But What About Meeeeee?

Posted by Administrator on April 12, 2012 0 comments

ASCD Inservice: Does the Common Core Exclude Personal Meaning Making?

Ah, I wondered when this would come up (again).

First off, I would like to enter a resounding “duh!” into the do you have your students make personal connections to the text question.

Of course.

Who doesn’t?

 

But, let’s be honest—those are the easiest bloody things to do in a classroom. You can get kids to respond with text-to-self connections while sleeping. Kids do not need my help to do that. They don’t need your help to do that. They don’t need a breeze to do that.

We are human.

That’s just what we do.

 

However.

Making meaningful connections to a text can only come when you understand the text. That’s all the Common Core is getting at.

Navel-gazing at a text can be done on your free time—on anyone’s free time. Actually getting in there and examining content, context, and complexity—those are the times you need a guide, an instructor, a (gasp) sage on the stage who can weave a story around a difficult text and make you want to read more.

 

Don’t lie.

We’ve all had those teachers in our past.

The good ones.

The inspirational ones.

If we’ve been lucky, we’ve been that teacher a couple of times in the past.

 

More and more data is telling us that direct instruction (horrors) is the only teaching method that works more often than it fails. This is not to say we ditch group work or that changing things up during the week is bad, but it does mean that we have to be good modelers of how to go deep into a complex text—and we have to know how to show that intellectual examination IS a personal, text-to-self connection.

 

Why does Shakespeare’s poetry still resonate? Listen to ChopBard and it won’t take your students long to realize that it’s because the precision, creativity, and beauty in the language is so multi-layered—and relevant to their lives—that it’s fun to pull it apart and find out what makes it tick (think Sylar on Heroes if you need a vaguely creepy icon for the exercise).

Start with sonnet 130, wait till they pick up on what he’s really saying (and they will), help them with the bits of archaic language—your work is done.

A student once asked why we only read “depressing” books in my American lit class—we were working on The Great Gatsby at the time. A girl turned around and said, “because you can understand the funny ones on your own! We need her to understand the hard stuff.”

 

I couldn’t have said it better.

Because Authenticity ≠ Spontaneity

Posted by Administrator on March 13, 2012 0 comments

A Defense of Rhetoric – Michael Gerson – The Washington Post.

In today’s Washington Post, Michael Gerson—a speechwriter for BushII—called a recent Santorum speech, “a 20-minute ramble of lame jokes, patriotic platitudes and half-developed campaign themes.” Gerson goes on to say that,

on the evidence of these remarks, Santorum’s guiding philosophy is “free enterprise” and “free people” held together by free association. He vaguely honored Ronald Reagan for saying inspiring words, without bothering to contribute any of his own. He praised the “greatest generation” without crafting a single phrase that captured their accomplishments.

Santorum is, indeed, representative of our times. And, perhaps also proving in this speech that he sees no value in a college education because he received no benefit from his own?

When I taught high school, students came in as freshmen with the same ills—inability to craft an argument, a vague vagueness about their writing which referred to “taking it to the next level” and “important goals” and “deeper meanings” without ever defining those levels, goals, or meanings.——this is, by the way, not a criticism of those students. We all enter high school similarly——But by the time those NYC students left our school, they were quite capable of identifying a thesis and then setting out to prove that thesis by using proof from the texts they selected or were given. This skill—which I compared to a scavenger-hunt for meaning—of being able to analyze a text, come to a conclusion, then prove that conclusion, is, quite frankly, something I want in a leader. I find it disturbing that the more complex the world’s problems get, the more we seem to gravitate toward the guy we want to have a beer with rather than the leader who might actually have the intellectual power to keep the world from going ‘blewie’!

Gerson continues:

Santorum — fresh from spewing on John Kennedy’s shoes and questioning the value of a college education — has an interest in praising the virtues of impulsive, unfiltered language. It is the backhanded praise of his own failures.

But Santorum is also making a public argument. “You’re voting for someone who is going to be the leader of our government,” he says. “It’s important for you to understand who that person is in their own words, see them, look them in the eye. . . . You’re choosing a leader. A leader isn’t just about what’s written on a piece of paper.” The great enemies of authenticity, contends Santorum, are “speechwriters.”

I’m under no illusions about the popularity of my former profession. But let me rise in defense of “what’s written on a piece of paper” and the people who help produce it.

The idea that a leader should carefully craft his public words, sometimes with the advice and help of others, is not particularly new. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were known to polish George Washington’s prose. …Richard Goodwin helped Lyndon Johnson rise to the rhetorical demands of the civil rights struggle. “At times, history and fate,” said Johnson, “meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom. So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”

Such collaboration is not a species of fraud. It is a process in which a leader refines his own thoughts, invites suggestions by trusted advisers and welcomes the contributions of literary craft to political communication. A very few presidents — Lincoln may exhaust the category — have no need of consultation on policy or style. But political mortals generally benefit from it.

