cracking pages

I’ve been busy writing lesson plans for ELL Camp and a Revisionist History writing workshop that starts next week.

This week is pirate week at camp, so all the lessons have been pirate themed. So far the kids have formed pirate crews (mine is the Swashbuckling Buccaneers), made pirate hats, used quotation marks by writing stories about pirates, learned how to play 20 questions, and written articles for a pirate newspaper.

In my free time I have been reading as much as possible. (though not as much as I would like!) I just finished Roberto Bolaño’s “2666,” which was 898 pages of intense, lyric, and sometimes baffling prose. Fortunately it was divided into three volumes for portability. Unlike most books it actually earned its jacket description of “a sweeping tour de force.”

Right now I am reading Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home,” as well as Italo Calvino’s “Numbers In The Dark.” I like to think I am absorbing the latter by osmosis because it has been on my night stand for almost two months now. I only read one story at a time, when I am too tired to focus on anything more substantial. It has a fantastic title, don’t you think?

As if I didn’t already have enough books waiting in queue, I just got a delivery of three more from Powell’s:

“The Urban Homestead” was the most straight-forward, informative guide to sustainable city living that I could find. Just from browsing, I have already seen some techniques I would like to implement in my victory garden (covered self-watering containers, mulch) and some things that are probably not worth attempting (raised beds, which would be impractical in the sandbox that is my yard).

On a side note, Lucy the surrogate kitten mama has reported that my garden is suffering greatly under the Arizona sun. This is disappointing, of course, but I am hoping that if I restart seedlings when I get home in mid-August that there will still be enough time to grow some things for an early winter crop. Since the season that most people call “fall” feels more like spring in the desert Southwest, I’m hoping to trick the plants into producing fruit before the end of the year — hopefully in time to make delicious soups when it gets Really Cold!

Returning to books, “Norwegian Wood” is the book for this month’s 826LA West staff/intern book club (and an excellent excuse to add to my Murakami collection). And “Teach Like A Champion” is a book I have been dying to read since I heard about on NPR a few months ago. Since then, I was also impressed to read a blog by a junior high history teacher who documented his experience of using some of Lemov’s suggestions. Due to the scientific nature of his experiment, he was able to observe himself and his students in a new light, and to develop his methods from the experience. It sounds like an eye-opening book, and I’m psyched to read it.

i’m not very helpful

The other day, one of the kids in tutoring was trying desperately to get me to do his homework for him. He wanted me to read his worksheet out loud so that he could write a summary. I told him I would have done it if he had asked politely, but because he had demanded my help, I didn’t feel so keen on cooperating.

He was getting frustrated and running out of time (his dad was waiting in the parking lot), so he started getting creative in his attempts to win my assistance, refusing to give up the assumption that I would do the work for him. Among his top arguments were:

“This isn’t college, ok? Don’t freak out.”
(Kid logic: It’s so easy, you may as well do it for me.)

“Do you see this big ‘N’ right here?”
“Yes.”
“Ok, so can you read this part for me?”
(Kid logic: If I divert your attention, I can trick you into doing it out of confusion.)

I’ve noticed that this particular student tends to get a lot of assignments that require summarizing — and that he usually takes as many shortcuts as possible to summarize the information as generally as he can, rarely paying attention beyond the surface of the text.