words in context

Last night I started reading “36 Children,” Herbert Kohl’s account of his first year as a public-school teacher in Harlem. Like Jonathan Kozol and Sylvia Ashton Warner, Kohl is constantly cited in my textbooks for his revelations on public education. (It’s surprising to me that classes don’t assign these trade books, since they are both more insightful and more engaging than our texts. But I digress.)

Something that jumped out at me immediately was Kohl’s account of how his sixth-graders were fascinated by his method of defining the word psyche by contextualizing it within Greek myth. Capitalizing on their interest, Kohl used the root psyche as a hook to introduce psychic and psychology, and eventually went on to replace the prescribed vocabulary curriculum with a study of the evolution of language. He writes:

Before we talked about language and myth the children, if they thought about it at all, felt that most words were either arbitrary labels pinned on things and concepts the way names seem to be pinned onto babies, or indicators as connections amongst these labels. These “labels” probably represented the way the adult world capriciously decided to name things. I doubt whether the children ever thought of adults as having received language from other adults even more remote in time.

Although he was referring to black children in the early 1960s, this observation strikes me as profoundly applicable to English language learners today. Especially for young children who have not yet learned to recognize parts of speech, English must seem like an arbitrary string of unfamiliar sounds; the direction to “write a complete sentence” as incomprehensible as asking someone who has no carpentry experience to build the frame for a house. A young student’s response is invariably a disjointed string of letters resembling words in groupings resembling a sentence. But missing are the foundation, the necessary supports, the correct type of nails…

This analogy makes me wonder if sentence construction could be taught within an ordered framework such as a plant, with subject as root, verb as stem, adjectives as flowers.

More relevant, since I don’t intend to teach elementary school, would be to introduce new vocabulary in context. I already planned to do this to some extent, selecting words for each unit from resource texts and key concepts. But in addition, we could inspect words’ applications, their etymology, their connotations. And there is truly no better subject than social studies in which to analyze the power of words on the collective unconscious! (socialism, anyone?)

Incidentally (and curiously), the WordPress spellcheck software does not recognize the word contextualize (which Merriam-Webster traces to 1934) and suggests that I replace it with conceptualize (which is not what I meant). Yesterday I learned that this type of search-and-replace spellchecking is called the Cupertino effect, which makes me happy because I love being able to assign names to specific annoyances, such as palimpsest. If you know of other terms that describe similarly insignificant irritations, please share! (For example, is there a word that adequately sums up “misuse of the I-before-E rule”? There should be.)

champion-in-training

Over the weekend I got absorbed in Doug Lemov’s book “Teach Like A Champion,” and I couldn’t wait to try out some of the techniques he recommends. So this week I have been trying to teach like a champion. So as not to overwhelm myself, I decided to try focusing on just two techniques each day.

Yesterday I chose “What To Do” and “100 Percent.” (Lemov gives each technique a proper name so they can be easily discussed. I think it’s genius.) “100 Percent” is intended to set the expectation that it’s not enough to give the teacher most of what she asks for. If I ask for quiet, I need to wait until every student is quiet before I speak. It sounds simple, but it was extremely difficult to put into practice. The writing lab is full of adult tutors — I’d guess there’s about a 1:3 ratio of tutors to kids — and it’s difficult to achieve authority when there are so many potential authority figures in the room. At first I was surprised by this, because I would have predicted that the strong adult presence would have a positive effect on students’ compliance with directions. After reflecting, however, I realized that unless the adults in the room can just as easily undermine the entire effort. If even one tutor continues to converse with a student after I ask for silence, or doesn’t actively enforce my request, the students will assume I’m not worth listening to and continue whatever they were doing.

“100 Percent” was a tough one. But I definitely like it, so I’ll keep working on it.

The premise of “What To Do” is that students are less likely to follow vague directions (“pay attention”) than specific ones (“put down your pencil and and turn to look at me”). I was somewhat skeptical about this one, but I decided to try it anyway. I had an opportunity right off the bat when a couple of boys at my table started playing with scotch tape. This galls me because it is a banned activity and it is wasteful. I told the boys, “Stop it, you guys. That’s banned.” Their only response was to look at me impassively and press the tape tighter over their lips. So I switched my focus to one boy and said, “Alonso, take the tape back to the bookshelf and then come sit here next to me.” Lo and behold, it worked. Not only did Alonso pick up the tape dispenser and take it to its place on the other side of the room; but he then returned to the seat I pointed out, which was across the table from the boy he had been messing around with.  It was incredible. I am definitely keeping this technique in my arsenal from now on.

