Book Review: Chomp

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There’s been a lot of interest in the book that has been sitting on my desk the past week or two. Carl Hiaasen is a hit with my sixth graders (and we read Flush as a class novel). When Chomp came in, they kids huddled around the desk, and each day, I have this one girl asking me, “Are you done yet?” (One other student could not wait and downloaded it to her Kindle). Others periodically came up and looked it over with eager eyes.

Yep. I am done, and just in time to pass it off for her to read on school vacation next week.

Chomp is very familiar terrain for Hiaasen fans, and that’s not a bad thing.

Set in the Everglades, with an environmental theme and plenty of humor, Chomp tells the story of a boy named Wahoo Cray (and his friend, Tuna) whose family of “animal wranglers” is hired to help film an episode of an adventure television show that goes completely whacky and out of control. The star of the television show (think of all of those wilderness programs) models himself as a Crocodile Dundee sort of character (complete with fake Australian accent), but only for the camera. His lack of street smarts with animals is the cause of much hijinks, and Hiaasen uses the opportunity to poke fun at so-called Reality Television.

The book begins with Wahoo’s father (his mother is in China, trying to earn money as a language teacher to pay their mortgage) getting a concussion after a lizard falls out of the tree and bonks him on the head. Tuna (a girl) joins up with Wahoo and his father because she is on the run from her father, who is violent and a drunk with a gun, and out to find her.

Mix all of those pieces and characters together with the wildness and unpredictability of the Everglades, and you get a novel that is fun to read. I still think that Flush is the better book. The pacing of Chomp felt uneven to me, and I didn’t connect with Wahoo as much as I did with Noah in Flush. But Hiaasen has his formula: a boy and a girl rising to the occasion to save animals or some environmental issue, while at the same time, mending some fissure of their families, with ample does of humor.

A nice little bonus in the book I got is a fake “magazine” in which Hiaason interviews the adventure show host in the aftermath of the adventure.  It’s a (excuse me here as I reference Hiassen one more time) hoot to read.

Peace (in the ‘glades),
Kevin

 

Ode to Sliderule Angst

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Bud Hunt put up an image of a sliderule this morning, asking us to write a poem. (It’s part of his poem-a-day visual inspiration project). I know my kids have trouble with rulers (!!!), never mind a sliderule. So, this humorous take is told from a student’s perspective because I had this visual of a kid looking for places to plug in their headphones as they did some math problems.

Batteries won’t work in this analog computer
you placed in my hands today
and I can’t find the port to plug in my headphones
so what music am I supposed to play
while I work out that problem you put on the board
on trigonometry, logarithms and roots?
I’m completely befuddled by this ruler-kind-of-thing –
The device refuses to boot.

The podcast of the poem is here.

 

Peace (in the rule),
Kevin

Why Is Facebook So Ugly?

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duke fb
I’ve had Facebook on my mind for a few days now, I’m sad to say. It began with some incidents with my students at school, but then shifted when my band –Duke Rushmore – launched our own site on the social network as a way to let friends and fans (!) know when and where we are playing in the coming months. Another bandmate is in charge of our FB page (I am the webmaster of our Duke Rushmore website). And then, the other day, I was working on our Western Massachusetts Writing Project Facebook site, too.

You should know that I am no fan of Facebook for a variety of reasons (mostly on privacy issues). Now, after spending more time there, I am even less of a fan. Is there anyone at Facebook who knows a thing about design or what? I have come away with the feeling that Facebook has to be one of the ugliest sites on the Internet (I know this isn’t true but …) and is slowly coming to resemble MySpace with its ads, and its clutter, and more (and may very well someday hit the trash heap like MySpace.)

Given the huge cash flow at the company, why aren’t they investing in some designers? I look at a typical FB page and find it difficult to navigate, get quickly tired of that standard blue, and my eyes don’t know where to even begin to focus to find what I want to find. It’s a mess. This year, I have been teaching a lot about design principles with my sixth graders and it seems to me that if they were in charge, they would come up with something cleaner and easier to use/read than what Zuckerberg and company have put out there for the world.

