Too Many High-Sounding Words

Multiple Intelligences and Poetry Response

2009-12-20T20:28:00.005-05:00

How we respond to reading is deeply personal. Although the author has a specific message he or she wants to convey, different people will receive that message in different ways. Our personal experiences shape how we understand and appreciate what we read, and no two people will read the same text in the same way. We also express ourselves in different ways when we respond to the world around us.

For my poetry unit, based on the anthology I Am the Darker Brother, I wanted my students’ responses to the poems to reflect that diversity, in reading and in response. I designed a project where they chose which poem(s) to respond to, what in the poems to respond to, and how they could to respond. I also wanted to honor the fact that some students do best when they have lots of small tasks, while others prefer a longer-term project. Building on our advisory curriculum of multiple intelligences, I made sure the various response choices would allow them to use different strengths. The final product was the compilation of response activities.

On the day the responses were due, I told my classes that this was a new project and I wanted their feedback so I could make it better for next year. The students appreciated getting to make choices and having a chance to incorporate their outside interests into a class assignment.

Here’s the assignment. The most popular choices were “poetry for dinner,” the artistic interpretation, and the remix. The only ones no one did were the skit performance and the choreography. Maybe next year!

“You see, Mr. Asagai, I am looking for my identity!”

2009-12-19T14:56:00.001-05:00

Last year, after reading A Raisin in the Sun, my students chose a social issue from the play (e.g. segregation, expectations based on gender, dream jobs vs. real jobs), thought about how the issue applied to their own lives, interviewed people in their communities, and created podcasts in which they analyzed the interviews. It was an OK project—especially given that it was new and there were a billion tech problems with GarageBand—but I found that some students wanted to generalize the experiences of their interviewees to represent an entire group. In one particularly problematic example, three white students wanted to write about de facto racial segregation in New York neighborhoods. When I suggested they examine their own predominantly white neighborhoods, they resisted.

I’ve been thinking ever since about how I can design a project that will get students to connect themselves—their own identities, their own conflicts—to the play. I keep returning to what Lorraine Hansberry said in To Be Young, Gifted, and Black, in response to drama critics arguing over whether it was a play about a black family or a family: “I hadn’t noticed the contradiction because I’d always been under the impression that Negroes are people” (128). It is a universal play, in that all of us have families and all of us have a race. It is not a universal play, in that we come from a diverse array of families and races, and our experiences of family and race differ. It’s both/and. And I want my students to get that their own experiences are like that too: both universal and highly context-specific.

So this year, instead of having them find social issues the play raises, I’d like to have students track conflicts in A Raisin in the Sun. That should be easy. There’s not one relationship in the play that isn’t riddled with conflict, and many basic relationship types are represented: mother/son, mother/daughter, husband/wife, brother/sister, mother-in-law/daughter-in-law, sister-in-law/sister-in-law, boyfriend/girlfriend, father/son, neighbor/neighbor. Each character is also in conflict with himself or herself: Mama over how to spend the money; Walter over whether to occupy the new house; Beneatha over which boyfriend she likes more; Ruth over whether to keep her baby.

I think it’ll be easier for students to relate to conflicts in the play than to see how a “social issue” pertains to them. Even calling it a “social issue” makes it about “society” and not them in particular. But being a brother or sister, son or daughter, grandchild, friend, student, or work partner is something all of them can consider on a personal level. They might, for example, relate to Travis asking his mother for 50 cents, her saying no, and his feeling disappointed. (They might also relate to the fact that Travis’s father then gives him the 50 cents, much to his mother’s chagrin.) Or they might relate to Beneatha and her family having different ideas about how a she should spend her time. Or, they might relate to Walter’s entrusting his money with his “friend” and losing it all. After reading the play and examining some of these conflicts, students will choose one they can relate to and examine how that conflict plays out in their own lives.

But in A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry goes further, making identities and roles central to the conflicts. Identity: Walter is working-class, black, male. Role: He is a father, brother, son, and husband. The conflicts Walter confronts—most notably, whether to take Lindner’s offer and restore the family’s financial security that he destroyed, or maintain his family’s dignity by moving into the new house and facing the racist neighbors—are inextricably bound up in his roles (father, husband, brother, son) and identities (black, male, working-class, Christian). Beneatha, Ruth, Mama, and Travis also find themselves in various conflicts that either flow from their roles and identities, or handle their conflicts in light of those roles and identities, or both.

Are seventh graders, many of whom haven’t quite made the leap to abstract thinking, and many of whom are beginning to question identities and try on new roles, ready to examine how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or ethnicity plays into their own conflicts? It might be too easy for a 13-year-old to oversimplify causation (“It’s all because…”) or resist the concept (“It has nothing to do with…”). Still, I want to teach to the kids who are ready to think about the conflicts in their lives this way—and push those who aren’t. I’m wondering how I should go about doing that.

All Those A’s

2009-11-24T19:37:00.005-05:00

I have a student—let’s call him Mark. If I’d been grading writing like I did last year, using rubrics and points, Mark would be getting a B-, or maybe a B at best, in English for the trimester. I’m giving Mark an A.

I knew it would happen. I knew that if I went from rubric grading to a satisfactory-unsatisfactory approach, I’d end up with a boatload of A’s and A-’s when in the past, grades in my class fell on a pretty nice bell curve centered on B or B+. And I admit that giving Ben an A makes me wince a little bit. As great a kid as he is, his writing is fairly bad. But in seventh grade, even the kids who write well write badly. And, more importantly, I have to grade in a way that reflects my values:

Process over product. My goal is not to produce 47 brilliant essays—if it were, I’d write them myself. My goal is to help my 47 burgeoning writers develop processes that work for them. Yes, everyone’s process should ultimately involve lots of revision, but there’s no one schema that will work for every writer, every time. I want them to experience what “process” feels like and decide what works for them. And, if I do value great writing, I need to promote the long process by which a seventh grader becomes a great writer.

Subjective interaction between reader and writer over attempted objectivity in my own reading. There is no such thing as objective reading. Reading is an exchange between reader and writer. I want my students to understand that different people will perceive their writing in different ways so they, as writers, can learn to honor and accommodate that diversity.

Learning over natural talent. Kids come to school to learn. Different kids come to my class with different amounts of natural talent (and pre-cultivated skill) in different areas. It’s not my job to see who’s a better writer than whom. My job is to make every kid a better writer by June than he or she was in September—and to want to learn how to write even more effectively after June.

Student-teacher partnership over autocratic grade-giving. How are students supposed to learn how to assess themselves if I don’t give them a chance to assess themselves? And if the self-assessment is meaningless because they know I’m going to give whatever grade I give, why should they bother? And, who am I to be the final arbiter of their performance without getting some input and insight from them?

As I’ve explained elsewhere, I no longer put scores on assignments. Kids get either S (satisfactory) or U (unsatisfactory). If they’ve met my high standards, they’ve done satisfactory work. If not, they have more to learn, and after they’ve learned more, they can redo the assignment. As I expected, my new system of getting feedback from multiple readers and thinking about audience has led to more variety, creativity, and risk-taking in the students’ writing. I enjoy their papers more. But it doesn’t help me at the trimester’s end, when I have to assign a grade to each student.

What I did was, I had students reflect upon their trimesters. What did they learn? What do they need to work on? Here’s the survey they filled out.

Answer these questions thoughtfully and honestly.

What did you learn this trimester?

What were one or two of the highlights of English class?

What are your strengths as a reader? Be as specific as possible.

How have your reading skills improved so far this year? Be as specific as possible.

What do you think you need to work on as a reader? Come up with 1-2 specific goals.

What are your strengths as a writer? Be as specific as possible.

How have your writing skills improved so far this year? Be as specific as possible.

What do you think you need to work on as a writer? Come up with 1-2 specific goals.

Comment on how you think you’re doing in each of these areas.

Respectful Behavior

Being polite; waiting your turn to speak

Maintaining a positive and productive working environment

Making sure you don’t distract others or disrupt the work environment

Speaking respectfully, without putting others down or making inappropriate remarks

Responsibility

Bringing all materials to class

Doing and turning in assignments

Arriving on time to class

Getting class notes and homework assignments when you miss class

Participation

Listening actively during discussions

Taking notes as needed

Contributing relevant comments to discussions

Asking appropriate questions

Commitment

Following all directions on assignments

Using guidelines to do well

Making assignments challenging and interesting for yourself; taking them to the next level

Focus

Using class time wisely

Staying on task

Avoiding side conversations

Circle the grade you think you should get in English, keeping in mind the following policies:

1. Your trimester grade drops for every unexcused late assignment. (“Unexcused” means you did not contact me BEFORE the assignment was due.)

2. If you have any never-revised “U” assignments or never-done work, you can’t get higher than a B- in English. The more unrevised U papers or missed work, the lower the grade.

A-

B+

B-

C+

C-

Explain why you think you should get this grade.

Students were astoundingly perceptive. I don’t know which impressed me more, when they picked up on strengths and weaknesses I noticed, or when they came up with strengths and weaknesses I hadn’t thought of. And they were specific in how they stated their strengths, achievements, and goals.

For the most part, I entered the grade students gave themselves. I bumped a few students up—mostly those who felt uncomfortable giving themselves A’s. And I bumped a few students down if they violated the late policy or the unsatisfactory work policy, or if their behavior in class made it difficult for other students (and themselves) to learn. My breakdown looked like this:

21 A

18 A-

3 B+

2 B

2 B-

1 C

So, they’re entered. They’re in the computer system for any of my colleagues to see, and they’ll be printed on the home reports for parents to read. And it feels scary, and it feels good, because I’ve fully and irrevocably committed a system of assessment that reflects my values.

Our Groups of Friends: A Mix-It-Up Day Processing Activity

2009-11-11T19:51:00.008-05:00

Tuesday, November 10th was Mix-It-Up at Lunch Day. Schools throughout the nation participated. The event is very simple: students are asked to spend one lunch period sitting with kids they don’t usually sit with. The purpose of the lunch isn’t to send the message that it’s bad to have a group of friends. It’s to get students—and faculty—thinking about the kinds of boundaries we all put up around ourselves and our groups.

