Blurring the lines between education and entertainment

On the way home today I stopped at the library to pick up more materials for the girls’ current unit of study, which is France, and which means my wife is attempting to broaden their minds to a realization that there is more in France than an annual bicycle race (that obsession would be my contribution—our favorite racer is Michael Cavendish). In one book on France the girls discovered a picture of the Tour, so every time my wife attempted to turn to a new page and share something else, A– would ask to return to the page with the bicycles. What can I say, that three week study we did on bicycle racing this summer was effective (Did I just call watching a sporting event on TV a unit study?).

They’re working out of the Five in a Row series for Kindergarten/pre-school, or at least, that’s where they begin. When the topic is particularly interesting we kind of go wherever it takes us, which means, for example, the girls now know quite a bit about China, more than their dad knew when he graduated high school, anyway.

Among the things I picked up at the library was a CD for learning French. That might sound insane for a family where the oldest child is five, but the reality is that neither of us parents could speak the language, so we needed to a CD to expose our children to the accent. I cannot express how sorry this situation is. I took four years of high school French and I have to buy a CD for my children simply to hear a few basic phrases and an accent. I am a pitiful man.

Before dinner E– began showing me what she’d read earlier in the day about Paris, and then I asked her if she wanted to hear French a bit. We popped the CD in the stereo and E bounced around the living room repeating every few words the folks on tracks said while A laid on the floor flipping through a children’s book about the Palace of Versailles. While brushing teeth tonight E and I played French, telling each other “Bon jour! Comment ca va?” and “Ca va bien!”

A beautiful thing about educating your children at home—a beauty that our home schooling friends with older children also affirm—is that the line between entertainment and education is rather blurred. Not that our children will always have these hyperbolically eager attitudes about learning (When does it generally wear off—7^th grade?), but by filling our lives with learning, and by making learning our lifestyle rather than our 8-4 obligation, the jaded edge does not seem to develop as easily or as hard.

In my classroom, my students generally wear that edge, and how I can plane it off even a hair is a question I am asking but cannot answer. At this point, my main attempt is to blur that line between entertainment and education, between normal conversation and learning, as much as I can, thinking that somehow we might discover that learning is better suited to be a lifestyle than a duty. I don’t know that it’s possible—there are some mighty big obstacles out there—but I’ll give it a shot anyway. It’s another one of these areas where it’s the best thing for my own children, so why can’t I bring it to the classroom for other people’s children?

We’ll see.

Thanks for reading.

 

Becoming better writers with professional help

I recently read an article from Ruth Beechick in The Old Schoolhouse, a homeschooling magazine. I enjoy Beechick, though I admit that my familiarity with her is mostly from perusing in random spots the books that my wife is reading.

The thing I’ve discovered is that Beechick has a refreshing take on language arts, a take I need after five years of immersion in professional development coursework. For example, in this article I was reading she talks about the structure of essays and points out quite concretely what I have babbled around in the past: that though educators often teach solid structures for essay construction, writers do not follow the formats with any sense of loyalty.

Her suggestion for homeschoolers is to head to the newspapers and other sources of writing and study the structure of the writing there. See how writers open articles, how they develop arguments, and how they wrap things up. Find the patterns worth imitating, and then attempt to incorporate them into your own writing.

That’s good advice and I can easily see leading my children in such a sincere pursuit. In fact, I can hardly wait to do this with my children. We can pick up a magazine, an article one of us has read, or any book in the house, and read it as writers and editors. The amusing part of it to me is how obvious it is. After all, that is how I learn to write better: I read many writers and latch onto particular methods and techniques. This is why I have said I would love to be E.B. White, and why I often present the writing of people like Annie Dillard to my students as a model of great writing. Yet in my work with students I think I often miss a strength of Beechick’s strategy: quantity. In looking at lots of writing, a student conducts a kind of meta-analysis and discovers the real patterns. Seeing lots of patterns can help a student discover how one trick works here and another trick works there. Too often what I do is to show students one great trick, a trick they may not be able to imitate, changing little for them.

The advantages to students of learning Beechick’s way are overwhelming. In evaluating professional writers, the student has read attentively and eventually learns to see that which she may not have seen before. The trained eye knows what to see. With writing, an exercise like this helps the student develop that trained eye, and she can read with a new perspective. Additionally, she increases her ability to view her own writing the same way—critically and precisely.

