Lazyteacher » Lesson ideas

Having a hard time…

nstearns — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:10:48 +0000

…finding a time for writing.

I had ambitious ideas to get a novel off of the ground, write a daily blog post, and work out. Results? Bad back finally getting better. 30 pages of a novel (not all bad). And an intermittent blog read by me mostly.

Still, it’s a start, Sysiphus.

I want to add to that by noting that I want to start adding to the Shorewood Teacher Resource (aka Shorewiki) and at least set up the bones so that other teachers can contribute. The question is whether anyone would be willing to devote time to something with all of the craziness that school can stir up.

Any great teacher resource wikis already out there?

Style and the love of words

nstearns — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 15:53:48 +0000

I recently read Style: An Anti-Textbook by Richard Lanham and was impressed. It doesn’t have a load of useful or immediately effective info in it, but what it does have is a clear, well-argued claim that the best way to teach writing is to instill a love of words and what they can do. Lantham indulges in a lot of snarky and very fun scalpelling of “The Books”–the traditional composition textbooks– as well as of the common bureaucratic-speak and academia fog machine prose. But he kept coming around to the idea that Style is not so much a love of clarity in the sense of limpid mountain pools but in the expressive sense of a style that attends to the purpose of the writing. In this way, even crazy, pull out your armhair and stab yourself with a #2 pencil postmodern speak has a purpose: to proclaim the writer a member of the secret Illuminati of semioticians.

What does this mean for next year?

One thing I want to work on is finding ways to introduce a sense of playfulness in language. Sometimes that can be accomplished by showing models of this (such as this review of the Hulk and this one of The Happening or even this one of the book How to Talk about Books you Haven’t Read). This I’ve done. The other is to try to play games. For instance:

Will Shortz word games
Scrabble
Writing captions for the New Yorker cartoon contest
Rewriting lyrics to songs
Neologisms or slang dictionaries
Online Word Games

Shammes eats a shtekeleh

nstearns — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:53:50 +0000

I just finished Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union yesterday even though it’s been out for about 1000 years. Chabon and I go way back and it’s always been a strained relationship. I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh and was amazed by the prose style and fascinated by the way he was able to make a description sing and surprise. But I never loved it; it was always about admiration and amazement for me and never about a true head over heel lets-run-away-together enchantment.

This novel is a detective story/alternative history where the Jews were kicked out of Israel in 1948 and somehow land in southeastern Alaska for a few decades before the US decides to kick them out again. The main character, Meyer Landsman, is a detective (a shammes in Yiddish) trying to find the killer of a junkie heroin addict killed in the flophouse he live in before the Reversion sends all the Jews scrambling. There are all kinds of hoary detective cliche’s (down and out detective, losing his badge, tough guy banter, gangsters, at least-spoiler!–his partner doesnt’ die). Still, no detective story is so crammed full of scrumptious language.

In the acknowledgements Chabon notes his use of Yiddishdictionary.com and it shows. Did you know shoyfer means phone in Yiddish? Well, actually it is a ritual ram’s horn blown on the Sabbath and so therefore it’s the slang term for a phone. Yikes. Still, even though there is a long, obsessed, devoted description of the magic properties of the Phillipino/Yiddish doughnut called shtekeleh which apparently Chabon made up.

But when it comes to description, dude can write.

A ganef wind has blown down from the mainland to plunder the Sitka treasury of fog and rain, leaving behind only cobwebs and one bright penny in a vault of polished blue. At 12:03 the sun has already punched its ticket. Sinking, it stains the cobbles and stuccos of the platz in a violin-colored throb of light that you would have to be a stone not to find poignant. Landsman, a curse on his head, but he is no stone.

Such a great mix of hard-boiled fiction metaphor-twisting prose and that “violin-colored throb…” Wow.

What I love about Chabon is that he’s so clearly a lit fiction writer with those sensibilities and brings them into the realm of popular lit. He’s not always easy to read but his challenges tread a good line between litera-cha and popular lit. There’s talk of a movie version with Cohen brothers directing which could be beyond amazing. I’m not sure who get to be Landsmen–Harrison Ford? Phillip Seymore Hoffman?

As a teacher, I want to clip out some passages as good description models–especially to show how he is able to create surprising metaphors that are nevertheless clear. I’m also interested in how he uses the Yiddish vocab. Could their be an assignment where you get a set of dialect terms or jargon terms and you have to use them to tell a story? I love the idea of the play of language as it’s own character. It would be an advanced skill for students but amazing if it works.

Other resources:

Teacher on the Screen

nstearns — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:45:02 +0000

Continuing the discussion on Brain Rules from yesterday, I want to use this post to sketch out some ideas for lectures or concepts that I teach all the time, lectures that might benefit from being set out in a animation or a video.

dy/dan, a math teacher who has a pretty fervent following as been putting out pretty impressive short videos about, well, video-making for the classroom. As far as I can tell, he is of the Ze Frank school of talking head+quick cuts+B-roll illustration school which is definitely workable and accessible to kids.

dy/av : 002 : the next-gen lecturer from Dan Meyer on Vimeo.

It’s chief flaw–as far as I can tell from what he’s done so far–is that it reproduces the structure of a lecture too closely. dy/dan himself seem to feel this when he worries that he is “feeling a bit ripped apart by the distance between Job & Hobby.” It feels too much like an enhanced lecture than a completely new structure. For instance, this CommonCraft Whiteboard set up or this elaborate video castigating Google’s ubiquity might have the kids wondering less about why they are watching a video of someone who is right there, but these would take even more time to make.

So, the obvious answer is to get someone else or the students to make the videos. Here are my top lessons I’d like to see get the video treatment. Of course, then it would make sense to do a little Action Research to find out if videos like these result in actual better learning.

The Show don’t Tell principle in writing (Jerz’s handout on this is pretty amazing).
Turning off your internal censor (in other words, dare to stink)
Using strong verbs and avoiding passive voice
Why the entire writing process is necessary for good writing
Metaphors and other figurative devices: why they help writing come alive

Medina notes research that shows that we learn facts more readily and for longer if we have moving images, but is that also true for more conceptual understanding? Has research been done on that? I hope to take a shot at making at least the Show don’t Tell video. A really lazyteacher would just find what other people have done, but I haven’t found good vids on writing topics yet.