At my school this year, the 6th, 7th, and 8th grades participated in Mix-It-Up at lunch. Later in the day, each grade did an activity to think further about the boundaries they create. For the 8th grade, I created an activity that got students to examine how diverse their groups of friends are, both as opposed to their parents’ friends and in the context of their grade.

First, students met as a whole grade to discuss two simple questions. Why is it good to have things in common with your friends? And, why is it good to NOT have things in common with your friends—to be a diverse group? Next, they broke into advisory groups. Each student got a chart and were asked to follow these simple directions—with pauses so that everyone could complete the step before anyone moved on:

Write your own name and the name of an adult you live with.

Write the names of 5 of your closest friends. It doesn’t have to be people who go to school here—it can be anyone you consider to be a close friend, by whatever your definition is of a close friend. Then, write the names of the adult’s five closest friends. Again, you can decide for yourself what a “close friend” is. DO NOT PROCEED UNTIL EVERYONE HAS COMPLETED THIS TASK.

At the top of the red column, write “Race.” Make an S in the box next to each of your friends who has the SAME race you identify yourself as having. Make a D in the box if your friend has a DIFFERENT race from yours. You might not KNOW how each of your friends identifies. The point is how YOU perceive each of your friends. Do the same for your parents: S for same race, D for different race.

At the top of the orange column, write “Age.” Make an S next to each friend whose age is within 1 year of yours. Make a D if your friend is more than a year older or younger. For the adult, make an S next to each friend whose age is within 5 years—as you perceive or guess it. Don’t worry if you’re right! Make a D if the friend’s age is greater than 5 years older or younger.

For yellow, write “Gender.” Make an S for same gender and a D for different gender—as you perceive it.

For green, write “Socioeconomic Class.” Make an S if you perceive your friend to be of the same socioeconomic class as you, D if different—as you perceive it. Do the same for your parents.

For blue, write “Religion.” Make an S for same religion and D for different religion—as you perceive it.

At this point, the students were ready to process and discuss. Here are some of the discussion questions advisory groups used:

Count your Ds and the adult’s Ds. Who has a more diverse group of friends, you or the adult? Why might that be?

In what way are your friends most diverse? Least diverse? What about the adult? Why do you think this is?

Why is it valuable to have friends who share your identities? Why, for example, would you want to have friends who are of the same gender, or the same age as you?

Why is it valuable to have friends who do not share your identities? Why, for example, would you want to have a friend who’s a few years older, or a different religion?

Do you talk about these aspects of your identity—race, age, gender, socioeconomic class, and religion—with your family? For example, do you discuss what it means to be wealthy, or Muslim, or 13 years old?

Do you talk about these aspects of your identity with your friends?

Some of the results were surprising. One advisory group discovered that their parents’ groups of friends were more diverse than their own. A student theorized that kids have a limited group at school from which to draw their friends, but their parents are out in the world and so have a more diverse pool of potential friends.

Next came what I think is the most interesting part of the activity. Students got 25 dot stickers, 5 in each of the colors from their charts. Looking at their own friend lists, they labeled their dots with Ss or Ds, by color, according to how many Ss and Ds they had in that column. So if, for example, Molly had 2 red Ss and 3 red Ds, she labeled her red dots accordingly. Out in the hallway were 5 large posters, each labeled with the appropriate color and identifier (Red-Race, Orange-Age, Yellow-Gender, Green-Class, Blue-Religion). Each poster was divided in half, with the halves labeled “Same” and “Different.” Students stuck their dots one the appropriate halves of each poster.

Here are some more discussion questions for after making the posters. The students ran out of time, but I’m hoping they’ll get a chance to have these discussions in future advisory meetings or in small groups with teachers.

Which “D” poster got the fullest? Why do you think that is?

Which “S” poster got the fullest? Why do you think that is?

Do any of the posters surprise you?

How do you think the results of this activity would change if, instead of going by your perceptions, you had to ask each of your friends how they identify?

Why would you want to have friends who are the same as you in some of these ways?

Why would you want to have friends who are different from you in some of these ways?

And the results? Unsurprisingly for 8th grade, the dots on the age and gender posters were almost entirely on the “Same” side. Religion was about 50-50. Class and religion were fuller on the “Same” side. Food for thought on Mix-It-Up Day.

If you’d like to do this activity at your school, please leave me a comment (or send me an email) and I’d be happy to share the lesson plan and chart!

Whole Brain Teaching: How Brainy Is It?

2009-11-03T20:06:00.004-05:00

“Whole Brain Teaching” is a method of classroom management that engages more of the students’ brains—mostly through movement and sound—focuses their attention, and makes students actually enjoy following rules. But it’s really better to see it than read about it, so:

Falling squarely in the “so crazy it just might work” category, I tried some of the techniques in my classroom this week.

What I like:

1. “Class-yes” gets their attention. I’ve used a countdown (5-4-3-2-1) for years, and it works more often than not, but it’s always felt a little fake and condescending to me. “Class-yes” is so over-the-top fake and condescending that it becomes genuinely fun and equally silly for all of us. And, “class-yes” gets their attention at least as well as the countdown—probably better.

2. I tried a version of the scoreboard today without telling them what smiley face and frowny face meant, why I was giving points on both sides, or whether they’d get anything as a result of how the scoreboard ended up. And still, their behavior changed: when they got a smiley point they became more engaged, and when they got a frowny face point they stopped doing whatever they were doing. I also followed the suggestion of never letting the difference between smiley points and frowny points get greater than three, because I don’t want them to give up or grow overconfident.

3. I also tried micro-lecturing followed by having them explain what they learned using loud voices and vigorous gestures. Know what? They did it, they loved it, and they learned from it. Go figure.

4. I’ll try “hands and eyes” because it seems, like much of this, silly enough to work.

What I don’t like:

I don’t believe in extrinsic motivators and can’t bring myself to use them. Even if Alfie Kohn is wrong that extrinsic motivators decrease student interest and excellence, what would I use as the carrot? Should I let them out a few minutes early for good behavior? That sends the message that our minutes together are so unbearable that their removal is a wonderful thing, and that they’re so unimportant that I can give them up whenever I want. Should I give them a free pass on homework? If the homework weren’t valuable preparation or review, I wouldn’t assign it in the first place. Should I let them do a fun project instead of a boring one? I try to make all of my projects engaging, relevant, meaningful, and fun—but less fun projects like essays are important too and I can’t simply take them away. And again, I don’t want to send the message that certain kinds of work are torturous. Should I give them candy or pizza? That would mean expenditures of my free time and money, all to promote junk food consumption.

No extrinsic motivators. They’re just going to have to learn because they’re interested and behave because it’s the efficient, compassionate, and ultimately smart thing to do. And again, it was fascinating to see their behavior change simply because I made a tally mark under the smiley or frowny face. I wonder whether the tally marks themselves, signifying absolutely nothing tangible, work as extrinsic motivators that decrease their interest and performance, or whether they’re simply reminders of what kids should be doing without my having to scold.

What I’m unsure about:

“Teach-OK” seems perfect for classes where most of what the kids are doing involves absorbing information. A great way to learn is to read, see, or hear something and then explain it to someone else. Today, I had the students explain what they learned directly from me (the definition and features of a thesis statement, the parts of an essay) back to each other, using loud voices and vigorous gestures.

But, so much of what we do in my class is constructivist activity-based. They’re not absorbing meaning from me (or a book or video); they’re creating meaning together. So for example, they’re looking at great, decent, and terrible essay introductions and figuring out what makes a good introduction good. Or, they’re finding examples of a motif and figuring out what the motif means. If I gave the command to “teach” the symbolism in Cannery Row before they’ve analyzed how it works, they wouldn’t know what to do—though if I gave that command at the end of class, for review, they’d be fine.

I think I need a different command word that basically means, “Do whatever activity I just told you to do,” which can include explaining what they’ve just learned, and a response that means, “Sure, boss.” Maybe just “Go-OK.” Sounds like the name of a band, doesn’t it?

Prizing the Literature Essay

2009-10-29T20:03:00.003-04:00

Should seventh graders write essays analyzing Steinbeck’s techniques or what’s wrong with Holden? I’m of two minds on this one. In one mind, I believe literary analysis to be a great way for kids to sharpen their ability to make an argument and support it with specific evidence. As Carol Jago, president of the NCTE, explained eloquently in a recent article, reading fiction allows kids to empathize with characters who are very different from themselves and to think about ethical dilemmas that they might encounter as they build their own lives. Writing about fiction allows them to dig deeper into the text, make meaning, and create a logical argument based on the meaning they see.

In the other mind, I keep thinking about authentic purposes for writing. Better writing usually comes from a more authentic purpose—so says pretty much every writing book I’ve read, and I also know it from experience. The seventh grade essays are pretty consistently painful. But, if I’m writing an email to complaining parents, I’m going to write a beautifully-crafted argument for why their child is actually doing fine despite the B- besmirching her record. The email will probably be better written than the briefs I wrote for law school. You don’t get much more authentic a writing purpose or well-defined an audience than those emails warding off evil parents. And I hope that’s not the best writing I do, but for certain it’s good writing—better than if someone gave me a prompt to write a pretend email.

That’s what some of our assignments are, right? “Pretend you’re writing this op-ed for a newspaper.” Or, “Pretend you’re writing this podcast for NPR.” For most others, we don’t even pretend there’s an audience: “Write a paragraph explaining a symbol in The House on Mango Street. Be sure to use at least two well-blended quotations.” Only occasionally do we give them real reasons to write: “Write an email to your congressional representative arguing for a more aggressive stance on an issue that matters to you. Remember to cc me on the email.” I’ve got to wonder, though—are those emails really going to be better written than the symbolism paragraphs just because the emails have an authentic purpose and audience? I suspect not, but I couldn’t put my finger on precisely why.