The analogy that pops into my head immediately is from my watching of the school’s football team last night. I never played football, so I do not understand many of the intricacies of the game, even though I have watched plenty on TV and know the basics. Last night, in overtime, the opponent ran for a touchdown but had it called back due to a holding penalty. I never saw the hold and had actually begun to shake my head with disappointment when I realized the man behind me was loudly informing the referee about some action on the field: “Holding!” The ref must have heard, because no one was celebrating and a few of the men in zebra-shirts were conferring. As I stood there waiting, I thought about what I had seen on the play. I had been watching in particular a linebacker I knew running awkwardly and flailing his arms. I had laughed at it even as the play continued, thinking how goofy he looked, but I never realized what I’d seen. This afternoon I had that linebacker’s brother in class and asked if he’d been the one who had been held: “Oh yeah, that guy was totally grabbing him. It was blatant.” Blatant for one who understood what he was seeing, but for one who is not an expert in the finer points of the game, it was invisible. I was looking right at it and never saw it.

The trouble for me is that I still want to bring some of this ideal education my wife and I plan to provide to our own children to my students in the public school classroom. Thus, after reading Beechick, I was stuck ruminating how to implement something similar on a grand scale. How can I guide classes of 25 students through close examination of professional writing?

I figured a good place to start would be with a glaring weak spot of most students’ writing: introductions. We can look at piles of articles and analyze their introductions to help realize what an introduction does and how one can begin with something other than a question or the thesis statement. While with my own children we can simply head to the computer together and find an article that interests them, I am not so naïve with a classroom full of cherubs. Few things could waste our precious class time more effectively than a fuzzy request to roam around the Internet.

Thus, today during my planning period I spent an hour browsing the most-read and most-emailed articles from the New York Times, Slate, the New Yorker, The Atlantic, and even ESPN. I haven’t read all the articles in full, but I have read the introductions, and they all begin with something that grabs one’s attention and then at some point tells us what their point is before moving on to the rest of the article. I’ll probably have each student read at least a half dozen of these articles and fill out an analysis of each one in a table I’ll have designed (I envision a column for categorizing the attention grabber’s strategy, a place to write the thesis statement, and a box or two to describe what they felt was strong or weak about the writing). They’ll confer together, we’ll discuss the results, and then we’ll attempt to write our own introductions, probably to an introduction-less article that I’ll supply.

I won’t have the time to sit with each student and detect whether he or she has begun to see the structure supporting the articles, but I’ll create the exercise nonetheless. Ultimately, the attempt is driven by this conviction: the method strikes me as the best approach for my own children, so I don’t see any reason to attempt less with other people’s kids.

Thanks for reading.

 

After weeks of preparation, Ninehub turns to blogging

I signed up for a Ninehub Moodle account last spring, thrilled that someone was willing to host a free Moodle class online. I was so thoroughly impressed with Moodle when I used it that I began to concoct plans for turning all the professional development work I lead in the district into distance courses.

Then the whole Ninehub thing seemed to crash over the summer and I couldn’t get back to any of my stuff, which I hadn’t had time to back up yet (I hadn’t done that much so it wasn’t the end of the world). I’ve contacted the administrators but still have received no reason to hope that I’ll be able to access the class I created, and at this point, really, why would I want to access it?

Either way, here’s what I find amusing. I received an email today from Ninehub inviting me to use their new educational blogging service, called Eduperience. I’m naturally tempted by anything of the kind, since I’ve quit using Edublogs in the classroom (too slow, too unreliable, and too full of obnoxious and misleading advertisements), but the email invite sounds like it came from that guy who found my only remaining relative in Zimbabwe–the one with $150,000 for me if I’ll advance him $20,000 for lawyer fees:

After weeks of preparation, we are ready to introduce Eduperience.com – an easy blogging tools for teachers and students. . . . We always obsessed to provide useful tools for educators, therefore If you have any comments or anything we can improve, please let us know.

As impressed as I was by weeks of preparation, I followed the link, and my favorite part of the site is where they ask me this:

For today, I have seen enough, but I’m not sure I’m ready to check out, thanks.

Years ago I would have thrown caution to the wind and signed a class up for blogs here, desperate for anything that would work for blogging in the classroom, even if the providers don’t know a thing about the English language. With a lot of help from unreliable blog providers and scant computer resources for students, however, I’ve moved past that stage, and my taste for risk is going down. I don’t have the energy to devote to ventures that can’t figure out capital letters or transitive verbs. It may be a snooty response, but I’m an English teacher. If I don’t have high standards here, who will?

 

Another project bites the dust

It is amusing to me how often I think of a project I am convinced will be great and how often these projects completely tank. I have mentioned that I am trying to implement in real, tangible ways strategies where students work more and I talk less, and I tend to pick away at this one lesson or project at a time. Maybe I can add something to this unit this month, maybe something to that other unit next month, until perhaps five years from now I’ll have managed to create a new classroom, one where students walk in the door, hear me for no more than 15-20 minutes, and then work diligently for the next 70-75.

