It All Starts With A Sentence

   That right up there is a working representation of how I feel about giving out grades and evaluating students. In a lot of ways I feel like grades in the way that they are traditionally structured violate all the teacher/student agreements that we try to set up in our classrooms to make the environment more hospitable and establish the kind of trust and respect there needs to be in order to really work together. Reading Christensen's take on grading particularly takes away some of that fear and pressure that I feel about not wanting be the dictator that I know many teachers, even the most well meaning ones, can sometimes turn into when it comes to grades. I know what my intent is with evaluating work, but the student may at times take criticism as a personal affront and that's something that needs to be addressed because there are plenty of factors that go into those walls that students put up about being judged.  As a writer, I know that I'm not w...

           I really enjoyed the readings for this week for a number of reasons. It's particularly fun and fascinating to talk about using artifacts in the classroom and REAL instruction. I know that personally I needed to have things taught to me in a way that I could use my senses to puzzle it out. I think that's why I never took to math. History, art, science, reading, and writing were all things that felt accessible to me where numbers never felt real and I would have to draw out the problem in order for it to make sense. We're English people though, so it comes as no surprise that we are capable of loving things that are figments of someone else's imagination. However, even in the most fantastical books, there is some type of connecting thread that binds a story to reality. It mirrors and even surpasses the limited scope of reality to find the humanity in any situation.          I really fell in love with this book that wa...

          Danny Martinez's story and by extension the story of his parents, is really interesting and moving, because it is reflective of what so many people experience going through American public schools. When Martinez describes his mother's leaving WHS, he said that she was "pushed out," instead of saying that she dropped out. I liked that he reframed it this way, because that's what it really is. Shoving a student out the door when more effort is needed to help them. Going from being mocked for having an accent and called a wetback to being a teacher in the space of a generation is a remarkable achievement. Even more so because it was at the school that Martinez's parents where considered outcasts at.         There are so many powerful statements to be found in that reading, but possibly the most powerful is Martinez saying, "I observed youth attempting to make personal and contextual connections with literature only to be dismisse...

             I have frequently said that the best thing about the internet is that I never have to talk to anyone unless I want to or I'm being paid to do it. I can order food, do my taxes, find any source of entertainment I can imagine or remember, all with a couple of clicks and some minimal typing. It's great. It's a little bit sad, but it's also a relief that I get to decide exactly how dependent I am on other people. The two images above at first glance can seem diametrically opposed to each other, but I think the extreme polarization of wanting for everyone to just go away and desperately craving deep affection and connection comes from the same place. Personally I may be able to act like socializing doesn't take a lot out of me, because I like talking and enjoy getting out and doing things when there's not too much pressure for everything to be perfect and have a good time, but it absolutely does. I don't easily let my guard down and tru...

          Essays are a unique form of writing. They can be incredibly fun and engaging to write or that experience can be the exact opposite where you pray for death the whole time you're working on it. Essays inspire strong feelings. That's just the nature of the essay. A lot of where that comes from is the strength and thoughtfulness that goes into the argument presented. As Turner and Hicks point out in chapter one, we have the job as conscious consumers of varying kinds of media to be mindful of where our information comes from and the kind of spin or argument that the texts we read are presenting. And there is always an argument, whether it's obvious or not. We need to sort, "through a variety of texts and make sense of each within the network where it exists. Status updates. Hashtags. Blogs. Infographics. Web searches. Any text we encounter ---- fiction or nonfiction, print or digital --- is at some level presenting us with an argument," (Turner-Hicks...

           When I was a senior in high school, Rhode Island was just testing out digital portfolio assessments and graduation requirements. The administration, through the teachers, told us that we would have to do these things, but because it was a trial run it was not life or death. We would still graduate as long as we participated and if we did really well we'd be exempt from our exams. I think if presenting in front of my digital portfolio panel the way that students are now, I would have been a lot more cautious with how I handled the whole business. Of course I have no doubt that I would have felt comfortable anyway because I found out that my favorite teacher would be on the panel. My best friend had my aunt on her panel. She'd met her at a family party already and she's a really nice former elementary school teacher so it was no big deal for her either and she's just about the most anxious person I know.     Of the quotes that Au had...

