Annual reflection and setting new goals

I have never done this in public, but I think it's worth doing if only to publicly commit myself to some goals and raise my own level of accountability.  Now, as we approach the dawn of a new school year, it's time to lay out specific plans for improvement in my courses and my classroom.

Management Issues

Lateness - With only a 40-minute period, too much time is being lost to lateness.  Moreover, the problem got so bad late in the year with one course that it was hard to determine, even ten minutes after the bell, whether I had enough students to proceed with my plan or to shift course.  I would shift, and then the stragglers would show up.

One problem is that detention does not work.  It palpably does not work, because at the end of the year we still had dozens of students assigned to detention every day.  This is as effective as locking up drug addicts has been in fighting addiction in our country.  Yet we persist (in both cases).

I've spent some time this week reading everything I can find on the subject and it is all the same and it is all unhelpful, because the advice addresses individual aberrant cases of lateness, and a lot of attention is given to tracking and record-keeping.  I am fundamentally opposed to punishing myself for a student's misbehavior.  (That is one reason I don't have my own detention.  Another is that I am too involved in co-curricular activities to be able to drop what I'm doing and see a student after school.)

Phone calls home are school policy and I will, of course, comply.  But I don't believe in them, partly because we have so few reliable ways to communicate with our parents in a timely manner (will have to work on THAT this year) and because I teach seniors.  Parental disapproval and sanctions may be effective, but they are a poor preparation for the phase of life my students are about to begin.  They need to have their own discipline and their own habits in place, unless their parents are going to run their whole lives for them.

Clearly I need to move beyond sanctions.  Many of my colleagues (including many who should know) believe the lateness thing is cultural.  (Incidentally, that should not be viewed as racist.  Many European Mediterranean cultures do not value punctuality, and they are not generally oppressed minorities in this country.)  However, I need not investigate root causes or do some deep character education.  What I need to do is establish that whatever culture my students come from, when they enter my room, they enter MY CULTURE with my expectations.

So I need to be disciplined myself, start the class within a minute of the second bell, disregard who's there and not there, ignore late students when they enter (which I do anyway) and deal with lateness reporting issues later.  I will establish that I will mark absences at the top of the class and that unless they sign the latebook, it will go down as a cut, with the attendant consequences, which are out of my hands.  Hopefully, once it is clear that the class begins when it begins, the issue will diminish.  I only wish that I could flip my classroom so that the entrance was in the back of the room, but that is not practical for a number of reasons.  In any event, I will stop trying to use punishment and shame, and try and establish a social and cultural norm and set of expectations, at least within my own four walls.  Consistency.

This also supports a specifically educational imperative I want to press this year:  that, as we learn to write, we are writing in a specific and separate dialect called Standard Written English.  (Not Standard White English.)  SWE is not the way we speak every day.  It may not even coincide with formal speech.  It is a special, particular language which my students will be expected to use in college composition, and in most written communications other than to friends and family.  It is not a denigration of natural speech, but a commonly accepted and preferred alternate to it, and using it does not signal racism, but simply the employment of a Lingua Franca.

So in both punctuality and form of written expression, we have different expectations in the classroom than you have with family and friends.  Not superior, just different.

Phones - There is little or no support on the ground for a no-phones policy in class, although that is the stated written policy of the district.  Confiscation is not practical and could lead to liability problems, especially without support up the line.  Again, I must establish a cultural expectation, which I will reinforce with by distributing a copy of the page in the district handbook banning phones and having each student sign and acknowledge that.  I know that is no solution to anything, and is frequently an empty gesture, but perhaps it will be a signal that I intend to be consistent with that.  I must not let myself slip and lose heart about reminding students to get the phones out of my sight.  On the other hand, there will be times (I hope) when I will invite the students to use their smart phones in class, as a reminder that it is not that I am a Luddite, but that there is a time and place for everything, and that it is important to be present in the place where one is physically present, and to leave the cyberworld from time to time to be here now.  You know, all zen and stuff.

The Teaching of Literature  - I read an interesting piece this summer about the ascendancy of teaching literature over rhetoric in our high schools, which puts them out of joint with our colleges.  The fact is, I have never formally studied rhetoric, but as a former lawyer, I am familiar with and equipped to teach its application.  And as a reader, I am far more interested in journalism and other forms of non-fiction than I am in literature.

This comports with a district and building initiative to intensify the reading and analysis of short non-fiction on a regular basis.

So a couple of interlocking decisions.  I am not going to attempt to "teach" novels.  I will frame them and contextualize them at the outset.  Students will read them independently, using a schedule I provide as a rough guide.  I am still debating assessment of reading, whether to journal, quiz or other technique. From time to time, students will rotate in leading discussion, a process I will teach, building on what they learned junior year.  There will be the assessment of rote reading in a one-period timed test and a more important assessment in the form of a project which requires synthesis, as I have done historically since I began teaching.  The larger point is that our book of the moment should only occupy one or two days per week.  This leaves two days for writing and two days for everything else.

