An annual assignment in CyberEnglish9 is to write a self-reflection. Students are asked about what they liked, didn’t like, learned, etc. in first semester English. These reflections are not published because we want students to be open and honest, which they might not wish to do on their blogs.
As a teacher, I like to think I can learn from my students just as I hope they can learn from me. Most of what they say in their reflections reinforces what I already know:
- Not everyone loves everything we do in English, but while some students didn’t like reading Speak or To Kill a Mockingbird, others loved them. I am still happy that ninth graders choose four books to read in English. It’s so much easier to like a book we pick out for ourselves.
- We give students a lot of varied writing experiences and they appreciate that. With ThinkBooks, there is definitely variety. What one student loves another one doesn’t like at all. We can’t please everyone with every thing, but over time, we can give our students some fun ways to be creative.
- Students will learn what is meaningful to them, not necessarily what is meaningful to us. As teachers, we must strive always to show our students that what we teach is relevant to their lives.
I also want to be open to suggestions. Here’s one I like:
Q: What was your biggest disappointment of the semester and why?
A: I actually really wanted to do the “once a month free blog”. The one where if we do well, we can post one post about something of our choice. I was looking forward to it, but it never happened.
It did actually happen, but it was not well publicized. The one problem with “open blogging” is that each post must be reviewed and published by the teachers. This does take time. However, I see no reason that students should not feel free to write about anything on their blogs, just as long as they meet their assignment requirements AND as long as they don’t overdo it.
On the same topic, another student thought we should have been doing open blogging for the novels we read as a class. In hindsight, this is such a logical and rational idea.
If student bloggers could be content with the fact that they won’t get a grade for everything they post to their blogs, then I say post away, within reason, of course.
Cross posted in Ms Hogue’s Classroom Blog
Tagged: self reflection, student bloggers
In his post Practical Theory, Ted Nellen describes what happened to him as he moved from a paper and pen classroom to a computer classroom:
Everything had changed from a teacher dominated room to a student dominated room. Differentiated instruction became the rule, not the exception. Lessons became projects not daily lessons. Students were much more responsible for their own progress and game plan. So much of what I learned about teaching in the previous 15 years had to be morphed into a new paradigm, a new pedagogy, a new way to teach based neither on theory nor practice alone, but instead on practical theory.
Yesterday, I worked with our English department to create their own websites and wikis. They expressed sincere trepidation about what we were doing and what it would mean to them. I tried to explain that this change to computer-based teaching and learning will seem odd and even time-consuming in the beginning, but it will not always stay that way. I ended up saying that what will change is how you think about yourself as a teacher. I needed to say what Ted said better, but finding his words today is still helpful.
Ted is exactly right. Everything changes. BUT the change is not to be feared. The change is very exciting and actually freeing. I have learned so much about myself as a teacher that has made me a better teacher since I made the shift from paper and pen classroom to computer classroom in 1991. And yet to convince others who are wary of change that it is good is not so easy. The change comes from within, from a change in perception, a change in procedure. Shifting from paper and pen to computer is truly “hands on” paradigm shift.
Tagged: computer classroom, CyberEnglish, paradigm shift, Technology and Education
A former AP English student emailed me this morning to recommend a book he’s been reading as he hides out in the fiction section of the local book store because the heat in his apartment is out. (Not all nostalgia about those poverty-laden college days is romantic, and his plight reminds me of that).
But that’s not what I want to write about. Matt said something that made me proud and joyful.
He recommended a collection of stories called The View from the Seventh Layer by Kevin Brockmeier, saying it was one of the best books he’s read since he saw me last (two years ago) and even compared it to my favorite book, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Matt’s class studied Solitude and loved it, so that is high praise.
I love that Matt still feels connected enough to recommend a book for me. But that is still not what prompted me to write this post. It was something else he said.
He wrote
I am fairly certain this collection will be one of those reads that I will pick up in the future and the stories will have changed drastically according to how much I’ve grown personally.
This is the cool part. I hope that he learned from me that not only can books change us, teach us, and shape who we are, but that as we change, the book can also change in that we learn from it something new each time we read it because as we grow and experience new things ,we take to a book a pair of new eyes with which to read.
We have so little control over what students actually learn from us no matter how earnest our motives are our how competent our knowledge is. That Matt understands that he can read a book again and again and that the book will continue to reward him is something I am awfully proud he learned.
