What Do We Do When What Happens Outside The Classroom Is More Effective Than What Happens Inside The Classroom?

Jejak PandaJumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda
ceme 99 onlineMy undergraduates in Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers are working on a term paper in four stages. The first draft requires them to write about their own literacy—how and when they learned to read and write, influential people and experiences, that sort of thing. The second draft requires them to begin theorizing about the acquisition of literacy. They have to begin to analyze their own experiences in the light of research we’ve been reading for the course. The next draft will require them to incorporate their experiences and observations from their clinical placements in schools. A simpulan draft will require them to bring the paper to fifteen revised pages. I just finished reading their second drafts, collected right before the students went on break this week.

In the first draft, many students wrote about literacy experiences that happen outside of school, or, more properly speaking, that happen before schooling begins. They wrote about reading with their moms and dads, writing stories for their grandmothers, playing school, trying to imitate their older siblings’ reading and writing habits, taking trips to the public library, that sort of thing. This isn’t surprising to me. These experiences go a long way towards explaining how and why these students wound up pursuing the teaching of English as a career. However, I am struck by the frequency of outside the classroom experiences mentioned in the second drafts. It seems that many students are having their most important and influential experiences with reading and writing outside of the classroom.

One student wrote about a teacher who had sponsored and advised a school club for creative writing. The principal objected to the club because few of the students in it were doing well in their English classes. He believed that students should only be allowed to participate in such a club if they got their grades up in their regular English classes. Spending time doing creative writing was simply distracting them from concentrating on their regular studies. So he disbanded the club. The teacher agreed to meet with the students informally and outside of school to help mentor their creative writing. The so-called club ceased having any affiliation with the school, and only met off campus and after school hours.

Another student wrote about a relationship she developed with one of her English teachers, whose class she really liked. She began hanging out in the teacher’s classroom at the end of each day for the thirty or so minutes before sports practices began. They talked about books and writing. Eventually the teacher shared with her that she wrote and published poetry and stories, and was working on a novel. Soon, the teacher and the student were spending their brief time together every afternoon sharing their writing. The student was very impressed with her teacher’s poetry and the excerpts she heard from her novel, and enjoyed the feedback she got from the teacher on her own writing. Thinking back on this experience now that she is going into teaching, the student made the observation that the teacher could have brought her writing into the classroom and created this sort of experience for all the students. However, the teacher apparently felt at a loss for how to fit poetry and fiction writing into the very prescriptive American Literature curriculum, and was uncomfortable sharing her personal writing with students, or having students share with her and one another their own personal writing. As it was, it had taken a large part of the semester to feel comfortable sharing with this one student she had developed a trusting relationship with, and even then she worried that her administrators might disapprove of this out of class writing and sharing relationship for being unprofessional or inappropriate.

When I think back on my education, I would have to say that some of my most influential experiences took place outside the four walls of the classroom, too. I took Saturday morning enrichment classes throughout elementary school, and some of the things I loved about those were the loose structure, the lack of assessment, and the opportunity to work with older students. Years later, in Catholic high school, I worked with the campus ministry running peer counseling sessions and visiting soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and hospices; and I worked for the school newspaper writing and editing mostly sports articles. Again, I loved how much more free those organizations were. We never sat at desks in rows and never took tests. Long periods of time might pass when I or some small group worked on something totally out of sight of the advisor. I couldn’t even have told you where he or she was.

In the early years of my teaching career I advised a high school newspaper and literary magazine, and much the same culture existed—loose structure, lots of freedom and autonomy for the students, deadlines and rigor but not tests or grades. One year I had a group of kids that somehow or other got into the habit of calling me by my first name, but only after school during the meetings for the magazine and newspaper, never during the day in the classroom or the halls or in front of other teachers or students.

My wife and I have had similar experiences traveling abroad with students. The supervision of their whereabouts cannot be as rigid as it typically is in school. Interactions tend to be much more personal in nature. The days are filled with rich and valuable experiences, but there are no tests. No one is going to grade the quality of anyone’s participation in a travel- or study-abroad experience. And yet the kids, of their own accord, will write and blog about what they do each day, take photos, make videos, all sorts of things that they are inspired to do by the nature of their experiences, not because anyone required it.

What does all this say about traditional instruction and classroom structure? I think the challenge for us becomes how to make our students’ experiences inside the classroom more like these experiences outside the classroom.

First, The Bad News ...

