnell were just writers of leveled texts, and I had no idea that phonics wasn’t being taught in some districts, etc. I haven’t listened to the podcast since my first listen, but I remember the overall sense that something was right about it. That tingly sense that while it was assembled as hard-hitting journalism, it is a documentary, and documentaries have bias. And whew, boy, is there a lot of bias.
And this is where things get tricky: that bias is important and led to a grand conversation about how to teach reading. But — maybe in my silly little Masters’ cohort of about a dozen or so adults obtaining their Masters in Ed., from a local university collaborating with a local school district, our mentor, Dr. Candy Schulhauser, was an absolute rock-star, genius, amazing provider of K-8 literacy instruction. We got it all: fluency, comphrension, neuroscience, read-alouds, reading intervention, instructional and recreational reading, the problems with whole language (which is something, I suspect, the warriors for the “Science of Reading” folks confuse with balanced literacy).
I don’t know what Dr. S is doing these days. I do know that almost 20 years later, I still have all the books, hand-outs, and the strong foundation of teaching children to read. The bonus outcome is helping them love to read, and become confident readers and critical thinkers.My Master’s Thesis was titled something along the lines of “Using Engaging Children’s Literature…” and I am still a hug fan of Grant & Wiggins, introduced by Dr. S, and Understanding by Design.
There is something about being a classroom teacher as long as I’ve been one: I’m at that point where I’ve seen things come and go, and folks panicking when new things come out, and putting aside the old. Sometimes the old needs to go, but sometimes it doesn’t. I feel like there is something else going on that we’re not ready to admit, and I’m not sure what that is yet. There are parents who did everything they were “supposed to do” to help their child read– reading aloud, having shelves of books, etc., and still their child struggled. And I’m just throwing out wonderings right now:
I wonder:
Are we not providing enough context, background knowledge, and schema building for all students?
Are we passing students too quickly instead of providing more art, PE, and creative time to help build their growing brains? Or just passing and putting them into more remedial help?
Are we teaching to the test, meaning just a focus on isolated skills and not enough strategies to help students use and foster their metacognitive skills (know when they are lost)?
Are we bypassing small motor skills and key brain development activities like handwriting practice and cursive?
Are we not giving kids enough playtime and socializing time? Build the stories and their own narratives?
When new practices or a review of prior practices are introduced, do most educators and parents panic instead of taking a nuanced and inventory of practices? (Thinking about how Visual Learning and Hattie’s work got so misunderstood and misused.)
Well, I am not sure. I have my opinions and my anecdotal observations. That and $4 will buy a latte and all that — however, I am grateful I had a sensible, knowledgeable expert to help me and the other educators in the cohort understand and become experts on literacy. Things change, and being a professional practitioner means keeping the good and learning about “new-good.” I just don’t think what Hanford had to sell was “new good” for me and the others who received better teaching instruction. (I must mention, I also appreciate Stephen Krashen’s work on diving into the points and issues with the Science of Reading folks.)
Some resources I’ll be diving into that will work for my students moving forward:
TL:DR; how to help students read and access content areas.
Today, Saturday, April 24, I am a cartographer of curriculum mapping, trying something new, useful, and just a little bit sad, too. I love books and teaching ELA, and while I will still teach reading and writing, listening and speaking, my new role as the EL teacher in an alternative high school shifted my instructional direction.
Basically, I’m tired of students not earning their credits in other content areas. And since I can’t change content, I can change what I do and provide for students, and the space and intentional instruction.
We can many conversations about behind, learning loss, (!) grade level, Lexiles, etc., and the encompassing educational philosophical debates, but my students, right now, sitting in my classroom, are not earning credits, so I’m going to research this and modify through a diagnostician’s perspective.