Tagged: former students, great books
Please take a look at my new and improved Ms Hogue’s Online English Resources!
When I was in high school (in the early 1970’s), I was told by my parents that being a student was my job. It was my job to learn and to do well in school. I think this idea must seem old fashioned, or maybe it was never a prevalent idea to begin with. I thought my fellow classmates, in general, believed as I did, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that more and more, the students in my classes have a much different idea than I do about what it means to be a student.
Here is my premise:
Learning occurs at the intersection of good teaching and honest scholarship.
A good teacher must be a knowledgeable and effective practitioner. The public demands we do our jobs well, and rightly so. We’ve been working on this. I’ve seen the science of teaching stressed more and more over the years. As they strive to make accountability more transparent, administrators and educational consultants have been asking teachers for several years to answer three questions :
- What is it that students must know and be able to do?
- How do we know they know it?
- What do we do if they don’t?
I understand the premise of the questions. I don’t dispute that we should consciously consider them each day. But they’re not the only ones. I also ask myself other questions:
- Why is it I want my students to study/read/do something?
- What do I want them to get out of it?
- Why is it important?
- How will I help students know it’s important?
I realize that students do not automatically see the relevance of reading classic literature or of writing a compare/contrast essay or even of learning to punctuate sentences correctly. That is also part of my job–to show students the value of being educated.
But that’s not only my job. It’s everyone’s job–especially parents.
And this brings me to the part of the equation that I cannot control: honest scholarship.
What does honest scholarship mean? To me it means that students come to school ready, willing, and able to learn. If they are not able, we have many means to help them. However, if they are neither ready nor willing, then all my time and effort and knowledge will be wasted.
If a student does not put forth honest scholarship, good teaching is in vain.
Here’s what an honest scholar does:
- prepares for class by reading or completing assignments
- has all materials needed for study
- actively engages in classroom activities: reading, writing, listening, speaking, problem solving, creating, dissecting: in general, thinking
- believes that getting a good education is vital to his or her future
If our culture taught our children that being a student is a job, an important job, maybe the most important job, I think we’d have fewer students unprepared for school. Think about the analogy. No serious worker is consistently late for work. A good employee does not come to meeting without his report, without a pen, or without the means to take notes. An employee who expects to earn a raise or a promotion expects to put in extra effort, to show he or she can do more than what is expected. And the entrepreneurs who lead with creative innovation are always thinking, always in tune with their environment. They aren’t plugged in to their own dimension, oblivious to what surrounds them, or worse, disaffected by “whatever.”
If it’s not cool to do school, not cool to be smart, I wonder what will follow. It can’t be good. How will these happy-go-lucky, academically apathetic kids fare in a world that demands more of them?
It’s not all bad. I have several students who know that honest scholarship is their responsibility. They shine. They’ll continue to do well wherever they go. I do not worry about them. I worry about the other nearly 80% who think school is a place to hang out, eat lunch with friends, joke and laugh, and pass. Just pass.
Tagged: student_apathy
It is time again to nominate worthy recipients for an Edublog Award.
- For best student blog I nominate Michaela A, one of my students who is not afraid to share her voice or her intellect online.
- For best new blog I nominate Addie Degenhardt’s Journey Through The First Year, a blog that teaches me each time I read it.
- For best resource sharing blog I nominate Blogwalker by Gail Desler; Gail has her pulse on what matters.
- For best individual blog I nominate Kimberly Johnson’s A New Ecology that never fails to engage my heart as well as my mind.
- For best educational use of a social networking service I nominate Jim Burke’s English Companion Ning; a vehicle for so many significant conversations about teaching English that it’s hard to begin to say why it’s so great.
- And for lifetime achievement, I agree with Gail’s nomination of Steve Hargadon:
- Gail wrote, “Lifetime achievement – Steve Hargadon – Hmmm, where to start listing reasons why Steve Hargadon deserves this recognition?!….Maybe with his creation of Classroom 2.0, which provided so many educators (myself included) with their first experience with a ning. And how about the amazing and free Edubloggers’ conferences that he organizes across the nation and always before NECC (and our state CUE conference)? Plus he is an awesome keynote speaker. And the way he stands quietly in the background while encouraging others to step into the limelight…now that’s a gift!”
I was reviewing my Diigo links and rediscovered Gail Desler’s post about PhotoStory. As we’re going to have our 9th graders us PhotoStory soon, I thought her post would be good to review. I also wanted to share it with my CyberEnglish9 colleague.
