Category: Wish I Had Written That

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.

framing birds

Teaching To Kill A Mockingbird in the age of The Hate U Give

Written at the beginning of January, I sought advice and resources to teach To Kill a Mockingbird. Here’s how it’s going:

Okay.

But also kind of great.

The Engage NY curriculum is clunky and goofy-footed when strained through district curriculum committees.

But that is what we have to work with as part of our GVC. And while there are many good tools, it’s been a welcome challenge to roll up my shirt sleeves and get back to what I do well, and that is bridge what “has to be taught” with why is taught.

I cannot thank the wonderful educators on my query post who came to my rescue. Facing History and Ourselves: To Kill A Mockingbird is a breathtaking unit: simple, organized and incredibly rich. Anyone who loves to design curriculum should review it and cherish it as a masterwork.

And then the unflappable Tom Rademacher provided these resources: The Construction of Racism Resource List and Cait Hutsell, a powerhouse and force for good put this together: One Pagers and Article Set.

Some things I’ve put together are co-constructed anchor charts on theme theories/inquiries, and my Chapter Expert Project. Hey, if I can get 120 students to jigsaw The Hobbit, I certainly can provide the structure for 60 to scaffold TKAM.

Inspired by Catlin Tucker: Thematic Throwdown
Learning is messy
This simple structure can help scaffold theme statements.

The process is fairly simple: have students work in pairs or groups of three, and find key words from the chapter. Collect those words, and then they choose three they think are the most important. From Chapter 5, many found ‘religion, religious differences, God, sin, garden, weed,’ etc. From this, one student thought that the noxious weed in Miss Maudie’s garden was important, and that led us to think that yes, it was–symbolic of the festering racism in the town and needed to be rooted out.

“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”

― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

We’re getting through TKAM with help of the graphic novel, audiobook, movie, and discussions. We haven’t had a chance to go too deeply into some burning questions and ideas that I have or Facing History explores. But we are getting there.

Slowly.

And all the while, we are hoping to be able to watch THUG if it comes out on Netflix, and I get parent permission slips. *Fingers crossed*

Summer Series of Saves: Disrupt the Essay, Continued. (IV)

Three examples of how an essay structure can be dismantled and put back together:

I. Chuck Wendig retells The Three Little Pigs: #literaryanalysis essay:

Chuck uses the medium of Twitter to take on a writing challenge and analyzing The Three Little Pigs and how it relates to capitalism.

II. This is America, Childish Gambino, Donald Glover – from Genius

Think how we co-construct meaning and share insight into art and music. Quotes and sections of these insights provide help and mentor texts for students.

https://genius.com/Childish-gambino-this-is-america-lyrics#

III. The Face in the Waves 

This is how a story can be told with imagery, compassion, and share the voices of those affected by tragedy and loss.

https://mrskellylove.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/430d5-face-in-the-waves.mov

Work in progress:

 

Survey for bullies.

Please take the survey on the Widget list in the right-hand column. Thank you.

I’ve been working since I was nine years old. Granted, it was mostly babysitting gigs and poorly run lemonade stands until age thirteen when I was a busgirl in a Mongolian Barbecue restaurant. But I’ve worked constantly. Along the way, I’ve met my share of sexism and microaggressions from all manner of coworkers and supervisors. And in those four decades of work experience, not once have I ever witness a bully paying any kind of consequence for their actions. Maybe there is some invisible karma that gets metered out, or some moment of self-reflection in a quiet, pensive moment where the bully thinks, “Gee, whiz, I was kind of a jerk. Since [X] happened to me, I now understand when [this other person was going through the same thing] how awful I was to them.”

Is empathy really empathy when it requires the same exact event? Well, that’s a question for another time perhaps, although my first instinct is to answer empathy is a proactive emotion, it gets in front of another’s pain in order to prevent further damage.

In a recent discussion thread, a parent shared her detailed concerns about her son. I know from a teachers’ perspective addressing bullying is a daunting task: children, and then they grow up to adulthood, get deep pleasure from the control and social status when they bully others. Even in one of my classes now, a new student says something that makes other boys snicker, just because they aren’t used to his colloquialisms. So: time for a conversation with those two young men. It can’t be ignored.

What bullying is:

  • Persistent and targeted harassment regarding someone’s personality, social status, race, gender, health or cultural viewpoints.
  • Putting someone down or marginalizing tastes in clothes, music, movies, books, and other media
  • Not having an established understood relationship (friendship) that has its own rules and boundaries for ‘trash talking’ and teasing and proceeding to harass or intimidate another physically or verbally
  • Systematically shunning someone from a group or social situation

What it is not:

  • Differences of opinion or approach regarding a common goal or objective

This is from a discussion thread, and he shares insightful information:

I am sorry to see that this is going on, and a repeated daily matter no less.