Background/Context
The English Learner students must meet a protocol to join our building. Currently, the roster includes native Spanish and Marshallese students. The reasons for this are justified, however, the protocols do not guarantee students will come to the building with grade-level skills and strategies. It is an alternative high school whose primary mission is to help student retrieve credits expeditiously. We are on a quarter system: each quarter works like a full semester at the comprehensive high schools. If one could earn .5 credit per class in a semester, they earn .5 in a quarter. Because the instruction and content is truncated, which can be stressful and nearly impossible for some areas such as math and science, students must come to our building with a Level 3 proficiency in one of the EL domains:
Online students: Those who chose to be online come to Google Meet classes
Hybrid students: come to the building for instruction
Online students: Those who chose to be online come to Google Meet classes
Hybrid students: come to the building for instruction
Those who chose Hybrid work asynchronously
Those who chose online work asynchronously
Those who chose Hybrid work asynchronously
Those who chose online work asynchronously
Fourth Quarter Schedule
Assignments:
Each class period, online or in person, the students will:
Check Skyward for current grade and missing work
Look at their schedule and focus on one class reading assignment:
Science
History or Civics
World Geography
Electives
PE
Math
They commit to getting one thing down during ELA class and must write this intention in their notebook (composition notebook or digital).
Use class time to do a first read of their assignments. The classes are mostly based on reading or viewing content, and worksheets based on reading packets.
Daily Check-In:
Reading Across Content Areas:
Five Words I Heard Vocabulary:
When they come across words in other content areas, they’ll write them on the wall, or a co-constructed anchor chart/word wall. These are the words they’ll also use in their Friday Five vocabulary presentations.
Building contextual knowledge:
My students will be tested this spring. Though the SBA has been waived again this year, the ELPA21 has not. That test doesn’t concern me, but passing their other classes does. Now that we’re back in the building two days a week, and most of my ELA students are physically present, I can support them in their other content areas. My hope is this becomes a habit, we increase text structure, text features, contextual understanding, reading strategies and skills and then build toward assessment and engage in some enrichment activities. I will offer books and choice to read independently, and I won’t settle for just getting them through it. But for now, this is how it has to be.
Reading Wars Resources:
*When I received my teaching certificate for K-8, our professor included phonics instruction and balanced literacy. I didn’t even know there was a problem or debate until this past year.
My son struggled with ADHD in school and because teachers didn’t know how to deal with it, it destroyed his love of reading. But there is hope.
I had a heart-wrenching conversation with one of my sons this afternoon about #ADHD and reading. Not going to share more right now. But teachers: for now, back off.
Please read all the heartfelt comments in this thread: many teachers and parents reached out with amazing resources, love, and ideas.
Last night my younger son, Daniel, who’s 23, was hanging out with me, and I asked him how reading The Hobbit was going. He had mentioned he was reading it because, well, he never had, and thought he’d go through Tolkien’s books. He said he hadn’t made it through the first chapter. He said with ADHD, he has to read paragraphs repeatedly, and he just gives up. I asked how that made him feel in school, like everyone knew some secret magic that he was left out of, and his body language and face, his deflated posture, broke my heart. Yes, he confirmed. And it made him feel ashamed. School was a place that took a bright, funny, smart,* laughing little boy and turned him into someone who’s had to fight hard to find his own path. Like every other kid out there. He’s not special. His generation has never gone to a public school building without testing from kindergarten through their senior years, and drilled skill after skill, without little experience or joy knowing what those skills were for. Reading logs and extrinsic motivations, academic achievement, meetings with the principal and band director because the band director was going to flunk him because we needed to go on a family trip for personal reasons. Time and again, the cruelty was the point. My older son followed all the rules and fit their mold. Daniel did not. Nothing I did or didn’t do. And yet these two beautiful sons of mine taught me so much about how horrible a place school can be.
But why does this have to be this way? Why does school have to be a place that most of us ends up hating? We end up resenting?
I told him during the pandemic, this past year, I’ve struggled to read. My escape of novels and fiction just isn’t there. Friends posting book after book on Goodreads while I languish. I find myself reading the same paragraphs, too. I just started reading Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians and am embarrassed to admit I am going to have to start over again for the third time because I don’t understand what happens in the first chapter. Is that an elk? A fight? A fight with an elk? And please don’t step in and explain it to me. I’ll get it. About all my brain can handle right now is watching old episodes of Inkmaster and
My dad, who’s 79, tells a story with some trace of bitterness, how one teacher told him his fate would probably be jail. I don’t know what my dad did or said that prompted this reaction from his high school teacher. My dad was a middle child of three boys, all close in age, with two parents who worked outside the home. And I guess he was mischievous, a troublemaker? Prone to staying out late, maybe? I don’t know details of my father’s high school years. I do know my dad is one of the sweetest, funniest men I know.