The Teaching of Writing AND Reading Non-Fiction  - This provides an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.  As mentioned, there is an initiative to stress non-fiction reading.  The plan as it stands right now, is to assign new non-fiction reading each Monday.  (Note to self -- because photocopying must be submitted in advance, must have non-fiction selected before leaving building on Thursday night.)  This can be in class, silently or aloud, partially in class and partially independently, etc. etc., depending on the specific task to be performed in connection with the reading -- analysis, rebuttal, extrapolation.  Then writing based on the writing can be assigned every other week, to be submitted electronically by Thursday.  I must then faithfully review and assess all writing over the weekend and return e-mail it before Monday.  On alternate weeks, students will be re-writing per my comments, to be submitted the following Thursday.  That is, one week write, next week rewrite.  After one semester, and with the use of projections and lecture-demonstrations, students will understand the edit and rewrite process well enough to do peer review, and start to incorporate those ideas about better style into their own drafting.

I have to brace myself to work harder this year and get better at seeing around corners.  At least this year, I've read most of my literature once already.  And the longform work must be interlaced with more short work.

Assessments - More of them, more at higher levels, more rapid marking and return of them.  Last year, my students rarely had the opportunity to benefit from comments.  That must change.

Advanced Placement -  I have ideas about re-formulating the Advanced Placement, starting with administering practice tests within the first week and regularly thereafter.  Earlier classes seem to have been completely sandbagged by the test, and there is no reason for that.  As high level as the class is, at some level it is all about the test at the end.  I am determined to have some 4s and 5s this year.  I will have more to say about this after next week, when I complete my mini-course on teaching AP.

Social Justice in Film  - Very charged up about this new elective.  I have always had trouble designing assessments for electives.  I am thinking of two principal modes at the moment -- having students blog about each film and having a rotating assignment of introducing and giving context to each film.  I will give the student a list of terms, names, etc. which are connected to the film and ask them to prepare 10 minutes for the class.  (Naturally, I will be prepared to back this up.)

Work Deadlines - This year I really want to walk the talk.  Keep deadlines myself and hold students to them.  I must start at the beginning of the year and not accept late homework at all, other than for excused absences.  I understand that students are allowed to re-take tests, but if they never hand in a paper assigned in lieu of a test, can they "re-do" that?  I am inclined to given them the 55 for a missing assessment and then assign something else, rather than give the impression that deadlines mean nothing, and that any work can be handed in at any time before the last day of the marking period.  That was just making me miserable.

I am hereby putting my DC and my principal on notice that my September gradebook may look very scary, but I am confident the situation will correct itself if I remain firm.

Use of the School Website  - As soon as possible, I am getting all my classes to the computer lab, show them my page, show them where their work is posted, give them the Twitter feeds and the Facebook page they can like in order to receive information about all the homework assignments.  It must be clear that if they are absent, excused or not, they are responsible not only for doing the work but for finding out what it is.  I must consistently refuse to answer questions about what the past work was except to direct them to the website.  They must learn that this is how most college courses operate.  The professor will not chase you and scarcely will talk to you about past assignments.  They must assume responsibility.

Apps - Speaking of the school website, I have it on reasonably good authority that a bright high-school level hacker/code monkey could write an app that makes our school website legible on a smart phone.  I would love to offer a prize for a student to do that for all the obvious reasons.  I also want to research free or cheap apps that help students manage their assignment calendars, not to mention college and scholarship application deadlines, which leads me to...

The War Room - I hope that Coach T and I can hold to Mr. Gregory to his agreement to commit Room 401 to be a War Room for college applications and scholarship applications.  Too much was compromised last year due to students not managing timelines.  We need to support that, to counsel students on their choices and to celebrate ALL THE ACCEPTANCES.  Last year, some got noticed and some didn't.  That's not right.  They are all a big deal, and we have to make them that way.  Which reminds of something else that needs to be different this year...

College Presentations during English instruction time  I need better advance notice of this, and they must be limited.  There have to be other times and places found to meet with seniors other than decimating a graduation requirement course.  Also, I'm putting my foot down on this specifically -- NO CLASS TIME AFFORDED TO FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS.  We don't know what those schools are doing, what kind of financial problems they could create for our students, and they are off-mission for us.  Yes, some post-high-school education is the goal for all Newark Public School students, but AHHS is specifically a college prep school, and our message should be consistent.  Again, there must be other means, other times for the for-profit schools to reach our kids.

Well, that's all I can think of now.  There are a lot of details that are still fuzzy to me, such as the sequencing of my literature units (chronological order did not work), but this reflection was more about architecture than engineering.  Time for the latter later.

Now I've published this and you can all throw it in my weary and bedraggled face in June!

Lecturing and teaching

I first saw Professor Michael Sendel of Harvard talking about his book Justice: What's The Right Thing to Do? on The Colbert Report and immediately sought it out. It's a very readable, straightforward, unfootnoted primer on Political Philosophy built on an inquiry into ideas of justice, morality and ethics.

Then I discovered that the course from which this book arose had been recorded for broadcast on PBS and was available on disc and online. In fact, here's the first episode (warning - it's 54 minutes long and there is a good chance you will be fascinated and unable to stop watching):



Now you can paint me blue and call me a Buick, but I don't think any of that is beyond a reasonably accomplished high school senior. (I believe Professor Sendel's course is for freshmen -- they sure talk like freshmen.) And if I had the chance, I would love to build a course on the use of these lectures (they are divvied up into discrete 24 or 25 minute segments), using my own classroom as the seminar-discussion portion of the class between lectures, just like in college. It would be a nice foretaste of college procedure, and these are issues and ideas that automatically engage any young person. In fact, these are the issues that any thoughtful young person MUST reflect on as they are becoming who they will be.

