We FINALLY began reading today.

I also assigned homework - the kids asked for 20 points for doing it. Seemed reasonable. I like letting them choose the points they get for their work. It's a vocab worksheet. We'll see how this comes out.

I need to give them progress reports so they know what their current grades are - this will also let them see how the points they get during the week affect their grade. Hopefully that will make it real and help them feel like they can control their grade.

Most kids haven't brought in binders. I have several extras so I think I'll just give them to the kids and not give them points.

The reading was interesting - the kids who read were very engaged and the kids who didn't read weren't. I guess that's not surprising. I need to find a way for the other kids to be engaged. I think maybe they should be waiting for answers to the short questions. They can have those sheets and listen for when they hear the answer - then all the kids will get points based on that. You know, peer pressure.

I also asked them to end with character maps so we'd have a sense of who we are reading about, their relations to other characters, and some of their personality traits.

All the kids read well - a few unfamiliar vocab words, not pausing sufficiently at commas, and one student had difficulty with words that break across the line.

Oh, and most every student read their do now out loud. That was fantastic. We need more of this.

Tomorrow:
do now
binders for all
short answer questions for non-readers
continuing character maps
finish reading act one scene one
questions and predictions for next week of reading.

english class

today I had plans to finish the apartment collages and vocab.
half the class wasn't there and there was some rumor that we were supposed to be at an assembly. we walked over and were at the wrong place. it was embarrassing because they made a whole big deal about how we weren't supposed to be there -- so the kids were singled out as being academy and soda. we were all made to feel stupid.

back in the classroom we'd lost one kid - who was late anyhow - i marked him as cut. I'll call his mom and let her know.

LT seemed very angry and upset - but the reading magazines and finishing her art project seemed to calm her.

it was a quiet day... so many kids missing. also a really nice day. i turned off the lights and used the window to create a nicer atmosphere. every one worked and chatted to friends - no one was yelling across the room. nancy came and helped out, brought glue sticks, and gave resource secrets away - like who here has what paper, dividers, markers, etc.

i also started w the free write being an interesting question and had people sit apart - everyone wrote! i will continue with this approach for solo work.

honeymoon

The honeymoon is short with a new class. It's established, i'm nice, but not too strict. What that does is students focus when i ask them to, but they don't focus until i ask them to.

things to note: for the do now i asked what values do you think people in the 1950s held based on the videos we watched. people said they didn't know what i meant. that blows my mind. are they playing with me?

conclusion: i will try creative writing prompts for the do nows. the topic oriented stuff is too dry and boring. if they're not engaged in the first couple of minutes it's a recipe for distater.

other observations: things as basic as a collage of the apartment Raisin in the Sun takes place in should be broken down into small steps and demonstrated. I am not clear enough in my instructions - plus I needed to show them an example of what i wanted.

i think i may resort to 2 seating schemes - focus scheme - with desks between all students and silence. collaboration scheme where students can sit near friends or work together on projects as long as they keep working.

I will demonstrate these in class and we can practice them. I need to be more methodical and it's just not my way -- i could use lessons in being a drill seargent.

Problem Student (teacher) Post #1

I've been blessed with the greatest students. Even when I guest taught my colleague's English class, the students were fantastic. I know 10th grade is a hard year; we refer to it as the lost year in my Media department. It's the year where the hormones seem to go completely haywire, grades don't seem to matter, and the peer pressure reaches its peak. On my guest teaching, I tried to group the kids for an activiy based on random groups and there was a coup. Some kids were huddled in the corner shaking all over while others yelled at me, "we work better with our friends, you know!" In the end, I let them work with their friends.

In my creative writing class I have a student, going on two years now, who struggles with her creative writing. She recently handed in something that I looked at and felt as though I have failed her. After two years of a creative writing class, shouldn't I see more improvement? Is it that she's lazy, and just appears to be a hard-worker? Have I not given her enough feedback, enough customized attention or constructive instruction? The answer, I suspect, is that I simply don't know what to do with her.

The latest assignment is a 5 - 8 page short story. We are writing reverse dramas, that is, a short story with a dramatic twist at the end. Her story doesn't have a twist. There is no "showing," it's an entirely "told" story, "Michelle and Brian talked on the phone for an hour. Then Michelle went to bed." I asked her, "What did they talk on the phone about?" She gave me that familiar smile (the one that either means she doesn't know what I'm talking about or she's uncomfortable, she's not easy to read), and said, "maybe... um... I'll have to think about it." Ugh.

I gave her the story back the other day. I had a plan. I made sure the rest of the class was otherwise occupied, I had an hour I could focus entirely on her, and we went through the story sentence by sentence. We talked about showing and not telling - for the 1000th time. We discussed the effect of each sentence. She edited sentences to make them mean what she wanted them to say. In retrospect, it really seemed that she needed my encouragement to give her the confidence to rewrite her sentences, to take a risky leap at the complexities in meaning she was after, acknowledging that she didn't know how to craft the words to convey the meaning. Using my Nelson-English Training, I didn't give her the answers, I just gently pointed a little more this way or that until she could find her own path.

