Monthly Archives: March 2010

April Showers (Of Poetry)

Posted by Jackie in personal goals, poetry, teaching, writing

In the middle of grading and spring breaks and grading and lesson planning, I completely forgot that April was coming! Okay, not April–I do have calendars and such–but April is also National Poetry Month! Exciting for teachers and writers alike! Last year I was more organized in my celebratory efforts, and this year, it got totally away from me, so I’m thinking of how to celebrate this year.

Here are the options I’m considering:

* giving my students an extra-credit opportunity by asking them to choose a poem and doing some kind of public poetry project with it. The opportunities are many: posting poems in public places, making a poem poster, greeting card or bookmark, adding a poem to their email signature for the month of April, reading one aloud at our morning meetings, or even printing the poem (or a portion of it) on a t-shirt and wearing it out. I was inspired by the Poem In Your Pocket ideas, and I would require the students to submit their event on the Academy of American Poets website. If they read it aloud somewhere, I will send them to Billy Collins on reading aloud.

* for myself, I’m thinking of trying the Poem-A-Day challenge again, through the Poetic Asides blog, which offers a prompt per day throughout the month, as well as the chance to submit your five best poems for recognition. I did this last year and had such a fantastic experience, and it dovetails well with my writing goals for the year. So why not do it again? Because I’m weary and exhausted, mentally, and I just don’t feel the juice. But then, of course, that is the reason I feel like I should do it, because I feel better when I feel creatively energized, and maybe this will kick-start me into it.

The real question remains, can I whip something up to get both of these ideas launched when April 1st is a mere two days away, and submitting my third quarter grades and comments lurks between me and that day like a sea monster? Stay tuned, my friends. I’ll keep you posted.

ETA: Check out Tammy’s treasure trove entry for many more great ideas, including another poem-a-day challenge! I don’t know now which I would like to try–what if the prompts on one are more to my liking than the other? I may just do the challenge for myself and keep the poems in my own files instead of posting them anywhere, so I can pick and choose from the prompts–but then I lose the community feeling and the accountability. Hmmmm. Decisions, decisions.

Experiment

Posted by Jackie in writing

This is one of those posts that I hate to read and hate to write, but I’m checking something about posting that has been giving me trouble, and I’m too frantic right now (grades due Wednesday) to work on any of the longer, more thoughtful drafted posts that I have ready. So here I go, posting a crap filler entry and expecting no comments.

Centering

Posted by Jackie in all about me, photos

Last week, I spent most of the day Wednesday getting a hot-stone massage (stones pictured above), facial, and manicure/pedicure. I debated about whether to post about it–it seemed a little “let them eat cake-ish”–but then I decided that if you can’t be a little self-indulgent on a personal blog, where can you be? The facial was not that thrilling, but everything else, down the chicken salad sandwich I ate for lunch, was downright delightful.

The spa day was a gift from my wonderful in-laws, and it was just exactly what I needed. By the end of my break, I realized that what I had needed most was time to re-center, to get back in touch with myself outside of work, to refocus my energies on home, family, life beyond my job. I needed to spend some time worshipping my own lares and penates, helping my husband restore our house to the place of refuge and peace that we all need it to be. We ate pizza at our favorite local joint, went roller-skating, walked to the duckponds, and just spent time reconnecting in the sunshine. I felt more present and mindfully so in those hours with my girls than I have in months.

The last quarter of the school year is upon us, and I’ve got grading to do, lessons to plan, students to support and meetings to attend. But for the rest of this school year, I’m determined to hang onto some of that peaceful feeling I managed to rediscover this past week, and stay in tune with my loved ones as best I can.

Help Me Help You

Posted by Jackie in all about me, teaching

One of my fears as my girls grew older was that soon, they would move into that part of childhood where they have secret fears and hurts, the kind that can’t be fixed with a Band-aid, the kind that might fester in the dark corners of their little minds, the kind I wish with all my heart they would share with me. So a while back, maybe when they were in kindergarten, whenever they told me things they were upset about, like a fight with a friend on the playground or some interaction with an adult that upset them, I always made sure to thank them for sharing with me. “Thank you so much for telling me that,” I say. “Because if you don’t talk to me, then I don’t know how to help you, and helping you when you’re unhappy is one of my most important jobs as your mom.”

The week before my spring break, I found myself thinking about this as I had various conversations in my school with students in varying levels of distress and upset. I tried to thank each one of them, with words and hugs, for trusting me enough to let me into their own pains and heartbreaks. “I am so glad you came to me,” I would say. “Thank you so much for sharing this with me.” At least one girl looked back at me and said, “Really? Why would you want to hear all this?” And I replied, “Because it would break my heart to think that you girls felt like you were all alone here, and had no one here at school who would listen to you or try to help you.”