But that's beside my point in making this post. What's really interesting, beside Dr. Sendel's clear and simple explication of the ideas and analysis of the writers and questions considered, is a good illustration of the difference between writing a book and teaching a course. As I said, the book Justice is ultra-clear and ultra-simple to read. I think I even almost understand Kant's categorical imperative, at least if I stand very, very still and don't look at any flashing lights or kitties or anything.

But oddly, it is almost too clear, too smooth. It goes very fast and ideas rush at the reader very quickly. It's probably not a good idea to sit down and read the book straight through, but to stop and reflect for a while between each chapter. But when you watch Professor Sendel teach virtually the same material it doesn't rush at you the same way. We can see him "feel the room," engage in dialogue with the students, incorporate what he needs, deflect what he doesn't, and yet make every student there feel included in the conversation. Because oddly enough, while he is teaching in the most regressive and (research tells us) ineffectual mode available, yet he is effective and his ideas land and stick and leave a residue in your mind after the video is over.

Of course, when you're actually at Harvard you have a week or so between lectures to absorb what Sendel has said, to read the material for the next class, to find the holes in his arguments and to prepare questions about how it all fits together. But even without that, the videos are more effective than the very fine book. I would summarize the difference as teaching.

It all put me in mind of another series of lectures recorded at Harvard back in 1973, when Leonard Bernstein occupied the Norton Chair for Poetry and conducted six very lengthy lectures -- the longest was just shy of three hours -- on the direction of concert music. In fact, the whole thing was a defense of diatonic harmony which had been on the wane for the previous 60 years or so, but which turned around and defeated non-tonal music within a decade of his lectures, especially in the work of Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich. And oddly enough, Bernstein built his argument on linguistic theory, justifying the whole series as a matter of poetics, which was what the endowment was supposed to be for. (But really, who would have hassled Bernstein if he had wanted to show home movies of his dog for 102 minutes?)

Again, the lectures were published as a book, but the book is really missing something. What they're missing is both Bernstein's pedagogical skills and the force of his personality. Which are inseparable, as they are with the charming, though less histrionic Professor Sendel.

Here's a short excerpt explicating Bernstein's central conceit:



Fun, huh? And you don't even have to know anything about music to engage with his ideas. You don't have to agree, but you almost HAVE to respond.

What makes this work, what makes old-fashioned lecturing appropriate for both Bernstein and Sendel is that they are not simply delivering information you could get from a book or a website. They are conducting an inquiry and constructing an argument; engaging in the fine art of persuasion. And to do that effectively, you must bring the power of human personality to bear, provided you have one.

Aw, the heck with it. Here's the entire first lecture by Bernstein, if you've got an hour and three-quarters to burn. It's really worth it.



All of the Sendel course is available on YouTube, and here, where there are supplemental materials. And all of Bernstein's Unanswered Question lectures are on YouTube, absolutely free. (The DVDs cost hundreds.) Isn't this a great age we live in?

And if your school IT guy still is blocking YouTube, show your principal this and start knocking some heads together. Don't take any guff.

What do you think?

Is this video just a cheesy marketing ploy for Microsoft Word, or is it a way to get students to think of history as a chain of possible alternative actions and outcomes, not to mention a lesson in the value (and ease) of rewriting?



Either way, I wish they'd credited the theme from Parks and Recreation.

Integrating poetry into Language Arts Part I

At the outset, I need to be clear about two things. (1) I don't know much about poetry, and even less about the poetic literature. Of the great 18th and 19th century English poets I am almost completely ignorant; and (2) I don't care.

I have always approached teaching English as a discipline of skills (which is why I prefer the name "Language Arts.") I have no special brief for literature over all the other modes of writing. I want my students to build their toolkits as readers and writers, and I don't care much where and how they acquire their tools, so long as they work well. For instance, if you want to borrow from math and use a Venn diagram to teach metaphors, why not?

So from poetry, I'm not as interested in the sheer art of poetry as the craft elements which can contribute to the student's general literacy. To begin with, one of the greatest values poetry brings to writing in general is precision and economy. In a short piece of writing, such as ultra-short story, a song lyric or a poem, every word must be working hard to perform its task and contribute to the entire effect of the piece. Hence the challenge and fun of Hemingway's six word novels, for example:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn
Playing pool was just an excuse.
I finally realized he loved guacamole.
Said I'd never marry again. Damn.
My secret discovered. Plane ticket purchased.
Two lives, one day. Never again.
He woke to an empty house.
Lost her sweater. Kept his jacket.
Heaven can't. Hell won't. Now what?
Wrong day for the scenic route.
Found true love, married someone else.
Hey Stranger, coffee's on, sit awhile.

So one approach might be to pack and unpack some especially pithy poems or portions thereof.

"So much depends/upon a red wheelbarrow"
"Do not go gentle into that good night"
"I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference"
"I have measured my life out with coffee spoons"
"I held a Jewel in my fingers--/And went to sleep"
"yes is a pleasant country"

(Note - Shakespeare is not useful for this exercise, because he generally seems to unpack his own metaphors and images. As the experienced reader and playgoer will testify, Shakespeare always strives for utmost clarity, and eschews enigma.)

So for example, the "unpacked" version "I have measured my life out with coffee spoons" might be, "My life has become so dull and routine, that each day is like another as each mound of coffee in the spoon is like another." Or, "Another day, another pot of coffee, nothing happening but drinking cups of coffee, day after day." Or, "I keep spooning out my days like coffee until they will all be gone, like the coffee in the jar." Or some combination of all of these. None of these interpretations are all right or all wrong, but they are all contained, all "packed" into those few words, like a huge database packed into a Zip file.