In the process, I discovered one more cool thing about Diigo: I can post to my blog directly from Diigo!! This is a great example of horizontalizing: tools that work together.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
“Everything means itself and something else,” David Lehman told us in our poetry workshop yesterday afternoon at the Great Lakes Writers Festival at Lakeland College, Sheboygan, WI. About 15 high school students (from several schools) and two teachers were seated in a circle, Lehman one among us, and he led us in an exercise meant to engage our imaginations. He was generous, funny, and sincerely pleased to be with us.
His wife, Stacey Harwood, led the prose workshop, and my students who were with her said they enjoyed the experience tremendously. They emerged with ideas for how to improve their writing.
Our day at the festival began with an open mic session, where tremulous students pushed their fears out of the way and read their work with confidence. I could not have been more proud of our students. It is moments like this that remain in their consciousness forever.
We then assembled to listen to Lehman and Harwood read their work. They could not have been more gracious, these two New Yorkers who were literally in the midst of cornfields in rural Wisconsin. But far from being uncomfortably out of their element, they were grateful for having seen the moon the night before–a harvest moon of poetic legend, huge and orange looming almost ominously in the sky. In the Q & A session that followed the readings, they shared themselves with us even more.
For small town Wisconsin students to be able to connect with nationally known writers is one of the miracles of the Great Lakes Writers Festival, and each year as I come away from the experience, I am in awe of its effect–how simple and at the same time how immense. If I see myself through the eyes of Jacob, a 14-year-old writer who read his story at open mic, who submitted his story for workshop, and who, due to his willingness to share, engaged in conversations about writing with the writers, I know my journey as a writer has been catapulted in one day to a new realm of possibility. I imagine somehow that in one day I am no longer just a high school freshman who likes to write. I am actually a writer.
Everything means itself and something else. This day meant learning about writing from two people who live writing. It meant also that we, who live amidst cornfields and harvest moons and take them for granted, were also connected to the world of taxis, subways, books in print, and the urgency to read and write.
Thank you, Karl Elder, for always making this day so amazing!
Tagged: David_Lehman, GLWF, Great_Lakes_Writers_Festival, Karl_Elder, Stacey_Harwood, writers
The bell was about to ring, and my eyes were on my computer screen, getting ready to take attendance. When I looked up, there was Jake, fully six feel tall now, in new desert fatigues, his Army uniform.
I didn’t hear him come in. He was suddenly just there, smiling. My freshmen looked at this soldier, wondering.
Jake wasn’t even supposed to be in the building. He’d come in unofficially through a back door by the greenhouse to visit the agriculture teacher, who had him go to the office and get an official visitors pass.
Just getting to basic training wasn’t easy for Jake. Graduating from high school was even harder. I remember him in 9th grade–a little guy who hated English because he thought he wasn’t any good at it. But there were flashes of soul in whatever he wrote that made me want to nag him to write more.
Jake came back to me as a junior, and we worked hard to get him to pass both semesters. He still didn’t love English, but it was more school in general that he wasn’t too fond of.
It became almost a mission to seek him out in his senior year, to ask how he was doing. I’d always get a shrug of the shoulders from him, but with a little smile.
Now here he was, standing proudly in my classroom once again, though not as a student, as a man.
“I’m not even supposed to be up here,” he said. “They told me I had to stay down in Mr. Brunner’s room, but I had to come see you.”
I was glad. We talked for a bit about how he was, how he liked the army, and then he had to go.
“I had to come and see you,” he repeated. “You never gave up on me.”
No Jake, I never did.
I had a great day today. A somewhat foggy morning did not mar my appreciation for seeing Green Bay (the water, not the town) from Hwy 57 on my way to Sturgeon Bay in Door County, Wisconsin. The fall colors were still vibrant, perhaps even more so as they had to fight for their dominance in the mist.
I led a session on Web 2.0 tools today for the K-12 ELA team at Sturgeon Bay.
As always, there are a few tech hang-ups, but overall, even spam filters could not keep us down. The practical result of the day is that there are 2o new bloggers and 20 new members of Teaching English in Wisconsin.
Beyond that, who knows? Who will the ripples touch? Where will the ripples lead to?
I loved the energy in the room, the willingness to try and become engaged. I hope these teachers continue to satisfy their curiosity and click on links, read blogs, post comments, start discussions, and share their knowledge with all of us.