Once you see your kids walk away from you and out into the world, the chances increase that their circle of trusted adults will widen, and include adults outside your family, adults you don’t know that well. I’ve been very lucky so far with my kids’ teachers, and I hope that will continue, and when they are older, I know they might someday to turn to another adult before, or instead of, turning to me. Even the idea of that makes me shiver, but as a teacher, I know it’s true. And I want them to have that kind of support at their school, especially in those tumultuous adolescent years.

Basically, I was saying to those students: I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me, so please, please talk to me, no matter how sad the story, so that we can try and make it better, as a variation of what I say to my own girls. I hope someday, a trusted teacher might say those words to my kids, and I hope somehow, my students’ parents know I’m saying it to their girls, and meaning every word.

Blogging Catcher in the Rye

Posted by Jackie in blogging, teaching, writing

For the fall semester, my ninth graders began every class with a freewrite. They would go to my website’s calendar and view the page for that day, which would have a question for them to answer, or would give them a poem or quote to respond to and connect to our reading. I tried to develop these freewrites as ways for them to connect their personal experiences to the text– questions about siblings before we discussed Cain and Abel, for example–and then we would read some aloud and move into discussion for that day, or use the freewrites to transition into whatever activity I had planned for them.

I like beginning the class with a writing exercise, and the resulting pieces of writing were often interesting and useful as far as discussion. But the students had gotten a little complacent, and I didn’t collect them every day, so I had no way of knowing exactly what they were writing unless they volunteered, which I didn’t want to make mandatory if they had chosen to write about something more personal. So I started thinking about ways to try and keep the same utility, but adapt the assignment itself, make it more assessable and more challenging.

I used the idea of the transactional reading journal to create an assignment (document linked here) where my ninth graders would begin each class by writing a transactional response as a blog post, which they would then publish. I decided to give over 20-25 minutes (from a 70 minute period), depending on the day, to this activity, which is twice as long as I used to dedicate to freewrites, and I asked the students who finished early to comment on any published blog posts made by their classmates. I also comment on their entries regularly, and required them to choose a different type of entry each day, so that they would have to stretch themselves. As with my Hamlet blogs, I created student blogs that are hosted on my teacher website and set to only be viewable by the members of each class.

I’m in the midst of this unit now, and I have been really pleased with the results so far. Sometimes they have trouble settling down to quiet work at the beginning of the class, and sometimes there is some chatter amongst them as they decide which prompt they are going to respond to that day. But I think they really enjoyed the novelty and the break from the familiar, and once again, the act of commenting on each other’s writing has knit them a little closer together as learners, which is great to see. Their blogs have also functioned as portfolios, as they have posted writing tasks and assignments there which I have graded instead of quizzes.

They’ve written advertisements for hunting hats and nun-staffed hotlines, poems about ducks in the park, a letter from Holden to Mark David Chapman, predictions about the novel, movie casting reports, found poems from different chapters and testimony for a mock school board meeting on censorship, which we held in class. They explained their reactions to certain scenes, examined “five-star quotes,” and written letters from one character to another, created comic strips and Facebook profiles and soundtracks. I love getting to see everything they’ve created, and I love that they get to see how creative their fellow students can be.

Blogging Hamlet

Posted by Jackie in blogging, book reviews, teaching

I knew I wanted to try student blogs with my juniors after our Gatsby Facebook project was such a success, and now that I feel more confident with managing and explaining digital projects with my students. I also knew I was committed to digging deep into my Shakespeare Set Free book (which is absolutely invaluable) and building my unit from the lessons there, one of which is a log the students keep throughout their reading of the play. I’ve been doing a lot with response logs and reading journals this year, so this seemed like the perfect fit for adapting digitally.

I worked with our tech coordinator to set up blogs for each student that would be hosted on my faculty website and password-protected. Then I gave my students the following instructions, adapted from the Set Free assignment:

As we read Hamlet, you will make an entry in your log, paying attention to different aspects of the play each time. There are six options to guide your responses:

1. Comment on the significance of the scene. What would the play be like without it? What does it add, and how?
2. Ask questions about the scene: has anything caused you confusion? Ask the characters in the scene some question.
3. Quote lines from the scene that you enjoyed and comment on them.
4. Describe your reactions to a character, action or idea you confronted in the scene—be specific.
5. Talk about the relationships characters have to one another, quoting specific words or phrases to give evidence for your opinion.
6. Imagine yourself as an actor playing one of the characters in the scene. Get inside that character’s mind. Tell how the character feels about herself or himself, about other characters, about the situation of the scene.