Yesterday, one of my colleagues made an interesting point about authentic writing. It’s not so much about purpose and audience—though these matter—as it is about the writer’s investment in the writing. Nell knows her vignette collection isn’t getting picked up by Random House, but she cares about what she’s writing because they’re about her life and the topics matter to her. She’s invested. And the writing is brilliant. Scout, Kate, and Sara know their podcast won’t air on NPR, but they care about the issue they’ve chosen—whether people act more like themselves with their families or their friends—so they’re invested. And the reason my email to those obnoxious parents is so brilliant isn’t that I have an authentic purpose and an authentic audience; it’s that I care about the writing. The writing matters to me. If we want students to write well, we have to get them to care about the writing: its purpose, its content, its effect.

Very often, the reason writing matters to the writer relates to how it will affect others. I want that parent email to have the effect of convincing those complainers that their child is learning and they need to get out of her way. I used to say to my classes that all writing is persuasive; authors are trying to convince us that their message is true or right. So sure, the purpose and effect of the writing make the writing matter. But the content can also make it matter. I’m writing this blog not because I want to convince anyone that I’m right, but because I care about what happens in my English classroom and I want to reflect upon my practices. I write books both because I hope others will read them, eventually, and because I care about the characters and their stories.

So I guess the way to resolve the literature essay problem is to make sure my students are invested, both in the text itself and in the thesis of the essay. Now that they’re finished with their Steinbeck books and the time has come to write their essays on “What makes Steinbeck Steinbeck,” I’m asking them to look through their notes for topics, themes, and techniques that they want to explore further. When many of them chose topics we’ve discussed to death in class, I urged them to think about who they are and what aspect of Steinbeck’s writing they connect to. “Look in your notes for items you wish we’d had more time to discuss,” I urged them. “Don’t pick foreshadowing or the power theme just because we talked about it in class. Find something that matters to you. Like, if you really care about nature, maybe you want to write about how Steinbeck portrays the natural world and the human relationship to it. Or if you’ve been in a conflict with a friend, maybe you want to explore the conflicts between friends in Steinbeck books. Find something that matters to you.”

It doesn’t feel quite as real as when I asked them to write vignettes on episodes from their own lives. With that project, it was easier for them to connect the assignment to what matters to them. But then again, and contrary to what they might think with their 13-year-old brains, the world isn’t just about them. Maybe, if we’re all lucky, they’ll choose topics they care about and learn something about how the world beyond themselves works. And maybe I will actually like reading them. Here’s hoping.

Questioning Assumptions with Steinbeck

2009-10-26T18:21:00.004-04:00

My Steinbeck author study continues. In today’s lesson, the students examined the theme of appearances vs. reality and had a chance to think about assumptions and labels in the three books and in their lives.

First, the students folded a sheet of paper and into four sections and wrote the names of four characters, depending on which book they’re reading. Students reading Of Mice and Men used Lennie, George, Curley, and Curley’s wife. Those reading The Red Pony used Jody, Carl Tiflin, Billy Buck, and Gitano. For Cannery Row, they wrote Doc, Dora, Mack, and Lee Chong. In the boxes, students listed things people might assume about each character without knowing him or her well. I asked, “How might people label or judge this character?” I urged the students to consider appearance, job, living situation, interactions with other characters, and other behaviors.

Perhaps because they’re in a middle school minefield of assumptions and judgments, the groups had no trouble coming up with labels. Some felt uncomfortable and asked if it was OK to label Lennie as retarded or Curley’s wife as a slut. I reminded them that the purpose of the activity was to dig deeper into the theme of appearances but that they were right to feel uncomfortable about using offensive terms. I wish they’d picked up on the race prejudices in how characters view Lee Chong in Cannery Row and Gitano in The Red Pony. We’ll definitely be coming back to that when we talk about forms of power in Steinbeck’s books.

After about 10 minutes of students identifying labels and assumptions, I asked, “Which of the assumptions you listed about your character are true? False? Unknown?” They marked each item T for True, F for False, or U for Unknown based on textual evidence. Interestingly, many of the assumptions they identified turned out to be false or unknown; for example, there isn’t one shred of textual evidence that Curley’s wife actually sleeps around. Careful reading will reveal that far from being greedy, Lee Chong is very generous and cuts off credit only when it becomes necessary. Neither Mack, who is homeless and unemployed, nor Lennie, who is disabled, is stupid. Then again, some assumptions turn out to be true: Doc really is smart and kind, and Curley’s wife does in fact cause trouble.

Next, I asked groups to consider which of these characters they actually like. On the board, I circled these characters’ names. Then I went back to the labels. I said, “If these are the characters Steinbeck wants us to like—a mentally disabled guy, a simple farm boy, a homeless and unemployed man—what is Steinbeck trying to tell us about appearances and assumptions?” Students wrote their answers in paragraph form, and I asked them to share insights. Lots of kids said variations on, “Don’t judge a book by its cover.” Others said that if we can like people who are different from the way we are, maybe we shouldn’t judge them on those outer characteristics. One student said something like, “We like the characters who we know the most about. But maybe if we knew more about Curley, like why he feels the need to be so insecure and hate people, maybe we’d like him too.”

I found that last point particularly compelling, that we can empathize with others and like them more when we know their stories. (It will be interesting to see whether, after hearing more of Curley’s wife’s story, the students reading Of Mice and Men begin to like her more.) I’d like to ask students to think about their own stories that they reveal, conceal, repeat, revise, remember, and forget. A friend of mine pointed out that stories are social currency: which stories we tell, who we tell them to, and how we tell them plays a large part in how our images are constructed. Elections are won and lost because of stories. Defendants are convicted or acquitted based on how their stories are told. Romances and business deals are built and destroyed with stories. And, as my student pointed out today, we can reach out across the wide valleys that separate us from each other with our stories. When we tell stories, we give others a chance to ask questions instead of making assumptions, to understand instead of judge. I believe Steinbeck wrote his books at least in part so he could tell stories that weren’t being told, so readers would label a little less and relate a little more.

I closed the class by asking the students to close their eyes and picture a student in the middle school that they don’t really know and don’t really like. I asked, “What assumptions are you making about this person? How are you labeling him or her? How are you judging? Maybe if you knew more of this person’s story, you’d like the person better. Just something to think about.”

What Kids Can Learn From an Author Study (That They Can't Learn from One Class Novel)

2009-10-25T21:20:00.006-04:00

This week, I started my much-anticipated (at least for me) John Steinbeck author study where students pick one of three Steinbeck novels: Of Mice and Men, Cannery Row, or The Red Pony. In the past, I’ve taught Of Mice and Men as a class novel, but I wanted to provide more choice for my students. I’ve read enough arguments that whole-class novel studies don’t address students’ diverse needs as readers and lead to only a few kids doing most of the talking (because they like and understand the book) while the rest of the class is frog-marched through the reading—if they even do the reading—and count minutes during class. Given some choice, kids are more likely to find a book they like and to contribute to their group discussions. So far, that’s just what I’m finding.

On the other end of the choice-in-reading spectrum, I’m not quite ready to let everyone pick whatever book they want. I recognize the strong arguments in favor of total student choice: they’re more likely to enjoy reading and want to read on their own; teachers can guide students toward more appropriate choices after establishing a relationship of trust (more likely to occur when a student feels the teacher takes his or her initial choices seriously); a student is more likely to grasp sophisticated elements of literature, like motifs and symbolism, in an accessible book; a student is more likely to take risks in discussions if s/he feels s/he understands the text on the surface. I get it.

But still, having seen so many students rise to the challenge of a text on the edge of their comfort zone, I see the value in pushing them to that edge. And, I know from the “gradual release of responsibility” model of teaching reading that students need a slightly lower-level text for independent reading than for guided reading. In short, students can read more difficult books for class than they do for themselves. And, a common text helps students build community because it gives them a non-threatening starting point—and a point of comparison—for discussing deep and difficult issues in their own lives. It’s easier to talk about, say, seeking approval in The Red Pony than it is for them, at thirteen, to discuss how they seek their own parents’ approval. And giving more kids access to the same text means more of them can participate in such discussions.

So, I created my Steinbeck author study as a happy middle ground between the class novel and free student choice. Because my default model in class is to give small groups of kids an activity, I’m able to use many of the activities I used for Of Mice and Men, but now for all three books. For example, last year, one way I’ve had the student think about setting was to have them sketch a landscape, map, or “image collage” of the pool in chapter 1. Within the drawing, they write short quotations to show where they got their ideas. I explain that the activity helps them visualize the setting more clearly, appreciate Steinbeck’s precise description, and begin to notice how Steinbeck uses his settings to convey themes and set up conflicts—almost like the setting is another character in the book. To deepen this last point, I have students list adjectives to describe the setting. What kind of place is this?

Because the students this year are all reading different books—and only because they’re reading different books—I was able to take this activity one step further. In their book groups, students came to a consensus on the 3-5 best adjectives to describe their settings, and I put these lists on the board. Then I asked each group to look at the lists they had not made—the adjectives describing the settings from the other two books—and note the ones that could describe their book’s setting too. I circled adjectives that could describe two or more Steinbeck settings, words like natural, peaceful, isolated, simple, and beautiful. After reading the list out loud, I asked, “So, if these are the words that describe Steinbeck settings, what are some of the ideas Steinbeck is concerned with? What messages is he trying to send by setting his books in these kinds of places?”

The kids hit on some important points. That Steinbeck is concerned with the interaction between the human world and the natural world. That there’s always an isolation factor. That the places he describes aren’t exactly tourist destinations, but Steinbeck finds the beauty in them. All of these ideas come up in the motifs, symbols, and plot conflicts in the three books, and now we’ll be able to refer back to them. And again, the students were able to make these observations precisely because they’re reading different books.

