World Lit., Here We Come!

I am making progress on the year-long plan for SILSA Honors World Literature. In terms of the literature we read, world lit. is such a hodge-podge. In order to align with the Civics and Economics class, we begin with early Native American literature, Colonial American literature, and slave narratives. Then we read literature from the American Civil Rights Movement. It takes a couple of months before we move into the world beyond America.

Each world lit. unit this year has a conceptual lens: utopia/dystopia, justice, the hero archetype, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic literature, poverty, gender, etc. I am writing essential questions for each unit, too. By the end of the year last year, I had decided that my essential questions were too broad. I hope that this year's questions will generate more lively discussions.

Like most world lit. students in North Carolina, my students will read Night by Elie Wiesel. This year we will read at least excerpts from Cormac McCarthy's The Road when we do so. I mentioned this to someone recently who balked a bit at the idea of 10th and 11th graders reading The Road. I do not understand her objection. Isn't Night even more horrific than The Road? Does Night seem more suitable for high school students only because it has been a part of the high school literary canon for twenty years? I think The Road will help students connect better with Night. In this unit we will also read excerpts from Dante's The Inferno. I just hope the soon-to-be released film version of The Road will not ruin my students experience with the book. I have seen the trailer for the film, and my first two complaints are that there is too much of mother in the movie and that the child, especially, is not nearly as thin as he should be. If the child and his father are not malnourished, then the movie will not be nearly as desperate as the book is.

We begin our SILSA retreat in one week. I need to finish my year-long plan first, then I need to work on my electronic presence. Our school district moved from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 this summer, and my website isn't ready yet. I am also allowed to pilot Moodle, but those sites aren't available yet, either. I hope both will be available before the start of school.

Homework for Online Book Group

I am unable to embed homework for my online book group in the Moodle we are using. Therefore, I will ask my classmates to view it here.

Reflections on Homework by travlnc | Make Your Own At www.toondoo.com

Online Book Group

I've been participating in an online book group for Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works. I was already familiar with the Marzano text, and I had owned this new book for almost a year. I will take away from this experience some powerful and exciting tools that I know will change my teaching and my students' learning for the better when I am able to implement them.

What I like about this book is that it shows us how to use technology with many of the teaching/learning strategies that we already use in our classrooms: KWLs, thought webs, newsletters, and bulletin boards. I am excited to learn that I can use some technology tools to expedite feedback for my students. This is an area that I struggle with as an English teacher. I believe I can use email and online tools for one-on-one "conferencing" with students. I am also excited about creating an Excel version of our school-wide writing rubric that would allow me to (perhaps) provide better feedback.

I am encouraged by the tools I could use on my computer with the LCD projector. I believe that most of these strategies will work best only when all of our students and their parents have Internet access at home. I was frustrated by how often the authors expected some students to complete assignments at the library if they didn't have Internet access at home. I believe the digital divide is the root of today's achievement gap.

Using Blogs for Reciprocal Teaching
The authors describe using a blog for reciprocal teaching. Technology plays a supporting role in the classroom during this lesson. Students watch a BrainPOP movie as an introduction to the unit. One student engages in reciprocal teaching, leading the class discussion while creating a blog on the big screen. This blog serves a record of the lesson, accessed later by the students and easily shared with other classes or parents.

I think it would be incredibly powerful for any student to enjoy the focus of the class for a couple of days. In this secondary role, the technology facilitates students’ learning from one another. The structure of the reciprocal teaching strategy keeps the students focused on higher-level thinking. I think it would be easy for the teacher to provide a blog template for this lesson.

My Next Big Project Is About Essay Writing
I want to develop a multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank survey that collects data from students as they turn in an essay:

Rate your interest in this topic.
What sort of brainstorming activity did you use?
How long did you brainstorm?
What kind of prewriting did you use?
How long did you prewrite?
What sorts of editing did you do?
Did anyone help you edit this essay?
What is this essay's Lexile level?
According to the AutoSummarize tool, what is the thesis statement?
Is this correct?
ETC.

Then students will complete a follow-up survey when they receive their graded essay:

How many spelling errors did you make in this essay?
How many subject-verb agreement errors?
How many pronoun-antecedent agreement errors?
How many run-on sentences?
How many sentence fragments?
What was your Ideas and Content score?
Organization score?
Word Choice score?
Sentence Fluency score?
Conventions score?
Citing Sources score?
ETC.

All of this data will go into a spreadsheet where students can track their own growth as writers and learn the importance of adequate time and thoughtfulness and editing. I will also be able to collect class data about students' success with various prompts and their needs for Conventions lessons or editing lessons.

In the past, I have tried to do a very limited version of this using paper and pen, but the technology version will be much better. I hope the students will think it's more fun and easier, and I hope that I will be able to track individual student's needs, class needs, and grade-level needs more effectively.

Now, if this were a perfect world, an energetic graduate student would swoop in to save my day!!