This is true of everyone’s writing. Perhaps the most important thing I’ve drilled into the heads of my students is do not think for a moment that you can edit your own prose! Life is too fast and we don’t take enough walks or breaks or moments of idyll to let our brains percolate. We write what we thought was good at the time (or we wouldn’t have written it). But rare is the missive that couldn’t use some clarification, the blog post that is beyond a proofread, the paper that needs no editing. The brilliant thing we said so gracefully at lunch yesterday has long ago left our brain…but perhaps, if we send the document on to our lunch mate, she will recall the statement and help us refine it.

Santorum’s case for extemporaneousness depends on a questionable premise. He assumes that authenticity is identical to spontaneity. By this standard, the most authentic political communication would come after rousing a candidate from bed in the middle of the night, turning him around three times and asking him to share the deepest convictions of his heart. This elevation of instinct and impulse is deeply unconservative — akin to arguing that the only authentic love is free love. Conservatives generally assert that discipline and preparation reveal authentic commitments, not discredit them.

It is actually a form of pride — in a politician or anyone else — to believe that every thought produced by the firing of one’s neurons is immediately fit for public consumption. The craft of rhetoric involves the humility of repeated revision.

That humility is not something we’ve seen much of—for a long time. “History,” as Gerson says, “is not shaped or moved by mediocre words.” I wish that were true, but I’m starting to believe that our current history IS indeed shaped by mediocrity—and will continue to be. And, sadly, I fear that it will get us into more and bloodier wars, and deeper and more intractable economic crises that must be met with a less and less flexible or fixable infrastructure.

Or we could start demanding more thoughtful, literate, and well-spoken leaders.

I know. My breath isn’t held either.

Sliced Bread=a run for its money

Posted by Administrator on February 23, 2012 0 comments

The AirPrint Activator v2.0 from Netputing just rocked my world. I changed my mind on a printer last year while at the store. I knew some of the models were AirPrint models and foolishly thought that meant ALL of them were.

Mine wasn’t.

Guess we know why it was on sale.

I’ve been frustrated for a long while, not being able to print remotely from the Pad or Phone. Yes, the Epson print app worked, but not very conveniently.

Enter the genius’ at Netputing!

Watch the video.

Install the doohikey.

I have OS Lion and it worked immediately.

Share and enjoy!

Huck Still in Danger—Run, Huck! Run!

Posted by Administrator on January 17, 2011 0 comments

NB: I write this post using language that I never actually say and never actually said in a classroom. I taught Huck for years, but only in NYC, and only to classes that were predominantly filled with African American and Hispanic students (Dominican and Puerto Rican) and eventually some Asian (largely Chinese) students as well. White students were definitely the minority at our school. I believe this made the teaching of this extraordinary book much easier for a white teacher—but that is a different blog post.

Each time we began the book I set the stage with a number of preemptive strikes:

  1. I explained the controversial history of the book and offered students book covers so they wouldn’t be harassed on the subway*;
  2. I explained that I would never say the N-word in class—it’s not “my” word or my generation’s word and I only ever heard it used in hate when I was young. It’s a word I personally abhor;
  3. I explained that if anyone else in class didn’t want to hear the word while in class (I couldn’t help their reading it), all they had to do was drop an anonymous note on my desk or in my mailbox saying, “don’t wanna hear it—4th period” and we would all pause or say “n-word” or substitute “slave” in that class. However, with the “slave” substitution I added some further caveats which I’ll address in a moment.
Unless you’ve been out of the country, in a cone of silence, or under a rock, you’ve probably heard the hubub about the “new” version of Huck Finn. New ‘Huckleberry Finn’ Edition Does Disservice to a Classic – NYTimes.com. I quotationalize (thank you, Damany) the word new because this isn’t new. We’ve had eviscerated versions before (thank you, John H. Wallace). They caused the same trouble and created a new—and I argue more dangerous—problem than the N-word did in the first place.

For those of you who haven’t read Huck, there are a couple of things you should know about him.

  1. he’s White Trash (my husband’s students called him “Bart Simpson” in the early 90s);
  2. he’s been told he’s good-for-nothing (his Pap certainly is/was) and Huck has been shown to always be in the wrong (and on the slippery path to hell) by the adults around him;
  3. he’s superstitious and ignorant, but obviously smarter than everyone else, except Jim;
  4. he’s a better person than everyone else, except Jim.

This is where all the irony happens. And irony is part of the problem. We just don’t DO irony very well any more.

Here.

Jim is a slave (that’s bad in our world) but someone bought him (that’s good in the Old South) but now someone’s bought his wife and child and he wants to go steal them (that’s good in our world but bad in the Old South) and Huck just wants to get the heck out of Dodge, so they head out together, but miss their turn (the Ohio river) and head right into the heart of slave-owning Arkansas (that’s bad for everyone).

Now, Huck has to decide whether or not to help rescue Jim and get him out of his temporary prison so he can get on with finding his wife and child. That’s the moral dilemma in most of the book, and after MANY adventures together it comes down to this passage (which still, actually, chokes me up):

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn’t know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I’ll go and write the letter – and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send. Huck Finn.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking— thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ‘stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I’ll go to hell”—and tore it up.