My own troublemaker self was almost kicked out of kindergarten, and often sent to the corner or hallway many times for talking in first and second grades. The teachers simply did not understand that I was trying to help others near me understand the material. But those corners of the room smell like tooth-fairy breath and shame. And I didn’t learn a damn thing about staying quiet, except that when I do share ideas and thoughts, it comes with anxiety and sometimes pain.
Okay, enough of this. We have a family history of ADHD, this seems pretty clear. Now what? Whenever I am overwhelmed, I make a list. Here are some of my initial thoughts, and many of these were echoed on Twitter. I promise I was not ‘workshopping’ anything — what a breathtaking community you are. I love you, my teacher out there — ready to jump in, share ideas, with love, compassion, and without hesitation.
Reading is not just print on paper. It’s audio, acting, movement, illustrative, and beyond. Let’s embrace a culture of reading.
Love of stories must come first, and remain, the goal.
Burning questions (allow students to co-construct their units of study with teachers and shifting classrooms– this is a seed of an idea I have)
More money for better early reading instruction that extends throughout all grade levels
All teachers have a partnership with specialists
Art at every grade
Music at every grade
Physical movement without ableism
Multi-modal essays and collaborative work
Sketchnoting, and other interactive ideas to express glorious passages of the ‘grand conversations’
There is so much more, and we’ll keep talking adding, and thinking.
My son will probably finish The Hobbit someday. Right now he’s switched to Recording Unhinged by Sylvia Massey because he’s been playing a lot of music lately with his dad, (who does not have ADHD), going to school, and working. I’ll finish my books, too, and figure out what that elk is doing.
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?
Reading logs irk me. Few things made me feel more like a slatternly and crappy mother than when I forgot to sign the boys’ reading logs. We read to them since day one, and having this accountability drudgery soured my love of reading a bit, too. It was a reminder that reading isn’t for pleasure, thinking, talking–it is about getting a tired parent’s signature and holding children “responsible” to remember something that has no connection to hearth, heart, and home. Add a child with ADD to the mix, and not only are reading logs one more thing that everyone will feel guilt and shame over, but will almost certainly associated only negative feelings with reading.
Last year I thought I’d try the reading challenge, and gave myself an ambitious number. I really thought I could will myself into reading 50 books. Why did I do that to myself? Toward the end of the year I changed the number by almost half and still didn’t make it. And then a funny thing happened: I started seeing my friends’ posts about how they not only read dozens of books, but beat their challenges. And that thing…that thing in me…that is not competitive with others, in fact rebels and fights against academic competitiveness reared its messy head. I felt turned off and a tad defensive. It become all about numbers, not what we were reading and our shared thoughts.
Maybe it’s time to bring back my book club.
I set reasonable goals for this year, and want to read again for ideas and thinking That’s it. Just going to read when I can, want to, and relax about it.
But…what if…we use Goodreads and others like it (Book Riot, LitHub, Brain Pickings, etc.) to share with students authentic and real-world reviews, analysis and thinking? This idea sparked from a conversation on Twitter about star ratings, and reminded me of this review about a book called Basic Witches:
Before you question about why I have this book, I have always appreciated kitschy silliness like this. It’s an okay book, and I wasn’t that impressed. Not sure what I thought it would offer, but it was fine. The illustrations are cute, so maybe that’s what drew my attention.
So how do we not only encourage students to read, read whatever they like without judgment, and grow to communicate when they like, love, or hate a novel? Maybe it’s time to share reviews like this one to encourage students to speak against, or for, books.
One reader, “M” wrote a scathing review:
A reviewer from GoodreadsPart 2 of the review
Let me give this some more thought. I think a mini-unit on how to write a book review, (not a report) but true literary critique would be valuable to most middle and high school students.
“I didn’t find the characters believable.”
I have a Youtube channel, and I need to update many of my videos. In the meantime, here is a link to how to write basic Short Answer Responses and Funnel paragraphs (it cuts off weirdly at the end).
