Monthly Archives: September 2011

Dictionary Nerd

Posted by Jackie in teaching and tagged with , , ,
Cover of "The Oxford English Dictionary (...

Cover via Amazon

The part of Say Anything… that people remember, the part that girls idolize and that won our hearts for Lloyd Dobler forever is, of course, the boombox scene. However, as the Diane Court type of girl, one of the scenes I always loved was the dictionary scene. Remember? First of all, she’s got an OED on its own stand, which is awesome, and Lloyd starts flipping through it while she’s changing her dress, and she says that she made a pencil mark next to every word she looked up. And he starts flipping through the pages, and sees dots and dots and more dots on all the pages, and kind of freaks out, and slams it shut.

I have always loved that scene, partly because I felt a kinship with Diane Court (and always wanted to be as gorgeous as Ione Skye), but because I love dictionaries. I love looking up words and then seeing other interesting words nearby, I love learning more about a word’s etymology and language of origin, and I love learning new variations of old favorites. Learning more about one of my favorite words, splendid, led me to one of my new favorites: splendiferous.

Today, I outed myself to my students as a total dictionary nerd. We did some lessons in our grammar books about dictionaries and spelling, but I also hyped my favorite online dictionary for quick usage, and showed them some awesome dictionary-related videos, like this great one on octopus, one of many Ask the Editor videos Merriam-Webster offers on its site. I tried to impress upon them how much dictionaries have to offer beyond a quick definition, and how many interesting nuggets of information are hidden in the entries.

The majority of my students use my least favorite online dictionary, typing the word in quickly and grabbing the first definition they find. We’ve talked explicitly about context clues, a concept I know they’ve heard before, but the ease and speed of tools like SpellCheck and GrammarCheck too often supplant any real research or use of tools that actually help increase understanding.

I want my students to have better grammar, spelling and vocabulary skills, and I want them to see how interconnected those skills are. But also, I want them to see how inventive and fun writing can be when they have all these new spices in their cabinets, and how much richer their reading experience can be when they can recognize all the different layers.

Plus dictionaries are really just so cool.

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Priorities and Balancing

Posted by Jackie in all about me, conversations, personal goals and tagged with , ,

I’ve been reading The Simple Dollar for a few years now, and while it’s ostensibly a personal finance blog, I have found it thought-provoking in many different ways over the years. Trent often posts about work-life balance, which as we know is a preoccupation of mine, and he always inspires me to think deeper about my own balance, though our lives are very different.

In a recent entry titled What Are Your Priorities?, Trent listed nine priorities in his own life and postulated that any significant problem in his life comes from violating one of these priorities, by which he means when, “I take something of importance away from a higher priority and give it to a lower priority.” Here’s his list:

1. My marriage
2. My children
3. My spirituality and faith
4. My extended family and close friends
5. My health
6. Writing
7. Reading / learning new things
8. My community / politics
9. Other hobbies

Now, my list would look very differently from his. I’m not a person of strong faith, the way he is, for example. However, in considering his list and trying to make one of my own, it helped me see parts of my life and recent choices in new ways. If I was totally honest, there’s no way my own health would make it as high as #5 on my list of priorities, and I don’t think I’ve been very good about keeping my close friends and family that high on the list either. Being totally honest, I think my list often looks like this:

1. Work/Children battling it out for the top slot and taking turns at winning
2. Marriage
3. Reading and writing
4. Extended Family and a close friend who is basically family at this point (hi, Karen!)

Engaging in my community outside of my children’s school and activities, taking care of my own health, having hobbies, nurturing friendships apart from the closest ones? Minimal. I realized this recently also when I looked at my color-coded Outlook calendar, the one that captures my whole life, without which I would be lost. I had colors for family, Girl Scouts, and seven different categories for work responsibilities. Guess what I didn’t have? A color just for myself: I had been using the “family” category for everything.

So I’ve been determined to shake it up health-wise, and I made myself a category just for me and used it to sign up for a poetry workshop in October. I signed up to Race for the Cure (okay, I’ll be walking for the cure, but still), and am investigating a lead on some other Zumba classes to try. We had a Labor Day cookout and got to see some good friends there, friends I hadn’t seen in too long, and I’m in tentative negotiations to see some old friends soonish. But community work? Definitely room for growth there.

I know some people (like my mother) would think I am being too hard on myself, trying to Do It All and Have It All, and there might be a grain or two of truth there. But I also think that constant self-reflection is part of living a good life, and trying to live a better life, and that thinking clearly about my values and priorities is a very important part of that.  I think it’s important also to not to blame it all on “not having enough time,” when in truth, I need to be more thoughtful about how I use and focus the time I have.  I think Trent would say this is where time and money are similar, and I think he’d be right.

What would your list of priorities look like, ideally or honestly?

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Working It Out

Posted by Jackie in all about me, family life, personal goals and tagged with
Medicine Balls

Image by Beneteau Sailor via Flickr

I just got back from a four-mile walk, which is exciting not only for the exercise, but because I still went on it despite a few factors that could have worked against me:

  • cold, gray, drizzly weather
  • being at the end of the longest week of the school, in which we have our first full week of classes, plus Parents Night, and I realize how much juggling I have to do again now that summer is officially over
  • not really wanting to go, which has always been the biggest deterrent for me

So why did I go?  Well, I’m still feeling the same birthday-inspired resolve to get myself in better shape this year.  I’ve had to make a few modifications to my plan: the Zumba class was sadly canceled for good, so I’m trying to look around for another one on the weekends at other studios.  I’ve not yet made it up to my school’s indoor track to walk, but I have taken several outside walks like I did today.  Also, I started doing a core conditioning training offered at my school, which has involved crunches, medicine balls, physio balls and other instruments of torture, but that seems like a really good addition to my plan. It also uses planking, so I’ve done a few planks, but have not yet gotten into the Plank A Day Revolution fully.