Jejak PandaHallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Blog Ini
judi ceme terpercayaI was listening to NPR yesterday as I drove home from UConn, and I tuned in to the tail end of an interview with a woman who was talking about positive economic news. The thrust of her interview was that positive economic news does exist, even in this economy, and that it is important to report it so that people’s spirits don’t become totally depressed. The interviewer even gave a plug to websites like the GoodNewsNetwork and PositiveEconomicNews for taking the time to find nuggets of hopefulness among all the gloom and doom that has dominated the news since the fall. And listening to this I got myself thinking that this week when I write my column I would try to be positive and write about good news.

But it’s so hard …

I find it hard when I know that Governor Rell has proposed eliminating state funding for the CWP-Fairfield, or that she has proposed HB 6388, which would strip teachers of their collective bargaining rights. These rights date back to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, but were given teeth in Connecticut with the 1982 Educational Enhancement Act, but not before teacher strikes in 1978. Think about that. No collective bargaining rights. Boards of education in every town would be free to cut pay, increase class size, even alter medical benefits, and teachers and their unions would have no legal right to do a thing for themselves or their students. How long till we found teachers on strike again? Fortunately, the CEA and AFT have aggressively campaigned against the bill, and it looks like it will fail, but I remain angry that Rell would even propose such a thing. She seems patently hostile to teachers and education.

I also find myself angry at school boards looking for 0% or even negative increase budgets for the coming fiscal year, which would mean layoffs and kegiatan elimination everywhere. To the average tax payer a 0% increase sound like a maintenance budget, but it isn’t. A maintenance budget requires approximately a 3-4% increase just to meet cost increases for existing programs and to accommodate contractual pay increases for all employees. I know that in my wife’s district the board of ed maintains that a negative increase is reasonable considering the educational stimulus money that will be received from the federal government. What they are neglecting to note, however, is that the stimulus funds are earmarked for very specific programs, so any budget that comes in under a 3-4% increase will result in school districts using federal dollars to expand certain programs at the same time that cuts in state and local funds will require the elimination of other programs, teachers, and staff.

This type of scenario was made very salient for me this past Tuesday. I was in Hartford at their central office discussing professional development for one of the eleven new schools that are being created with money from the Sheff v. O’Neil case. I read in the Hartford Courant the following day that hours after I had spoken with the superintendent outside his office, he had to make an announcement of planned cuts and layoffs at existing schools. How terribly ironic. Of course the superintendent does not want to have to make such an announcement, and it certainly seems unfair considering there is money to build new schools and train new teachers, but as with the federal stimulus money, the Sheff money can only be spent in certain ways and cannot be used to prevent layoffs and kegiatan eliminations at other schools. As seems to be too often the case, elected officials and not educators themselves (never mind students or their parents) are making school policy.

But I promised myself that I would write something positive.

I guess I would have to concede that I am pleased that President Obama signed the bill reauthorizing funding for the National Writing Project for 2009-10, including an increase of $710,000. This bodes well for us all when site directors and Teacher-Consultants converge upon Washington, DC April 1-3 for the NWP Spring Meeting and the lobbying of our legislators for NWP reauthorization for 2010-11. Hopefully during the next four or eight years the NWP won’t have to engage in an annual fight to prevent the elimination of the NWP’s federal funding.

I am happy that even in the current economy the CWP has continued to contract with schools and school districts for professional development, that the funding from the Aetna Chair of Writing holds steady, and that the English Department plans no additional cuts to the CWP’s operational budget, nor has there been any more talk of eliminating our graduate assistant. From my end, it looks as if things are actually stabilizing. Hopefully soon I can go back to worrying about, well, anything other than finances.

Speaking of which, my son is five now, and a week or so ago I took him to see the school he will be attending, and to meet his likely future teacher. Amy and I were concerned because he’s a pretty shy kid and the school will be much bigger and more crowded than anything he’s been used to, but he was excited, even elated, to walk the halls and see all the kids. I practically had to drag him from the classroom once the visit was over. He can’t wait to begin, and keeps asking me when his first day will be and how soon his next birthday will come. The one thing he’s going to be disappointed about, however, is that he will not be riding the school bus, which he has been eager to do ever since he went to day camp last summer and saw some of the campers arriving on the big yellow buses. See, we live two doors from the school, so he’ll be a walker, like I was back in elementary school. But it’s just as well; they’ll probably be eliminating the funds for the buses next. Sorry, I just couldn’t maintain the positivity any longer.

