I saw this in my RSS feed yesterday from friend Larry Ferlazzo. It’s a writing activity perfectly suited to Twitter in which teachers are asked to write a six word essay that captures the essence of teaching. If you are on Twitter, use the #6wordessay hashtag. Larry is collecting some of the responses via Storify. The whole project evolved from a project that Michelle Rhee is doing with young people.
Here is what I came up with:
What’s yours?
Peace (in the mini-essay),
Kevin
I’m a sucker for collections of essays, and Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan fit the bill. I’ve come across him as a writer here and there in magazines, and I should have been paying more attention. His writing is lively, his viewpoint is slightly off-kilter, and his topics are unusual in a way that draws you in. From examining the town where Axl Rose grew up to mulling over how his house was used as the setting for a television show (One Tree Hill) to a fabricated essay about a fake professor who believes that animals on the planet are in revolt against mankind, Sullivan lays the storytelling on thick with insight and humor.
I appreciated the focus around music for a lot of the essays, too. Along with the piece of erratic Rose (the GnR singer), the book includes insightful essays about the originators of Deep South Blues who have been mostly forgotten by time, insights into the impact of Michael Jackson on pop culture, an interview with Jamaican reggae pioneer Bunny Wailer, and the opening piece in this collection in which he travels to a Christian Rock festival. Sullivan immerses himself and the reader into this these stories, using rich language, anecdotes and personal stories.
John Jeremiah Sullivan is one of those writers who sees the essay form in a creative way. You won’t be disappointed in the stories he weaves here in Pulphead.
Peace (in the pulp),
Kevin
From The Springfield Republican
Before I was a teacher, I was a newspaper reporter. It seems like a lifetime ago, that world of journalism, but every now and then, the past peeps out at me. Recently, the art teacher at my school handed me a photocopied newspaper article and told me to look at the story that focused on our school’s art program. She pointed to the reporter’s name. It was me.
To be honest, I don’t remember writing the article. I was often writing two, sometimes three, news articles each day, and my memory of most of the specific stories are a blur. But I do remember when I briefly was the reporter covering the town in which my school is located. The community was much smaller then and has grown considerably. I remember scratching around for news. I often went to the schools to focus in on students (one of the reasons I became a teacher was that I was inspired by the work I was seeing in classroom when I was an education reporter).
It’s interesting to find myself drawn back to that chapter in my life. I may not remember the story I wrote, or the kids I focused on, but it is fascinating to think of the connections that are drawn between that life and this life. The newspaper article is like a little echo of those times when I was a writer, every single day.
Peace (in the news from the past),
Kevin
You know how sometimes one topic suddenly veers off into this completely separate tangent in the classroom, and you just have to go with it for a while? We are nearing the end of reading The Watsons Go to Birmingham, and there is a scene where the main character almost dies in a whirlpool (only to be saved by a vision of his younger sister and the rescue by his older brother). I just casually asked if anyone had ever had a brush with water that they remembered.
Hands shot up. You would think I was in the room with near-ghosts waiting to tell their stories of how a river, or a pool, or the ocean had tried to grab life away from them. We had stories of riptides, and currents, and scary pool incidents. While it was interesting to hear all of the narratives, it also reminded me of how dangerous water can be.
Finally, after almost 20 minutes of this kind of storytelling, one of the students looked at my co-teacher and I and asked: What about you?
My colleague told a story of how he almost drowned in his pool when he came up for air and sucked in a mouth of clorine, and couldn’t breathe. I related the story of how I slipped under the ice in the river and how my older brother saved me by yanking me onto shore (just like the character in Watsons, I realized).
One year, during 24-Comic, I wrote a graphic story of those events.
I didn’t mind the way our conversations moved around, away from the topic, because those stories demonstrated the power of memory (and possibly, the failure of memory, too, as no doubt some of the stories were exaggerated a bit), and you can be sure that every student connected with the character in Watsons.
Peace (in the moment),
Kevin
One of the all-time classic read-alouds for elementary students has to be Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIHM, and you know, it stands up to the test of time. I remember hearing it and I still read it (to my own children, anyway, and all three have loved it). The sequel — Racso and the Rats of NIHM — is by the original author’s daughter (Jane Leslie Conly), and she picks up the energy and interest of the original without missing much of a beat.
In this novel, Timothy the mouse meets a new rat, Racso, as he is heading to school in Thorn Valley, where the rats relocated their colony in the first book. Racso is a city mouse, with a connection to the rats that only comes out later. The book circles around the ways that humans impact the environment — in this case, through the construction of a large dam that will flood the entire valley for a recreational area (and toss in some political corruption, too). Racso is determined to become a “hero,” and joins a group of rats who come up with ingenious plan to destroy the dam on its opening day.
How? They learn how to program computers and become rodent hackers. Really.
These super-smart rats teach themselves computer programming and then hack into the dam’s main computer, sabotage the dam on the opening day and hope that the damage will be so severe that the humans will give up and leave the valley alone. In the book, that does happen. In real life, that would never happen. (reader sarcasm alert)
The story moves along at a good pace, and the smart rats are always interesting to view. Casting humans as the antagonists makes a lot of sense (even my son asked why people would want to harm animals and added “I don’t really like humans right now.”) Racso is an interesting character (with a backstory about his name, which is not Rasco but Racso, which took me about a third of the book to correct, and then my son demanded that the character be called Rasco … until we learn more about his name) who evolves from being being a selfish, self-centered rat to a creature willing to sacrifice for the greater good of others.
