Monthly Archives: July 2010

On the One Hand; On the Other Hand

Posted by Jackie in all about me and tagged with

Plus: Project Runway is back!

Minus: All the judges seemed hyper-bitchy in this first episode. We’ll see.

Plus: We have a lot of fun things planned for the summer ends–a short beach trip, a movie night at our local football stadium, a pre-season football game, Rock the Bells including Lauryn Hill, which I’m so excited about I can hardly stand it. Also a dinner party or two, plus a bridal shower and a baby shower.

Minus: Have you ever planned a whole bunch of exciting plans and then realized how much money all those exciting plans were going to cost you? At the end of a relatively pricey summer? Right before the inevitable money-sink that is back-to-school? Well, I have.

Plus: I have checked a LOT of items off my “Summer To-Do” list. And yes, I have an actual list, with subcategories.

Minus: There are some big items still left on that list. And hey! Some of them cost money!

Plus: I’ve been going to the gym lately, which was a big item on my “Get healthier and more responsible and stop treating your body like a teenager now that you’re in your thirties” list. I think I also expected a responsibility trophy.

Minus: I’ve not been going thrice-weekly as I hoped. More like once-weekly or sometimes twice-weekly. And I still don’t enjoy it. At all. No trophy for me, I’m afraid.

Plus: I’ve read some really great books this summer. Yes, I will be blogging about them soon, I promise!

Minus:The school-related books have languished. As has a lot of my school-related work.

Plus: I think my girls have had a really fun summer.

Minus: But they’ve also been suffering from a case of the Whiny-Crankies, which has resulted in a lot of bickering and complaining. I have not handled this with my customary poise.

Plus: I have some really wonderful people in my life.

Minus: I can’t fix what might be making them unhappy, and I really wish I could.

Poetry Cage Match

Posted by Jackie in poetry, teaching and tagged with ,

When much of the world is dreaming about college basketball next spring, my students and I will be engaged in a very different kind of frenzy: Poetry March Madness, courtesy of NCTE and the wonderful teachers on the EC Ning!

While not even I am enough of a planner to be entirely mapping out my March lesson plans in the heat of summer, many of the teachers suggest doing some lead-up in the fall, and that I would like to do some thinking about while I’m mapping out my fall semester. I’m still working on my Edgar Allen Poe unit for the weeks before/around Halloween, so I may use some of his poetry to test out the idea. I scatter poetry in all my units, but am looking forward to doing a more intensive poetry unit as well.

So I want to hear it: what are the essential poems you think I should teach? This will be for ninth grade girls, and I’m willing to throw it open pretty far and wide. If you were picking poems to battle it out, head to head, in a tournament-style bracket, what would you pick and why? You can choose solo combatants, or pick a pair by the same poet, or a pair that seem very dissimilar but are united by your love. What poems do you think young women need to hear? What should every student get a chance to hear, at least once, in the high school years? If you could have one poem at your wedding, funeral, birthday party– what would it be?

Letter-Writing Challenge

Posted by Jackie in calls for submissions, personal goals, teaching, writing and tagged with , , ,

I’ve told you before that my favorite punctuation mark is the lovely interrobang, and I believe I’ve done some good work in spreading my love throughout the world, proclaiming it to the Internet, select students, and my classmates at the revolutionary grammar workshop I went to last summer.

But now a chance has arisen to proclaim it once more, and perhaps win a free book in the process, as part of the Emdashes “So You Love Punctuation?” challenge. I fell in love with this post even before I reached the end, because it introduced me to names for marks I’d never heard before, such as the manicule, pilcrow, and grawlix. The deadline is August 15th, and the task is to write a letter to that punctuation mark and post it in the blog comments over there. At Bard, I wrote as a punctuation mark and about one, but never to one, and I think the time has come.

The book that inspired the challenge has also a companion site, Letters with Character, which solicits and publishes letters from real people to fictional characters. My first thought was that I could assign this task to my students at the end of each book we read this year, which I still may do, but then my second thought was that this could be a good way to challenge myself along with them, as I have decided to do more. I’ll be keeping a teacher blog on my school website for the first time this year, and I think I’ll have this be a blog post for all of us at the end of each unit, and then require them to submit to this website also. I’ve been trying to find more ways to empower my students to think about audience and publication when they write, and this seems tailor-made.

If you were writing to a punctuation mark, which would you choose? Alternately, which fictional character would you write to? If you try either of these challenges, do please let me know.

Nine Years, Nine Accomplishments

Posted by Jackie in personal goals, teaching and tagged with ,

How do you measure accomplishment or prowess in a job like teaching, with constantly evolving challenges and a new cast of students each September? Though I’ve finished three years at my school now, I’ve actually been teaching for nine years, and I think I’ve come a bit closer to the answer, after reading Tammy’s entry on the accomplishments she can claim from the past school year. She has nineteen years in, and nineteen positives about her year, which is characteristic for Tammy; her blogging voice is one of the most consistently optimistic I know. Now that I have some distance from the overwhelming sense of constant motion I felt this year, I am pleased to think of just how much I did manage to get accomplished.