Why don’t people revolt? Seriously. Why, in this day and age, don’t people demand excellence in design when it comes to the web? It’s not like good design is difficult to do. (OK, so people don’t revolt because FB has momentum, and now comfort, and people will put with bad design for ease of use.)

What I realize is that Facebook knows all of this (of course they do) but doesn’t give a damn. They see the money flowing and why change a thing (the timeline design? ugly. The new banner picture? very ugly. Horrible, in fact) when millions of people are content to write their lives onto an ugly page that is difficult to manage (I am still trying to figure out how to make our WMWP Facebook page public to the world outside of Facebook. I spent a lot of time yesterday trying … and failing, and thinking, what the heck … this should be easy).

I won’t argue with my band against Facebook, either. It still is a way to get folks to follow us to our shows. But I don’t have to like it.

Peace (with good design),
Kevin

 

 

Graphic Book Review: Smile

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I loved Smile. This graphic novel by Raina Telgemeier is so nicely done that it’s hard to know where to begin. The non-fictional story of Raina herself as a sixth grader, whose teeth are are severely damaged in a running accident, unfolds at a perfect pace and through her artwork and storytelling, we come to care for Raina as she dives into adolescence marked by dental surgery.

Of course, Smile is more than that.

It’s also the story of a girl trying to fit in, trying to make sense of shifting friendships, dealing with the pain of periodic surgery, surviving an earthquake, and worrying all the time of how her looks (with braces, and with fake teeth, and more) might make her so different that she will never be accepted as a regular kid. Oh, and throw in a mad crush on an older boy who barely notices her, and you have a “coming of age” graphic novel that is very touching and compassionate.

What works so well is Telgemeier’s writing and art, as they come together with wisdom and lead us in the end not to some dramatic moment or plot twist, but instead, to the understanding that our path through life takes us in many directions, and leads us towards many friendships (some that last, some that don’t), and we need to keep our head up, stay positive, and smile.

I can’t wait to put Smile into the hands of some of my girl readers. They are going to love it.

Peace (with a big fat grin),
Kevin

PS — Smile began as a serial webcomic by Telgemeier and it is still available online. I prefer the book format.

PSS — On a personal note, my youngest son fell on some rocks in Maine two years ago and we are still dealing with the dental aftermath of that accident. The story here connected with our experience, even though he is still quite young. It was interesting, though, how Raina’s story resonated with ours. And she came out smiling. He has, too. (but it has cost us a pretty penny and will continue, too.)

Research Skills and the PARCC Assessment

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Parcc ELA Content Frameworks
PARCC Assessment Model

 

Each week, I meet with my grade level colleagues for a Community of Practice meeting. Yesterday, they asked me to bring some information about the PARCC assessment now under development as it pertains to our sixth grade. They know I have been diving into the Common Core, PARCC and all that to get a handle on the direction our state is going (moving into full implementation of Common Core and PARCC looms on the horizon). We, as a team want to be ready, knowing that in two years our entire testing system is going to likely change.

I shared the two images above with them. These come from the PARCC site (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers), and the assessment criteria and system is still in draft stage at this point. But there is enough of what is being talked about being made public now to understand the general shifts that are surely coming our way, and soon. For us, we have been using our COP time this year and some of last year to begin talking about how to teach literacy skills in the content areas, and certainly, we have beefed up writing assignments and instruction in ELA, Social Studies and Science. We’re sharing and developing common rubrics and communicating more about assignments that touch on the skills, and how to best coordinate those activities together. (We could still do more, though).

As we perused the PARCC materials, it became clear to all of us that we will need to be doing a lot around teaching critical research skills to our students. We know this is a weak area for us.  And in talking to other teachers and working in other districts, this seems to be a common area of weakness.

We’re lucky in that our librarian/media specialist does work with our students around issues of research and citation, but her curriculum and lessons are fairly isolated activities. In other words, her unit is not really tied to an authentic assignment in the sixth grade classroom. I’ll be doing a bigger push this spring in ELA classes around research strategies, the Internet as a source, and citation as part of an environmental essay/multimedia project that brings together a lot of components from the entire year around writing. In the past, I have touched on these issues of research but focused mostly on the writing.