And now, we are on to the third and last in the series: RT, Margaret and the Rats of NIHM. This is one (also by the author’s daughter) that I have never read before, so I am not sure what to expect when little kids are rescued by the rat colony and come to live with them in Thorn Valley. It seems like that might be pushing the narrative a bit too much but you never know.
Peace (in the valley),
Kevin
Our game design website, in which we examine how we used game design in conjunction with writing and science, has a lot of videos embedded in it, as we talked with our students and us teachers about what we were doing, as we were doing it. Our goal was to capture the project in the moment, and then use those videos to share out resources.
A few teachers said they were having trouble accessing the videos (hosted at Vimeo) in their schools. This might be a firewall issue or a Flash issue. I am not sure. But what I did was uploaded the videos onto YouTube and created a playlist for sharing out the videos in that format. There more context within our website resource, I think, but the videos (particularly those of the students) might be valuable for teachers considering game design as a project in the classroom.
Go to the Game Design Project Playlist.
Peace (in the design),
Kevin
It’s no secret that the Common Core curriculum is going to be influencing states, whether or not they come to adopt it as the framework for curriculum development. My state is part of that initial push around the Common Core, and so I am constantly on the lookout for resources that will help inform the ways I can make some shifts, particularly around the idea of content-area reading skills. Subjects Matter: Every Teacher’s Guide to Content-Area Reading is another one of those valuable books that provides some scaffolding on teaching reading with an emphasis on science, social studies and math.
While authors Harvey Daniels and Steven Zemelman highlight strategies that can work with any kind of reading, their showcasing of about two dozen strategies and lesson plans around encouraging young readers in the maze of pulling apart of facts and data and non-fiction information from dense texts and textbooks provides a strong focus for teachers who may be used to teaching mostly fiction (ELA teachers) or not teaching specific reading skills at all (content-area teachers).
Chapters on how to read a textbook (something we teachers often take for granted in our students but our students often flounder with), expanding a class library beyond the traditional textbook, understanding the emerging critical thinking skills of middle and high school students, and building a community of learners are all ways in which Subjects Matter approaches the topic of reading. I also enjoyed the long list of book recommendations for middle and high school students that are grouped according to content areas, and there is a wide variety on the list — from novels to non-fiction books to graphic novels.
The book also includes two interesting sections at the very end: a list of the research around reading that has informed the book’s premises and testimonials from students about their reading lives. These “voices” from students are worth the read, as they talk about the frustrations they often feel in most classrooms around reading content area texts, and how some doors were finally opened.
The authors also provide plenty of charts, including this one that spells out some strategies that teachers should consider around the kinds of reading that students should be doing.
MORE-LESS CHART
More:
- real books
- teaching of reading
- student choice of reading
- in-class reading
- workshops and book clubs
- reading as a community activity
- reading lots of books
- reading for enjoyment
- reading as a life activity
Less:
- textbooks
- assigned reading
- reading only “the classics”
- take-home assignments
- whole-class discussions
- reading as individual activity
- many weeks on a single book
- struggling through hard books
- reading as a school activity
I have a lot to think about when it comes to my own approaches to reading, even in my ELA classroom. But books like Subjects Matter have me making more connections with my content-area colleagues. Our conversations are really just beginning to take shape. How about yours?
Peace (in the subjects),
Kevin
We, The Pirates
The world reverted to blank canvas today;
I speak here only of the world
as it had become
so that we can wonder about the world
as it has been;So, Pa, is this what you wanted
when you sought to close the gates
to keep the ragged troops at bay?
We stare into their eyes and see
… only us, staring back.So, Pa, we are the pirates aboard this ship
and you seek to run the tanker aground
in order to save the gold doubloons in the captain’s pocket,
never understanding that the real treasure
is in the sails that catch the wind of the seas
that float us forward into the unknown worlds.The world reverted to blank canvas today, Pa,
but we still pulled out our pens, and pencils, and crayons, and keyboards,
and envisioned the way the world might be
if the doors were left open to creativity and chance.
More about SOPA and the efforts to either stop or at least modify it is here.
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Peace (in the protest),
Kevin
Yesterday, I reviewed The Hunger Games and I was exploring the Scholastic book site where writer Suzanne Collins has plenty of interesting videos about the books and her inspiration as a writer. I also noticed a link for some Hunger Game-inspired games, so I figured: I might as well check it out. There are two games on the site, both of which are really just advertising for the book.
The first, Trial by Fire, is a Choose Your Own Adventure game, which is kind of interesting since I was just re-exploring that genre last week as part of our blogging series around Mentor Texts for the Digital Writing Workshop. Here, you choose a name and you are the character in the Hunger Games, making decisions as the clock ticks down on you. The music made my heart beat faster, pointing once again to the power of all the multimedia elements for website design. The quick pace and the connections to the story were well-done, and I bookmarked it as a good example of an adventure story with multiple paths.
The second, Tribute Trials, is a quiz-style game, in which you are asked a series of questions on survival, and you are awarded characteristics — such as strength, courage, charisma — that are then tallied up at the end of the game. If you have enough of what you need (I never quite figured that out), you stay alive. I didn’t. I died.
The two games were nicely constructed, with direct ties to the novels. I imagine some of my students would enjoy them. It made me think a bit about how publishers are marketing to young people now, using game theory to spark an interest in the book. I wonder, too, if the games here would have been as interesting if I had not read the book. Would I care? It seemed like the content of the games were designed to tap into what I already knew about The Hunger Games series, but with the movie coming out soon, I suppose eyeballs will be searching the Web for Hunger Games content.
Also, I was thinking: how could I get my students to create companion games for the stories they are writing? What would that look like? Hmmmm.
Peace (in the games),
Kevin