My nine accomplishments, from the 2009-2010 school year:

Presenting at AIMS, which was a first for me in this new phase of my career and gave me a wonderful sense of contributing productively to my profession

Publishing my first teaching article. For me, this represents not only being a continuing part of the professional conversation, but taking a new step as a writer, expanding on the nonfiction work I’ve done.

Traveling to Denver for the People Of Color conference, re-immersing myself in the work on diversity and multiculturalism that I spent so much time and energy on in graduate school while also making some new connections with colleagues.

Reading college essays: Even just rereading this entry from last September makes me tired, and college essays were a big part of that pacing dilemma. But rereading that entry also reminds me how lucky I felt to be so engaged in my school and my work, and reading college essays was also a big part of that. One-on-one writing work with students is one of my favorite aspects of my work and always has been, and having so many students trust me with such personal writing was indeed an honor.

Serving as dramaturg for Much Ado About Nothing: my school’s spring play this year was this Shakespeare classic, the first our school had done in my years there. Our theater teacher asked if I would come in a few times during table read sessions and then sporadically through the weeks of rehearsal, to help the cast with meaning, pronunciation and the humorous aspects of the text. I am so glad that I agreed to do so, because I had a blast!

Using dialectical notebooks and blogs: I have a series of posts planned on dialectical notebooks and an upcoming feature for Instructify on using blogs and discussion boards for peer review , so I won’t say much more here, but I am definitely excited to build on this in the upcoming year.

Advising: This was my first year working within an advisory program, and I didn’t blog about it at all, though it took up a large part of my time and energy this year. I don’t see any way I’ll be able to blog about it in the future, either, because part of what makes advising so powerful (and tiring) is the way the advisor becomes integrated into a student’s life, both at school and at home. Is that always true? No, but it can be, and that potential makes it a complicated role to navigate, and I’m thrilled I made it through my first year advising.

Surviving my first Unbloggable Issue. I think I moved forward in a timely and appropriate fashion, but the ripple effects continue to come, and continue to affect me.

Surviving my first full-time year! It was tough, and I felt swamped for most of the year, but I think that after experiencing all of these “firsts,” the upcoming year will be a little less hectic. I’m really proud that I didn’t let it completely submerge me, and that I kept moving forward despite feeling continually behind.

I highly recommend this activity if, like me, you spent a lot of time this summer decompressing from a hectic year, or even if you are a teacher looking to get a fresh perspective on a career that can sometimes seem sisyphean. As a goal-setting strategy, this also makes me think about what my accomplishments might look like at this time next summer…..

Update: Gatsby Facebook

Posted by Jackie in teaching, technology, writing and tagged with , ,

What post has gotten the most views and comments on my blog and continues to be a traffic-generator over 15 months later?

Definitely my post on the Gatsby Facebook project, which is one of the reasons I started posting more about teaching, and also shows the incredible interest teachers have in teaching with technology and especially Facebook.

It’s been really wonderful to see such enthusiasm and to send documents out to teachers across the country. The project’s genesis was in a lesson plan I found online, and then I worked on turning it into a project with our tech coordinator. I posted about it here, then we presented it to various interested parties and then wrote an article about it and other projects.

The most common question teachers always have for me about this project is about assignment sheets and rubrics for Facebook projects. I’m posting the documents here, and anyone reading has permission to use them to create a version of the project for their own classes. I’m not entirely thrilled with my rubric–these days I would probably try Rubistar and make sure it was available to students at the beginning of the project. But it may serve as a good jumping-off point for other teachers, and thus I am including it.

If you are interested in implementing this or a version of this project, you’re welcome to read these blog entries and download the documents (linked above), but also, it should really be helpful to read the article on digital scaffolding we wrote, which gives a great overview of the project and both times I used it in a class, with information about the students’ reactions, what I would change, and why I think the project was so useful. If you’re looking to have students create just Facebook profile for characters, you might be interested in the Profile Publisher tool, which is printable also.

All that I ask is that if you do end up using what I’ve done to inform or inspire your own project, PLEASE let me know how it goes! Nothing has inspired me more as a teacher than what I have learned from other teachers, and I would be honored to think I have served the same function for others.

Nine Ways Blogging Has Made Me A Better Writer

Posted by Jackie in blogging, writing and tagged with ,

Since the school year ended, I’ve really been enjoying having the mental space and energy to get back to writing. I’ve also been working my way through this workbook on better blogging, not so that I can be the next Dooce or anything, but just as a fun challenge. Per that program, this is my list post, specifically a list within a post, paying tribute to this here blog as a huge part of my writing life.