The final exercise might be to take a short story or passage and condense it down into stages. First an abridged version of itself, then perhaps a list of salient points or events, then a poem, then a critical line or two of the poem. This task is best done collaboratively. What you end up with might be banal: Hamlet condensed might be: "Revenge is folly." But that's not important--what matters is what the student experiences or learns in the process of winnowing down the large to the small.

And that, ultimately, is the lesson of poetry -- that which is large contained, encompassed, suggested in that which is small.

DIY is authentic

Mark Frauenfelder in THE ATLANTIC :

Imagine a school where kids could do the following: clone jellyfish DNA; build gadgets to measure the electrical impulses of cockroach neurons; make robotic blackjack dealers; design machines that can distinguish between glass, plastic, and aluminum beverage containers and sort them into separate bins; and convert gasoline-burning cars to run on electric power.

No such school exists, but in August I went to Detroit and met the kids who did all these things, and more. They—along with 22,000 other people—had come from all over the United States and Canada to demo their creations at Maker Faire, a two-day festival of do-it-yourselfers, crafters, musicians, urban homesteaders, kit makers, scientists, engineers, and curious visitors who congregated to present projects, give performances, and swap ideas. Having attended eight Maker Faire events since 2006 (they’re put on by the same company that owns the magazine I edit), I’ve become convinced of two things about children and education: (1) making things is a terrific way to learn, and (2) schools are failing to teach kids to learn with their hands.

My son attended a technical high school and while he has a natural proclivity for physics, he struggled at first with chemistry. His chemistry teacher suggested that the problem may have been that he thinks with his hands. I don't know if that's true, but I know that the men in my family have an engineering-tinkering proclivity.

The challenge is to come up with some Language Arts DIY -- I mean beside the annual literary magazine and the increasingly irrelevant monthly newspaper, which are only semi-authentic as it is. They really only serve as a function of the school community without any direct outside use or application. But surely students can produce work of more general application. Perhaps they could develop a sustainability plan for the district, which would be a cross-disciplinary project with the Science Department. Or work with the police department and write a safety plan (although that may involve confidential matters which makes student participation impossible).

How about online wikis for the general community; job or recreation resources. Create study or discussion materials. Develop a One Book plan for the entire community. The municipal library may be able to steer students towards needs it or its patrons have.

But the point of these projects is not to look at them as something to earn Community Service points toward graduation. They each have literacy education value of their own. Remember, when our parents and teachers saw us acting out in frustration, they would tell us, "Use your words." Why not use our words to actually make stuff?

Don't celebrate National Poetry Month

Those "Special Months" - Black History Month, Poetry Month, National Widget Month - are a tempting trap for a teacher. Focus on this topic or area for this specified period of time and it will be "covered." It's a little frightening how many English teachers I talk to who freely admit not knowing much about poetry and/or not really liking it.

First of all, not knowing about something is NEVER an excuse not to teach it. It is an invitation to learn more. From my own experience, the most exciting things to teach are the things you are learning at the moment you are teaching. Much better than the stuff you've known for ages and ages. I didn't know much about poetry when I started teaching it, but I think I know something about good writing and bad writing and the difference. The trick is not to be sucked into the craft issues around verse which can smother an appreciation for poetry. If you're teaching English, you should have developed some personal taste, and that's all you really need. Teach what you respond to and/or what you believe your students will respond to.

The idea is NOT to teach "all about poetry." It's to teach poetry. I face this problem in general music courses all the time. Students come in at the beginning of the year with all sorts of facts about how many children Bach had and how old Mozart was when he died, but trivia about the lives of musicians is not music. Similarly, English teachers sink into a swamp of Robert Frost's New England roots, the use of anaphora and how a triolet is put together without ever developing a taste for poetry, either in themselves or in their students.

You know, like this:



In fact, these analytic habits are so ingrained that your students may assist you in killing poetry, like this:



And so poetry becomes a "unit," which is defined as "something we have to work on right now but soon you will be able to forget completely." To read and write poems for one month in an academic year is like only listening to music in the fall. If poetry is going to get under your skin and that of your students, you need to make it part of your routine, at least on a weekly or perhaps biweekly basis -- but no less frequent than that.

WHY should you care about poetry? Your students just need to be able to pass the HSPAs, write a resume and a college essay. They're never going to "need" this. If that's how you feel, stop, step back and remember that you are teaching literacy. Language and its uses. And poetry is language at its most assertive and vigorous, doing what only words can do. It's the same reasons you don't teach art by looking at book illustrations or teach music by studying Muzak. Most of the time we put language to work serving some other master -- typically, persuasion or narrative. (Both of those tasks can be performed by other means.) But poetry is lacuna pro lacuna, words on display, leaping and pirouetting as only they can do.

Step One: Find a whole bunch of poems YOU LIKE that you can explicate with energy and enthusiasm.

Where to look? Here's a few suggestions:

Poetry 180 A poem a day for high school students and teachers at this website created by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. There are two versions of this collection in book form, if you're still attached to those old-fashioned things.

A note about anthologies - you can always look at the big ones, the Norton and the Oxford being the best. But they are rather anonymous and extremely over-inclusive, and you will have to slog through or pass over a lot of poems that mean nothing to you to find one that does. My advice is to find an editor you are comfortable with, or at least understand their point of view, and see what kind of poems they like.

