Viewing the world through our lenses. Flickr photo by Bri...D
Here are some extra resources to explore further the ideas of women in the media. Check out more media resources here and here plus my favorites on youtube. Head over to the Center for Media Literacy to learn about the teaching of ML and the 5 Key Questions. More resources and links can be found here.
I call them “linchpins.” They are the student to whom almost every other student in the class turns for social approval. They are the ones who can disrupt or corral a disruptive class with a single rude noise or comment. They can change the atmosphere of the day or class period by walking into the room. Do you know these students?
In What Would Google Do? Jeff Jarvis discusses the idea of making your worst customer into your best friend. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not advocating turning any students into “friends” (on Facebook,Twitter or otherwise), but I do think he has a point applicable to the classroom.
On the first day of classes, I stand outside my door watching the fresh-faced students enter the classroom. I watch how they walk, whether or not they look me in the eye or say ‘good morning’ or ‘hello’ as they enter. When the bell rings, before I begin whatever first-day activity I have planned, I look around the room. Where does this ‘linchpin’ sit? Will it be a girl or a boy? Who is talking to friends? Who is slouching, apathetic or sitting up, alert?
Truthfully, none of it really matters, but what does matter is how much I listen to them as we begin to talk and discover about each other. Pat Hensley, wrote yesterday about how sharing stories of herself helps to make the classroom a safe environment. More importantly than telling stories about myself is listening to the students’ stories. Within the stories (brief or personal or superficial) I begin to understand who is sitting in the classroom.
The ‘linchpin’ may be disruptive, may be loud, may be rude, but in reality, the ‘linchpin’ is looking for attention (positive or negative, it doesn’t matter). I work hard to give that student (or students) a little extra positive attention. This is, of course, after the whole class has talked about what a ‘linchpin’ is and how they’ve had ‘linchpins’ in their other classes. Every year I learn some pretty important lessons from my ‘linchpins’ (mostly about how to be more engaging, more open in my lesson plans, more willing to cede control).
Jarvis’ point boils down to one word- “relationships.” If we can foster a positive, encouraging learning environment where at the end of the day regardless of what happened during a class period students know that the student-teacher relationship is solid and reliable, we’ll come to recognize the disruptive students as some of our best customers.
I recently visited Scott McLeod’s blog and saw that he was reading What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis. Low and behold, when I went to the library yesterday, without looking for it, I saw the book on the shelf and decided to check it out.
I realized quickly that this is a book I should buy so that I can scribble and mark in it, but my house is already overflowing with books; I’ll stick to post-it notes.
I started to wonder what this book would look like, sound like, if the title was something like “What Would Google Do to Education?” I know Google has already impacted education, but could Jarvis’ concepts apply cleanly to the day-to-day, high school classroom? (Side note: In my district, student access to Google’s image search is blocked.) It’s this question that will drive the next few posts.
Jarvis posits that businesses would do well to follow Google’s lead. He begins by reviewing “10 Things Google has found to be true.“ The first one seemed to me a 1:1 with the classroom environment: Focus on the [student] and all else will follow. What if the classroom really became a student-centered environment where the student(s) had choice and control 0ver what the teacher taught and over what they learned? I know that I like to have control over what read and write, so how would students respond to having that much control? (I type this with reservations, but I’ll get to them later.)
What would happen if all the teachers in a school were bloggers? What if students knew that regardless of time (with the exception of the hours between 10P.M. and 5A.M. because teachers need their beauty rest) they had access to their teachers? Would they even rely on their teachers? What if students were bloggers and able to critique, review, and analyze their own education? Would teachers pay more attention to the critique if it were public? (as opposed to the student who mutters just loudly enough for their immediate compatriots and teacher to hear, “This really SUCKS!” The teacher then, to save face, sends the student to the dean’s office to receive punishment [I've seen this happen for real]) What if the relationship (student-teacher, student-student, student-administrator, administrator-teacher) mattered most?
Just asking.