And then she said this: "Can I rewrite this in the first person using dialogue?"

After I picked myself back up off the floor, brushed myself off all casually, I nonchalantly whispered, "that is a great idea!"

Then she mused, "but won't it be boring if I just keep writing, 'she said, ...' and 'he said...'"

So I grabbed a book of short stories off the shelf and she made a list of alternatives that she liked. She said she'd finish it over the weekend.

I CANNOT WAIT to read what she wrote.

This is exactly the type of problem I hope to be able to recognize much sooner than after 2 years - how to help a student, who clearly doesn't read for pleasure, how to write. What does it mean for me as a teacher when a student says, "I can see what I want to say in my mind, I just can't seem to get it down on paper?" I know a lot of people say that you can't teach writing. I'm not sure where I come down on that argument – it's too soon for me to draw any conclusions. But given the space to write and some appropriate focused attention, a young woman can teach herself a lot and educate me in the meantime.

participation peer pressure

I used to give points for participation, but in the English class I just guest taught, I scratched it in light of two things – one the grade pollution discussion we just had in class, and two, the Virginia Tech incident. I decided I need to go back and work some things through before I go back to giving points for participation. Briefly explained: in the English classroom I was teaching in for 3 weeks, there are the two rows to the right occupied by the "popular kids." They are one large crew, they're somewhat unruly – it was difficult to get them to stop chatting and passing notes to each other, if they weren't applying make-up and flirting. However, they are smart (if not smart-asses) and participated meaningfully. In fact, they dominated the discussions. The next two rows to the left were kids who were not in the popular clique. These students participated occasionally. It was a mixed group of students some of whom wrote the best stuff I read in the class. Lastly, there was the far left row. This row was occupied by one French American student and three Chinese/Chinese American students and no one in that row participated in discussions. I chalk the participation patterns up to popularity and comfort more than a comment on the student's engagement in the material. The strength of the written work in the class did not bear out a correlation between participation with subject matter engagement, analytic ability, or sheer writing talent.

One of the things that have influenced this is something I read regarding the shooter in the Virginia Tech incident. When he read aloud in his English class (undoubtedly he was required to do so), classmates ridiculed his accent and told him to go back to China. I wondered when I read this, where were the adults in all of the bullying he edured? I have a zero tolerance policy for bullying in the classroom, but even with my thin skin (I was subjected to a lot of humiliating bullying in my early adolescence), I know that things slip by me. Additionally, much bullying takes place on a subtle psychological level, and there is often no need for spoken words, a simple look or smirk between students can be enough to reinforce an insecure student's position at the bottom of the social pecking order. The fear and damage from ridicule is so profound I can't force kids to share in front of their peers when they might be scared to death of being laughed at or scrutinized by the "popular kids." So for now, I will not punish or reward participation.

10th Grade Honors English

've taught a colleague's class for a couple of weeks. I wanted to do a unit on writing. Writing something other than the 5-paragraph essay. So I decided we'd do a letter to the editor type assignment. I have worked ridiculously hard to create materials for this unit since I built the entire thing from scratch. We looked at advertising. The idea was to find something about which they would have a lot to say without having to spend a lot of time on learning a new text. That part of the plan worked pretty well. I had a collection of fantastic and controversial ads, the students were willing to talk and had a lot to say.

The teaching writing part I'm not sure was as successful. I did do a modeling exercise and it seemed to help the students figure out what I wanted from them. I need them to edit their letters one more time - and so I think I'll give them a sample of a letter that I write that they can model. I've decided that modeling is the best way to teach a particular skill. Ever. On the other hand, contrary to what some of our recent readings (in my C&I class) claim – that all writing should be authentic – so that students buy in to the work… students are so used to writing essays, that asking them to write a letter to the editor seemed far less authentic than just writing an academic essay for a teacher.

Case in point: this morning one of the students came in and asked the Mr. Markwith when they would be back to doing English. He said, "you are doing English." But it made me think about Nelson's question on the first day of my C & I class, "what does it mean to do English." Obviously, according to this kid, media literacy and letter writing doesn't cut it. If it were my class - maybe I'd have a dialogue in the first place about why we do what we do in an English class. But instead, I just continued to set up the projector feeling slightly bad about boring the students so much that they were eager to do Othello instead.

Today's slide show was a collection of great spoof ads (the best of them came from Adbuster's website). The students seemed to really engage with them. I think parody is a great way to understand a text. Since parody operates on surprising the reader's expectations, comprehension begins with identifying those expectations. This is a good place to start in discussing reading a text – even if that text is an ad. After we looked at the ads and pointed out the way they operated, we went to the lab (turns out the school has an amazing lab with fast computers and Photoshop installed) where each student created a parody ad of their own. They have tomorrow to complete them. And then Thursday we'll show them as a class.

Their final assignment will be to edit - one more time - their letters to the editor. For extra credit they can bring them in to class in a stamped addressed envelope. There is a massive attrition rate with each assignment. I'm not hounding them for their work. Mr. Markwith has reminded them that the assignments will count in his grade book. But short of that, I guess a part of me just feels, "it's not my class." The measure of success will be in Markwith's next 5-paragraph essay assignment, where we will hope to see students playing with their language just a little bit. As a vestige of the writing they did on this unit – developing a strong voice and taking a position in a piece of writing. If his next round of 5-paragraph essays are just a little less boring, we'll have succeeded.