  1. It’s established the writing habit for me, so that I can look back over the past seven years or so and know that I’ve been consistently writing, even if it was just a paragraph or two, not daily, but regularly.
  2. It’s kept me writing regularly, through rocky and even harrowing times. As I’ve said before, I don’t blog much about those times, but I would have hated for any of them to derail me in a pursuit that has been so important to me.
  3. I can write much better, much quicker, than ever before. This has been a big help to me when I am facing grades-and-comment-writing for school, but also it’s made me a much more productive writer. Once my girls were born, and now juggling full-time teaching, there’s no way I would get anything written if I clung to the luxury of needing enormous amounts of time and quiet to be able to write.
  4. It gives me a public audience, but one I have to earn and one that keeps me accountable. I have never gone pedal to the metal as far as earning blog readers, but I do think a lot about how I write here and what people might want to read, and I do feel guilty if my blog sits too long without a post. I’ve made some friendships as a result of blogging, and I like to think that is partially because of how I represent myself here, as a writer and also as a person.
  5. I can’t think of a better way to work on developing a personal voice. In the past few months, I’ve been given compliments on my writing voice by editors and several friends who are professional writers, saying that it is clear and distinct, and I owe it all to blogging.
  6. It does not detract from my writing energy. I’ve never seen this blog as a “platform” for a bigger project and have never expected to earn money from it (and I have never earned a dollar directly from this blog). So I don’t spend hours worrying about SEO, Adsense, publicity strategies or worrying that I’ve “sold out.” My blogging time is spent either blogging/writing or tinkering, which doesn’t use writing energy and has other benefits. I’d even say that blogging can sometimes get me into a writing groove, which will then carry over into other writing tasks.
  7. I’ve become better about rationing and deploying the writing energy I do have. This summer, I’ve spent time in my poem notebooks, drafted a personal essay and have ideas for a few more, wrote a poetry book review and website review, and am drafting a feature for Instructify. In short, I have generally been experiencing a slow but steady writing resurgence, which is a great feeling after my drought this spring. Each of these tasks has been accomplished piecemeal, as I jot down phrases and paragraphs, patch them together, and then polish the finished piece, and being able to write in small chunks like this is a direct result of the years I’ve invested in blogging. My reviews for Instructify are supposed to be 200-300 words, with a conversational tone: sounds like blogging to me, except I’ll get paid!
  8. It’s helped me get writing jobs. One of the reasons I switched to WordPress is the easy ability to have static posts, which adds website-style capabilities to a blog. It’s been wonderful to have a way to collect and regularly update my writing clips, and be able to easily and quickly send links to editors with pitches. I also like being able to look over my clips and see how I’ve progressed and where I might want to go next.
  9. It’s helped control my profile as a writer. If you Google my name after reading one of my articles online or in print, or when considering whether to hire me for a writing gig, you will likely land on this website, which is chock-full of links to other writing of mine, as well as a wealth of several hundred blog posts. Not only that, but it’s helped me be deliberate about what I want that impression to be, since I have full control and want to take advantage of it.

I’d love to hear any feedback you have on this post, whether it’s as one of my readers or as a writer or blogger yourself.

Tell Me Something Good

Posted by Jackie in all about me, family life, writing

Thanks to everyone for participating in my little two-part Q&A experiment! I got some great questions both here and on Facebook, and while I was away, it was nice to have scheduled posts pop up and still interact with you all.

I took my girls to Southern Maryland for a week to visit grandparents and have some historical fun at St. Mary’s City (through an excellent CTY summer program)and the Thomas Stone National Historic Site, as well as see some art, see a movie, see a show at another wonderful park, and eat pizza and ice cream and chocolate-chip pancakes and peanut-butter pie. We’re planning another “grandparent camp” experience in August, and yes, I know how lucky I am to have so many great grandparents within driving distance.

I am also on a little bit of a writing high, which is a wonderful feeling to experience again. I sent a personal essay draft to a friend of mine, and he wrote back with constructive suggestions and sincere praise, which was exactly the kind of peer review experience I like to have but always fear I won’t. Also, my very first Instructify piece is up, a website review for a site called Smilebox, and I also have an official bio page up, complete with a picture of myself I actually like!

And last but not least, I have my first book club meeting tomorrow: we’ll be discussing The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. This is not only our first meeting, but my first time in a book club, which is a bit of an experiment for me. I’ll be bringing gougeres, which were a Supper Club hit last time. I also have bridal shower and baby shower invitations hanging on my fridge, and it is so lovely to see good things happening for such wonderful people.

So here’s your mission: tell me something good! What is putting a summertime smile on your face these days?