Gaughan

Reinventing English stretches the mind. We've all been saying for months the benefits that would follow if we were to somehow take the traditional structure of English education, with all its inequities and shortcomings, throw it up as high as possible, and put the pieces back together. But in a better way. Practical, no.

But Gaughan is teaching me to change what I can change, in the smallest of ways--a mindframe, a conversation, a question. Just the simple questions he asks in the first chapter, designed to examine the underlying assumptions that make up our kids, are brilliant. Too much of the time, we throw pre-packaged lessons their way, one size fits all, denying room for identity construction is in its most developmental phrase. Watch a John Hughes movie. Kids who don't like school are the ones stuck in Saturday detention. It doesn't mean they don't want to learn, just that they don't want to play the game. I don't blame them sometimes, depending on how anarchist of a mood I'm in.

Subbing gives me the chance to check out other teachers' rooms and meet different classes of kids, and I like talking to them about their lives and what they think about things. A lot of them sound like Billy--"the familiar suck continues to populate his language and his emergiving identity. No one wants to 'suck.' But if everything around you 'sucks' (at least, as you perceive those things), it is difficult to find the flowers of hope." (16) The 6th grade class I subbed for today was plagued with conflict--we had all the stereotypes present: a fat kid, a dumb kid, a funny kid, a non-verbal kid, a follower kid, a big girl, a popular girl, and a gay kid. That's not me labeling, this is how they viewed each other. And they all viewed each other as dumb, even themselves. From the moment the bell rang, I struggled to make them understand how mean their comments about each other were and prayed a fight didn't break out.

"But I don't like him!" the gay kid screamed about the fat kid.
"Darlin, don't you think you're going to have to work with people you don't necessarily like sometimes in real life?"
"It's ok," said fat kid, "I hate him too."

Sigh.

Life is harsh. It can suck, and often does. Why keep presenting learning as a sterilized desk-filled room and a scantron? Teach kids how to deal with life, to examine their culture and upbringing and how it affects them, to understand what things mean, who they are, what do they think. In the very least, don't ask them to check the horror stories some of them live everyday at the door so they can try really hard on your worksheets.

Ok. Down a notch. Back to Gaughan. Is anyone else putting this on their syllabus? I'm thinking about it.

"As teachers, I believe we silence too many conversations, in our fear of stepping out of the politically neutral perspective assigned to us by society."

I particularly like Gaughan's ideas on leaving our mark.

By the way, Mary Pierce Brosmer apparently opened a school for women writing for change.

powerpoint is the devil

| View | Upload your own

for the full story

thank you, nice white lady

unpredictable

So now I'm attempting to write a hopelessly abstract and complicated philosophical post about prediction, reading strategies, and...uh, life. I'll ease you into it:


Myspace Layouts - Get This Widget

It began with an hour's worth of talking about the why/how of teaching reading strategies such as prediction and inference to reluctant readers, and how these skills play a role in reading, and, neccessarily, interpreting, which has a lot to say in terms of how we see life and other people (and since visualization is also an important skill in creating meaning, I want you to picture an aerial shot of our classroom in Sanchez and a quick pan out and up, pulling back from our city, our lives, our countries, all the way out).
The point of real-life application is (or should) always an issue for educators. Currently most of my papers and readings are directing me to think about authentic questions in curriculum and real learning. Unfortunately real-life assessment is more about evaluate-able items, such as: cause and effect, main idea, inference, etc, although these things too are open to bias and interpretation. I became interested in the usage of "predict" and "inference," and a quick Google search showed prediction's ties to the emotive, the mystic, the unexplained (but accessible if you just click on the right pop-up) while inference brings up several easy-to-use websites to practice making inferences from info in the text (and only in the text, dammit). A void seems to exist, at least in connotation, between the terms' relation to the unexplainable.