Grades and the Great Psyche-out

Okay I think I get the real reason we need to grade, and grade tough. Taco Fighter Talk was writing about a phenomenon in his class whereby "A" students were getting the "A" too easily on their written work. Therefore, they slacked. And "D" students were getting the "A" or "B" for their writing, so the "A" students – taking offense – slacked even further. There is more to the story, a happy ending, even. But for my purposes, this out-of-context excerpt is all I want to address.

Grades are feedback for the student. It follows that I should be using grades to motivate my students to take my class seriously, do their work, and respect me as a teacher. Right? I mean, when it comes to grades colleges care, and parents care, and future students' parents care, as do administrators, and "President" Bush. He cares too. But I don't really care that all those people care. I see grades as a system that serves only the privileged students (it helps him/her get into Stanford and Yale) and hurts the underserved students (they get passed from school year to school year irregardless of their ability to achieve).

[Warning: digression]

I might have a student who is whining and complaining about the assignment I have given them (spend your Wednesday afternoons from 1 - 3 making a short film about whatever you want - here are some cool props - have fun). Then amidst their whining they might have the audacity to ask, "What is the minimum I can do to get a good grade?" I tell them: "You can have an A. You don't even have to do the assignment - you see, I don't care. I'll gladly give you the A if that's all you want. In fact, you don't even have to bother wasting my time by coming to my class. It doesn't matter to me if I give you an A - you're the one who will miss out on the experience, who won't have anything to show for your time, who will know that you got an A in spite of being lazy and not doing the work."

Jack's a master as the psyche-out. This is a maneuver that's always great to pull out of your sleeve while playing Pictionary (it's especially effective after everyone has been shit-talking everyone else and is barely sober enough to hold a pencil). When a team doesn't really deserve to win a given round - say it was questionable that they got the answer before the sand ran out of the hourglass - you let them have it. Then in the event that they win the game you simply say, "yeah, well of course you won, we let you win that turn." This has two effects. One, if they've not experienced the psyche-out before, their win will be tarnished, and a tarnished win is no win at all. The second effect is for those who have had the psyche-out pulled on them in the past (every member of my family), they simply refuse to take a benevolent acquiescence when a turn is in dispute. They know it only leads to a tarnished win. And no one wants that.

So, in the tradition of the Murgisteads, I psyche-em-out. And it always has the desired effect. The student will start to sputter, "that's not what I meant, of course I want to come to class." It's at this point that they think that it's not that I want them to come to class, it's that I want them to want to come to class, right? Follow me here?

[End digression]

Anyhow, as strongly conflicted I am about grading I do feel as strongly committed to not assigning grades to the quality of the students' writing. I have to agree with the foundation of the argument by David Narter in Teacher as Machine: The Cost of Objectivity, "Our creative and humanistic goals as English teachers are in direct conflict with pure objectivism." As the audience of the student writing, we are bound to give them feedback and guidance towards improving their writing. This is in conflict with the judgmental tradition grading for quality.

We are forced to admit that grading, in particular quantifying the quality of a piece of student writing, is anything but objective. So why not just refuse to do it? Give them a grade for doing the work. Create a rubric that reflects objective requirements such as number of pages (better yet, words - teach them how to use word count), a cover sheet, typed, or whatever other presentation requirements you feel are important to the assignment. Bibliographies are either right or wrong. The format for a business letter, likewise either has the recipient's address left justified or it doesn't.

If our students' persuasive essays aren't demonstrating that the students have mastered the level of proficiency consistent with the unit's set out objectives, don't move on to the next unit. Give them feedback, assess what isn't working, do more essays, find new ways to teach that skill.

Why must we accept that only the top 10% will have mastered it (that's an A, folks) and that the average student's paper will be worth a C? Students must know how to write effectively to pass their stupid little tests, to placate that stupid little president and his stupid little initiative (I believe he calls it, No Child Left Unmolested, or something to that effect). More crucially, they need to be able to write beyond the seventh grade level when they are about to graduate from twelfth grade. Honestly, I find the acceptable twelfth grade writing deplorable and blame only the educational system that has completely failed these children. And guess what, their teachers pass them on from year to year, lying to them that their work is acceptable. The effect is a weeding them out of competition for quality higher education. They'll go to college, if they go to college, and spend two years learning how to write. They might not even notice how the system failed them because the majority of their peers will all be in the same situation.

How does this resolve the problem that Taco Fighter Talk encountered? That without tough grading (is this tough love?) students won't do their best? Without giving kids who can't write failing grades, they'll simply be handed off to the next year's teachers? Have I contradicted myself? On the one hand, I don't want to grade on quality, but on the other hand, what can force a students hand in doing the difficult work of learning to write if not the threat of bad grades? I will leave these questions for all my smart readers (you know the ones in my imaginary audience) to answer. See the comments link below? Click on it…