She Walks in Beauty by Caroline Kennedy, an anthology organized around the stages of a woman's life.

Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. There's a no-frills title for you. It's based on a daily radio feature, so you can be sure these poems are good for reading aloud to people who don't go to poetry readings. Read Keillor's preface about poems that are clear, direct and communicative, rather than dense and literary.

An Invitation to Poetry The third volume of the "Favorite Poem Project," which are poems selected by actual humans (not college professors or literary critics) because they are significant to those people. I like this third volume for the classroom, because it comes with a DVD of 27 different people talking about their poems and their lives and reading or reciting the poems aloud. Many of these videos can be seen online at the link above, too.

Editor Robert Pinsky also has a fine collection, Essential pleasures: a new anthology of poems to read aloud, which is a great place to start looking for poems to commit to and recite from memory. I've written before about the virtues of memorizing of poetry, and I am making a resolution to learn a new poem by heart each month, as a challenge to my students.

(If you respond to poetry that's over 90 years old and out of copyright, you can check out this list of public domain anthologies on Bartleby.com. And of course there is a lot of poetry online, so you can simply follow your nose - but that can be very time-consuming.)

Step Two: Learn how to SAY the poem. Not read it, because if a poem is still a thing on a page to you, that's what it will be to your students. You don't have to memorize it, but you should know it well enough to spend most of your time speaking making eye contact with your students. Here's a poem I like to start the school year with, performed by its author, Taylor Mali:



I like this one because it not only notifies students what I expect of them (keep an open mind) but lets them know that I have aspirations and feelings as their teacher, that their progress means something to me.

Step Three: Repeat. Repeat regularly. You'll get better at this, if you only just start by presenting a poem you really like, opening up an issue or two or three that the students can talk about -- that is, be sure it's interactive and not just a performance by you. Don't worry about filling up a period. A few minutes at the start of one class each week would be awesome, as long as it's regular.

The advent of Taylor Mali raises the topic of Slam Poetry, which deserves its own post, especially in terms of incorporating slam into a regular middle school or high school English course, as contrasted with starting a club or a special group. But since I raised the subject, there are a couple of good anthologies and descriptions of the slam phenomenon, Poetry Slam by Gary Glezner and The Spoken Word Revolution by Mark Eleveld.

And I need to write yet another post on the use of writing poetry in a regular course. But I will tell you this from experience: Do not allow them to use rhyme at all for the first half-dozen assignments. Students will disappear down the hole of doggerel. They get obsessed with rhyming and, unless they are skilled and experienced, will not give you anything from the heart or the head, but just string together rhymes and syllables of padding in between. But I do recommend using poetry as a way of teaching ALL KINDS of writing. It teaches students to be economical, visual and precise. More of that another time.

And one MORE additional post I need to write. You need to assign students AND yourself to create an anthology over the school year. I highly recommend creating a class-wide wiki. But that's for another time. Soon, I promise.

So forget Poetry Month. My students know I celebrate Poetry Tuesday. If it's not regular and repeated, it's just "extra" and you will communicate the message that poetry *doesn't count.* And frankly folks, if you are an English teacher and you don't have anything to say or teach about poetry, you might be in the wrong line of work.

Interactivity is Authentic

If you've read much of this blog before, you'll know I am a strong advocate of Authentic Learning, having helped pilot a project to develop a community of educators sharing authentic learning design. But as an English teacher, some of the areas we stumble on in creating such designs are (a) ownership of the work; (b) working cooperatively; and (c) identifying or developing a real audience. Our solutions to these challenges can rude toward the crude, for example, in-class presentations of group projects. You have an audience, but it is not a real one. You may not have co-operative work, but parallel work. And who ever felt ownership of the experience of holding up a chart or a poster and talking about it?

Interactive fiction answers a lot of this. For people of my age, who came of age in the 1970s or early 1980s, you may remember these as text-based adventure games, which were infuriating to us old-school types because the rules and procedures are never set out in advance. You were endlessly lost in some cave trying to figure out how to go right or whether you should put down the candle in order to pick up the wand. And endless prompts as we endlessly tried to do the same thing over and over, despite ample proof that it didn't work. (Or anyway, that's what happened to me.)

But as you may have noticed, technology, especially computers and their programming have developed somewhat in the last 30 years or so. Those text adventures are now called interactive fiction, not least because (a) they are far more sophisticated and complex than they were and (b) they can be created by users, rather than merely existed in closed, pre-packaged forms. And they can be created by teams or groups of users. In short, text adventures have morphed into a quasi-literary activity, in which text can be as good or bad, cursory or detailed, reflective or aggressive as the creator or creators wish. And in the course of this development, interactive fiction is (a) owned by its creator(s); (b) mostly written cooperatively; and (c) is capable of developing a real audience, that is, the players who experience a story as a game, with alternate outcomes (which encourages repetition and re-exploration, a hallmark of good literature).

But our students have grown up completely in the era of interactivity, of the democratization of creativity. Stories told by a storyteller in only one way, as in novels and films, are but one way to experience a narrative, and probably becoming a minority taste. Our students have a natural feel for open-endedness, for the hope built into the idea that the end is not yet written, and that a story is not to be heard, but experienced and participated in. What I'm trying to say is that if you are over 45, this may require some mental adaptation, but I believe such an adaptation is not only advisable, but necessary.