Listen to Miss Cleo:

I don't have to tell you what a big business prediction and prophecy is for us uncertain folk. Besides the consumer appeal of quick card-readings, we constantly think of (or assume, and you know happens when you do that) what's coming next anyway, it's what makes us human. In fact, I imagine animals do it too. When I woke up today I predicted the water in my shower would be hot after a few seconds, that when I turned the key my car would start. But that's experience, routine. I take what I see happening and apply it. Kids can do that. Kids know when they cry they'll get fed or changed or whatever. Kids know what it means when someone in a horror movie says "I'll be right back." They know if they act the fool they might be able to hide their embarrassment of having a reading problem. That's common sense with a side of symbolic understanding. But we have to teach them, for the benefit of being allowed into academic discourse, to do that from text alone.

One last thing. As a person who tries to see the irreverent/flip side of much of life, I realize how much of our humor is produced simply from predictions being wrong. A joke, a comedy, something that proceeds differently than we expect causes us to laugh. Misdirection. This technique is also popular among our politicians and presidents, with much less funny consequences.

As the TV drones, I am aware of how predictable things are in pseudo-life, in sitcoms and cop shows. Not so in real life. I wonder how many people predicted they would be where they are now.

8 Interesting Ideas in Myers

I've been grappling with the task of writing another post about Myers since his book is so jam-packed, so I decided to shift modes and write a decontextualized and succinct (sort of) rehashing of top points, based on my notes rather than the text. This is almost more for my purposes, as each time I rewrite notes I learn and remember it a little more.

1. the effects of tools/technology -- tools expand cognition, "every student must have a full range of tools in order to have the opportunity to be able to generate a full range of thoughts and to have a complete opportunity to show what he or she can do...." (161)

2. Sign shifting leads to new ways of knowing. Every sign system has levels of understanding. See also Bruner's new interpretation of Vgyotsky, Piaget's decalage, and Gardner's Multiple Intelligences.

3. Types of speech events (Hymes) -- notational (memory retrieval, avoids personal agency), academic/ritual (distancing, nominalization, 3rd person), conversational/social (linked to local identity, vernacular, colloquialisms), presentational, multivocal. What are we teaching in schools?

4. National Assessment of Education Progress recognizes 3 types of writing -- informational, persuasion, narrative (where Kinneavy's subcategories of expressive, referential, literary, and persuasive could fall). In Translation/Critical, there are 5 modes -- expressive, narrative, descriptive, expositive, argumentative.

5. The Enlightenment precipitated a shift of methods of knowing from time and space (narrative/descriptive) to parts or fragmentation (exposition/argumentative). Here I see an overlap to the first chapter of Schon's The Reflective Practitioner where he discusses the crisis of confidence in professional knowledge structures as one organization after another falls or fails. Translation/Critical literacy sees a balance, a shift from types of texts to types of readings -- here Harding and Rosenblatt collaborated, in 1938, the same year as John Dewey's Education and Experience came out.

6. The importance of play--"Pretend disarms and enchants; it suggests heroic possibilities for making changes." See Dibs: In Search of Self by Virginia Axline

7. Trans/crit lit. "keeps traditional literacy and pairs with previously marginalized voices, adding other forms, helping students to express themselves, comprehend/appreciate/critize literary texts within the context of other cultural artifacts, encourage a diversity of response." This definition of literacy is organized around apprenticeships and situated in communicative events.

8. There will be and is a struggle of local forms of literacy with the dominant form--parents with analyzing/decoding jobs vs parents whose jobs feature problem-solving and translation/critical type tasks. There will be those who fear a loss of nationhood in this view of literacy, those who fear exclusion in the melting pot.