The thing that saddens me is that schools ingratiate this behavior and “the person in question” will continue to go with a belief that they are invincible. This will carry on throughout life and unfortunately at some time “the person in question” will do real damage in the workplace.

Schools and companies have been far too risk averse and don’t want to deal with real issues because it takes time and too many resources. But there needs to be the line drawn at any kind of physical assault. The name calling and belittling, unfortunately, will be part of life and that should not be acceptable. While I personally would not condone it as it interferes with your son’s learning process (as you have already demonstrated with the vomiting).

Fortune 500 companies do nothing about a workplace bully on 99% of the cases. Ultimately the target is diminished, emotionally beaten and crushed, their work performance suffers and eventually leads to layoff or termination. The bully will usually get a promotion or move on to other larger projects to help feather their nest.

The rare occasions when a bully is held accountable is when they have done something so egregious that there are too many witnesses or it is so flagrantly damaging that it can not be concealed.

Just moving around and transferring schools is not going to be sufficient. There are always going to be cliques and factions with their small minded people who think they are responsible for choosing who is important in life.

–Allan Rei Tan

Have I ever bullied someone? Yes, once. And it’s a painful story for me to tell, and I pray for forgiveness. I didn’t derive any pleasure or status from the event, but regret and shame.

My plan as an educator is to continue helping students recognize when they’re bullying, or being bullied: to empower those who are being harassed and flip the script on the bully. But it can’t come from a single voice, but that is where it starts.

 

 

Dowry.

Back in April 2015, Love, Teach wrote a blog post that has been widely circulated, What I Wish I Could Tell Them About Teaching in a Title I School, and it is solidly one of those I wish I had written.

My district is in flux now, and I don’t know what exactly is going to happen next. I am learning that in times of chaos babies do, indeed, get thrown out with the bath water. (Forgive me, Sharon.) I’m resigned to whatever happens as long as I can keep teaching. I have invested in myself on behalf of my students, and I want to keep a positive net balance.

So when I move ahead, sideways, or upwards, what will I bring with me?

  • A robust classroom library I’ve spent years curating and refining.
  • A process of planning instruction that meets the needs of the students with forethought and deep reflection, in the moment, and processed over time
  • Binders full of lessons, units of study, scope/sequence curriculum maps
  • Technology skills galore
  • Ability to connect with students and parents
  • A love of working with teams of teachers to collaborate
  • A strong mentoring background to help new teachers
  • Deep devotion to teaching writing and helping students find their paths
  • Strong and innate desire to support the administration and colleagues
  • A supportive PLN across the country, and world
  • A sense of humor

And I’m also taking and knowing everything Love, Teach wrote, too.

As well as cups full of pencils.

I belonged in my building when I belonged: there is no gauzy film of nostalgia over my years in my first teaching job: it was and continues to be hard. Now, perhaps I don’t belong or am included. And that’s okay. I’m not going through the growing pains many newcomers experience in a tough school such as mine. When I was a new mother, I didn’t want the advice from older women, I just wanted them to tell me I was doing a great job.

And even though the difficulties and challenges, however, have shifted, the students still need the same from me: someone who knows them and cares about them and likes them enough to set high expectations grounded with deep empathy.

How do I know I’m helping? When a student asks me three tough questions about police violence and #BLM for her passion project. When a student is having a bad day and then brings me a flower the next day because I was kind. When I tell a student that dangerous behavior is first my problem, and he says, “too bad for you,” and then I tell him, well, now you know, so it’s your responsibility now….he got it. It’s not all on my shoulders, and that’s heaven: when colleagues I know and trust share the support and love for our students, I know we’re doing it right.

I still have a lot to learn, as do we all.

Why Took Much Experience Can Backfire by Francesco Gino, in Scientific American:

By contrast, when we’re reminded that the more we know, the more there is to learn, experience opens our minds to the fact that there are multiple ways to approach the same decision or task—even those that start to feel monotonous over time.

Consider views that do not align your own:

As Porter has found in her research, it’s an important realization: Higher levels of intellectual humility are associated with a greater willingness to consider views that don’t align with our own. People who have higher intellectual humility also perform better in school and at work. When added experience is accompanied by awareness that we have more to learn, we are more apt to see that the world keeps on changing—and that we’ll have to change along with it to thrive.

