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?

I always like reading Beyond School–not because I agree with his ideas (I usually don’t) but his ideas are ones I want to believe in. He is of the semi-anarchist anti-coercicion school of teaching which I find very appealing. I’ve always had dreams of an utopia wherin all grades were banished, students were there because they wanted to be, and we learned what we wanted based on what interested us. Kindof like I learn now. Although I thihnk my Utopia had me traveling with my students across Europe as well.

Burrell suggested that we don’t need buildings and when I asked him about face to face communication, he responded that “We get together f2f when we want, where we want. “flash ed-mobs.” And again, logically, that’s crazy talk. We’ll have 100s of thousands of students wandering around with their iPhones looking for an eduMob to drop into. Can you imagine anything else more designed to strike terror in the hearts of adults (although that may be a vote in the positive column for the idea).

Still, doesn’t it sound fun? You could just go to the library and text out “All y’all up for a little creative writing come on down” and then scores of hirsute teens would or wouldn’t show up. Kids would get points for every mob they attended (or not! too much like grades…maybe any certification we’d be interested in would be solely attached to actual work they created. A portfolio).  The teacher might get paid according to his/her draw and the evaluation of his customers.

Sometimes drawing lines outside of the box creates ideas that are more helpful than being logical. What if I had 2 weeks in my essay fundamentals class where we didn’t meet at all.  We all wrote wherever, whenever and met up or didn’t by checking in on a chat or other social network.  Still impossible…but closer. Would the absence of coercion make up drive more learning or would it allow more slacking?  That’s always the question, no?

Usually, I have the students teach the short stories to each other.

I recently finished Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners (from a tip on Bookslut) and I want to try again. She has a difficult style for kids and offputting to some: whimsical with a hint of disaster, winding plots, evocative if strange descriptions, and a taste for the surreal. Her first short story “The Faery Handbag” starts with a description of the Garment District in Boston and tells the story of her Grandmother Zofia who has an immense handbag which contains an entire village, a slavering dog, and the Zofia’s husband. Obviously, there are elements of magic realism there where you’re never sure if the rules of the story are different than the “real” world or if the characters are just coo-coo.

Link has a breezy, quirky style which is fun to read.

We had this theory that things have life cycles, the way that people do. The life cycle of wedding dresses and feather boas and T-shirts and shoes and handbags involves The Garment District. If clothes are good, or even if they are bad in an interesting way, The Garment District is where they go when they die. You can tell that they’re dead, because of the way that they smell. When you buy them, and wash them, and start wearing them again, and they start to smell like you, that’s when they start to reincarnate. But the point is, if you’re looking for a particular thing, you just have to keep looking for it. You have to look hard.

It’s verbal in its rhythms and eschews SAT words but for kids, and I’ll want to test this out on a few willing victims. I’m worried that the way she plays with reality and fantasy might irritate kids who want to know what’s going on at all times. Later stories have zombies and stone rabbits that come to life, but they’re always literary zombies who are reflective of the consumerist society or literary rabbits who symbolize modern ennui. They never just haul off and munch on brains. Still…zombies are zombies. Here are a couple of other review to get a second and third opinion.

Magic would be a good book to have on hand for the quirky, misunderstood kid who has a bit emo radiating from his/her general direction. I’d love for this to work with a larger class and it might in the aforementioned short story student to student teaching. It would definitely stand out next to Hills like White Elephants or By the Waters of Babylon.

Any others have success in teaching short stories.

Still, Twitter is a mystery to me (nstearns).

If you don’t know what Twitter is…the basic idea is that Twitter is a micro-blogging program that looks a lot like a party line Instant Messaging board. You have 140 characters to write what you want and then anyone who decided to ‘follow’ you can see what you’ve written. For some people Twitter is like fried, sugary manna from Top Pots Doughnuts. They love it; they rave, they gnash their teeth when it’s down (which is approximately 42.3% of the time).

Why would you want to do that? For me, the Internets are like a big stack of newspapers. I surf and link to find out stuff. I check out Slate magazine or my Google Reader or the New York Times. When my kids tell me, “I spent 6 hours on Facebook last night,” I’m not horrified, I’m mystified. What do you do for 6 hours on Facebook. Do you just write “Whasssup” on 1000 friend walls? That sounds like my version of Hell.

Apparently, even on the Web, I’m not a people person.

But in the classroom, I could see Twitter working. A number of edubloggers have talked about backchannels and how they relieve the tedium associated with paying attention in a lecture. When I watched some of the uStream or CoveritLive NECC conference, I noticed the accompanying chat was pretty off topic, irrelevant, messy, and human. People were responding sincerely to what they were hearing. Even if what people were saying wasn’t always enlightening, it was an improvement to being glued to a chair and having no contact with the people around you beyond passing notes.

If kids were able to chat with each other using one of those tools, would it enhance the classroom experience? Let’s say I were to do a class discussion on Letter from a Birmingham Jail. Normally, people would take turns responding to my provocations or leading discussions in certain areas. In a Twitter-ed class, they could be discussing what’s going on on an entirely different level. I could even shoot the chat conversation behind me as we discussed. I’m worried that this violates an important Brain Rule (#4 Attention), but it might be worth it if I’m not able to maintain Attention anyway in a 30 minute discussion.

