An Open Road to Writing

It's pretty exciting to hear students talk about writing outside of the classroom. Tom wrote and shared "This freewriting's getting to me. I went home last night and updated my Facebook status and just kept writing. I tried to add it, but it told me I had written too much," and Lakin comes in between classes to say "Ok. I"m loving freewriting. I went home and wrote in my journal last night. I love it. I think outside the box when I'm writing." And this morning, when Dillon was sharing with Mrs. Benincosa, I overheard bits and pieces from the conversation. "I write to get a grade," Dillon started, and then continued with this long list of reasons why he writes, none of which were for self. He talked about not knowing (and this is a senior honors student) that writing was valuable for anything other than an assignment. But he summed up with this: "I don't know why I write, but I wanna try to find out this year."

Of course these are things that make me happy. At the beginning of the year I ask my students to freewrite on this question: what's the best thing a teacher has ever written to you about your writing? I ask them to detail the experience, the assignment, or the circumstances surrounding the assignment. Most students have vivid memories of responses with positive comments from teachers, parents, and peers.

The second question, I intentionally leave out the word teacher, and ask students to recount the story and dialogue surrounding negative feedback they have received about their writing. ALL students this year wrote strictly about comments and feedback given by a teacher. After reading through them, I can't tell you enough, it was pretty depressing. Depressing in several ways. One because I hate for kids to be pushed away from writing, but mostly because I'm constantly writing comments to my students, and I know I've written some of the very comments these students view as negative feedback. It was the one-two punch to my gut.

First, I had to get in the right mindset to read through students response. I had to come to the understanding that these students were not wrong. In my mind it was easy to defend, or justify some of the teachers comments that students had written about. Specifically ones such as "You can do better" and "I get what you are saying but you can write better than this." How many times have I written something similar? But again, a quick reframing of thought--if the student views this as a negative comment, then indeed, it is a negative comment no matter what the circumstances of the writing, the assignment, or the student.

Second, I had to give myself a pep talk. "Will these kids ever love writing? Will they ever have the confidence and courage to actually write in class this year? How will I build a community of safety where students feel comfortable and challenged to explore writing as an avenue of expression and learning?"

I'm still working on it. My biggest goal...don't let Dillon down. Don't let any student down for that matter, but when a student decides it's time to learn something, I hope I will continue to understand the exploratory nature of learning. I hope I can help him come to a full realization of what it means for him to be a writer--writing for himself and not always for that grade that's attached.

Technology on a budget

Aaron McGrath, Spanish teacher at Marshfield, shared this blog post on the Missouri Educator's Ning. Embedded in the blog is a link to the PowerPoint he presented to members of Ozarks Foreign Language Association. The PowerPoint contains great information and links to useful sites.

Lessons learned from a one-room schoolhouse

As a kid, Laura Ingalls Wilder's books always fascinated me. My favorite books in the series were the ones that described being a student and then later teaching in a one-room schoolhouse. If I remember correctly, Laura's first days of teaching were challenging, to say the least. Probably a lot like mine. Like Laura, I wasn't much older than my students when I first walked through the doors of my classroom. It was a crash course in classroom management, but I had one thing going for me that Laura didn't: the teacher down the hall.

Now, with Facebook, Twitter, Nings and other social networking tools, it seems that my first years of teaching were a little like Laura's experience in that one-room schoolhouse, working in a bubble. I'm glad my bubble has burst and that I can collaborate with people across our swiftly shrinking planet.

Case in point: Amy and I found a link to Jim Burke's blog on Facebook. On the blog, he wrote about using Wordles to discuss the big ideas of a text, so we thought we'd try them in our co-taught English I classes. After tweaking a few things (providing marker boards for each team and throwing in a few cooperative learning structures), we found students were engaged in the process. Being able to see the board and hear discussion provided us with immediate feedback on student understanding of theme. Later, we had student teams generate theme statements.

My Writing Process

My writing process explained through text-to-video on Xtranormal.com. I made this video in five minutes, check it out!

Race to the Top in Missouri: Your Thoughts

Just posted on the Missouri Ed Community: A forum on Race to the Top funding. Weigh in with your thoughts.

http://missouried.ning.com/forum/topics/race-to-the-top-in-missouri

Dave Eggers Talks Authentic Learning

I found this video, from TED, through Twitter on a fellow teachers blog. It's a video of Dave Eggers, principal contributor to McSweeney's and author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius talking about a privately-generated public-service education project that only caught fire when the participants stumbled over real-world authentic tasks for the students. Very exciting.

NCTE Reflection, Part I

As a new teacher, I fancy myself an expert at being overwhelmed. I find myself inundated most days with involuntary illusions of industry (if it's wrong of me to alliterate so copiously, I don't want to be right). In other words, I make a strong effort to become as busy as possible because I feel obligated to do so in order to meet: deadlines, potential, standards, personal goals and professional contacts. I use the word "illusion" merely to imply that not every inch of ink I intend to write is invaluable to or interned by others, but in an introspective state I might consider their worth infinitely. Okay, I promise to stop alliterating now; the wrong person could do a character count and measure my "Is" and conclude I'm a bit selfish.

As incredible and infuriating as the first eleven weeks of my teaching experience have been, this weekend easily measured up. I am fortunate enough to have a district who will pay for teachers to go to local and national professional conferences. I got to fly to Philadelphia for the National Council of Teachers of English 2009 Annual Convention with several staff members. I was excited to see Julie Andrews and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz more than anything. I ran out and bought The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao and immersed myself in its half-page footnotes. A little kid inside of me sang "Spoonful of Sugar" as I became giddy thinking about the celebrity of the events and people at NCTE.

Sadly, the chaos of the flight computer systems on the coast kept us from leaving Chicago O'Hare until hours after our intended departure. We missed Junot Diaz. I was mildly traumatized. I don't think it's possible to be jet-lagged from a one hour time-zone delay, but I felt a bit crabby about it. I heard through the grape vine that the only way I was meeting Julie Andrews was if I had a ticket (something I wasn't aware of how to obtain). Still, I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the Philadelphia Convention Center as well as my textbook of a program; I started to think maybe I should've brought a special backpack just to carry it.

The scope of the workshop topics rivaled the venue's square-footage easily. It may have been possible to cover every inch of convention floor with every page from every program. Every session and section offered a dizzying display of dialogue to dig into (maybe I should talk to someone about my alliteration problem, I can't seem to control it). Thankfully, the cooperative learner I've been trained to be brings sticky notes everywhere (I think of them like blog comments or social bookmarks). I cracked open the spiral-bound giant and rappelled down into it, armed with my yellow flags. Anyone who knows semaphore would know I was immediately signaling for help!

In his own post-NCTE reflection, Alan Sitomer (whom I didn't get to see speak) compares the feeling of being overwhelmed by so many "keen minds" like a post-Thanksgiving type of meal. I couldn't put it any better. Being that it was my first convention I felt like a new member in the most welcoming and exciting family on Earth. I was being given so much all the time, that I had a hard time processing it all. I'm still processing in fact (warning: virtual memory full)! Maybe next year for NCTE 100 I'll have a new netbook to cart around and I can do some mobile processing. More posts to follow dealing with more specific aspects of the convention, its topics, and their impact on my instruction and planning.