I recently finished Christopher Benfey’s A Summer of Hummingbirds-Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade. I had seen the book last summer at my library but hadn’t had the chance to read it until now.
The book details an interesting intersection of poetry and prose, scandal and passion, art and nature, and the possibilities that existed during the Civil War and in post-war America.
Twenty years after his initial journey down river, Mark Twain described the post-war South in this way: “It is like a man pointing out to me a place in the sky where a cloud has been.” Here is where Benfey begins his tale of the changing country and changing attitudes about love and nature, and it is here that the tale Benfey tells takes on a gossamer quality- vague connections that entertain more than they inform. The book really focuses on Heade, a painter of nature, specifically hummingbirds, Dickinson (along with Austin Dickinson, her brother), and Stowe (along with Henry Ward Beecher, her brother and prominent minister). Through their tales of war, scandal, and travel, Benfey weaves the hummingbird, tracing its “route of evanescence.”
The book reinvigorated my love for learning. Not that the love had lapsed completely. Since I will be teaching AP Language this year, I thought it appropriate to get my mind geared toward the reading of non-fiction. I realized, too, that non-fiction requires a slightly different set of reading skills (more on my “skill toolbox” later).
Regardless, the book proved interesting. From the scandal of Lord Byron’s supposed love affair with his sister (his poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” proved important to these writers), to Henry Ward Beecher’s affair with married Elizabeth Tilton (a scandal reminiscent of John Edwards’ or Nevada Senator John Ensin’s affairs today) to Austin Dickinson’s romance of married Mabel Loomis Todd, who would later become one of Emily Dickinson’s editors, to the quest for the elusive hummingbird in “what Henry James would call ‘the great empty peninsula [Florida]‘” (236), from Fred Stowe’s war campaign and disappearance in San Francisco to the burning of Jacksonville, Florida under the watch of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the book captured my love of literature and love of history (albeit the connections between characters tenuous, seemingly specious at times).
Most surprisingly was how Benfey wove Emily Dickinson like the path of a pale hummingbird or the shy arbutus flower through the lives of the characters. Emily, who eschewed the public in favor of writing letters and walking in her family’s garden, and who for me is the most mysterious American writer of the 19th century, moved like the slight bird, flitting and fluttering through the garden of American history.
Today we spent the day at the zoo. Check out the pictures.
I knew it would be a lot of walking and that it would be hot, but I chose not to rent a wheelchair. I have now come to the conclusion that when I have to walk around a theme park or mall for any extended period of time, I will rent a chair to save my legs and energy for later.
See, it isn’t just the MS that is problematic for me; it’s my muscle disorder as well. (I would link to some explanation of what the disorder is, but it doesn’t really have a name. Suffice to say that exercise is problematic at best.) So it’s two for the price of one body. Despite of all that, I don’t appear to have any disability (I don’t limp or walk with a cane). In the past (the one or two times that I have used a wheelchair) I’ve gotten strange looks that become stranger still when I stand up and walk away. I’ve even gotten yelled at by a complete stranger for using my legally-obtained handicapped parking decal because “I didn’t look handicapped.” These instances have lead to my reticence to rent a chair.
But today I learned to give up a little pride to save my energy. It isn’t much, but it’s a start.
It’s a beautiful day, and I’m inside at the local big box bookstore waiting on my wife and daughter to call. Beautiful is an understatement- gorgeous blue skies, cool breeze, trees roaring back to life. This is the start of Spring Break. My hope is to write at least one new post a day during break. This may be far more ambitious than originally conceived, but I have to start somewhere.