In our modern world, we can easily brush that last bit off—and sadly, I think most do. But Huck believed this. Yes, he’s ignorant. Yes, he’s massively superstitious. And yes, he really believes that by helping Jim escape he will burn for all eternity in hell. He’s been so twisted up by all the righteous folks telling him he’s bad that he honestly believes that saving Jim—following his heart—must be the wrong thing to do simply because it’s his decision, and he’s a bad kid. He couldn’t possibly be right. So. There, a young man consigns his everlasting soul to hellfire.

I think watching a kid go through a moral dilemma like that might be exactly the kind of book kids should read and talk about and wrestle with. And a kid who is willing to do that for a Black man—well, he’s certainly not a racist hater.

But this new expurgated version of the book does something far more insidious than dropping the N-bomb on kids (as though that’s a new term to them). Let me show you why I think this is such a bad idea—and why we always had this conversation in class before we started reading this book.

Late in the book—the beginning of the last third of which we can argue the merits some other day—we come across this passage. I’m going to italicize the part we’ll deal with in a sec. To set the scene, Huck has arrived at Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally’s farm, the Phelps’ farm, and (as you’ll see in a sec) messes up by admitting to be Tom. Huck is “late” and has to think fast, but also lie in a way that no one will check-up on or he’ll be found out. And he has to do it all to a pre-Civil War, slave-owning woman from Arkansas. Watch his footwork:

“It’s YOU, at last! —AIN’T it?”

I out with a “Yes’m” before I thought.

She grabbed me and hugged me tight; and then gripped me by both hands and shook and shook; and the tears come in her eyes, and run down over; and she couldn’t seem to hug and shake enough, and kept saying, “You don’t look as much like your mother as I reckoned you would; but law sakes, I don’t care for that, I’m so glad to see you! Dear, dear, it does seem like I could eat you up! Children, it’s your cousin Tom! —tell him howdy.”

But they ducked their heads, and put their fingers in their mouths, and hid behind her. So she run on:

“Lize, hurry up and get him a hot breakfast right away—or did you get your breakfast on the boat?”

I said I had got it on the boat. So then she started for the house, leading me by the hand, and the children tagging after. When we got there she set me down in a split-bottomed chair, and set herself down on a little low stool in front of me, holding both of my hands, and says:

“Now I can have a GOOD look at you; and, laws-ame, I’ve been hungry for it a many and a many a time, all these long years, and it’s come at last! We been expecting you a couple of days and more. What kep’ you? —boat get aground?”

“Yes’m —she—”

“Don’t say yes’m —say Aunt Sally. Where’d she get aground?”

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know whether the boat would be coming up the river or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming up —from down towards Orleans. That didn’t help me much, though; for I didn’t know the names of bars down that way. I see I’d got to invent a bar, or forget the name of the one we got aground on —or— Now I struck an idea, and fetched it out:

“It warn’t the grounding —that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

Horrible. Right? I mean, can you imagine? I always got sick to my stomach looking at the way Aunt Sally talked—talked to her servants, her kids, and talked about people—especially her slaves.

And that’s where this new book gets into trouble. For better or for worse, a slave at the time was 3/5ths of a man. A slave was property. It’s appalling and repugnant but it’s the truth of the time, and thank God, it’s a truth we’ve left behind. Nonetheless, it’s the truth of Mark Twain’s childhood as much as it’s the truth of Huck Finn’s world.

Now, when Huck says, “No’m. Killed a nigger,” he’s not talking about a slave. If he were talking about a slave he would have used the word “slave.” He’s talking about a non-slave, a free African American man. With that in mind, go back and look at Aunt Sally’s reaction.

Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about that woman? Everything Twain wanted you to know about that woman? If you remove the language you remove characterization and subtext and… well… kind of the point of the book!

You can’t—you simply cannot—whitewash (pardon that) the past. It’s ugly. Yes. There’s lots of things happening right now that are ugly. Putting lipstick on a pig only gets you a scarily ugly, still-smelly, pig with lipstick on it. If we can’t confront and look honestly at the past then we can’t learn from it. And Huck has always been able to teach us a lot about ourselves.

When we have the guts to listen.

*After years of the book-cover gambit, we actually did have an incident. One of my girls was on the subway reading (sans book cover) and unknowingly sat by a NYC Board of Ed woman. This woman looked at my student and said, “Why are you reading that book? It’s banned!”
“No it’s not.”
“Yes it is. What school do you go to?”
My student brilliantly covered the school stamp on the spine and said, “None of your business.”
“Yes it is. I work for the Board of Education and that book is racist!”
Without missing a beat my student looked her in the eye and said, “Then I guess you don’t understand irony!”
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I loved teaching in New York.

Madame Merch and Great Video

Posted by Administrator on December 13, 2010 0 comments

Last week, to celebrate the upcoming release of What Would Madame Defarge Knit? our artiste extraordinairé created free, downloadable holiday cards for you and yours to use this holiday season. Holiday CardsYou can view and download the goodies over at the Madame Defarge site. More goodies will be a-comin’ so keep checking back. » Read more…

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...