Beginning to Fill the LGBT Gap in My Curriculum

2009-10-14T06:42:00.004-04:00

Last Friday, I had another conversation with colleagues about what it means to “represent” kids in the curriculum. When I wrote about representation last time, I lamented the fact that the Latina girls were most silent during the unit on The House on Mango Street. But thinking further, I realized they weren’t silent at all. The culminating assignment during that unit was for the students to write their own collection of vignettes, all on different topics but all on the same theme. The best collection I read was by one of the Latina girls. Maybe she didn’t want to speak in class about the “Big 8” social identifiers, but she did speak with her pen, telling stories that were so beautiful because they were real and true and precise. They were her. In a wide, wide ocean of vignettes about camp and pets, A___’s were about the bus she took to Prep for Prep, and the piss-smelling tunnel she has to walk through. I still remember her vignettes, a year later. And this year, the best vignettes I’ve read so far are by another Latina girl, and once again, what makes them the best is how real and true and honest and specific they are. So the Latina girls are, in fact, speaking.

It didn’t take my going to the National Equality March for me to see that one of the gaps in my curriculum is the absence of LGBT characters—unless you count the ambiguous sexuality of Holden Caulfield. I’ll get to him in a minute. But the march did remind me that I could do more to make LGBT authors and characters, and issues of sexual orientation, more visible in my English class. I don’t expect that talking about sexual orientation will mean that all my LGBT students will suddenly feel comfortable coming out, but I do hope that all my students will begin to question heteronormative views and behave in ways that promote equality and inclusion. And that, just as some of the Latina girls found their own ways to speak through the vignette assignment, so will my LGBT students find ways to speak.

One way I can make my curriculum more inclusive is to use Holden as a way into discussions of identity. Interestingly, Holden Caulfield’s identifiers fall on the privileged side in 7 (or maybe 6) of the Big 8 social identifiers: he’s white, rich, male, able-bodied, Christian, and of unknown European stock. The one identifier that’s absolutely on the targeted side is his age—he’s only 17—and age is the very thing that obsesses Holden throughout the novel as he struggles to preserve the innocence he sees around him but at the same time tries to access the power and privileges of the adult world. As for Holden’s sexual orientation, he very well could be gay or bisexual, but he certainly doesn’t come out.

It seems to me that a perfect time to talk about how identity is constructed would be during the unit on The Catcher in the Rye. Last year, I made a chart with the Big 8 (race, socioeconomic class, gender, ability, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age) in rows and main characters (Esperanza from The House on Mango Street, Lennie from Of Mice and Men, Walter from A Raisin in the Sun, and Holden from The Catcher in the Rye) in columns. We named their identities and talked about how we “know” when it doesn’t say, like how we know Holden is white even though Salinger never actually says. This year, I want to dig a little deeper into our assumptions. Could Beneatha Younger be bisexual? Could Holden be a quarter Jewish? In short, when are we correct in our assumptions about identity and when are we wrong to assume in the first place? And how does that relate to privilege? And why does that matter in our readings of literature and our interactions with each other?

Beyond my classroom texts, I would like to use independent reading as a way to include more LGBT books. One of my colleagues puts on his syllabus a list of suggested independent reading that goes along, in genre or theme, with the class text. Immediately I thought, I must do this. What a great way to encourage independent reading and diversify the books my students are reading. So I’m thinking that starting with my next unit, I’ll give out suggested independent reading lists and that I’ll incorporate literature with LGBT characters. I realize that including these books on a list is a necessary but not sufficient step toward greater inclusion in my curriculum.

I went on Amazon and started looking through seventh-grade-appropriate literature with openly LGBT characters, and these are some books that are well-reviewed. I can’t speak personally to any of them yet. Maybe you can.

Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You

E.M. Forster, Maurice: A Novel

Jim Grimsley, Dream Boy: A Novel

Keith Hale, Clicking Beat on the Brink of Nada

Brent Hartinger, Geography Club

Steve Kluger, My Most Excellent Year: A Novel of Love, Mary Poppins, and Fenway Park

Bill Konigsberg, Out of the Pocket

P.E. Ryan, Saints of Augustine

By Golly, This Lollipop is Following Me

2009-08-21T15:56:00.009-04:00

I interrupt this otherwise stone-serious blog to say that every time someone talks about “following” someone’s blog or twitter food, this is what I think of.

I could tie this thought-association to my blog’s theme by deconstructing the gendered imagery, describing a lesson plan based on it, and saying something about my personal, contextualized worldview as a white suburban girl who watched The Electric Company in the 80s, but I’m gonna spare you.

Resolving My Grading Crisis – For This Year, at Least

2009-08-16T13:25:00.005-04:00

My grading problem has been bugging me all summer, and now that August is half over, I need a plan. It’s not going to be perfect, but I can’t go back to pretending my point system and rubrics lead to fair and honest assessments of student writing. If my grading system is to promote my values as both a teacher and a writer, something needs to change.

My new grading system must:

1. Provide some basis of merit-based grading at the end of each trimester. At my school, the assumption is that grades reflect the quality of student work. (This assumption is flawed, but it’s what I’m working with.)

2. Look more like real-life writing assessment. Any time I read—an article, an email, a recipe—I’m assessing. Am I convinced? Intrigued? Disturbed? Encouraged? With rubrics, instead of thinking about what the writing says, I’m simply deciding the extent to which the work measures up to prescribed categories. My comments merely show students what they did wrong. Why not use comments to show what they did right: inspiring thoughts, ideas, feelings, and associations?

3. Encourage (or at least maintain) students’ intellectual risk-taking, deep thinking, love of learning, interest, and self-esteem. If I have to grade, I want my policy to minimize the damage of grading.

4. Honor diversity, both of the writing itself and of people’s reactions to it. What if the writing moves others but doesn’t move me? Am I the ultimate arbiter of good writing? I sure hope not.

So here’s what I’m thinking.

Each trimester, there are two major writing projects and lots of little writing assignments. For major writing projects, like the vignette collections or the Steinbeck essays, students go though an elaborate revision process. They get feedback from several readers, make sense of what the different readers said, and make choices about what to cut, keep, change, rearrange, and add. By having different people read the papers, students get to see a variety of reactions—and from people other than me.

Then, students turn in their work on a due date. When I read, I make, in the words of Peter Elbow, “a binary decision: acceptable or not.” Pass or fail. Satisfactory or unsatisfactory. The publishing industry does it: accept or reject. I expect quality writing and high effort, and if I don’t think a student is meeting those expectations, I reject his or her submission—and there’s my merit-based grading. I write S (satisfactory) or U (unsatisfactory) on every paper. Students don’t have to feel bad about their B- papers because there are no B- papers.

Instead of “justification comments,” written to prove that the grade I’ve given is fair, I’ll write what I think about as I read—the kinds of comments I would write on any other text. I’ll also write one suggestion for future writing on every single paper and have students refer back to the suggestions the next time they write. Every writer, even Pulitzer winners, can grow.

And the U papers? If a student’s writing doesn’t pass muster, I expect him or her to give me a plan for revising or redoing the assignment, along with a due date. Maybe students feel bad if they write unsatisfactory papers, but they can redo them. And then they can feel good knowing they improved.

More importantly, now that students don’t have to find a magic formula to satisfy me (or my rubric), their writing doesn’t have to be formulaic! They can take more risks in their writing. They can enjoy and personalize the assignments. I’m leaving more room for diverse interpretations of the assignment and multiple paths to excellent writing. I can still use rubrics, but as writing guidelines instead of grading yardsticks. I can point to them when students do unsatisfactory work, but I no longer have to pretend they’re some sort of scientific measuring device.

At the end of the trimester, students compile their writing (and feedback), and they write a reflection on what they’ve learned as a writer. Where did they start out? Where did they end up? Where are they going next? Each student also proposes and defends a trimester grade. Those grades and comments, along with my own observations and suggestions, form the basis of my home reports.

Because this system raises the danger of students taking advantage, I need some checks and balances. I probably need more, but here are the two I have so far.

1. Lateness is not tolerated. If an assignment is going to be late, the student must talk to me in advance, at least the night before a minor assignment and two nights before a major assignment is due. The student must tell me when s/he will turn in the assignment and how s/he will make sure it’s done by then. If a student misses school the day an assignment is due, s/he’s expected to turn in the assignment either beforehand or electronically, except in cases of illness or family emergency. And, students have to inform me themselves—not through their parents. I’m so sick of their dodging responsibility. And I’m sick of their technology excuses. How often does your toner run out, your internet go down, and your flash drive break all on the same day? A student who doesn’t follow my lateness policy doesn’t get higher than an A-. And the more unexcused late assignments there are, the lower the grade goes. Fair?

2. If a student has any never-revised “U” assignments or never-done work, that student can’t get higher than a B. Basically, “U” means the student didn’t follow the assignment, didn’t (as one of my colleagues puts it on her rubric) demonstrate evidence of my teaching, didn’t respond thoughtfully to feedback, didn’t think too hard, didn’t learn too much. The more outstanding U papers or missed work, the lower the grade. Again, this is merit-based grading.

And what are the potential problems?

· Kids like who work really hard, learn a lot, grow a lot as writers—but still are doing less-than-stellar writing—now get As. I can live with that.

· Kids who don’t work that hard or think that hard but write “satisfactory” (but not great) papers also get As. I have a problem with that, but a lower grade isn’t going to motivate those kids to do any better. If a kid is underperforming in my class, I need to figure out how to get that kid to open up and take some risks. I can do that without, in the mean time, docking her or his grade.

· Kids who do poor work inflating their own grades. I think my checks and balances take care of that problem. If their work is really that bad, they’ll get a U. And if they go back and rework the paper to do better, why shouldn’t they end up with a better grade?

· Kids who are being modest and lowball themselves. Well, that’s why it’s a proposed grade. I can always make it higher.

· Complaining parents. Too bad for them. I will need administrative support, though, if this is going to work.

So, is this going to work? Is it going to get me in trouble? What will students think? What problems am I not thinking of? And are they worth the risk?

Leaning into Writing Discomfort

2009-08-07T07:52:00.004-04:00

In her book Designing Writing Assignments, Traci Gardner quotes a line I can’t get out of my head: “Students translate an instructor’s goals into processes they can handle.” The line comes from the Mānoa Writing Program’s study of almost 200 writing students, which further concludes that students use “strategies they devised to deal with earlier writing assignments, and they may try to use these strategies again rather than risk something new.”