I’ve also had them use their blogs to record their reactions to different filmed versions of particular scenes, and to make predictions about the next act or scene. Once when I was absent, I assigned them writing work and they posted it on their blogs, a paragraph addressing one of the soliloquys to be graded for 20 pts. I try to comment regularly on their entries, and I’ve given class time to have them read each other’s blogs and comment as well. Finally, I will give them a grade at the end of our unit as a major 100-pt assessment.

This blog has supplanted the dreaded reading quiz for me, and feels like such a more authentic way of really discovering whether or not they are engaging with the text. I learn so much more about each of my students from these blogs than I would from a quiz– I see their senses of humor, their preferences, their opinions and reactions, and what they truly find most important, revealing or interesting about a text. In my comments, I can offer encouragement, give gentle nudges if a student has wandered off-track, agree or disagree with one of their conclusions, or trade favorite lines, as I did tonight. I have really loved getting a peek into their minds, and it has really enriched my teaching of the play.

I’m still working on the rubric, but I envision it as a mix of this one, this one, and this one, with some tailoring. Since my Gatsby Facebook entry is consistently one of my most visited, I am trying to do more entries like this one that really talk about a specific project or lesson. I’d love to hear what you think!

What Makes A Great Teacher, Part Four

Posted by Jackie in conversations, education, teaching

I thought this series (which I did in one, two, three parts already) was over, but then another long-form article on how to make great teachers popped up, with more books I want to buy and fancy demonstration videos to boot.

At first, I didn’t know that there’s a lot said here that wasn’t said in the Atlantic article: it’s very tricky to know how to make good teachers, hiring Ivy Leaguers or giving them merit pay hasn’t necessarily worked, the impact of teachers on a classroom can be massive, etc. But I also liked the tone of the article, which was not accusatory, but instead acknowledged that many teachers want to be better (myself included), but in the early years, we often are just as mystified as to how to accomplish that improvement as scholars and journalists are. Like the article says, why buy a better teacher, when it might be possible to build a better one instead? They acknowledged that increased opportunities for women and minorities resulted in them leaving teaching, to some degree, for “better” jobs, which hasn’t helped the profession either. A recent survey of teachers in my state backed up the theory that new teachers need a lot more mentorship and guidance in the first few years. The teachers over on the EC Ning seem a little nervous about why all the sudden attention to measuring teachers and what that might mean in an era of massive governmental budget cuts. There’s some great stuff in the comments over at Crooked Timber too.

I love the idea of a 49-step taxonomy of “bite-size” techniques to make teachers more effective, regardless of subject matter. In shifting from college teaching to high school, that is one major difference that has changed how I think about my work: subject-matter knowledge is much more integral in college-level work, which expects a level of scholarship, while high-school level teaching requires more attention to classroom management, effective pedagogy, and emotional connection (in addition to subject-matter knowledge). I loved the story of Lemov, the introvert who transforms in front of a classroom, mostly because I, a life-long introvert, hope that transformation happens in my room too. I think the idea that a good teacher needs to be a stand-up comedian or a talented thespian is one of the ideas that keeps people out of the classroom unnecessarily. I know I will definitely be buying Teach Like a Champion, Lemov’s book about his taxonomy, when it comes out, and maybe even in hardcover, and I’ll probably read it this summer, when I always spend hours and hours thinking about how to do my job better.

Maybe it’s naïve of me, but I would love to think that we are finally going to try seriously to make teaching a seriously respected and valued profession in this country. All apologies to the doctors, nurses, priests and others out there, but I don’t know of a more important paying job for our world’s future.

Fresh Starts

Posted by Jackie in all about me, family life

Now is the time of year when those two small words are constantly running through my head:

Spring Break!

Mine is only a week away, and since my girls have a different school schedule, spring break is usually a staycation around these parts. I try to tackle a house project each year, but it’s also a time to rest and rejuvenate. This year, I’m going to finally cash in a gift certificate my wonderful mother-in-law gave me for Christmas and get a massage, manicure and pedicure one day during the week. I’m going to sleep, and I’m going to read for pleasure, and I’m going to cook new recipes and just relax.

In addition to resting, I’m in the mood for some new beginnings. While I’m not making any massive changes, I’m enjoying the smaller ones: a new short haircut, a new blog template, new ideas for my classes next year, and new projects at school.

It’s going to be lovely, in a very low-key, old grown-up kind of way!