With PARCC and the Common Core, research is clearly a big part of the learning, and students must use what they have found to create a powerful argument on a topic. If you look at the Assessment Chart, you can see that a large project is the main assessment of skills under PARCC. Research and argument is at the heart of the expectations, as far as I can tell.

Talking with my colleagues made it clear we all have some work to do in this area. I think we are up for the challenge even as we are wary of the shifts in the political winds. We see the benefits of some of the changes — research is important; argumentative writing is powerful; literacy in all content area classes is crucial; etc. — yet we remain uncertain of where it will all shake out.

Peace (in the research),
Kevin

The ‘Draw a Stickman’ Interactive Activities

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If you have an interactive board, use these two stories at Draw A Stickman (the second episode is fairly new) to get kids up at the board, drawing and talking about the stories that unfold. It’s a great activity, and you will have a class of fully engaged students, for sure. I’ve used the sites to talk about protagonist and antagonist, foreshadowing and story arc. I guess there are Apps, too (and a student said it had a different ending) of the activity.

stickman
Go to the site and start creating!

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

 

Slice of Life: That Ol’ Ball Game

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It’s funny. One theme that DID not come up in my Slice of Life challenge with Two Writing Teachers as a topic last month was youth baseball, which has been a consistent topic to write about over the last few years as I help one or more of my sons’ Little League baseball teams, and all that begins in March. I usually write about the evaluation day, and then the team lottery, and more. But this year, I got sidetracked with other topics.

Last night, our team came together for the very first practice of the year. It was a chilly but mostly sunny evening, and after introductions and a little team history (we were the “the little team that could” last year when a mediocre regular season turned into one of those magical runs in the playoffs that landed us in the championship game that went into an unprecedented extra innings — we finally lost, but what a game!).

It’s too early say how this team will come together this season but the older kids (including my son) are anxious to get things going (he and I have been throwing a ball around for weeks now) and already began to emerge last  night as leaders with the younger kids, who are nervous about moving up to this level with faster pitching and quicker bats. We spent much of the night allowing them all a chance to bat, and hit, and have fun.

Our head coach gave out a clear message: “We’re going to work on skills so you can improve your game but we’re going to have fun. And if you feel like we’re not having fun, you need to let me know so us coaches can make some changes.” And he is serious. Serious about fun. We’ll see how it goes. All I know is that the crack of the bats and the pounding of the ball in the gloves is as much a signal of Spring as those flowers trying to work their way up to the sun.

Peace (on the field),
Kevin

 

Writing a Poem

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Inspired (again) by Bud the Teacher:

Take wing –
Take heed –
Find the wind that leads you forward –
Take care –
Take stock –
Your journey ahead is marked by what it is you have left behind you after all this time –
Protection –
Hardly worn yet battered by the breezes, shaken yet never torn from where it stood among the trees –
You emerged anew as a child born again –
Take flight –
Take care –
Be gone now and follow the slow arc of the Earth towards your destination-
Take wing –
Farewell!

And the podcast version:

 

Peace (in the poems),
Kevin

 

A Small Gift of Post-it Poetry

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Post a Poem

I began class the other day by telling my students that I was going to be giving them a gift. There was an excited murmur. What was it? Pencils? Candy? Nope. Poetry. As I wrote a few weeks ago, I ordered a book from Scholastic called Post This Poem that is a collection of poems and pieces of poems on sticky note paper. I had been putting the poems up in the hallway trophy case, as a secret poetry project for our wing of the school, but now decided that since the art teacher needed the display case and since I had many poems left, I would give the rest of the poems away to my sixth graders.

I went through the room, passing out poems to every student. It may not have been pencils or candy (which we don’t give out anyway), but they were pretty excited about getting a poem (some were excited because of the color paper but you take excitement where you can get it, right?). “What’d you get?” they were asking. I gave them a few minutes to peruse the poems, and then I asked, “Anyone want to read theirs?”