English teachers: the stereotype is fussy, middle-aged woman whose sole job is to sneer at students’ misplaced commas and deny acceptance of late work. There are posts and tweets about how a student turns in late work, and the sheer amount of gleeful, snotty remarks dishearten me to no end. And after I remember to breathe after my raging, fist-shaking, and look deeper into what may be at the heart of this, I am asking all of us who love to read, to write, and to speak and listen to get back to the heart of what we love about being English teachers.
It is well known that English teachers carry the unfair, unbalanced burden of too much grading. Our standards are vast: we shoulder the weight of teaching all students how to communicate clearly and well in the English language, a language fraught with peculiarities and nonsensical rules, more broken than adhered to. Our scores (along with math teachers and sometimes science) are “counted.” During staff meetings and data carousels, the reading and math scores are displayed on metaphorical pikes for all to see, judge often under the pretense of “growth.” Administration are pressed to raise scores, and if they are truly instructional leaders they promote a school-wide approach. If not, they turn the data walks into fuel for petty discourse and grudges.
While we can’t excuse all of the grading, because we are the expert in the classroom, and our feedback and insight is ultimately what our students desire, I am offering some alternatives to lessen the burden. However, if you are one of those for whom control is more important than your students’ learning, I don’t have a lot of hope. Please –with love-ask yourself if it’s about control versus guidelines.
Consider:
Writing Workshop. Please: Do not let students read each other’s work. This is not about finding spelling mistakes or misused comma. The reading of the piece is a critical part of this, as is the listening, undistracted, by the feedback giver. The writer reads the work. Follow this protocol for some truly inspired writing experiences. https://mrskellylove.com/2019/07/31/writers-workshop/
Studio: my personal teaching philosophy is that teaching of humanities should be more like teaching art: help the talent grow and guide, but remember art is subjective > objective. If the creator can defend his or her work, allow them to make a case for it. Display students’ work as often as you can, and provide chances for open gallery feedback and discussion.
Single-Point Rubrics Jennifer Gonzalez has a great post that my own master mentor and friend, Holly, suggested to me years ago. Great ideas do that: they spread, sharpen, and improve. https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/single-point-rubric/
Don’t grade everything. Pick one or two larger pieces of work. Give small check-in grades for progress along the way: 1. Pre-write 2. Draft 3. One revision pass 4. One editing pass 5. Final published work
Do not assign reading logs. Alternative: assign curated content. (Are your students checking up on your and your reading logs? It’s not much fun when we think about it that way.)
Speaking: give students a chance to talk, and you can provide an accountability piece if they share something that’s on their minds.
Listening: Read aloud. Play author’s interviews and speeches. Listen in workshop.
Calendars and Conversations: do not work in isolation, if you can help it, and reach out to colleagues to see if they’re giving assignments that can be cross-purposed. Make sure to help students with time management (Pomodoro method, etc.)
but…mah deadlines!
Deadlines do matter, but I offer that we take a version of ‘love and logic’ about deadlines. English teachers: make a promise to yourself and your students: if they miss a deadline do not offer sarcastic responses. We had a saying in the Puget Sound Writing Project: “Writing is never finished, it’s only due.” Tell students ahead of time that deadlines matter for everyone’s peace of mind and self-care, theirs and the teacher’s. Getting it done and something turned in gives everyone a place to start the feedback and discussion. I would tell students, if you turn in nothing, I am like the fire department: I don’t know if you’re drowning or if you’re on fire. I need to know how to help. There was always the last week of grading where I gave a small window to turn in missing/late work, or redo-work. Some kids took me up on it, some didn’t. Some…couldn’t. I think as we learn more about depression and other trauma we will have new means of helping students with deadlines. And, since we’ve been testing our students since kindergarten, not allowing free play time, we are facing a generation of students who do not know how to self-manage. We’re seeing more anger, violence and disruptions, and the solution seems to be keep kids in the classroom, and we’ll solve the root causes later. But that’s a post for another time.
We have our jobs to do, and putting in grades and accounting for production is deeply embedded in our educational systems. Until that changes, or we make adjustments where we can, we are going to become increasingly burnt-out. We can be creative and thoughtful about this process, and above all: respectful. Modeling both self-respect and respect for our students will create a safer, gentler community of readers and writers. And who knows? They just might meet their deadlines.