Anyone ever tried this in the classroom?

Image Credit: Screenshot from TwitterBlocks

Maus led to a number of graphic novels–some revelatory others disappointing. I’d head of Will Eisner’s The Contract with God Trilogy from Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Published in 1978 it was a watershed moment for the medium. The first set of the trilogy (The Contract with God) is a set of 4 stories that revolve around life in mythical Dropsie Avenue, an Jewish immigrant neighborhood in NYC. The stories combine forceful, almost melodramatic illustrations with wry, cynical stories that dwell on human weakness and our inability to resist our impulses.

The title story involves a Russian Jew who escapes the pogroms of Tsarist Russia because of his piety and good works. He makes a “contract with God” in which he promises to be do good works in order for unspecified advantage. When he takes in a foundling girl and she later dies of leukemia, he rejects God in a heart-rending panel. Afterwards, he becomes a unscrupulous slumlord and tries to make as much money as possible. Strangely, this may be one of the more positive stories of the series. The other three trade in a much darker, much grimmer view of human nature. No one seems to have benign intentions and no one seems to be able to resist their gnawing Ids, clamoring for release.

I want to be able to say I could teach this in my classes. I don’t think I have the guts. Many of the stories in the first book of the series involve graphic sex and violence. Of course, I realize that I’ve taught books like 100 Years of Solitude which have more sexual content. But the shock of seeing even blue outlined forms having sex in haylofts might be too much. Still, the graphic novel has the potential to amaze. Students might accept Eisner’s graphic stories in a way they might dismiss or ignore if they were more traditional short stories. The writing and art has an undeniable vitality to it that attracts even while the stories themselves express deep reservations about human nature. At the end, I get the feeling that Eisner retains some affection for the grimy lives of humans, something close to pity, disgust, amusement, and wonder all mixed together.

The second book (”A Life Force”) is much tamer and a good US History class could use excerpts to illustrate ideas about life in Depression-era US. The stories even intersperse short articles about the Depression along with the narrative. The last (”Dropsie Avenue”) describes the machinations involved in the evolution of Dropsie Avenue froma tenement into a set of inexpensive homes. This feels less vital to me, but it does make interesting points about white flight and political power which would be harder (and less engaging) to describe traditionally.

In the end, I think having a set 5 books might be a good solution. Smaller groups (especially in a US history class) could read the book, present aspects of it, and even create their own panels or comic book pages that tell stories which illustrate issues in US History. A class in literature or creative writing could use the book to show (ala Understanding Comics) how a graphic novelist can use the conventions of the comic page to tell a story, set a mood, and suggest themes and symbols.

Eisner’s work is masterful and engaging; it would take an excellent teacher to exploit it, but the result could be well worth it.

Last year, one of out tech support teachers had a set of clickers for free won at a door prize. I’ve always imagined the hilarity that must ensue at a tech lottery: milling crowds of blinking tech people salivating over laser pointers and webcams.  90/10 M/f ratios. Acronyms flying out into the ether.  Backchannel twitters filling the air…A glorious technohaven/glimpse into the future.

Teaching with clickers is an enterprise fraught with doubt, even though I had what might be reasonably termed success with them.  My AP Rhetoric class could go through multiple choice test questions and I could get a good, quick evaluation on which types of questions were difficult for them (i.e. anything about tone or those maniacal questions involving roman numerals). My regular 10s took quizzes and the clicker software automatically recorded their answers and printed out their score. Almost as good as ScanTron.  But I thought the most useful way of using Clickers was in guided discussions about values and attitudes.

You can put up a statement like:

I think most of what I learn in school will have little impact on my life.

and ask students to rate the statement according to how much they agree or disagree with the statement.  1-being agree totally and completely 3-being neutral, meh while 5-being disagree totally and completely. Clickers have a magic effect on participation; no one lackadaisically clicks a clicker. It’s always done with spastic abandon.  In a discussion like this, a quick 10 minute (or on the fly–shh!–don’t tell anyone) prep will get you a good 30-40 minute discussion on the questions.  First, you have the asking of the question, then the vote, then the Reveal! look at that pretty graph.  Finally, individual students talk about why they completely agreed with the idea that school will have little impact. It’s a great way to start a unit or even conduct a midway point snapshot of where students’ feelings are.  It would be interesting to do a pre and post value check and see if the experience of reading, say, The Things the Carried or All Quiet on the Western Front has changed students’ opinions about war.

Unfortunately, I’ll be bereft of clickers next year.  The tech people giveth and they taketh away.  But my pathetic Twitter feed (more on that later) has just given me a couple of options for next year even if I don’t have the cool quasi Wii handhelds to play with.