I was expecting maybe one or two students to volunteer. I was therefore pleasantly surprised as more than three-quarters of each of my classes wanted to read their poems out loud. I also shared poems from the collection. They stumbled on some difficult vocabulary, and the Olde English in some of the poems tied their tongues up knots, and the lines and stanzas didn’t always flow the way it would with practice. Still, that didn’t matter. Wordsworth, Dickinson, Whitman, Rossetti, Tennyson and more joined us in the room that day as they read the words, and the rest of us listened, silently, to some of the most famous poems in the English canon.

It was a nice way to wrap up our poetry unit, and it was one of those lessons that started as a spur of the moment — “Let’s get rid of these poems” — and maybe touched a few students with the poetry bug.

Peace (in the poems),
Kevin

PS — I still have not had any luck finding a link to the Post This Poem book online. I’ll need to grab the IBSN number off of it.

Dear Librarian (at my son’s school): Remember the Books

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Dear librarian of my son’s school,

First of all, I want to thank you for being a librarian. I can’t think of a more important job. Your task is to place the right book in the right hands of the right child at the right moment, and when hundreds of kids are coming through your doors every week, I am in awe of your profession’s charge to reach every child. I also know that you need to be keeping track of so many new books each year, so that you are on top of the latest works of literature. And now, on top of all that, we are expecting you to be proficient media and technology specialists. Your role is constantly shifting. That’s a lot to ask of anyone. But librarians are nothing if not adaptable, and wise. I admire what you do.

I know that you are new to my son’s school this year, and therefore, you have to carve our your identity as the librarian. The last person in that library, an aide who filled in as librarian, did her best for many years and we are thankful for her years behind the desk. At least, the library was open for children. We didn’t necessarily like that she was so strict with our children around the books they could take out. We still don’t understand the day our niece came home and told us that when she (a second grader) tried to check out a fifth-grade level book that she really wanted to read, she was denied because it was not a “second grade book.” I have trouble getting my head around that, don’t you?

So, we have high hopes for you. You are young and energetic, and we like that you are offering after-school enrichment programs. You connected with the kids right from the start, it seems. Our son would come home, talking excitedly about going to the library. But we began to notice something strange.

He never had a single book in backpack.

All last year, after every library period, he would have a book for the week. He’d pull it out and we would read it together. Sometimes it was something new; Sometimes, it was an old classic. But he always had a book after going to library. This year, no books. His backpack is empty on library day. Instead, he has regaled us with talks of what he has been doing with the computer while in the library. He’s made little animated movies, created slideshows, played plenty of online games and more. All very nice.

But … no books.

We were hanging out with some other parents the other day and one of them noted that her child told them (and we will take this story for what it is and consider its source) that you told their class that if they could not behave themselves, they would not be allowed to use the computers and instead, they would have to spend their library time with books. “As if that is a punishment,” this mom said, shaking her head in exasperation. “If the punishment is quietly reading a story, then bring it on!”

I think I get what is going on. The push for technology in our schools (which is a priority of your principal) and the lack of expertise among your staff (which we know all too well … this child is our third) has you front and center with Animoto, Glogster and Go Animate. Sure, the kids are loving it. I get it.

But, please, in the hype to be teaching 21st Century Skills, don’t forget the power of the book. Don’t forget the quiet moments of story. Don’t forget the magic that can truly happen when the right book finds the right hands, and touches the right heart. You won’t find a bigger advocate for technology skills than me, but I want my son to keep loving books, too, and not just the ones that flash across the screen. I want his fingers and eyes and brain to move across the page, to connect an author’s ideas to his own experiences. I’m not ready to give up paper for bytes.

And it’s not just for my own child that I write. Here, in our home, we immerse our children in books and writing. You should see the stacks of books that we bring home from the city library. You should see the piles of books in our living room. As a librarian, you’d be very happy. No, what I worry about are those children who come from homes that are not immersed in literacy. Those children, and those families, need you more than ever. They need to have the love of reading and books instilled in them. You can make a difference in their lives just by allowing them time to read, and to choose what to read, and to help them navigate that experience.

Please, turn off the screens and open up a few books with the children of the school. There’s nothing more important for you to do than that.

Sincerely,

Kevin