The chances are that many of your students, especially the most imaginative and creative students are already doing this with your friends. You should ask who is participating in this, and what kinds of things they like and how they are interacting with their friends. You might want to scaffold your design with a pilot group, who can get you past your initial stumbles, presuming this is a new or new-ish area for you. (If it's not new to you, you really don't need to read this whole post -- just grab the link for Inform and begone with you!)

And, if like me, you're not sure where to begin among the competing aggregations of fiction, message boards and blogs, may I suggest a site and system called Inform, which was brought to my attention by a close friend who knows how enthusiastic yet clueless I can be about this kind of thing. Inform uses plain-language not just for the text that the players experience, but for the programming code. If you are a fogey like me, you need to adjust to thinking of narrative in terms of creating (or describing) an environment and setting rules by which the narrative will proceed. It's simply a matter of learning to turn over the some of the power of the storyteller over to the audience and relaxing one's grip over the order in which information is dispensed.

Obviously, this kind of writing is not going to yield a Harold Pinter or even a Dan Brown, whose craft is entirely based on the slow, calculated release of information in a particular order. On the other hand, many writers such as Cervantes, Dante and Raymond Carver and John Irving do not exert such tight-fisted control of the timeline.

Here is a video tutorial on some of the programming protocols and systems in Inform. You'll see they are fairly easy and intuitive

The challenge remains to incorporate this into our specified course of study. Of course, there are always ways and means to give encouragement, support and course credit to independent writing. But for the less naturally motivated student, interactive fiction can be used as an analytical tool, especially for those works which we teach with a strong focus on the temporal and geographical environment, such as The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, or To Kill A Mockingbird or The Kite Runner. The environmental aspects and the choices made by the persons in the story can be parsed out in a very precise manner so that the player can see to what extent the narrative is driven by environment and to what extent choice.

"Bold, persistent experimentation." If it's good enough for a US president facing the worst economic crisis in our history, it's good enough for me. Plus IF is bound to be a lot more fun than the National Recovery Act.

Raise the bar, dammit, RAISE the bar!

I don't have much to add to this story in the New York Times about a historical research quarterly written entirely by high school students (mostly public school students, by the way). These kids are researching, analyzing and writing up ORIGINAL RESEARCH for no school credit, no money, no headlines, no appearance on Jersey Shore. So why do it? Why does anyone want to be excellent? Do we really have to ask this question? (Yes, it will help with admission to college, but that has to be viewed as a secondary outcome, given the complexity of the task and the unlikeliness of one's paper being singled out.)

Here are some topics I found on the site currently: Austria-Hungary and the Compromise of 1867, The Paradox of Power: An Analysis of the Rise of Parliamentary Power with the Consolidation of the Monarchy in the English Reformation, and An Analysis of Alexander Kerensky's Handling of General Lavr Kornilov. I'm a bit of a history buff, and I find this stuff pretty arcane and sophisticated.

William Fitzhugh, who runs this journal, The Concord Review, is reportedly difficult and disagreeable. Maybe so, but maybe it's because he's swimming against the dominant school current of diluting and lowering standards. This impulse comes from a good place -- we want to provide success scenarios for all students, especially those who struggle and are likely to be frustrated. But the problem comes when we exchange interim, partial goals to be celebrated in order to spur students on for ultimate goals of excellence by objective standards.

The other reason that Fitzhugh may be difficult may be that his values conflict with parent's values, and those are always a problem for us classroom teachers. Let's be honest: the surest way to lower standards in education is to give parents more control. Parents are, as a rule, more interested in outward measures of success than in actual success. They press for higher grades for less work. They prioritize family activities, sports and other extracurricular obligations over school work. The Concord Review was not created by parents, nor would it likely to be run by them. It doesn't hand out "A"s or cash prizes or guaranteed school admissions. It's about learning a process, not rewarding an outcome. And the process should be its own reward.

Also, it's elitist. There's a mistrust of experts today, and that also comes from a reasonable place. "The Best and the Brightest" told us to trust them and led us into the Vietnam war. Experts lie and misrepresent. But that didn't make us smarter, didn't make us experts. It's not that we should disdain the hard work it takes to become expert in a field -- it is that we should question ALL AUTHORITY, including academic authority. Don't discard it, don't subvert it, but question it -- in an intelligent way, which requires being informed. Every time a politician compares the national debt to a household budget, you know either he's an idiot or thinks he's talking to idiots. The budget of a nation which has its own economy and its own currency is NOTHING LIKE the budget of a household. This is like saying, "I know all about defense appropriations because I own a Hummer."

We need smart, informed, hard-working people in the next generation and our school culture is moving in the opposite direction. Let's celebrate The Concord Review and identify the students we can get excited about writing for it, before it's too late.

It's the curriculum, stupid

There was a remarkable story in the New York Times yesterday about a 4,000-student school in Massachusetts which has had spectacular results in raising student achievement across the curriculum by simply requiring students to write across the curriculum. Even Phys Ed (which some of the teachers complained about). There were no mass firings, no technology gimmicks, no alteration of the work rules. Time ordinarily spent in routine administrative meetings were spent in retraining teachers and getting everyone on board with the goals and the plan.

Incidentally, the focus on writing confirms my own long-held belief, confirmed in law school, that organized writing requires organized thinking; that one way to calm down the chaotic thinking in our students' brains is to make them habitual writers.