Today I chose to work on “Strong Voice,” a technique with several components. Using “Strong Voice” means showing the kids that you refuse to lower behavioral expectations. It goes hand-in-hand with “100 Percent” because it dictates how to react if students are being noncompliant. And it’s difficult in the writing lab for the same reasons that “100 Percent” is difficult. (But I’m determined to get silence one of these days!) My biggest challenges were not talking over students and not engaging with misbehavior. These two teacher techniques are extremely important to authority because giving in to persistent noise and misbehavior shows weakness, and students will walk all over you as a result. It’s difficult not to talk over students because it is so hard to get their attention in the first place, and waiting for students to sense something wrong and grow silent doesn’t work with so many adults around. It’s equally difficult to avoid engagement with a student who is acting out for attention, especially if he has something interesting to say! Lemov recommends not even acknowledging extraneous comments, even to say “that’s beside the point.” It’s easier than it sounds.

So far I’m learning a lot from these recommendations. I plan to continue sampling a technique or two every day to find the ones that are most effective for me. I have come across some challenges, of course, but I foresee encountering some type of challenge in every environment I teach in. Even when I have my own classroom and policies, I’ll still have to meld my personal style with the school’s behavioral policies and maybe even contend with other teachers whose methods clash with my own. And kids will just keep coming up with new ways to irritate their teachers…

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.

accommodating

I spent Thursday afternoon working with a kid who has a lot of things working against her: learning disabilities, mood disorder, hearing loss. She told me right away it had been a rough day emotionally and then had a minor meltdown regarding missing assignments. Her step-mom had highlighted all the missing assignments on the kid’s progress reports, which came out to about every other entry on the list. It was legitimately an overwhelming amount of work, and I can’t blame the kid for cracking under pressure.

I gave her a couple minutes to collect herself, then put the progress reports out of view and told her to prepare for her upcoming English test by working on some study questions. I was scared she would refuse to read, like so many other kids, but miraculously she settled down and was immediately absorbed in the book.

After a few minutes I grabbed a clean sheet of paper and started to compose a list of things the kid needs to do to improve her grade within the next week. First on the list were things she needs to ask her teacher about: a worksheet she lost, a couple of quizzes she needs to retake. Then I listed the projects she’s missing for no good reason, and finally the two assignments that aren’t due until next week. Next to each assignment I wrote how many points it could earn toward her final grade. It was a sizable amount; probably enough to boost her from a 65% to a C or B.

I have no problem admitting that I left a few things off the list. A 5-point vocab worksheet from February is not going to help her nearly as much as a 50-point chapter summary, and I wanted to keep the list at a manageable length.

All things considered, our session couldn’t have gone much better. By the end of two hours she had finished two pages of study questions and accomplished a good amount of reading. When her dad arrived, she was laughing because someone in the book had used the name “Prometheus,” which sounded funny to her, and then she had a lightbulb moment when I told her who Prometheus was. (Is there any literature that doesn’t tie back to mythology?)

Dad was impressed with my agenda, leading me to realize that parents get just as overwhelmed by long lists of missing assignments as their kids do. Both of them seemed relieved to see things written out as a to-do list. It’s funny how the same information presented a different way can look positive rather than daunting. But I guess the marketing industry figured that out a while ago!

I’ll be waiting to hear how much the kid got done over the weekend… Hopefully the meltdowns are over with and she can get down to business.

(Incidentally, my mom used to call missing assignments “outstanding work,” which always confused the heck out of me because in my mind the word outstanding has positive connotations. Although I was never in danger of failing a class, I did sometimes forget to do a bit of homework. I even had a meltdown now and then, usually because I had underestimated the amount of work a project would take or because I didn’t feel like doing homework all weekend or maybe I was just hormonal. I mean, we’ve all been there, right?)

I watched “The Reader” last night. I’m not going to ruin the ending for anyone, but let’s just say it had a powerful impact on me and reaffirmed my faith in books. …Not that it has ever wavered.

literacy, ho!

(That’s as in land, ho! or westward, ho!, inspired by Detroit Ho!, which is the current project of some people I know. Rhyme rhyme rhyme. Also, I feel like the word readily should be somehow applicable to reading, as in I spent the afternoon readily surrounded by books.)

This post does not have very much to do with education. It begins with a discussion of McSweeney’s Quarterly. I may have mentioned a few weeks ago that I finally bought a copy of McSweeney’s (#34), which is something I used to fantasize about doing around the same time I became a young grown-up and started to do cool things with my life. Now that I have a vintage apartment and a garden and an internship at a nonprofit, I figure I have finally met those conditions.