Cherry Blossom Rain

Jejak PandaTerima Kasih Sudah Kunjungin Blog Ini
ceme online terbaikThe cherry blossoms are out all across Washington, DC, but the weather is unseasonably cool. The skies are a steely grey and the wind is gentle but steady. It scatters the pink blossoms across the monotone background of pavement and sky. I’m reminded of my three years in Northern California where the weather was like this so often. This morning the rain is pouring down upon the traffic outside my hotel window, muting the city sounds. The car tires on the wet road sound like the distant ocean surf. I slept in this morning because I can but will soon head downstairs for the simpulan break-out sessions of the meeting.

The first evening of the meeting I met up with my cousin John, who commutes here weekly from Connecticut to do subcontracting work for FEMA, writing materials for corporations to use in the event of another disaster. We went to a book store café in Dupont Circle, and I bought Cormac McCarthy’s first novel, The Orchard Keeper.

Yesterday afternoon I went to lunch with a grad school friend who lives here. He used to write for the Washington Post before leaving to pursue his PhD. He’s ABD now and slowly working on a novel. At lunch we talked about his struggles teaching English in a charter middle school here in DC. The mostly African-American students seem to love having an African-American man in the classroom, and the teachers and administrators by and large love having someone just shy of a PhD teaching the students, but the typical problems of any school rear their head and make the job difficult—lack of administrative support, philosophical and pedagogical inconsistency between and among the teachers and administrators, colleagues whose teaching is suspect at best, students with myriad problems brought from home, disciplinary and attendance issues, as well as bureaucratic demands that detract from the teaching, and the odd balance between professional independence and abuse of that independence that seems to be a hallmark of charter schools.

In the morning, I had visited Senator Joe Lieberman’s office suite in the Hart Senate Office Building, where I met VERY briefly with his education secretary to ask her to urge the senator’s endorsement of the National Writing Project appropriation for 2010-2011. We’re seeking an increase of six million dollars over the current twenty-four million dollar appropriation. That afternoon I visited the offices of Representatives Courtney, Larson, and DeLauro. Colleagues from the Fairfield and Central sites accompanied me, and also hit up Representatives Murphy and Himes, and Senator Dodd. Our efforts are worthwhile, but, fortunately, almost unnecessary, as the Connecticut delegation tends to support the NWP. (Even the Republicans Shays and Simmons were supportive. Rob Simmons’ wife Heidi is a Teacher Consultant of the CWP, in fact). Courtney’s and Larson’s aides were very young. They could have been my students last spring, but they were bright and interested and asked lots of good questions.

Everyone is very busy here. It’s like a bee’s hive, just constant movement and activity. Every aide I have met with has been courteous and quick, but I haven’t spent five minutes with any of them.

Between meetings I watched the student groups that are all over the city, mostly eighth graders, I assume, going on their annual Washington, DC trip and making it coincide with the cherry blossoms. The kids are fun to watch. They all seem to be in such awe of the place, the grand buildings with their sweeping staircases and colonnades, the high ceilinged hallways of the office buildings, all the men and women in suits and the ubiquitous security presence, which unfortunately reminds me of Spain just after the death of Franco, when I studied abroad as a high schooler. Men in body armor and automatic weapons stood on every corner of Madrid. I don’t remember DC being like this when I came here at thirteen.

There is a Cherry Blossom Festival, too, and tourists from all over the world. Security guards and police officers are everywhere, and many of the streets that run between the legislative office buildings are blocked off for security, creating aesthetic eyesores and traffic congestion. I got hollered at this morning by a security guard because I took too long to place my bag on the belt for the security x-ray machine. I had just wanted to ask if I needed to remove my laptop, as is done in the airport. I was told no in a most stern voice, and then the other guard must have felt bad about the poor treatment I had received, and she silently reprimanded her partner, and then very politely offered her assistance directing me wherever I needed to go.

Later this afternoon I will meet up with a colleague who is here on research leave from UConn, working on a book. She’s a Shakespeare specialist and spends inordinate amounts of time holed up in the Folger Shakespeare Library, which is just around the corner from the legislative office buildings. Normally she might like to get out into the daylight for some coffee, but on a rainy day like today she might just as soon stay ensconced in a study carrel.

I’m struck by the complex beauty of all that I see here, which seems embodied by the cherry blossoms against the greyness of concrete and leaden skies. There is the contrast between heavily armed guards and jubilant young students; there is my cousin the movie maker who is so far from his family and preparing for disasters yet to come; there’s my friend, the former journalist turned PhD candidate cum novelist who has been struggling to teach eighth graders, and my colleague the Shakespeare scholar in her solitary pursuit of knowledge; and there are all the hundreds of writing project teacher consultants here to lobby for money for teacher professional development. Everyone is here in pursuit of knowledge to share, and all of us are grappling with the various challenges of opportunity, inspiration, funding, and more.