The success story comes from a report presented in June 2009 at the conference for The Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University. Here's an excerpt from the abstract [emphasis mine]:

The main lesson from the presentations was that student achievement rose when leadership teams focused thoughtfully and relentlessly on improving the quality of instruction...Leadership teams succeeded initially because they used their positional authority effectively to jump-start the change process. Then they built trust. More specifically, they demonstrated commitment through hard work and long hours; they studied research-based literature to expand their knowledge and competence; they persevered to follow through on the promises they made; and they found ways to remain respectful of peers, even when asking them to improve their performance. In these ways, leadership teams earned the respect of their colleagues and the authority to push people outside their comfort zones. With cultivated competence and earned authority, they were able to help their colleagues overcome the types of fear and resistance that so often prevent effective reforms in American high schools.

Gee, I thought the thing was to threaten to fire teachers and completely demoralize the faculty!

The gazillionaires all claim that small schools and charter schools are The Answer. But apparently, they're not. Like everything else in education, it all comes down to curriculum.

English class is killing the essay

My parent's generation called them "themes." Students hate to write them. Teachers hate to read them. Brief expository pieces of writing on a subject usually specified by the teacher, set out in a strictly structured format, with all passion and color drained away to make way for rational "on the one hand--on the other hand" sort of blather that students have been taught to believe the teacher will like. No one will ever read them except the teacher, who regrets the forever-irretrievable 20 minutes of his life he spends reading and commenting on this (usually) drivel. Incidentally, a lot of this has been perpetuated by the standardized testing which requires working strictly to formula so as to be evaluated in an economically feasible fashion. (Essays on standardized tests are, we are told, graded in two minutes or less. This is what we are doing to writing in order to dance to the political music today.)

How to did such a great and noble art form get dragged down to this level? We don't define painting by what we did with acrylics in 2nd grade? Why is the word "essay" confined to this horrid exercise? My simple answer is that our students have never read great essays.

I discovered the form via Benchley, Thurber and Perelman. And while I don't imagine those writers will mean a lot to our students (well, maybe Thurber), but they do enjoy David Sedaris, who has the benefit of performing his works aloud very well (a la Benchley). As time went on I became interested in more serious practitioners of the form, such as Ian Frazier, E.B. White (pictured above), I.F. Stone, A.J. Liebling (who is perhaps more of a journalist), Joseph Mitchell and Lewis Thomas. In time I stumbled over Virginia Woolf (A Room of One's Own being a seminal feminist work), Emerson, Thoreau, Twain (I love his travel books), Orwell, Swift, DeTocqueville and Montaigne. (I confess I have never been able to really make my way through Montesquieu or Macauley, who are supposed to be the true giants.) An extensive collection of public domain essays can be found here.

I am a bit handicapped with many of the major 18th and 19th century essayists, as their given subject is literature itself, in which I am not as deeply read as the average writer of that era, plus I'm just not interested in reading about reading. (This is a peculiarity of writers. There are not, to my knowledge, a lot of music about music or paintings about paintings. Only writers can't resist the temptation to overthink it.)

Far more interesting to me is a Malcolm Gladwell, who writes about science and sociology or a Michael Lewis, who writes about two of the most popular subjects of the day, money and sports (he is author of the book The Blind Side).

Blogger Paul Graham, whose site I've commented on before, writes eloquently about the things called "essays" we had to write (and which I now have to read) for school, which students treat like bodily waste--to be gotten rid of as quickly as possible and never looked at; and the difference between those things and actual essays. He gives some tips and pointers on how to think about them and how to go about writing them, as in this central passage:

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called "essais." He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning "to try" and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don't know yet. And so you can't begin with a thesis, because you don't have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn't begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don't take a position and defend it. You notice a door that's ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what's inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That's why I write them.

In the things you write in school you are, in theory, merely explaining yourself to the reader. In a real essay you're writing for yourself. You're thinking out loud.

You can read the entire piece here.

This age of bloggers is, of course, a new golden age for the essay, or if not the essay, what The New Yorker called "a casual." 1 I have a few blogs I check in on regularly, and I encourage students to develop their own list. The great improvement of the internet is that one can not only comment, but the comments can develop into their own dialogue; a virtual salon that 18th-century belletrists could only envy.

We really should come up with another name of those things we call "essay questions" or the 5-paragraph essay that is required for standardized tests. I nominate the term squonkle, which, as far as I can tell, means nothing. I think that makes it eminently suitable.

I expect a 1000-word squonkle on this blog post by Wednesday start of class, no excuses.
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1 The term casual was used by Harold Ross, founding editor of The New Yorker, to refer to "fiction and humorous pieces of all kinds", and "indicated Ross's determination to give the magazine an offhand, chatty, informal quality". Thurber, James, The Years With Ross, 1959 ISBN 0-06-095971-1, pg. 13. - Wikipedia

Applying problem solving to...uh...solve problems

"Recall a time when you really loved something: a movie, song, an album or a book. You wholeheartedly recommend it to someone you really like. You anticipate that reaction, you wait for it. It came back, and the person hated it. That is the exact same state I spend every working day of the last six years. I teach high school math."
--Dan Meyer, March 6, 2010, addressing a TEDx. Dan teaches high school math outside of Santa Cruz, CA. In this brief 12-minute talk, he explores the intersection of math instruction, multimedia, and inquiry-based learning. His blog can be found here.