Be the biggest tool you can be

I liked the title of Bomer's article, "Things that make kids smart," and immediately began thinking of everything as a tool of some kind. After all, we're born here with nothing and must learn how to survive with what's around us. I've always had a certain fascination with personal objects, but had not considered them as medium affecting our thinking. Strange, when you consider the pinnacle of caveman days the invention of the wheel, after which we viewed their comic grunting as the beginning of intelligent thought. I suppose earlier tools would include clubs for wife-beating, stick for hunting, etc. Before that, finger for pointing. And as the caveman begins to walk more upright he gains control over more tools, more implements, fire, spear, boat...and as we stop crawling and start pulling ourselves up on chairs, we progress until we're simultaneously driving, listening to the radio, reading signs, and talking on our cell phones.

The internet as a tool has infinitely affected the way that we think, as Bomer says, "this symbolic, theoretical aspect of a tool and its use is an instance of the relationship between the material and the idea, or materiality and ideality" (226). Both the opportunities and needs for use and the ideality between its function are staggering--many people probably no longer compose on paper, do their taxes by hand, apply for jobs, use the Yellow Pages, research papers, pay bills, shop, or write letters anymore. But the issues of past weeks' discussions concerning language and communication were still on my mind--a few days ago I subbed for an older teacher as she struggled to log into a website where she would take an interactive test (TOPS Protocol? Any other English teachers heard about this bullshit?) after completing a review session with video clips, mini-quizzes, slides, etc. It literally took her all day. Had I known she needed help, I would have easily rescued her by clicking the correct part of the menu, turning off the number lock, logging in, and skipping through the slides, which I did when she finally asked at the end of the day. Easy, right? No. What comes easily to me, almost naturally, did not to her. Even as I write this, I read an email from my mom asking how to use the word count. I realized that in the last year I've continued to pick up online tools without formal guidance, just by playing around. I don't say this to brag, I know everyone who reads this also knows how to do those things. My point is...well, it has something to do with play, learning, and tools. Let me talk about play first before I finish that thought.

"A child's greatest achievements are possible in play, achievements that tomorrow will become her basic level of real action and morality," said Vygotsky. I truly believe the best thing you can do for a kid as a parent is give them a good childhood, including lots of time to play. I thank my parents for long summer days, sprinklers, tree-climbing, snow forts, library trips, and mud pies. Most of my toys were ten year old hand-me-downs, including the Ken doll whose head popped off. A Playskool record player with accompanying Disney books and records. Kickball. As I grew older, my best friend and I played restaurant, school, hotel, secret detective, and casino. More kickball. As I grew older still, we didn't really play anymore, but we sat around and talked about boys and music and social events, and played sports. I think this has fostered my imagination and creativity, made me into a well-rounded person: I've had a lot of different jobs and roles in my life so far. What did you play when you were little?

"While playing at using the associated tools, they appropriate not just the tool and its proper functioning but the kinds of cultural and relational uses to which the object could be put. They rehearse not just the intellectual skills of writing but the subjectivity positions, attitudes, relations, and purposes that people take on when they write" (pg. 229).

While subbing I thought about tools, signs, mediums of knowledge and functionality in a school setting. I thought about the tools in place but not used, such as the motivational posters on the walls, the movie left for the sub to show the class, the websites the kids choose to use on their own. My favorite poster:There were opportunities for learning in discussing these things rather than taking them for granted. I thought about how frustrating it was to watch the kids lose, steal, or demolish school supplies such as pencils, binders, books. I thought about how the district misuses tools for assessment, from TAKS to TOPS Protocol, wasting time and losing good teachers. "The teacher could not limit the nature of the instruction students received. The larger culture teaches even what school does not" (p. 245).

In terms of teaching and closing the achievement gap, we've spent considerable time discussing how to be culturally-responsive, and should include the tools, actions, discourses, and activities students bring to the table. This is especially valuable because of the schism between home culture and school culture and the need to soften the transition. We should also dispose of what doesn't work, starting from the top down--God knows public education is way too cluttered anyway.

To get down to brass tacks, we are put here with each other and the earth and have to learn how to work with both. Since most of our conflicts deal with miscommunication and greed of some kind, it makes sense that if we could learn to do those things, it'd be a closer-to-perfect world. Then we'd be smart.