It’s a crazy dream, maybe, but I continue to plug away and whenever I design one of these new projects I am almost always excited about a few particulars:

• It requires students to interact with material on their own.
• It seems to be a way for students to grab information that I otherwise would have had to convey through lecture.
• It requires students to manipulate the material in an individualistic level–that is, they can emphasize what strikes them as most important.
• It embeds much of the skill-work I try to teach, like writing and reading, and makes it seemingly more relevant.

A recent example is a way to avoid a lecture that I have never delivered effectively. It’s basic material about the communications process, and it’s the kind of stuff that students generally ignore even when I make them write it down. My real goal, when you sift through all the gobble-di-gook we call our curriculum standards and prioritize the main ideas, is to make my students better speakers. This year, then, I decided I’d make them create their own tips-sheets for public speaking. I’d make them read through a bunch of solid resources and compile what is best. Then, they’re reading the same material, they’re held accountable for paying a little bit of attention, and they end up creating a useful document for themselves (theoretically).

I knew something would go wrong, despite the carefully articulated rubric I explained to students before we began. I gave the assignment to students and in less than an hour they were handing in completed tips-sheets. I thought to myself, “You’re telling me that I designed that entire thing and you’re finished already? You’ve got to be kidding me.” Then I discovered why: many students had simply made up their own tips. Sources? You wanted us to read sources? Why? I can think of tips on my own!

Why would I tell them to make a tips sheet for themselves out of stuff they already know? Hello? Did you miss the part where I clearly talked about the resources you had to read?

Apparently.

In the future I may have to ruin the project a bit by requiring students to write by each tip where they got it. I was trying to avoid making them do that–it seemed to me to take the relaxing fun out of reading some good articles and compiling what is worth keeping. That had the research-paper feel I was trying not to awaken. Yet here I am with a pile of papers I now need to grade carefully, and half my students didn’t put half as much thought into them as I will have to put into the grading, as I attempt to determine whether they took the easy route or did the right thing.

That is so often the problem with these projects. There are so many shortcuts available, and students are persistent in looking for the shortcuts. They find them in places I never realized they existed. When they find the shortcuts they then turn in to me inferior products in far less time than I had anticipated . . . leaving me wondering if this project-based, active-student model is all it’s cracked up to be.

I’ll have to keep trying, if for no other reason than I am not interested in talking anymore. It strikes me as fundamentally better to keep my mouth shut and to keep them working. Sometime, maybe 10 years down the road, I’ll have some success stories to share about this.

Thanks for reading.

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• Third shelf crash in one year by: library mistress

 

Creating Suspense: A look at two classic tricks

I wrote the following article to be a resource for my students, whom I tasked with writing an essay about the suspense created in “The Most Dangerous Game” and “The Scarlet Ibis.” I arranged it on the page to look like a journal article, complete with stand-out quotes, and I’ll give it to them to use if they’re unsure about where to begin. (Here’s the pdf version–I just made it in Word).

It’s an attempt to create a true challenge and to avoid my blabbering up front about how writers create suspense in stories. I’m on that constant search for ways to convert my classroom to a place where students are learning actively, even when it is important that I convey some information to them. They want me to feed it to them through a tube, but I need to teach them how to use a fork and knife.

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When I have something good for my children I don’t like to share it right away. I always want to hold it a little longer and keep them in suspense, to drag out the anticipation of whatever I have to offer—whether it be a story or a bowl of ice cream. Sometimes I teeter too long on that line between savoring suspense and teasing them, but I try to give them whatever I have before venturing too far into teasing.

My tendency to hold back is something writers do as well. It’s a key to something called suspense. There are quite a few definitions of suspense floating out there, but the one I like best is the one from M.H. Abrams, that suspense is “a lack of certainty, on the part of a concerned reader, about what is going to happen” (225).

The way I see it, there are a handful of ways writers classically increase suspense in their works of literature, ways that create a lack of certainty. Essentially, they do the same thing in their writing that I do with my children—they try to give us just enough to make us incurably curious, and they try to withhold the item of curiosity as long as they can without losing our interest.

Fear and Intensity

One type of suspense writers often create is the kind of suspense that increases the intensity of the story, often creating fear for the reader. This is often the first thing people think of when they hear you say suspense. Thus, I searched online for the top suspense movies of all time, and the list is almost entirely horror films.

Usually what a writer does here is bring us to the point of intensity and then tell the story on a microscopic level. That is, the closer you get to the most intense part, the more the writer slows down.