McSweeney’s #34 initiates with 20 pages of letters, which I am still in the process of reading, so I can’t remark much on the body of its content yet. I am savoring the letters, however, which bodes well for the 200 pages of short stories that follow. Unlike typical letters to the editor, these correspondences generally takes the form of brief, creative expository essays about their writers’ environments. For example, Julio Villanueva Chang writes to tell about the glowing white sky in his hometown of Lima, Peru, as well as the impressions it has left on writers and thinkers over the years. It is a new format that I greatly enjoy and would love to try someday.

McSweeney’s aside, I am in magazine heaven. My aunt and uncle subscribe to a slew of magazines, including Time, Bon Appetit, Condé Nast Traveler, something about wine that is published on thick, shiny paper, and my personal favorite, The Week.

They also receive weekly mailings from the Church of Scientology, which are addressed to the house’s previous resident. My aunt and uncle have lived in this house for 10 years and have made repeated attempts to be removed from L. Ron Hubbard’s mailing list, to no avail. Last night I got to open one of these packages. It arrived in a clear plastic sleeve stuffed with a slick, full color pocket folder and two full-size posters, each presenting the same information. One displayed the covers of L. Ron Hubbard’s entire scientological works organized by topic. The other grouped the same works by position within the prescribed course of study.

According to my uncle, most of the mailings are similar to the one I opened. When I asked him if the scientologists ever send anything cool, like a bumper sticker, or a sample book, or even a letter that’s funny, he just said “no, they don’t.” Essentially, the church is spending an incredible amount of money marketing to people who have no interest in their message, and they never even send anything worth repurposing or keeping. How disappointing.

I haven’t posted new words in a while, so here are a few. I can’t remember where I acquired them, so instead I’ve found examples on the great and profound World Wide Web:

matutinal, adj.
“Get up early and wash your face in the matutinal May Day dew.”
related to or occurring in the morning

–from Ray Murphy, The Boston Globe

costive, adj.
“Winton’s only fault is a certain costive and unaccommodating virtue.”
slow in action, not generous, stingy (literally: constipated)

–from Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures

[I especially love the applicability of this word to the bureaucratic functions we encounter regularly!]

lionize, v.
(Here I’ll depart from the typical format to bring you Lionizing, a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. Read it. It is comical.)
to look on or treat a person as a celebrity

Finally, here is the quote of the week, as spoken by Danny at 826LA while trying to explain the qualities of Choose Your Own Adventure books to a group of eighth-graders:

There has to be action, right? It’s “choose your own adventure,” not “choose your own boring.”

excuses, excuses

I know, I know. It’s been a while.

After winter break it was difficult to get back into the swing of teaching– and blogging. Apparently it was hard for the kids to get back into learning, too. My most consistent student from last semester has only attended tutoring twice so far in 2010, when she used to come two or three times a week. Another student switched his schedule from Thursday/Friday to Tuesday/Thursday because he had too much trouble concentrating on Fridays.

While working with this group was never easy, they have been dragging their heels more than ever for the last month or so. Sometimes they simply refuse to attempt any work, and they will whine or drive each other into fits of giggles in an attempt to waste as much time as possible. Working with one student at a time isn’t usually too bad because I can match the student’s pace, but working with several students can get truly exhausting.

Sometimes it feels like playing three-on-one basketball; just as I try to intercept from one student, he passes the ball to another. Last week we had issues with kids texting under the table. This week, just as I got that under control, an epic bout of flirting started up between two of the students, with the third putting in a valiant effort to stay focused but repeatedly getting sucked off track just as the other two settled down. I can only hope that when I finally get my own classroom, creative lesson plans and relevant material will be sufficient to keep my students’ interest. But I can’t help but worry what will happen when there are 32 kids in front of me if I can’t even handle three.

Since it’s been a while, here’s an update on what I’ve been reading so far in 2010:

in review

Goodreads tells me I read roughly 35 books in 2009 — “roughly” because I listed a couple books I couldn’t get all the way through and probably forgot to list a couple of others. That’s an acceptable total; not nearly as high as 2008′s (56), but still pretty good considering most of my reading time dried up after I started school again over the summer.