• Poll Everywhere is a service that lets you ask poll questions and then receive answers through the web or cellphones.  The superpower here is that you can use either computers or cell phones to answer. When you stick with a set of 30 respondents per poll, the service stays free. You can also get the results downloaded into a PowerPoint slide. Still, it doesn’t record the respondents unless you spring for the next upgrade up so it wouldn’t work for quizzes.  There is some talk about certain schools qualifying for discounts, but that wouldn’t apply to us.
• There are a host of other free-ish poll services including PollDaddy, Freepolls, PollMonkey, SurveyMonkey, and Zoomerang. These offer various levels of support and ability depending on the service.
• I’m also interested in backchannel chat services like Chatterous or CampFire but my District bans such site like they are scurrilous plagues, so it would be hard to fall in love only to be ripped untimely from their bosoms.

Any other ideas for Clicker replacements?

See also this .pdf about 7 rules for clickers, this Wired article about the same, Clickers: A Classroom Innovation by Derek?, and then this breakdown from Vanderbilt U.

Image Credit: Flickr 21/365 New Clicker!  hcobb826’s photostream

So, how can I use King to teach writing. What can we learn from him. In his book on writing called On Writing (natch), he tells this story.

[Gould] started in on the feature piece with a large
black pen and taught me all I ever needed to know about my craft. I
wish I still had the piece – it deserves to be framed, editorial
corrections and all – but I can remember pretty well how it looked when he had finished with it. Here’s an example:

Last night, in the well-loved gymnasium of Lisbon High School,
partisans and Jay Hills fans alike were stunned by an athletic
performance unequaled in school history: Bob Ransom, known as “Bullet”
Bob for both his size and accuracy, scored thirty-seven points. He did
it with grace and speed … and he did it with an odd courtesy as well,
committing only two personal fouls in his knight-like quest for a
record which has eluded Lisbon thinclads since 1953….
(after edit marks)

Last night, in the Lisbon High School gymnasium, partisans and Jay
Hills fans alike were stunned by an athletic performance unequaled in
school history: Bob Ransom scored thirty-seven points. He did it with
grace and speed … and he did it with an odd courtesy as well,
committing only two personal fouls in his quest for a record which has
eluded Lisbon’s basketball team since 1953….

When Gould finished marking up my copy in the manner I have
indicated above, he looked up and must have seen something on my face.
I think he must have thought it was horror, but it was not: it was
revelation.
“I only took out the bad parts, you know,” he said. “Most of it’s pretty good.”
“I know,” I said, meaning both things: yes, most of it was good, and
yes, he had only taken out the bad parts. “I won’t do it again.”
“If that’s true,” he said, “you’ll never have to work again. You can
do this for a living.” Then he threw back his head and laughed.
And he was right; I am doing this for a living, and as long as I can keep on, I don’t expect ever to have to work again.

I love that. And the best part of it is that it’s not so obvious to a non-writer why the second part is better. Students can learn a lot from combing through the changes and realizing why the 2nd version is better. The Tom Wolfe shot at F. Scott is relevant here. Sometimes we rock because of what we refrained from putting it in rather than from what might have been shoveled onto the page.

Still, with kids it’s really only half the issue. Some kids are constantly overwriting and use way more words than is necessary: the prose is clogged with weasely words and extra doodads that should be shunted off to the recycle bin. But other kids write small. They have very few words, little description, not a whole lot of detail, and suffer from a deep lack of something. These kids are harder to reach for me.

I want to tell them to live harder and put more in. Go crazy. Read Howl. Make mistakes. Write badly…as badly as humanly possible. It seems much more pitiable to me to be neither a putter-inner nor a taker-outer but a not have anything in at all-er…How do we help kids make more?

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.

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The other brain book I’ve been reading is Brain Rules by John Medina. Dr. Medina works at the UDub as a developmental molecular biologist. His book is part of the wave of books about how brains work and the implications for work and learning. I’ve been hoovering them up lately, even though none of them has yet given me a silver bullet yet. In true blogging fashion, Dr. Medina has broken up his conclusions into 12 Rules:

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.
SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.
WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.
ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don’t pay attention to boring things.
SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.
LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.
SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.
STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.
VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.
GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.
EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Despite the nifty graphics and a strong resistance to the temptation to overpromise, I’m not yet sure how to use this information. The information in the exercise section suggests that some of that TPR stuff might not be such a bad idea. For instance, in my writing class I could start with a fast paced walk around the park to get the blood going and at the halfway mark maybe take an exercise break wherein we could do tree pose or downward dog.

Also, the visual section suggests that we don’t do so hot when it comes to strictly auditory processing. Even static visuals such as Keynote slides seem to be less than effective. Medina blithely suggests that we “animate” our presentations: nuhprobblem! I just teach 185 days out of the year. How hard could it be? Still, I’ve thought about emulating the CommonCraft format of whiteboards and paper cut outs. Or, I could sketch out the basic info I want to communicate and make my kids shoot the animation.

Other bloggers have commented on the book, including Will Richardson, HomeschooledTwins, Engaging Learners, and History Tech. Still, I haven’t seen anyone really try to tease out how this information would play in the classroom. I’ll try in a later post.