I’ve been eating too much junk/convenience food since school started, but I’ve cut drastically back on my soda consumption, which is another key element of my new health plan.  I’ve had two sodas since school started, which is a big drop from my daily consumption habit. I think the junk food will taper down once I’m a little less stressed, but I’m not going to beat myself up about it during the most stressful month of the year, and what I’m most focused on is eliminating soda, as for me, targeted goals are often much easier to achieve.

I’m going to try and write about this semi-regularly to keep myself accountable, and I’m going back to Health Month for the same reason (full disclosure: Health Month is owned by a friend of ours, but I am not receiving any compensation for using the service or blogging about it).  My three rules there are: limit soda, walk twelve miles a week, do weight training twice a week (my on-campus core conditioning class).  I’m hoping to be on the Wall of Awesomeness by the end of the month, but also, I’m resolved not to give up if I don’t make it.

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Balancing Act

Posted by Jackie in family life, teaching, writing and tagged with ,

At the beginning of this school year, I looked at my own work schedule and noted down Parents Night, which I alternately enjoy and dread every year. I love getting to meet the parents and am always nervous about making a good impression, plus it’s a long evening in the middle of a long week in the middle of a long month at the beginning of the year, when the pace is just frantic.

Then I got the flier from my kids’ school, which talked about Parents Night…..which was on the exact same night, at the exact same time. I took the news like a blow, immediately upset. I have not missed any of my daughters’ Parents Nights, and as a parent, it is always one of my favorite nights. I feel like a part of the community, I see friends I didn’t see much over the summer, I get to see faces and demeanors for those names that I’ve been hearing so much over the past few weeks. I get to meet the teachers, and show them that my girls have engaged parents. I tried to comfort myself with the fact that my husband would be able to go, but it still really bothered me that I wouldn’t get to go myself.

Then my husband got sick today, and now neither of us will be there. For the first time, my kids won’t be represented. And yes, things come up, and yes, you can’t control everything, and there are plenty of other chances to meet teachers and see friends. Perspective, etc.

But still. It really matters to me, and I missed it.

Review: Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements

Posted by Jackie in book reviews, teaching and tagged with , , , ,

I know I promised almost two months ago that I would review this book, but the past few weeks have been full of orientations and back-to-school craziness, so while I read the book in August, I am only getting around to the review now.

Excuses past, Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme was an incredibly useful book for me, and I’m so glad I kept it on my list after reading I Read It, But I Don’t Get It. On my last post about this book, I was heartened to see how many of my friends (all learned scholars and teachers) felt the same amount of discomfort or puzzlement when it came to teaching these elements, how to define them usefully for our students as tools for understanding literature.

The book is structured so that for each of the titular elements, there is a chapter discussing the term, with research and theory as accompaniments, followed by two practical chapters on teaching the concept, both in isolation and with specific texts and units. This structure makes the book valuable for a variety of teachers, but also, it’s easier to take the ideas one element at a time if you feel you don’t have the time to digest the book as a whole. Having the practical sections in their own chapters also makes the book easy to use as a reference, and the size of the book and pages make it very easy to scribble notes in the margins.

I’ll use the material on “setting” as an example of how the approach is both meaningful and practical. When discussing setting with students, it can be difficult to move them beyond a phrase like “Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s” into thinking about what that means and why it matters. In Fresh Takes, the authors develop a definition of setting that includes understanding it on a micro, meso and macro-level, while also thinking of the social, psychological, temporal and physical elements of that text’s particular setting. While this expansion alone is a useful one (with handy organizing chart included, ready for student input), the authors also include an array of activities to use in engaging the students on this concept, include activities centered on visual arts, dramatic staging, textual excerpts, writing prompts and more. I’m doing a seventy-minute period’s worth of activities on setting as one of my first classes, using our summer reading books as our texts to focus on, and I think we will be able to refer back to these concepts throughout the school year.

If you find yourself struggling to clearly express how to define these elements and use them as meaningful tools, then I would highly recommend picking up a copy of Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme, which has certainly become a key part of my teaching library.

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I Think I Am Like…..Because……

Posted by Jackie in teaching, writing and tagged with , ,
Scanned image of standard 3x5 notecard / index...

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This year I tried a new “getting to know you” activity in my classes, which only meet for 20 minutes on our first day, which we call “Day Zero” and is usually pretty fast-paced. I got the idea from a post on the epic first day of school thread over at the English Companion Ning, and I’m really happy with how it worked out.

The idea is pretty simple: every student gets an index card, which she writes her name on, and then uses to complete the following three statements:

I think I am like…… because…….
My parents would say I am like…… because…….
My friends would say I am like…… because…….

All of my classes completed this activity in around 5-7 minutes. I like it for several reasons: they need to reflect a little, it introduces the idea of identity and relationships (a theme in many of our major texts), I see a little more of their personality and handwriting, and it relates to figurative language, which we will spend significant time on during the year. I get to see how they see themselves, and how they think they are seen in the world.

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