As I think I've mentioned. I don't teach math, but I think that understanding how math is taught and how it can be taught can be instructive to all teachers. Because it is a process about process. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, a math teacher cannot fall into the trap inherent in Social Studies, Science and sometimes in English, in which we become enraptured by our content and we start shoving the kids a big pile of "stuff", often referred to as "facts." Math, as a discipline, must always be a verb and not a noun.

At their best, Science teachers know this--that's why they have labs. Hopefully, they do not tell the students too much about how a given experiment should end up. (I can remember fudging results to match the prediction--don't blame me, it started with Gregor Mendel.)

In Language Arts, this is why I argue against diagramming sentences. It tells you a lot about what things are called and how to categorize them. It's a very useful tool for linguists studying syntax, especially in comparing languages or dialects. One teacher friend who advocates diagramming tells me the students love them. But that is not an argument in their favor. One thing students really like is questions for which there are certain and "right" answers. They hate uncertainty, ambiguity and personal interpretation. But that's the way the world is built.

And most importantly, I do not know any way to draw a line between skill in diagramming and improved writing. There may be a connection, but it has not been demonstrated to me. I believe the only way to teach writing is to (a) require a lot of it; (b) give a lot of feedback; (c) require rewriting. And the writing task must itself be authentic and have an intrinsic interest to the student. Exercises in literary analysis are lovely for college students of literature, but to induce facility in writing (if not love for it), there must be motivation.

My greatest music teacher was Lew Spratlan, not because of any information or wisdom he imparted. I took Composition with him and there was one simple, hard and fast rule of the class. "Come each day with a new piece of music to demonstrate, or don't come." We learned that the most important tool for writing music was the seat of the pants--that is, learning to apply that portion of the body to a chair in order to write. And write. And write.

When I taught general music, I made sure that students were making some kind of music at least two or three times a week--not just listening, or learning terminology or other non-functional facts. (I can't tell you how much commercial music instruction material tells you all about how many children Bach had, while telling you nothing about how he put music together.)

This corresponds with Mr. Meyer's example of waiting for the container to fill. Everyone wants to know how long that will take, even if they don't care the least about how to calculate the volume of an object. A more detailed explication of this approach to math instruction is Lockhart's Lament, which I stumbled across for obvious reasons.

This is hard, it's labor-intensive, and it means you won't "cover" as much "stuff." This runs counter to the politically-driven high-stakes testing system we have in place now. But this is what we teachers must juggle today. (I just hope the politicians who advocate these multiple-choice tests have got lots of jobs waiting for our students which involve taking multiple-choice tests. Because that system will not teach anyone to think.)

"'You can know the name of that bird in all languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird. So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing--that's what counts.'" -- Richard Feynman, quoting his father in WHAT DO YOU CARE WHAT OTHER PEOPLE THINK?

Writing lesson plan

Greetings to all my new Twitter followers, mostly thanks to my friend and former boss Eric Sheninger, who is one of the country's leading advocates of the use of Twitter and Web 2.0 in education.

I feel a bit guilty that I haven't posted in a long time, partly because of a career upheaval I've had; but that does not overturn my passion to treat my (relatively) new profession as professionally as I treated my old one. I'm still excited about what I do (and probably about what you do), and I have generated a lot of ideas I want to write about, but there have been other priorities. In the meantime, here's a quick lesson idea from a news note I saw today.

According to this news story, President Obama has 10 letters from ordinary Americans directed to him every day. Reportedly, the President reads them all and personally responds to three or four. Now of course, we are always urging our students to write to public officials, but in my heart of hearts I can't help wondering if this is a feckless task, an empty gesture towards ideals of representative democracy.

Now comes the President with an authentic kick in the pants. Every letter to him is automatically entered into a lottery to be read, not just by a 23-year-old West Wing intern, but by the top man himself AND to be answered personally by the President. I don't know about you, but for me this kicks up the stakes tremendously.

So why not challenge your students to write a letter to the President worth his personal attention? I suspect a preliminary discussion of topics plus specific lessons on tone, and, depending the grade level of the students a basic lesson or a reminder lesson on letter format. Moreover, the letters themselves can be displayed in your school or online--maybe your school forms a Ning for letters to people in power. Help them start the dialogue, uncover their passions and harness the power of the word to that passion.

Speaking of letters, I am crazy about a site called Letters of Note. These are letters with historic or cultural significance, shown both in facsimile and in transcript. A lot of them are not safe for classroom, so I would not invite a class to run amuck at the site, but there are a lot of goodies to be found there for thought, analysis, discussion and writing for both social studies and language arts literacy teachers. Here is a marvelous recent post of a letter from Harry Truman to an old friend, begun just before he learned he was to become president with a post-script added just after. Simple and powerful.

Today In The Computer Lab

Today you are going to be setting up a weblog, or blog, where you will be doing a lot of the writing you will be doing outside class this year. One of the exciting things about writing this way is that you can invite to people read what you write besides your teacher.

Once you get your page set up, you will select a prompt from either the Imagination Prompt Generator or Writer's Digest or this place. Or you can make one up yourself. Maybe you have a subject you are expert on--video games or guitars or vampire novels, or whatever floats your boat. Or you can write about website(s) you like--but be sure to include a link for that page where you discuss it.

You must be absolutely certain that I have the name and the URL for your blog page before the end of class today.