Headline-style reviews of my last few reads, with attention to arrangement and brevity:

Chabon concocts spiritually charged murder conspiracy
in not-so-far-fetched portrait of Alaskan Jewish settlement

(Michael Chabon, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”)

Calvino pursues limits of imagination in ‘Cities’

(Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”)

Off-the-wall adventurer’s ‘Memoir’
jam-packed with historical insight

(Mark Helprin, “Memoir From Antproof Case”)

(Let us temporarily pause to mourn the dying art of headline writing, which has declined as an appreciable skill due to the irrelevance of column width on the Internet.)

review: “the secret history” by donna tartt

I just finished reading “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt. From the very beginning I was reminded very much of Marisha Pessl’s ”Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” and apparently I’m not the only one. When I read “Special Topics” a couple of years ago I found it compelling yet unsatisfyingly so. The literary references were clever but ultimately irrelevant to the plot, and my overall impression was that Pessl was trying way too hard. I never got uncomfortable with several story elements, such as the exaggerated intellectual snobbery of several of the students, who acted more like grad students than high schooler.

This makes a lot more sense now that I’ve read “The Secret History” and seen the same characters in their original incarnation as college students at a tiny liberal arts school. I’m not out to accuse anyone of appropriation, but the similarities do seem a little too close for comfort. I’m happy to report I found “The Secret History” much more believable and enjoyable, well-crafted at the points that made “Special Topics” weak. The students’ constant references to classical literature, for example, bear relevance to the plot, and their personalities are abrasive but still realistic. The moral undercurrent to Tartt’s narration is also much more satisfying than the constant confusion of Pessl’s narrator, which never quite gets resolved.

book reviews in six words

Because I’m all for quality over quantity. (And I’m too busy reading to write much lately.)

The Unconsoled
by Kazuo Ishiguro

I was never so contentedly bewildered.

The Graveyard Book
by Neil Gaiman

Ingenious use of the adjective “grave.”

The Pearl
by John Steinbeck

Why haven’t I read this before?

Atonement
by Ian McEwan

Better than stereotypical Keira Knightley flicks.

Twilight
by Stephenie Meyer

Didn’t actually finish; got the gist.

Gentlemen of the Road: A Tale of Adventure
by Michael Chabon

Hardship bonds Jewish protagonists. Classic Chabon.

monday indeed.

I just got a job with a tutoring company contracted through NCLB to offer supplementary education services to qualifying students. Tutoring is free and any kid who qualifies for free/reduced-price lunches can participate, even kids who have good grades to begin with. It’s a sweet deal.

Today was supposed to be my first day of tutoring. I put emphasis on “supposed to be” because things didn’t quite work out that way. First of all, I was supposed to get my students’ assessment records and contact information, but I only received their names. There were supposed to be two of them, but only one showed up. I brought a variety of young adult novels with me because I was supposed to be tutoring them in English, and I thought that would be a fun way to break the ice. Unfortunately we never got to the books because it would have been pointless.

My student, Yelena*, didn’t speak English at all. I asked her “what grade are you in?” and she said “Monday.” I tried “are you a freshman?” and she said “junior.” And that’s as far as we got because her response to everything else I asked was “No entiendo.” (I had to look this up, because obviously I don’t speak Spanish. It means “I don’t understand.” Now I can officially say I’m a Spanish language learner.)

Fortunately there was a bilingual tutor working with another group of kids, so I took her to his classroom and he invited her to join their discussion. It was a relief for both of us.

The bilingual teacher gave me a look that may have been unpleasant while I was on my way out, which I thought was a little unfair of him. When someone tells you you’re going to be tutoring high school English, you prepare to work on things like reading strategies, rules of grammar, summarization techniques, some vocabulary… skills that will help them when they have to read Beowulf and write an essay about the protagonist’s motivations. But what Yelena needs is tutoring in English as a foreign language. Trying to connect with her today felt like being prepared to teach English in New Jersey and then getting reassigned to teach English in Buenos Aires. Same name; very different curriculum.

I probably could tutor Yelena in basic English if I had a chance to prepare, but she’s way better off with a bilingual tutor in the long run. Needless to say, I will not be showing up to any more tutoring sessions without getting a little more background first.

Tomorrow I have four kids, and I know that at least one of them is friendly and communicates well in English even though it’s not her first language. I’m going to let them pick between “Holes” and “The Graveyard Book.” We will read the first chapter and talk about how the author sets the tone and grabs the reader’s attention. We will consider whether the book prompts us to ask any questions (it does) and we will write them down so that in a few weeks we can answer them (using complete sentences, naturally). Then on Thursday we will work on math… but I’m not even going to think about that yet!

Incidentally, a random kid in the hall told me “your whole outfit is really cool.” I won’t lie: It went to my head a little bit. I didn’t want to sound like an old fogey so I just said “thanks,” but all I could think was “I finally figured out how to look cool… and only 10 years too late to do it in high school!” Being a cool kid wasn’t that cool anyway. I’d much rather be a cool teacher.

 

___

*name changed, of course.