I’ve seen this phenomenon plenty of times. Last year, one new project I gave students asked them to make a podcast on a social issue that comes up in A Raisin in the Sun. For the project, each student was to interview someone and then analyze the interview. So if, for example, I interview my dad about his experiences with race, I might compare his experiences to my own, hypothesize why he had certain experiences, or fit his experiences into a larger framework I’ve studied. I was expecting wonderful insights in the podcasts, but instead, I got lots of summaries and descriptions, with very little analysis. If you want to talk Bloom’s Taxonomy, the podcasts were at the very bottom level of thinking, simple reportage.

I was disappointed then, and I sketched up some new lesson plans to give students a clearer sense of what “analysis” means. But now, having the problem framed for me as students doing what they think they can do because they’ve done it before, I realize my task is more complicated than defining “analysis” for students and showing them good models.

Here’s another example of how a learner changes the assignment into something surmountable. My daughter, who is two years old, calls the playground, “peegound.” It’s not an obsession with toilet training that makes her say it this way; it’s that she hasn’t yet figured out how to pronounce Ls, long As, and Rs. She deals with the L and the R in playground by simply omitting them. And the long A sound, she converts to a long E. So what is my daughter doing? She’s translating the implicit assignment, “Say the word playground,” into something she knows she can handle, “Say peegound.” And her coping mechanisms, changing or omitting problem elements, are exactly the methods my students use.

So, how can I make my students see that, as Barack Obama and César Chávez before him put it, YES THEY CAN do analysis? How do I show them they don’t have to pretend the instruction, “analyze,” isn’t there or hope their well-integrated quotations will satisfy me? Giving mini-lessons defining analysis wasn’t sufficient, nor was stating my expectations in clear and precise language. What will I do differently when I assign the podcast this year?

Not only do I need to share more models of analysis, I have to devote more class time to letting students discover what makes the good ones good. I didn’t have student models last year because it was a brand new assignment, and even this year I don’t have many student models because last years’ weren’t all that good. I’ll have to look on NPR and other radio sites for segments that analyze.

(Incidentally, I’ve been looking at The Norton Sampler as a source of good essays. It’s meant for college student writers, but the way the analogy frames techniques might help, and there’s a good companion website with links to more essays. I always say that students don’t write good essays because essays aren’t part of their reading repertoire. Time to change that. And, if reading good analytical essays translates into writing better analytical essays, maybe it’ll also translate into writing better analytical podcasts.)

Also, the purpose and audience of the podcast needs to be clearer. Why should they take a risk on writing if their only goal is to please the teacher? Why should they try something hard that they might do badly if they can do something easier and more familiar and still get an OK grade? If they’re writing their podcasts for a more authentic reason—say, to prove to their parents how much (or how little) has changed between the early years of the Civil Rights Movement and the early years of the Obama presidency—perhaps they’ll have more incentive to analyze the problem. If they’re going to bother with higher levels of thinking like comparing, categorizing, and theorizing, they need to know who they’re trying to convince and why. Perhaps I can get the podcasts published on the school website. What other audiences might motivate them?

The Grouse on Mango Street

2009-07-24T17:40:00.007-04:00

Here’s something I wasn’t expecting.

Last year, I decided to change one of my class texts, from short stories (Poe, Bradbury, Vonnegut, Thurber) to The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros. I changed the text for two major reasons. One, I thought Mango would be a more accessible first book of the year for seventh graders. Short as they are, some of those stories were rough reading for kids barely out of sixth grade. Two, I thought writing vignettes about their lives would be a more interesting and personally relevant assignment than writing stories modeled after Poe’s or Vonnegut’s. For sure, the previous class had fun writing horror and sci-fi, but I wanted my students to have a chance to express who they were, to use their writing to bring people and places and objects and moments and questions to school that they were used to leaving at home. That was the goal, at least.

For more than a few of my students, writing vignettes was a highlight of the course. The assignment was simple: turn in a collection of at least three vignettes connected by a common theme. (We’d also been talking about the difference between topic and theme.) One girl wrote about her trip to see the orphanage she’d been adopted from in China. One boy wrote about how he loved trains when he was small and told how he leaned down to the grates in the street to listen for passing subways. Another girl wrote about the mural-painted, piss-stinking tunnel near her home, describing how it felt shabby and sometimes scary but also like home. And predictably, I got stories about dogs and camp. (I don’t mind the topic; I mind the lack of emotional connectedness. I’m hoping good peer review will help with that.)

Given the quality and investment in the vignettes, and given that I’d chosen Mango because it’s approachable and lends itself to personal writing about identity, I was stunned to see how few students liked the book. On my course evaluation, of the 62 students who responded, 7 said they loved it, 17 said they liked it, 33 said it was OK, and 5 said they hated it. So, only 24 liked or loved it, and 38 thought it was OK or hated it. By contrast, for A Raisin in the Sun, 39 liked or loved it and 23 thought it was OK or hated it; for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 55 liked or loved it and 7 thought it was OK or hated it. What’s going on that my students like (or love) Shakespeare—ancient, incomprehensible Shakespeare—more than contemporary (well, OK, 25 years old, but that’s the most recently-written text they read, which is itself problematic), early-teenager-friendly Cisneros?

I’m going to start with the assumption that I made the right decision last year when I switched the text. Maybe that’s wrong, but I had some pretty convincing reasons for making the change then, and I’m still convinced now. So under that assumption—that Mango is a good book for my students to begin 7^th grade English reading together and writing off of—I figure something in the way I presented the book turned students cold, or lukewarm, to Mango. (Lukewarm is even worse than cold, isn’t it?) This year, I’m going to have to make some revisions. But what?

Whatever I change, I want to keep the vignette-writing assignment mostly the same. That was a successful part of the unit, so I’ll just tinker a little to get from silver to gold. But the reading bit—the discussion topics and structures—need to change. I think last year might have been a little too scattershot; with a book of vignettes, it’s hard not to be. I need an essential question to stick to. I also think I was a little too heavy-handed in introducing the identity themes in the book. The Big 8 do not have to be force-fed to them the first month of school. And finally, as much as the students need to learn about literary devices, I’m no longer willing to scrap writing time. The House on Mango Street will be, first and foremost, a model of how to write. Along the way, we’ll look at what Cisneros does to make her writing so cool. We’ll do some discovery and interpretation of the devices, and some using of these techniques.

Here’s how I want it to play out.

About half of our class time will be devoted to writing vignettes. Maybe 20 minutes of each class. I want those little buggernuts writing. A lot. That’ll give them even more material to go on when they compile their final collection. I’d also like to have them spend more time doing meaningful peer review and revision.

In that vein, I’m going to give writing prompts related to each vignette. After reading a bunch of them for homework, the kids can choose a prompt based on one vignette they want to write about. Last year, I think I gave too much freedom of choice, overwhelming some of them and leaving others feeling uncertain if what they were doing was “right.” The vignettes in Mango are about things, moments, relationships that make Esperanza who she is, so if the prompts ask the students to write on the topics in the Mango, the students will be writing about who they are. That should tease out the personal stories that make them who they are much better than discussing the Big 8 social identifiers.

As for reading/discussing/analyzing the text itself, I’d like to focus on what Cisneros does that makes the writing work so well. I think the essential question is going to be, “What do authors do when they’re writing for adults?” because to date, most of what they’ve read has been young adult fiction. Mango is a nice crossover book, not quite YA and not quite adult. The kids can see how Cisneros uses motifs, symbolism, irony, foil characters, foreshadowing, unreliable narrator—and that’ll pave the way for the Steinbeck unit. I want to take my students to MoMA to see how some of those literary devices come up in art too (and maybe to use art as a way into more vignette writing). Then, when they’re writing their paragraphs on literary devices, they’ll have points of comparison.

It also wouldn’t hurt to have them do a cool project, like maybe a video interpretation, or artwork inspired by one of the passages. I’ll have to make time.

What made me love The House on Mango Street was how Cisneros used vignettes to tell a story without telling it. How she honored the importance of small things and events—a bike ride with friends, a pair of ugly shoes, a name—and used them to reveal her characters. How she didn’t feel the need to write in grammatically-correct sentences, and her text was all the more powerful for it. If I chose this book for its excellent writing, I should use it to help students see what makes writing excellent so they can do excellent writing too. If I chose it because it’s relatable, then I want to reach the parts of students that relate to it. I want my classroom to be a place where students can bring their whole selves. If The House on Mango Street shows them a way to do that, then maybe it doesn’t matter if they love, like, or hate the book itself.

Honoring Disagreement is Honoring Diversity

2009-07-13T07:50:00.007-04:00

Sometimes, while reading student papers, I have moments of self-doubt. I hand the offending work—this time, it’s Zach’s Of Mice and Men essay that I’m about to give a C+— to my colleague, Jeremy, and ask him, What would you give this paper? He skims it and says, I didn’t read it that carefully, and I don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, so you’d know better than I would, but I’d say a B or a B+?

Jeremy is kind enough to give the string of qualifiers that honor my professional judgment, but at the end of the day, what does it mean for Zach when he gets a C+ on a paper that another English teacher—who teaches kids in the same grade at the same school—would have garlanded with a B+? I can’t say to Zach that he earned a C+ when the teacher who sits RIGHT NEXT TO ME would have said he “earned” a B+. But in fact, Zach didn’t earn a C+; I gave him a C+.

Not that I’m wrong to give the C+. He rarely explained his evidence, he integrated his quotations poorly, and he didn’t bother to address the second half of his thesis. And don’t even get me started on the grammar problems. I should have given the paper a C. But in Jeremy’s view, Zach had a interesting and personally-relevant thesis about how Curley’s wife’s asserted a false power because she lacked true power, and how this kind of dynamic exists among the so-called popular crowd at school. Zach also brought his own biting, slightly sarcastic tone to the paper. If you knew Zach, you could totally hear him speaking these words as you read them.

Had I been using a different rubric, say the 6+1 Trait^® Rubric, or one that awarded more points for voice, creativity, and personal relevance, I might have given Zach the B+ that Jeremy would have given. But that’s not the point. The point is that Jeremy and I had very different reactions to this paper because he and I are two very different people. And why shouldn’t we be?