Movie directors do the same thing. Take for example the first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring. Early in the movie Frodo Baggins and his fellow hobbits are running away from the Shire and they meet for the first time a ring wraith—an incredibly large and scary creature, draped in a black cape, riding a black horse. Frodo and the other hobbits jump into a ditch to hide and as the wraith approaches, the film slows down. We see shots of the horse’s hoof, a bug crawling on the hobbits, and the horse breathing, seemingly in slow motion. We watch Frodo reach for the magic ring, and we see a shot of his finger twitching as he considers putting it on. Each microscopic element is dragged out to lengthen the intensity and keep us in suspense. If the entire movie showed all these details it would have been 150 hours long. But it isn’t that long, because it only moves to that microscopic level when the director wants to draw out the suspense particularly. In those moments, though, we are left hanging there in our fearful curiosity: will they escape? Will the wraith see them?

In literature the strategy is often the same. In a story called “The Monkey’s Paw” W. W. Jacobs creates a fearful scene around an elderly couple. Near the end the old man fears that his son, recently deceased, has risen as a gory, zombie-like corpse. His wife, meanwhile, is eager to see her son no matter what state he is in. We, the readers, don’t know what the son is like, but we want to know, and as something approaches the couple’s door, Jacobs draws us out by telling many tiny details:

There was another knock, and another. The old woman with a sudden wrench broke free and ran from the room. Her husband followed to the landing, and called after her appealingly as she hurried downstairs. He heard the chain rattle back and the bottom bolt drawn slowly and stiffly from the socket. . . . [He] was on his hands and knees groping wildly on the floor in search of the paw. If he could only find it before the thing outside got in. A perfect fusillade of knocks reverberated through the house, and he heard the scraping of a chair as his wife put it down in the passage against the door. He heard the creaking of the bolt as it came slowly back, and at the same moment . . .

I won’t give away too much of the story because you should read it sometime, but you can see from the example that Jacobs is telling the minute details: the constant knocking, the sound of the bolt and the chair, the movements of the husband and his wife. He doesn’t use all these details in every part of the story, but he does here, because he wants to increase the suspense.

Choices

Fear and intensity are not the only kinds of suspense writers create, however. This is why I like Abrams’s definition so much. It doesn’t mention fear or intensity, just that the reader has “a lack of certainty . . . about what is going to happen.” Another kind of suspense develops when a reader anticipates what a character is going to do. This anticipation is built around a choice the character needs to make. This feeling is similar to what I feel when I tell my children to pick a color of freezy-pop and I wonder what they’ll choose, but they drag out their decision. All the while I am hoping they don’t leave me with the green one—again.

Here, the writer often creates a choice for the character early in the plot and keeps us wondering how the character will decide. Which way will they go? How will they choose? For a classic example of this we can look to a children’s movie most of us have seen, Aladdin. Early on we know Aladdin gets three wishes from the genie, but he saves that last wish as long as he can. As he goes through trials of the film—defeating Jafar, winning Jasmine’s love, we continue to wonder what he’ll do with that last wish. Will he use it on himself to gain riches, or will he do something kind for someone else, as we know he is capable of doing? We’re left to wonder until the very end of the movie. Leaving the choice open for a long while creates a suspense that holds us until he decides.

There are other ways to create suspense—we’ll study later this year how Shakespeare uses dramatic irony (when the reader knows something the character doesn’t) to create the suspense in Romeo and Juliet—but for now I thought it was worth looking at these two ways:

1. Pausing on microscopic details around the points of highest intensity.
2. Presenting the character with a kind of choice or challenge and helping us to wonder how the character will decide.

We’re not all going to be writers, but when we recognize writers’ tricks for creating suspense, we can steal their tricks for our own purposes, even if the purposes are just to toy with the children in our lives.

Reference

Abrams, M.H. “Plot.” A Glossary of Literary Terms. 7^th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1999.

 

I’ll work right after I check this one thing . . .

It’s addicting, you know. A friend altered me to this visual breakdown of digital distractions. Notice the way the iPhone trumps everything. If we note in history a decline in production during the 21st Century, astute historians might tie it to the introduction of the iPhone.

• iPhone 1G by Shapeshift

 

Creativity and Hard Work: A simple message for the first day

After reading Made to Stick last year I’m determined to communicate one simple message on the first day of school.

The message I hope to convey is how two important things overlap and become a key for academic success in my classroom: hard work and creativity (also called ingenuity). Success in my class, and I hope in much of life, comes where the two overlap.

Part of hard work means trying even when the purpose is not totally clear. To make my point I’ll turn to that classic scene from The Karate Kid:

I know students haven’t seen the movie and I’ll have to explain what leads up to that scene, but that’s easily accomplished. The point is that sometimes when you’re in the midst of learning, it doesn’t feel relevant. Yet if you don’t work hard even then, you won’t succeed.

For the creativity element I show a DVD version of Peter H. Reynold’s story, Ish. With creativity, you often have to forget about making things look the way everyone expects them to look before you can see something valuable. In my classroom, we value ish work, even if that means someone gives me something that is essay-ish.

Looking forward to the year. Thanks for reading.