I work at a big school. A really big school. We not only have a technology person on staff, but a whole department with a technology budget. When I learned about the educational promises associated with blogging, I knew I wanted to try it with my students, but I've never been the type to stretch the boundaries of what our school will allow or fund. I can't say I've really been a leader in this regard, so I was nervous to try. But I decided to plunge ahead with the project, and so I set up a meeting with my assistant principal, who got me set up with the technology director for our school. He asked me to put something together to show him and pitch my idea, so prepare I did!
When I went into his office, I learned that he was a former English teacher, and he launched into a beautiful story about how he had started a radio broadcasting project with his students when he was a young student teacher. He hinted that my blogging project reminded him of what he undertook so many years ago, but he wanted me to prove to him that it was a worthy cause.
Let's just say that, with many thanks to my New Media and Literacies class, along with my wonderful classmates, I was able to win over our wonderful technology guy. My school is going to fund a closed Ning network, for my use in a classroom blogging project, which I will pilot in the coming year. I'm going to be the guinea pig for the entire district. What a feeling!
I'll let you know how it goes-- the Ning should be up and functioning after we get back from Christmas break, so I'll have more to report after that!
My students struggle with poetry. I teach at a school with 100% poverty-level students, and studies show that these types of students "lag behind" their classmates in making nonliteral inferences. On a recent poetry test I gave, my students couldn't understand the sarcasm in a cold reading of Stephen Crane's "Do Not Weep, Maiden, for War is Kind," taking the poem to mean that Crane is showing war as honorable and glorious, when in fact it is just the opposite. I really thought that there was no better way to prepare students to understand sarcasm than to have me as a teacher!
I decided I needed to change my tactic. Rather than bogging students down with ten-step strategies and methods for analysis, I gave them a question completed unconnected to the standards. I gave them a question about life, and asked them to start by examining their own beliefs.
How do gender stereotypes affect society and the individual?
Of course, this was a bit lofty for self-reflection, so we started with these questions:
Are boys and girls today raised differently? What are modern society's expectations for each gender? Should boys and girls be treated differently?
The ensuing conversation (and debate) lasted for an entire class period, with students slamming their hands down in frustration at not getting the last word at the end of class. Wow.
Rather than looking at poetry as something to be beaten to death and analyzed for a test, we used it as evidence to help us answer our guiding question about life. One of my students shared the following slam poem with me. It's remarkable.
I asked my students to mark down the places where the crowd reacted audibly to her powerful statements. Then, we went through and marked all of the places in the poem that were not meant to be taken literally. We discussed the endless possibilities opened up by her nonliteral language. My students came up with dazzling theories about why she describes her mother "waning" and her father "waxing." They were able to make amazing inferences once they had a reason to read it beyond "analyzing poetry."
Our students are evolving, so shouldn't our study of poetry evolve with it? Why not use literature, poetry, art, and other forms of expression as a form of exploration into the human soul? After all, that is one thing that will never change.
In the past few weeks, I've been guiding students through the writing of a research paper which culminates our unit on war and poetry. I began it with my honors students, since they're a little more flexible (and therefore excellent guinea pigs), and it hit me very quickly that research has undergone an enormous paradigm shift since my high school days.
I remember getting my dad to drive me to the local college library where I approached the intimidating college librarian with sweating palms and asked how to find books in this overwhelming college library. Then, I read through about a hundred books and about a thousand pages to try to find one tiny tidbit of information I could use in my paper. I painstakingly copied out the quote onto a notecard and paid ten cents to copy the page with the bibliographic information. As I arranged my notecards and drafted my paper, the time spent must have amounted to what it took Beethoven to write his Ninth Symphony.
Oh, how things have changed. Before starting the paper with my students, I did some initial exploration into the databases offered by my school district, and quickly realized that the information was not only there, but also easily accessible and only a copy-and-paste away from an outline.
I can't deny I was a little bitter.
My students would never even have to touch a printed text or write a printed word. Instead, the digital tools available made it as easy as pie to conduct research and compile the information into a coherent argument. One of the databases even contained a full citation in MLA style, so all my students had to do was copy and paste the entry into their Works Cited.
I'm so excited by the up-and-coming research tools offered by the digital age. Yet a small part of me wonders if they're missing anything by skipping so many steps. Will it take away from their ability to problem-solve? To truly dig and make decisions about where to find information? Or is it acceptable to rely on these digital tools and their ease of use, knowing that this is likely what students will face in life after high school?
I feel like a bitter Betty doing a bit of soul-searching. What do YOU think?
This past week, grades were due. I don't know about you, but I find grading at the end of the semester (especially as a language arts teacher) to be a daunting and time-consuming prospect. In addition to finishing that stack of papers that has been piling up, double-checking missing assignments, and entering comments for each student, my district also requires that we enter a grade for students' effort and conduct, respectively. This is an amazing idea, because it allows me to separate students' effort (such as homework assignments that only count for practice, not assessment) from their true academic achievement, and also provides an incentive for them to be on their best behavior.
The only problem with these grades is that they're highly subjective. I keep track of students' completion of effort-based assignments, but a student can keep up with their homework and never say a word in class, so this percentage isn't really a true reflection of students' effort. Instead, I took a cue from my technology hero and colleague, Matt Bergman, and tried having students rate themselves using a Google Form.
(On a side note, check out his blog on Universally Designing Learning-- it's a great resource on using technology to make learning accessible to all students, and he's donating money to a local child in need for each visit to his website!)
I created a form based on Matt's suggestion, asking the students what they feel they did well, what they did not do well, and what they will work on in the coming semester, in addition to giving themselves a grade for Effort and Conduct.
Here's a preview of what my form looked like (without any coding or programming on my part!):
My students' responses were then automatically collected in a spreadsheet for me to read and print. They were surprisingly honest (and accurate!), and easy to read quickly because they were typed, resulting in some great feedback that helped both my students and I to reflect on their learning this semester.