Right now, I’m reading The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which I think is the most brilliant book I’ve read this decade. But I’m certain that there are people who wouldn’t like it. For one thing, the narrators use a lot of Spanish, and to understand it all, a whitegirl like me needs a background in Spanish and/or Spanish-English dictionary and/or Urban Dictionary and/or 33 years of knowing how to attack a word using context. For sure some non-Spanish-speaking readers would find all those Spanish words cumbersome to the reading experience. And though I wouldn’t know for sure, I’d bet good money that Junot Diaz thought about those readers and decided something like, “The Spanish is part of Yunior’s voice. I can’t take it out, and I can’t footnote every time. If some readers can’t deal with the Spanish, too bad for them.”

And that’s exactly the point! All writers make choices about who to include and who to exclude in their readerships. No writer writes for ALL readers. A text as universal as a New York Times article assumes a certain degree of formal education, worldliness, and familiarity with background events. Conversely, most writing is for more than one reader. In real life, the only time we write for one reader is when we write strictly for ourselves, as in a diary, shopping list, or notebook; or when we write strictly for one other person, as in a private email. Just think of the complexities when you decide, midway through writing, to cc an email: all of a sudden, you’re making subtle alterations to your tone, you’re asking yourself if you need to define a term, you’re deleting a joke. And that’s just for one extra person! Imagine how professional authors must feel negotiating the potential misunderstandings of their wide readerships. But they do!

With student writing, though, we make a funny compromise. We pretend students are writing for all readers—or at least all teachers. We pretend that any teacher could read their essays and give the same grade we did. We pretend that there is some measure of fairness to the way we grade. (For gorgeous proof to the contrary, just read the second chapter of Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, by Maja Wilson.) At the same time, we know there’s only one reader this essay is written for. Sure, a peer reviewer or a parent might have a look, but the teacher is the Reader Who Counts.

In real life, much of what we write will be read by multiple readers, our readers’ contexts matter. A Dominican might appreciate the historical and cultural details in Oscar Wao more than I, who have only a very cursory and second-hand knowledge of its history and culture. Someone who knows what cane fields, the SDF-1, and the Rutgers University campus look like will surely have an easier time visualizing these details. (It doesn’t let the rest of us off the hook, especially in this wonderful age of Google images, but it makes the reading experience feel different if we have to look up pictures versus if we have deep-set memories the book calls up.) How I think about a text will be related to my geographic roots, my education, my race, my religion, my gender, my socioeconomic status, my biases as an English teacher, my personal interests, and even—gasp!—my mood at the time of reading.

How is that fair to students? How is it fair that my opinion of Zach’s paper depends on something as incredibly capricious as my mood? It’s NOT fair. But it’s also reality. When Zach’s dad reads my home report at the semester’s end, it will matter whether he opens the envelope after sitting through 90 minutes of traffic or after watching Zach win his season-opening baseball game. He’s not sitting there with the home report guidelines to help him figure out whether my comment is useful. HE, a real person, is sitting there. Reading. When Zach’s mother gets her copy of the report, she might read my words about Zach’s difficulties in English class and blame her ex-husband for not pushing Zach hard enough. People bring themselves to writing. The best I can do as the writer is be as aware of my audience as possible, anticipate possible interpretations, account for some, and knowingly ignore others.

The best I can do as the teacher is teach my students to know their readers for the messy, moody, opinionated, contextualized human beings that they are.

In her book, Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, Maja Wilson spends an entire chapter discussing the fact that readers disagree about writing all the time, and that this disagreement can be very helpful to writers when they examine WHY different readers disagree. Forget the grades; WHY did Jeremy and I have such different reactions to Zach’s essay? Zach might learn that Jeremy used to teach a course on comedy, while my law school background has made me meticulous about logical organization and thoroughness in proving a claim. Then—and here’s what’s really important—Zach can make DECISIONS about how to revise. (When Alfie Kohn spoke at my school, he said something that stayed with me: “Children learn to make decisions by making decisions, not by following directions.”)

What does that look like? After reading Rethinking Rubrics, I’ve decided to try some of Wilson’s suggestions.

Let’s say Zach just finished a draft of his essay. In a peer review session, two of his classmates will use Ted Nellen’s “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method to tell Zach (a) what they got out of the piece; (b) what struck them about it; and (c) what left them confused or curious, or any suggestions they have for revision. I’ve created a chart version of the “I heard, I noticed, I wonder” method that we can use in class.

Next, Zach has to find two adult reviewers who will also use the “I heard, I noticed, I wondered” method. He can use his parents, his other relatives, his parents’ friends, his godforsaken tutor—whomever he wants. If a student doesn’t know any adults who can fill that role or doesn’t feel comfortable asking, I’ll give them mentors. (My big fat plan is to see if, at a nearby retirement home, there are people with time on their hands and wisdom in their heads. A reversal of good old community service. But I’m not there yet.)

Now, Zach has comments from four different reviewers—some his age, some older; some in his family, some not; some who know him well, some who don’t; some who did a similar assignment, some who don’t know what the assignment was. These different readers have brought their own subjective ideas, both about the content of the essay and about essay-writing itself. They’ve brought their backgrounds, biases, and moods. They’ve brought themselves. How does Zach “extract clarity from disagreement through careful study of readers’ context and [his] own purposes?” (Wilson, p. 65)

He can put all the feedback in one place (my very slightly modified version of Maja Wilson’s “Dealing with Disagreement in Response” chart on p. 97 of Rethinking Rubrics) and then make sense of all that feedback by finding common themes among the comments, thinking about his readers’ different perspectives, and using those perspectives to guide his revisions.

In real life, some writing is for only one reader. But essays are not meant for one reader, and I don’t want to be the one Reader Who Counts. I want to teach students that honoring disagreement is honoring the diversity of backgrounds, opinions, biases, interests, and moods that readers bring. I want my students to learn, in short, that readers are subjective and that writers need to make decisions that will ultimately include or exclude readers. I know the process is going to be messy, but that shouldn’t be what stops me.

An Open Letter to Ben (Or, Why I'm Changing the Way I Grade Papers)

2009-07-09T19:54:00.005-04:00

Dear Ben,

More than a year has passed since I read your essay about Holden Caulfield. At the time, it was one of 62 essays about Holden that I was reading; since then, I’ve read 63 more. Still, I remember that your essay applied something you learned in a YES Institute course: that Holden had a “listening,” or biased way of understanding the world, that got in his way. I confess I don’t remember much more about the essay—as I said, it’s one of 125 that I’ve read, and it was more than a year ago—but I do remember two more things about it. One, I remember loving it so much that I told several colleagues about it, and I gushed (which isn’t something I do easily or often) about how creatively you’d applied what you’d learned in one context to something in another context. That kind of interdisciplinary connection-making isn’t something you middle schoolers do too often (not that we teachers help as much as we should), and it’s very exciting when it happens.

Two, I remember the score I gave you: 44/50.

As you know, I graded the essay using a rubric. For everything of yours that I graded, I used a rubric. I don’t have the exact rubric I used for your essay, but here’s the very similar one I used for essays this year:

Paragraph 1: Introductory Paragraph ( /5)

· Introduction explains your topic in general and leads the reader to your thesis.

· Thesis is strong, clearly stated, and interesting.

Paragraphs 2-4: Body Paragraphs ( /10, /10, /10)

· Begin with a supporting argument that helps show your thesis is true.

· Give specific, well-chosen examples from the book that show the argument is true.

· Use at least 3 well-blended quotations that directly support your thesis.

· Explain how each example proves the argument in the paragraph.

· Remind the reader how all points in the paragraph relate back to the main thesis.

Paragraph 5: Concluding Paragraph ( /5)

· Summarizes the points you made in the essay.

· Explains why what you said matters.

Writing Style and Mechanics ( /10)

· Uses clear and precise language.

· Ideas follow each other logically, with clear transitions connecting them.

· Is free from spelling, grammatical, and stylistic errors.

TOTAL ( /50)

I’ve gotten very positive reviews of my rubric. Students, parents, and tutors like that it’s clear and specific. From the rubric and the detailed comment I give at the end, struggling essayists know what was expected, what they did well, and what to work on next time. I like the rubric too. It keeps me honest, keeps me from inflating grades. If the paper lacks clear points, sufficient textual evidence, and underdeveloped ideas, I can’t give it a B+ just because I want to.

Here’s the problem, Ben. Every time—and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME—I give a writing assignment, there’s at least one piece of writing that I want to give a higher score than the rubric tells me I should. (There’s also at least one that I want to give a lower grade than the rubric tells me I should. I’ll get to that in a minute.) Your year, for the Holden essay, yours was the one I wanted to grade higher. Your thesis was brilliantly creative and the paper was well-written. I could hear your voice in it. In a big stack of essays where some were bad and some were OK and some were pretty good, yours was by far the most interesting. If it weren’t my job to read essays, I wouldn’t want to read most of the essays I read. I’d want to read yours. So why didn’t you get a 50?

I was reminded of your essay while reading an article, an oldie but a goodie, called Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment, by a writing professor named Peter Elbow. Elbow examines three different ways teachers look at their students’ writing: grading the paper, analyzing the paper’s strengths and weaknesses in order to help the writer develop, and connecting to the writing. I have tried to make grades more meaningful by tying them to a rubric. Instead of slapping an A- on a paper because something about it appeals to me (or slapping a B- on it because something about it doesn’t), I measure the essay against important criteria of good writing. A good essay needs to have an interesting thesis; it needs to be well-organized so the reader can follow the ideas; it needs adequate support for the claims it makes. I look for those elements when I read students papers, and the score I put on the paper reflects the extent to which a student has measured up to the aspects of good writing I taught. In Elbow’s terms, I don’t just grade; I evaluate. The grade is merely a reflection of that evaluation.