World Literature: Where's the Groove?

I didn't let myself think about next year's SILSA World Literature class until June 12, my last day of school. My new student teacher Melissa met with me all morning that day, and we started to think about what we might teach and how. I have limited experience teaching world literature, but teaching in a small school means I teach all the English classes at some point. It's easier for me to teach American literature. My heart, my soul, my body, my voice, all of those personal elements move to an American beat. As I consider this world literature class to come, I wonder, "Where's the groove?"

SILSA World Literature is paired with Civics and Economics. The Civics and Economics curriculum includes colonial American history, the Constitution, the American Civil Rights movement, and economics. Last time I taught World lit., the first half of the class focused on American literature that reflected the social studies curriculum. It was quite difficult to find the groove.

Another minor complication to curriculum development is that students in this class will be working for either English II or English III credit. The NC Standard Course of Study for English Language Arts is, thankfully, skills-based, so the goals and objectives for the two classes articulate quite well. In one high school class, I cannot do a survey of World Literature, so I have just a few weeks to find a groove that we can enjoy for the year, a groove that lets us experience some World literature selections in a way that feels coherent, not scattered, pleasant, not discordant. It seems easiest to consider a thematic approach.

Brendan, the Civics and Economics teacher, and I talked about my class beginning with a utopian/distopian novel. When I taught this before we used Lord of the Flies to discuss the role of government in society. We don't have copies enough for all of the students to read most of the following novels, but I am considering lit. circles: Lord of the Flies, Brave New World, 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, The Giver, Gulliver's Travels, The Crucible. We might set the stage for The Crucible with some selections from Puritan American literature, all read/perform The Crucible together, as students read one of four of those novels listed. Also, I have considered (given SILSA's science theme, my love of science fiction, the thematic nature of the class, and the need for more contemporary "texts" but no money available for buying books) beginning each new thematic unit with a science fiction film. We don't have any copies of The Handmaid's Tale, so we might start with that distopian film. What lovely connections I could make to the Taliban and reviews of the contemporary work The 19th Wife, among others! When I think of it all this way, then I begin to feel a groove.

On that last day of school, Chad showed me a book by H. Lynn Erickson, Concept-Based Curriculum and Instruction for the Thinking Classroom. He has met with her when he did some work in Raleigh on some new approaches to social studies curriculum development. I had forgotten about his recommendation until this morning, as I have been wrestling with the bigger framework for this world lit. class. I ordered the book. I am hoping it will add to my understanding of essential questions and will help me build this class. I hope Lynn Erickson will help me find the groove.

_Spore_ Is Biology

I wanted to upload a picture from my iPhone of my brother-in-law playing Spore with my nine year-old niece and my seven year-old son eagerly looking on. I know little about Spore, but, from my vantage point, I am hearing tons of great biology. My little guy worried about a creature with tusks eating another. "But tusks aren't for eating!" said my b-i-l. I hear lots of conversation about the advantages of being herbivores or carnivores. There was a discussion of the benefits of having a carnivore in the group for protection against other creatures but an acknowledgement that the carnivore might pose a threat within the group. Of course, I also hear all of the problem-solving associated with being in a new world and discovering the rules of that world while they are trying to survive in it. Wow!! Can my kids please play this game in school, as a part of science class?

"Like a Patient Etherized upon a Table"

This blog. Soon this blog will be "like a patient etherized upon a table." I enjoy blogging here during the summer, but I haven't yet been able to keep it up during the school year. I have too many other things to do, like memorize the first few stanzas of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

PhotoStory and the Faculty Retreat

Yesterday and today I have been immersed in PhotoStory. This application, preloaded on the student laptops at SILSA, seems like a good introduction to digital publishing for our students. I have finished two stories, one about the NSP Conference in Winston and one about NECC 2008.

The NECC 2008 story is much longer, and I worked on it almost continuously from 7:00 am to 3:00 pm today. I would have finished much sooner, but I lost more than an hour's productivity by being slack about saving my work. Now I know that PhotoStory doesn't autosave.

I will use both stories during the staff development April and I are preparing for the SILSA Faculty Retreat. We are charged with sharing what we learned at NECC 2008 with the other staff members for a full day on Tuesday, August 12. Greg asked that we do as many hands-on activities as possible.

I am considering creating a folder of SILSA photos for each staff member and having each of them create a PhotoStory. We might be able to use those stories later at potlucks or recruitment events.

I will also present information from the Primary Sources workshop I attended at NECC. I want to make sure others know about the resources available at the Library of Congress website.

Finally, I want to discuss teaching students how to use InspireData to keep track of their progress in their classes a la Robert Marzano. I think Greg is going to order each of us a copy of Using Technology with Classroom Instruction that Works for professional development this year. Without reading the book, I have only a vague idea about how this might work.

We are leaving on Saturday for a final beach camping trip before school starts. We won't return until August 10, so I am trying to do as much as possible right now. I say, "Good luck!"