 

Cereal and roses.

It’s been a long time since I posted a “Wish I Had Written That” post, but this one came along at a perfect moment. This week is our spring break, and while my current professional life is a bit surreal, breaks are breaks, and I want to focus my energies on productive acts and thoughts.
Before the break, I asked for one more observation. My evaluator wrote in her scripts that one student sat in the back, disengaged from the class. Until we meet at our post-observation conference, I can’t tell her the student’s whole story–that she posted on the class blog her own, well-written Humans of Mill Creek story, and although she’s often withdrawn she does great work and we have a strong relationship. I went over to her to check to see if she was all right, and she assured me she was, so I let her be.
The next day, she quietly hands me this flower. No drama or presentation.
Genuinely, I have no answers to these questions: what do people not understand about high poverty schools? What do they assume? What is the guiding principle all leaders of a building adhere to in order to support teachers, students, and parents of a high needs school?
Children from underserved backgrounds are some of the kindest, funniest, most interesting students a teacher will ever work with. Despite odds being stacked against them, there is often a spirit of hope in children that does not seem to match the horrific conditions that may physically surround them in and out of school.
As a teacher, I have relished in academic successes, inside jokes, and laughter with these students, even as the challenges seem insurmountable at times.
Every teacher at some point must question her place in a building. I don’t really want to leave my school. What I want is for my relationships with the adults in the building, to be just that– adult, mature, professional relationships. No cliques. No personality grudges. Our school doesn’t need heroes, empire builders, saviors, martyrs or drama queens. No passive aggressive, gaslighting or undermining. It needs equitable leadership, shared, inclusive vision building, and peace ambassadors. My colleagues are capable of this level of expertise and dialogue.
However, the more I learn about the systemic conditions that have created and continue to sustain rampant poverty and racism in America, the more it seems absurd to expect my students to bring their best everyday with NO EXCUSES and then solely blame them if they do not always succeed. Books such as “American Apartheid” by Douglas Massey, “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein, “New Jim Crow” by Michelle Alexander, and “Origins of the Urban Crisis” by Tom Sugrue told me about how Blacks and Whites were deliberately separated from one another in America in the post-Civil War era, with a set of laws and public institutions that intentionally made it more difficult for Black people and poor White people to succeed in America. Regardless of any recent progress achieved, the bitter truth is that 21% of all children in America grow up in poverty today. We know that the effects of poverty on children are absolutely crippling.
Our building understands this, and the administrator and staff do their utmost to serve our population. What I am wondering, however, is does the blame shift to the teachers when the students require extra support? When Rita Pierson gave her famous Every Kid Needs A Champion TedTalk, we all believe that we are that champion: what we didn’t agree on was that students can have more than one. In fact, the more the culture of school shifts to shared service and support, everyone benefits.
Of course, as a teacher, I must put aside the problems of the world each day in order to bring out the best in young people and create an effective learning environment in my reality, no matter what that reality gives me.
But as the words of Jonathan Kozol invite us to ask, why should that reality for teachers and students in Detroit and America be so bleak?
Yet, as a teacher, I cannot help but be inspired by the outliers, the success stories, the majority of students who make my life whole with their kindness, humor, and hard work. I work tirelessly to improve the outcomes of my students, no matter what their backgrounds and circumstances are. In the classroom, I am no cynic- I inspire and I encourage students to achieve as best I know how. Still, as a “woke” teacher, I will always have the dilemma of how to reconcile the cruel world with my warm classroom.
What I have settled on is:
1) Listen to the stories of my students and always have empathy for them.
2)  Show students where they can have control in their lives that can lead to positive changes and successes.
3) Resist oppressive teaching practices that perpetuate the school-to-prison-pipeline.
4) Actively participate in the political change that I seek; ally with other teachers to fight for what we deserve (see Oklahoma and West Virginia).
5) Model self-care for my students; intentionally take time for myself and be kind to myself despite having a job that requires so much.
Kozol finishes his book by remarking that “(American children) are all quite wonderful and innocent when they are small. We soil them needlessly.” [2]
Sadly, his words ring true nearly 30 years later. In order to create meaningful change, we in education must look boldly in new inward and outward directions.
I couldn’t have said it better myself. (Thank you, Renegade Teacher.)
Oh, and we had “cereal day” on Friday in my fourth period, per their suggestion the week prior. This is something I could get behind!
6AC04F25-CF0E-4E47-B99C-3C04C5B55F73

WIHWT: Why I write.