“You’re only supposed to have three ideas, right? How can I write a thesis statement with four or five? You’re only supposed to have three body paragraphs, so I’ll have to mush all of my ideas together, and then I won’t get a good grade because I’ll have too many sentences and too many ideas. I don’t know what to do.”     When Michelle Kenney talks about the hyper-stressed Erica and her worries about keeping to the tight structures of a formulaic essay, I felt the pain. Why is it so difficult to write a five paragraph essay when other kinds of writing flow so freely? As demonstrated in the clip above, writing is not so easy when you have to write 800 words on what not to do at a stoplight and you've already procrastinated on it for four days. Spongebob meticulously goes into overdrive just to get a single word on the page. Writing that first word to start filling up the space is always the hardest part because the other words will follow (if you're interested ...

Before I get start on talking about the real feelings and issues, can I just admire for a moment the absurdity that is Daphne's face in this picture? I didn't really notice it until I placed it into the body of the post, but that sure is something. I'm totally keeping it. It's been a long day and I need some fun. I found it quite interesting that Kati Macaluso said that poems hide because I don't see it that way at all. In fact, I think that poems often reveal simple truths in the things that make us emotional and the things that make us think. While literally poems do hide since poems by nature bury the meaning behind a lot of floral language and clever arrangement, they reveal so much more than they conceal. Poems bring to the forefront the deepest feelings and insecurities. Underneath the clothing that we put on it, poetry is human nature in words. In her Forgotten Items poem, she talks about a worried wife who fears that one day while they're going abou...

      While reading Elbow and Belanoff I kept thinking to myself, "Wow. Have they been spying on the creative writing classes I've been in?" because most of the techniques listed were things that various professors had incorporated into their feedback structure. I know that sharing writing isn't easy for anybody because you're really putting yourself out there . You have to be vulnerable and open to criticism if you plan on getting something out of these critiques. Sometimes it can be really difficult when the writer feels that the piece is unfinished or not all it could be because their insecurities about the state of the writing can tend to make them defensive and they won't be able to take anything constructive from the points that others are making.      An important thing to do is make sure that the level of engagement is high and that the activities are varied and fun and the reading illustrates a lot of different ways that a writer can work thro...

    It's easy for me to say that I enjoyed this reading better than the Cameron from last week, but I really do like what Winn and Johnson have to say about culture in schools or in reality what amounts to a homogeneous culture where teachers and administrators tell students that their rich backgrounds don't account for much if anything at all. If student values align with white middle class values, then there are no problems, but outside of those bounds there emerges all this unspoken tension. A lot of students don't see themselves represented in the culture of their school and this essentially throws them off the track because why should they care if their school isn't interested about them and their perspective?  A point that struck me was when they said, "If you're a teacher who accepts the achievement gap, then you may attempt to fill your African American and Hispanic students with the knowledge that will afford them access to specific skill sets, cano...

Before I begin on the Cameron reading (which I have so much to talk about, so sit tight) I think I should delve into the Hawley-Turner and Hicks and the NCTE assignments as well just to touch on those assignments as well. The purpose of updating the NCTE Beliefs About the Teaching of Writing, (which is explained by using the charming euphemism "sunsetted" instead of saying it was scrapped) is to update the 21st century definition of what it means to write and be a writing instructor. In a thriving digital age, writing has expanded to an even wider variety of forms than was previously imaginable and that requires some rethinking about what it means to be an expert on the written word. In an effort to diversify contextual understanding, it's important that students know the fundamental differences between a text message, a tweet, a vlog, and the typical five-paragraph essay that are used to measure proficiency in the Common Core standards.  These new purposes include but...