The Midnight Cowboy

Jejak PandaSelamat Datang Lagi Di Blog Ini
bandar ceme terpercayaMy grandfather died eight days before I turned thirty. That was ten years ago this past Tuesday. I was very close to my grandfather, and so it never saddened me that his death day was so close to my birthday. In fact, it’s always been an gaji to think of him every year around my birthday.

I thought a lot about my grandfather this year, and not because turning forty is making me consider my own mortality. I think I’ve aged pretty well, thank you very much. But because it was the tenth anniversary of his death and because I was in DC for the cherry blossoms just days before the anniversary. My grandfather’s funeral was held at Iavonne Funeral Home in New Haven, right in the heart of Wooster Square, which is lined with cherry trees. The day of my grandfather’s funeral was sunny and warm, and all the cherry trees were in bloom. It was a gloriously beautiful day.

My grandfather was a rough-edged, foul-mouthed son of a bitch with a fifth grade education. He was a cop for thirty-five years. He rode a motorcycle. He had a blackbelt in judo. He was Mayor Dick Lee’s bodyguard. He served in the Navy between the world wars, where he had burst an eardrum in a diving bell off the coast of Panama. He had sixteen tattoos, mostly acquired during the two years he was stationed in the South Pacific. My favorite was the tattoo of Betty Boop on his right bicep. He used to make her dance for me. He had been an auto mechanic and a trucker. He drove what he called the mountain run, from Providence to Albany along Route 44, before power steering or power brakes. Simply turning and stopping were death-defying feats.

When I was sixteen he was seventy-two. He bought me a shitbox of a car, a ’75 Chevelle with body rot and a hole in the radiator. It got eight miles to the gallon and had an eight-track tape deck. His reasoning was that if I hit or got hit by anything, I’d win, and I wouldn’t care about the damage to my car. One time I met him downtown in New Haven for something that today escapes my memory. Parting from him and merging onto the highway, I inadvertently cut off a carful of guys about my age. They began following me and then driving up alongside me, threatening me. I wasn’t easily intimidated, but the reckless and unrelenting nature of their aggression frightened me. Suddenly my grandfather’s enormous red truck came barreling up from behind our cars and drove right between us. As soon as their car swerved away, he drove right at them, diagonally across the highway and onto the embankment. Then he sped off without so much as tipping his cap at me.

Another time a few years later, he was parked downtown off Grand Avenue, in front of Tobacco Joe’s, an old-school smoke shop owned by a friend of his. It was the crack of dawn and none of the shops were open yet, so my grandfather just sat there smoking his cigar with the window down, the engine running, and the police radio on. Some kid walked up from behind him and put a gun to his head and demanded his wallet. My grandfather still carried his gun in a side holster. He struck the kid’s arm away, pulled his own gun on the kid, and when the kid ran, my grandfather dropped his idling truck into gear and drove up onto the sidewalk after the kid till he ran down an alleyway too narrow for the truck. My grandfather then drove back to his parking spot out front of his friend’s store, holstered his gun, and lit a new cigar to replace the one he’d dropped in the street during all the commotion. He never even called in the attempted armed robbery.

When he entered the police academy, my grandfather passed a test that was the equivalent of a GED exam. He wrote daily police reports, and kept a meticulous journal of his daily events. Even in retirement he continued to chronicle his trips to the coffee shop, his walks to get the mail, how much time he spent raking leaves, and the maintenance he did on his and my grandmother’s cars. He never wrote his stories, however, yet he had thousands of great stories. He loved to talk, and loved to tell me his stories. Most of them I remember and can retell, but I always told myself that one day I would interview him and write down as many stories as I could glean from him. Even into his early eighties he was hale and healthy, and it seemed that I had plenty of time.

But one day he drove downtown to the coffee shop and arrived early as usual. Since it was winter, he left his engine running and got out to clean his windows while he waited. His shoulders had become worn out from years of hard labor, and he couldn’t raise his arms. He had a column shift on his truck, and he had failed to put the truck all the way into park. While he cleaned the back window, a sand truck drove by. The vibrations from the bigger truck caused the column shift to drop into reverse, and the idling truck knocked down my grandfather and ran over him. He actually managed to drive himself to the emergency room, but after that accident he was forced to use a walker, which he hated and avoided. Not long afterwards, while working in the garage, he tried to climb the four steps from the garage to the house. His bad leg gave out, and he fell head first onto the pavement, precipitating a stroke. He died a couple of weeks after.

Ten years later, watching the cherry blossoms fall in DC, I felt the need to tell some of his stories.