Yesterday, a student asked me, “If I wasn’t teaching, what would I do?” A bit non sequitur, but after a few moments hesitation I replied, “Writing.” To be honest, this was only a half-truth. I do want to write; I want to tell stories. I want to share all the ideas floating through the jelly of my brain, like this one:
A young man knocks on the door and casually, with the familiarity of a nephew, asks the occupant if he’d like to buy some books to sponsor his college and if he buys a few items he has a greater chance of winning a $15,000 scholarship for college and won’t he just buy one because I even have children’s books and you can buy some books for your daughter c’mon man you can buy a few can’tcha? The man smiles thinly and says we’re about to have dinner, why don’t you come in and join us for a bit and we’ll take a closer look at your lists of items to sell. The boy, whose face is marked by late adolescent acne, hesitates for a the briefest of moments, but seeing the man has a daughter and smelling the scent of something cooking from the kitchen decides the sale just might be worth taking a few extra minutes and enters the small, suburban home much to his regret.
I do want to write, but I’m not sure that I can give up time in the classroom, time away from young people. What I really should have said was, “I want to start a business like Dave Eggers started in New York and in Los Angeles. I want to create a place where young people can learn about computers and writing and media production, where the young people can discover their voice and express that voice in a safe, comfortable environment, a place where what they produce isn’t graded on a rubric or dictated by state standards, where if they come late or stay later they won’t be punished or pushed out the door, where a young person can rediscover that learning can be and is fun. An after school program that will support classroom learning in a way that is non-threatening, inviting, open.
I am tired of the rules of the classroom. Tired of the grading, the rubrics, the state mandates, the budget cuts, etc. I want to have fun learning again. I want my students to have fun too, not just see learning as something they have to do but rather something they want to do.
Posted in Teaching
Been doing some thinking lately about how this exponential growth in technology affects poor and rural students, and if, as 21st C. educators, we are supposed to be helping our students gain the skills needed to navigate this brave new world, how do we address the issues of access and equity in the classroom?
Does that make sense?
This stems from a conversation I had yesterday with my seniors about their passions. This particulary class is comprised of low-ability readers and writers who have lost interest in school and have been blinded by the light at the end of the tunnel called graduation. Most are students from working-class families who expect to be manual labors in the forseeable future.
I think of them (and my other students of a predominately rural and low/middle-class community) and wonder about their place in the tech world?
Skills are skills right? All students need to be able to read critically and write cohearently and effectively- that doesn’t change…right?
Dave Eggers delivers an inspiring speach about the power of one-one help for all students.
I’m always amazed by the TED talks.
What’s your favorite talk?
This rock’s been rolling around my head for a bit:
Is there a statute of limitations on writing about past blog posts written on other’s blogs?
Would writing about old posts be the equivallent of approaching an acquaintance after not seeing that person for a year and saying, “Remember when you said _____________? Well, I was thinking about it and realized ________________.”
Just curious.
Posted in Questions
Recently, I decided to unplug from Twitter and Facebook and Stumbleupon and only allow myself to check email and peak at my Bloglines reader. I did this for two reasons: 1) My wife was reminding me how much time the computer was taking out of my days. This was a truth I didn’t want to admit and one I’d been struggling with. Between teaching and the computer, I wasn’t devoting much time to the things that are important (i.e. wife and daughter) [Disclaimer: I wasn't shirking responsibilities or daddy-daughter time, really.] 2) I was feeling overloaded, too connected. Does this make sense? These were my thoughts the morning I read Teach42′s post about joining a PLN.
“I also know quite a few educators that are becoming more and more disillusioned with their jobs and are leaving teaching, and I can’t help but wonder how much of the blame falls on being part of an open network.”
There’s a simplicity in Teach42′s statement, but something in it resonated in me.
“Yeah, that’s me,” I whispered into my coffee cup.
Why is it that the more I am connected, the more overloaded and disconnected I feel to what is happening before my eyes? I’ve learned more that I thought possible through Twitter and in reading others blogs, but more times than not, the information is coming so quickly that I have difficulty sifting for the kernels of nourishing corn.
And what does that say for my teaching practice? Am I uncomfortable with the challenges of teaching in the 21stC? Am I too self-centered to realize that that the more connected I am to other teachers around the country and world, the better I can teach my students how to navigate this flat world?
I’m left with more questions than answers.
Namaste
Posted in Teaching