Except, there’s another dimension of reading a paper. I’m not a paper-reading robot—although, when I have 60 to read, I sometimes feel that way. I’m a person. I connect with some ideas more than others. I enjoy beautiful turns of phrase. I love creative thinking that makes me pause and say, I never would have thought about it that way, or, what an interesting connection, or, YES! Reading your paper as a teacher, I gave it a 44 because it measured up to most of the standards I’d set, but according to the rubric, there were little things here and there that it lacked, or places where it needed more development, or something. (By the way, I don’t remember what was “wrong” with it. I hope you don’t either.) But, reading it as a reader, I enjoyed it. It put enough ideas in my head that I still remember the paper now.

Whenever I read anything, I write on it. When I read student essays, I write notes about the clarity of the argument, perhaps, or the effectiveness of transitions, or the development of the ideas. Evaluative comments. I write evaluative comments on other forms of student writing too: your stories, poems, dialogues, descriptions, and vignettes. I also write on published writing, but not for the purpose of grading it. I’m thinking about it. I wrote on Peter Elbow’s article: arguing with it, jotting down ideas for my own classroom and team meetings, asking questions, connecting his ideas to other articles I’ve read, noting my (rather strong) emotions. I write on fiction and nonfiction, for work and for pleasure, to note the questions and ideas and feelings and associations I make as I read. As a general rule, I like writing that gets me thinking, and the more I think, the more I scribble down. The sheer amount of commentary I write in the margins of a text is a rough measure of how much I like it. Maybe I should start reading student papers like I read everything else and give a grade based on how much I write. That would be a lot easier and a whole lot more fun.

Fun for me, but I wonder how it would affect you, and other students. What if you got back a paper, and instead of reading all the comments about what you did well and what you might have done differently, you got to read comments grappling with your actual ideas? There’d be responses to some of your thoughts and questions about others. You’d find out, through my reactions, where you’d reached me, where you’d convinced me, where you’d inspired me—and yes, where you’d confused me, where you’d bored me, where you’d failed to prove your point. You might come back to me and explain what you were thinking, so I’d get it, and I would say, OK, now go put that in your paper. We could talk about WHY I was confused. Maybe it was the lack of transitions. Or WHY I got bored. Maybe your thesis stated the obvious. See where I’m going?

Peter Elbow makes a startling point in his essay. He says that when teachers like a student’s writing, they find it easier to criticize. He says that when he doesn’t like the writing, he struggles to write comments, “trying to soften [his] criticism, trying to find something nice to say—and usually sounding fake, often unclear” (Elbow, 171). But when he actually likes the writing, when he’s excited about it, he’s also able to be more critical. I’ve discovered the same thing when I read papers. When I really love an essay, when it engages me as a reader and a thinker, I can give specific commentary on why I like it. At that point, I feel like I’ve established an intellectual relationship with the writer, like we are two scholars on equal footing, exploring an interesting idea together. On that equal footing, I feel entirely comfortable raising my objections to the organizational structure, or the wording, or the third paragraph’s content. And the student, who feels genuinely respected as a thinker, eagerly returns to his or her desk to make the writing live up to how much I like it.

I’ve seen it before. But I’ve also seen the opposite, when a student knows that even though he or she got a perfectly decent grade—thanks, rubric—I didn’t really like the paper. There was one essay this year that I remember reading, and though there was nothing really wrong with it and I think I gave it a 42, I just didn’t like it. The arguments were predictable and the prose was boring. It was fine, but it was boring, and I gave the B begrudgingly.

What’s weird about rubrics is what they do to me as a reader. I let the rubric make decisions instead of making them myself. Ben’s essay gets a 44 because he didn’t do x, y, or z. Walter’s essay gets a 42 because he didn’t do x, y, or z either, and he also didn’t do a couple of other things. Writing gets reduced to whatever categories I put on the rubric, and however thoughtful I was in designing those categories, their ultimate effect is still to reduce writing to x, y, and z. Writing isn’t algebra. (Even algebra isn’t algebra—there’s always more than one way to solve for x.) There are no formulas. There’s only me, the reader, you, the writer, and the spaceship of words that carries meaning from your planet to mine. Sure, I might not understand everything you say; I might even misunderstand, and everything you write gets filtered through the atmosphere of experiences, ideas, and biases I already have around me, not to mention whatever weather systems of feelings and thoughts are swirling around at the moment when I read.

But Ben, that’s what reading IS. It’s interactive. It’s as variable and diverse and messy as people are. I use my rubric to try to take all that messiness and make it neat and clean, but as I discover EVERY SINGLE TIME a pile of papers lands in front of me, that neatness doesn’t really exist. If it did, I’d be able to justify a C for Walter and an A for you. But then, if that neatness existed, I probably wouldn’t be an English teacher, because writing would follow easy formulas and would lack the richness and surprise that made me love writing in the first place.

So what happens now? Well, with the help of Maja Wilson’s excellent book Rethinking Rubrics in Writing Assessment, which echoes (or rather, presages) many of the ideas I’ve put down here, I am rethinking my entire system of assessing student writing? What possibilities are there beyond the rubrics that strangle my sensibilities? How can I grade (because I still have to grade) and make sure you get that A? And so very much more importantly, how do I honor the wonder and delight I felt upon reading your essay—the relationship we now have as reader and writer? I don’t think that volume-of-commentary system is going to fly, but I am committed to finding something that will.

Respectfully,

Ms P

Equity, One File at a Time

2009-06-25T09:16:00.004-04:00

I have a website on Moodle where I post stuff that students might find useful: syllabi, assignments, writing guides, graphic organizers, reading recommendations, extra credit opportunities, useful links, and other fancy stuff. My students know that if they lose their handouts, or if they miss class, they can check Moodle and will find whatever they need. Moodle provides organizationally-challenged students with extra copies while keeping them more accountable and independent. You lose your stuff? Fine. Get a new copy. Just don’t come asking me for it, because you know what I’m going to tell you.

Whenever I make a new handout for class, I save it, print it, and upload it. Moodle has an absurdly clunky interface—it’s a 14-click process from login to uploaded document, and that’s not counting naming the file, writing an explanation of what it is, and all the scrolling it takes to get where you need to be—but it’s pretty easy once you’re used to it, and it saves stuff from year to year, so you don’t have to re-upload unless you make a lot of changes. I do make changes, so I do re-upload, but that’s my problem. Even with all of that, Moodle does save me the time of having to email students (or their parents) gazillions of attachments.

Here’s the problem, though: Henry doesn’t have Microsoft Office.

Henry is an awesome kid. He’s intellectually involved, he works hard, and he’s trying to understand himself as a learner. One thing he figured out about himself is that he’s not the most super-organized kid in the world. Sometimes, he loses stuff. When he does, he sometimes remembers to ask for a new copy. I give him the usual refrain: “Check Moodle.” But then he comes back with, “I did check Moodle. All the stuff is in Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. I don’t have Microsoft Word and PowerPoint.”

And really, why should he? Microsoft Word, especially the most recent version, is not only counter-intuitively designed point that you need a gazillion hacks just to make it function acceptably, but it’s absurdly expensive. Why would anyone purchase a bad program for a lot of money when they can get a perfectly good one for free? Moreover, and more to the point, some students’ families don’t have the financial resources required to purchase Microsoft Office. If a student needs access to course documents, that access shouldn’t hinge on their parents being rich enough and/or dumb enough to buy Microsoft Office.

What I told Henry was, “Well, the school has Microsoft Office, so print it here.” That was a bad answer. It’s true that Henry could have—and sometimes did—print at school, but the whole point of Moodle is to give students access. Usually, the time when they need that access is when they’re at home, either doing homework or preparing for the next day’s class. Plus, when they’re at school, surrounded by their friends and rushing from one of their eight classes to another, the last thing on their minds is, “Oh yeah, I need a new copy of that essay organizer.”

So, what would have been a better answer for Henry, and all the other students who don’t have Microsoft’s family of products? PDFs. If you have a computer and internet access, you can download a PDF reader for free. And then, you can open any PDF. My problem was, I didn’t know how to make PDFs, but now I do. It’s easy, especially if you have a Mac, but even if you have a PC.

So now, I begin the process of saving all my files as PDFs, deleting the Word and PowerPoint versions from Moodle, and uploading the PDF versions. That’s a whole lotta clicks. All in the name of equity.

What Does it Mean for a Book List to Reflect Students?

2009-06-20T09:00:00.009-04:00

My seventh grade classes read the following books:

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Of Mice and Men, The Red Pony, or Cannery Row (students choose one of the three), all by John Steinbeck

I Am the Darker Brother, an anthology of poems by African Americans

A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

One by a Latina, two by black men and women, and three by white men.

One question I’ve asked is, where are the Asians and Native Americans? If my students reflect those groups, shouldn’t my curriculum? But a deeper question I’ve been thinking about lately is, what does it mean for an English curriculum to “reflect” the kids? A book by an author with the same color skin as mine, or whose ancestors come from the same continent as mine, or whose sex chromosomes look roughly like mine—does a book by that author reflect me? Why should Alicia feel reflected in the curriculum simply because she and Esperanza from The House on Mango Street are both Latina? A book about a white Jewish female writer with man trouble and self-esteem issues isn’t about me. In fact, I might rebel against identifying with that girl precisely because her outer characteristics are so much like mine. My experiences are as unique to me as everyone else’s are to them; I don’t want to be reduced to categories. (That individualistic stance is itself rooted in white culture, but I’ll save that discussion for another post.)

Some students do prefer characters who resemble them. In general, students do seem to get more into books with kid characters; I've had my students tell me as much. But some students don’t need the characters to share their own traits. In Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie are middle aged male migrant workers in 1930s rural California, yet Grace, a young female from a Manhattan family in the 2000s, felt their pain and longing and frustration because these are human emotions. It’s not that age and socioeconomic class and gender don’t affect Grace’s experiences, but it would oversimplify and insult her human capacities to assume that she’d only be able to identify with those whose gender and socioeconomic class and age are the same as hers.