This Wish I Had Written That is inspired by Rebecca Solnit.

Sometimes the artmaking stalls out.

Sometimes I’ve written my truth and it conflicts with someone else’s narrative. Writers step on toes, cause disquiet, and challenge ideas and status quo: and yes, I count myself in that group.

And when I stall out it’s because of fear. Fear of reprimand, unwarranted criticism, or being misunderstood.

But I suppose if I want to write, reflect, question, challenge, and process I must let go of any naivety and just write. Let go of the belief that all my words and ideas will be welcomed as a first-grader’s art project stuck on the fridge with a souvenir magnet.

It’s fun when there are over 1,000 hits and views on this blog. I realize other writers get tens of thousands a month, but for now, I’m satisfied with whoever takes the time to read.

There are too many fascinating and amazing miracles happening every day not to take snapshots of them, and curate the wonders of this world, and let fear get in the way. This age demands transparency and questioning. Carry on, be brave.

From:

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/post.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Frebecca.solnit%2Fposts%2F10155696952865552&width=500

Focus:

“You make art because you think what you make is good, and good means that it’s good for other people, not necessarily pleasant or easy, but leading toward more truth or justice or awareness or reform. I write nonfiction and know a lot of journalists, political writers, and historians, whose efforts tend to be more overtly geared toward changing the world but I believe this is true of poets too. This weekend a friend sent me a Neruda poem to celebrate the king tides—the exceptionally high winter tides we get here—and though it’s hard to say the way this might help someone, it helps me to read:

the disdain, the desire of a wave,
the green rhythm that from the hidden bulk
lifted up a translucent edifice

Because pleasure is part of what gets us through and helps us do what we’re here to do. Because the political struggle is to protect the vulnerable and the beautiful, and paying attention to them is part of the project.”

Saving Summer: WIHWT: The Promise

I haven’t done a “Wish I Had Written That” in awhile, and this came across my view today:

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Currently, I’m framing my Canvas classes for next year, and the overarching concern/message, (the thing that maybe someday will be the cornerstone of my doctoral thesis) is how to help students support their own learning, and not accept negativity or peer negativity/learned helplessness. Or something like that. The subtle and not-so-subtle messages students press on one another may be one of the most damaging and obstructionist practices I’ve witnessed. The illuminating moment flashed when a student asked me last year between the difference between the tech academy students and “regular” students: when I realized that the tech academy kids never made each other feel bad for wanting to learn something. That simple. And how do we build those communities when the community rejects being built? All the ice breakers and relationship building in the world won’t help unless there are cohorts of students/teacher teams, and the feeling of belonging. The ‘academy’ students move through their years at my school as a community, a family, and when the ‘regular’ part of the school had teacher teams, it helped build that, too, when the teams were allowed common planning or encouraged to meet. Things have gotten much more isolating over the past few years, so here is looking forward to those changes. (Is it a change when we used to have something and then get it back? Question for another time.)

And how do we build those communities when the community rejects being built…if the ‘community’ simply sees working together more like gentrification than a Seedfolks moment? All the ice breakers and relationship building in the world won’t help unless there are cohorts of students/teacher teams, and consistency in scheduling. The past two years, we have students changing core teachers mid year now, and it’s really hard on them. If Hattie says relationships impact student learning, then we need to listen to this and take steps to protect the bonds that students and their teachers have: we’re moving back to teams, thank heavens, so hopefully some of the issues that were solved once at our school will be solved again.

Source: Hattie, J. (2009). Visible Learning: A Synthesis of Over 800 Meta-Analyses On Achievement. Routledge.

Circling back to the spark: before I saw Tom Rademacher’s tweet, on my Canvas page I crafted this draft of the promises we need to make to one another in my class this year:

It is a draft: it gets a little wordy and mixes messages of both attitude and product. I’m still processing the 40 Book Challenge and using Three Teachers Talk as a guide and trying to figure out the most important ingredients for next year’s secret sauce.

For now, I’ll let this percolate for a bit, and enjoy a beautiful Saturday…any ideas are welcome!

PS

You have the right to be an introvert, as long as you feel that your voice is heard.

You have the right to be an extrovert, as long as you allow yourself and other mental oxygen.

…thinking of more….

Chivalry isn't dead.

galahad

Here is my attempt to help students using the Notice and Note strategies for one of my favorite short stories, ‘Chivalry‘ by Neil Gaiman.

 

N&N

Or:

n and n pinterest

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.

This book of short stories is well worth it:

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