Maybe what it really means for an English curriculum to reflect student diversity is for the books to present a diverse array of human emotions, struggles, triumphs, failures, and experiences—including race-, gender-, ethnic-, and class-based experiences. That means a white girl like Grace should read Walter Lee Younger’s story, because he reflects her somehow, and she won’t know how until she reads A Raisin in the Sun. It means Adam, a black boy, should read A Raisin in the Sun too, because something of himself is reflected in Walter, though no one can assume what. Making the curriculum reflect my students is not only about finding characters who look like them. It can be about finding the ways a character’s encounters, decisions, and feelings look like their own.

To complicate the question, in our class discussions of The House on Mango Street, the Latina girls were the ones who spoke the least. Later, when we read A Raisin in the Sun, the black boys were the most silent. What messages the kids of color are getting—from me, from the curriculum, from each other, from the school—that they clam up when characters look like them? Are they protecting the uniqueness of their own identities by dissociating themselves from characters who resemble them outwardly? Or is the message that they’re being asked to represent their race? As a white girl, I never faced that. When my classes discussed Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, or Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Taylor in The Bean Trees, no one asked, explicitly or implicitly, “As a white girl, what do you think?” At the same time, I was allowed to claim an understanding of The Woman Warrior and The Invisible Man.

Perhaps Alicia did nod in recognition when she read The House on Mango Street. Perhaps not. Perhaps she saw herself more in Beneatha Younger, or in Holden Caulfield. But even if that’s true for Alicia, the fact remains that it matters, for Alicia and for all students, whether there is a Latina voice in the books we read. And it matters that there are no Native American or Asian voices. If I leave Native American and Asian authors out of the curriculum, I send a message that Native Americans and Asians are unimportant. That’s not the message I want to send, not to Olivia, an Asian student, and not to Alicia, and not to anyone. Reading an Asian author’s story would not mean that Olivia, who was quiet all year, would suddenly have lots to say, but omitting Asian authors sends a negative message, not only to Asian students, but to all students.

As a white girl in middle school myself, I didn’t have to worry about representation. Throughout my school years, the curriculum was replete with white female characters. On the outside, and occasionally on the inside, the curriculum did reflect me. I want my students to say the opposite. I want them to look back on seventh grade English and say, on the inside, and occasionally on the outside, the curriculum did reflect me. If ALL of them can say that, I’ve begun to create an inclusive curriculum. At this point, not all of them can say that.

The Last Day of Classes

2009-06-12T18:29:00.003-04:00

On their last day of classes, our students have a special schedule where they see all of their teachers for 15-minute mini-classes. Mostly, they sign yearbooks and said goodbye, but I couldn’t resist a last opportunity to teach them something, so I told them the following story. It’s a version of “The Turnip,” as retold by the Brothers Grimm.

Once upon a time, there were two brothers. One was a soldier who had risen through the ranks and became rich and well-known, and the other was a farmer who remained poor and unknown. One year, the farmer-brother planted turnip seeds, and when the plants came up, he noticed that one was much bigger than the others. It grew and grew, and when harvest time came, he found that the turnip was so big that it filled an entire cart and required two oxen to pull it.

“What will I do with this turnip?” thought the farmer. “Will it bring me good fortune or bad? I cannot sell it, for who would want such a thing? I shouldn’t eat it, for little turnips would be just as good and easier to cook.” After much thought, the farmer decided there was nothing to do with the giant turnip but bring it to the king as a present.

When the king saw the turnip he said, “I’ve seen a great many wondrous things in my time, but I’ve never seen anything quite so wondrous as this turnip. Tell me, how did you come by this turnip? You must be a great man.”

The farmer said, “No, it is my brother who is a great man. He is a rich and well-known soldier whom you’ve heard of. I am just a poor and simple farmer. No one’s heard of me.”

The king felt compassion for the farmer and said, “I will raise you from poverty. You will have gold, and land, and herds of cattle, and your brother’s riches will be not match for yours.” And so it happened that the farmer became richer and more well-known than his brother.

Now, when the soldier-brother heard of what had happened to his farmer-brother, he became envious. He said, “If that could happen to my brother because of a simple turnip, imagine what the king will give me if I bring him the wonderful treasures from the faraway lands I’ve visited in my travels.” So, the soldier-brother loaded a cart with treasures from around the world and went to visit the king.

When the king was presented with the treasure, he said, “What wonders you have brought me! I would like to give you something wonderful in return. And in all my kingdom, I have nothing so wonderful as this magnificent turnip!” And so it happened that the soldier had no choice but to load the turnip onto his cart and take it home.

As the soldier-brother was on his way home, his rage turned to hatred, so that by the time he reached home, he had resolved to kill his brother. He hired some murderers and had them hide by the side of the road. The soldier went to his brother’s house and said, “I know of a great treasure buried near here. Now that we are both great men, let us go together to dig up the treasure, and we’ll divide it between us and become even richer.” The farmer-brother, suspecting nothing, went along. And the murderers fell upon him, threw him in a sack, tied the sack, and prepared a rope to hang him from a tree.

But suddenly, in the distance, they heard singing and hoof beats. Afraid they would get caught, the murderers simply tied the sack up in the tree and ran away. As it turned out, the singing and hoof beats came from a student who was riding his horse back to the university and singing joyously of all the things he was learning.

Meanwhile, the farmer worked a hole into the sack and poked his head out. When the student came riding by, the farmer called, “Hello! Today is your lucky day!”

“Who’s there?” called the student, looking left and right.

“Look up in the tree! Here I am, sitting in the Sack of Wisdom! Why, in the short time I’ve been in this sack, I’ve learned a great many things about the world.”

When the student heard this, he said, “Please, you must let me enter this sack. I too desire to learn a great many things.”

The farmer said, “Well, you’ll have to wait a little while. There is still one more thing I need to learn.”

After a short while, the student couldn’t bear his thirst for knowledge and called again, “Please! You must let me enter the Sack of Wisdom!”

So the farmer said, “If you want to enter the sack of wisdom, you must use that rope to lower it down.” Eagerly, the student lowered the sack, let the farmer out, and began to climb in. “Oh, no,” said the farmer. “You must let the wisdom surround you. You must go headfirst into the sack.” So the student dove into the sack, and the farmer tied it up, hoisted it into the tree, and rode off on the student’s horse.

When I finished telling the story, I said to my students, “So, why did I tell you this strange story on the last day of school? Because I want you to be a little bit like each character and little bit unlike each character. I hope that, like the solider, you will have great things come to you. And I hope that, unlike the soldier, you will never think that just because you have some privileges, you are automatically entitled to others. I hope that, like the like the student, you will always seek new knowledge and take great joy in learning. And I hope that, unlike the student, you never expect learning to come easily. I hope that, like the famer, you will take all new situations—whether good, bad, or ambiguous—and find creative ways to make them good. And I hope that, unlike the farmer, you will never deceive or exploit another person for your own gain.”

What do you think? Too didactic? Or a good lesson for the last day of school?

Gender in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

2009-06-06T16:42:00.000-04:00

One of my students, David, pointed out how odd it is that after a year of digging deeply into the themes and literary devices in texts, we end the year translating the plot of a shallow love story. David’s right. We don’t do much with A Midsummer Night’s Dream beyond understanding the words. Sure, we act it out, and sure, we use it to learn the concept of subtext, and sure, we talk about how it’s adaptable to different settings. But the level of depth still isn’t very impressive, especially for the motivated critical thinkers I get to teach.

David’s problem with Midsummer stung because I had identified the same problem and hadn’t done much to fix it. I’d thought, it’s the end of the year, so it’s OK to do curriculum lite. I’d justified it further thinking, it’s Shakespeare! Even if all we do is read it and translate the meaning (or, as Kelly Gallagher put it in Deeper Reading, “construct the gist”), the students are learning Shakespeare. But still, I wanted to get a little deeper into the characters—even if that meant exposing their shallowness—and the themes of the play. Quite by accident, or as if fairies had planned it without my knowledge, I came upon a solution.

For the first part of the lesson, I adapted a activity I’d sat in on in my friend Kalin’s classroom. I broke the students into four groups and assigned each group of students a group of characters: the four lovers, the three other main Athenians, three of the mechanicals, and the three main fairies. I put the characters’ names on the board, and as a group, the students had to write three adjectives that they felt defined the character. Easy enough.

Next, each group of students rotated so they had a new group of characters. They had to revise the list. The rules were that for each character, they had to keep at least one adjective and change at least one adjective.

In the third round, when student groups rotated to get a revised list, the students were allowed to circle only one adjective for the whole class to discuss and negotiate. At the end, they copied the lists into their notes.

The next day, I told them we were going to discuss a theme that interested Shakespeare: gender roles. We reviewed the difference between sex and gender, the concepts of gender role and gender identity, and the idea of a gender continuum (which some of them had learned by participating in the YES Institute). In each class, students mentioned terms our society uses to label those who defy gender expectations—terms like tomboy, metrosexual, and yes, gay. We discussed how sexual orientation and gender identity are not the same thing; there can be a gay man with very masculine characteristics, or a heterosexual woman with very masculine characteristics.

Groups of students then placed the characters on a gender continuum. I asked them to put each character where they, as the audience members, saw the character and not where the character would put him- or herself. As the day before, we rotated groups and revised; this time, the second group was allowed to move only one character, and then the class raised characters to discuss.

Toward the end of the lesson, I wrote the adjectives from the previous day under the character’s names. So Helena, who they’d deemed very feminine, was also insecure, jealous, and whiny. Titania, who they’d deemed more masculine, was aggressive, stubborn, and powerful. I asked the students, what does this reveal?

It was powerful stuff. Some resisted the implications. Some acknowledged that gender stereotypes affect them. Most protested that guys and girls aren’t really like that, and I kept reminding them that we weren’t talking about individual behaviors but about social expectations. I can’t say I changed their consciousness, but they did think about something they might not have thought about in a way that was just comfortable enough.

So for next year, too late for David but worthwhile for the class below his, I’m considering titling my unit Social Justice in Shakespeare. We can talk about the racist language (“Away, you Ethiop!”), the stereotypes perpetuated by framing working-class characters as ignorant and foolish, and the question of whether characters are responsible for their behavior when under the influence of the love flower.

What do you think? What other social justice lessons have you taught using Shakespeare?