The Polliwog Journal

“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!

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.

For awhile I thought that FrontPage would kill CyberEnglish in the same way that video killed the radio star.

We’d been using FrontPage as the web editor for our students to create their websites since 2001, but FP is no longer supported by Microsoft. Also, our server was a Microsoft system set up to do live editing on the server, and if we moved to an open source web editor, we’d need to find some way to ftp pages, or whatever the lingo is for publishing. Also, our security is tight. We adhere to the extremely stringent Wisconsin Open Records Law in our school, so whatever new tool we decided to use, it would have to keep us in line with the law.

I have wanted to move to blogs for quite awhile,  and a convergence of factors this year propelled us somewhat last minute to do just that.

We installed WordPress MU on a local server (when I say we, I don’t mean me). My CE9 colleague and I and a brilliant technology teacher in our district worked on customizations. It has taken us awhile to manage it all, but this week our students were blogging like crazy. And they love it.

Moving to WP MU and blogs did give us some advantages over websites:

• Students can login to their blogs from any Internet computer. They can create new posts and submit for review. This means they aren’t “confined” to the school building or the school day to accomplish their goals. This is great for students who need more time as well as for students who are absent. Students could not edit their websites from home.
• I can edit my classroom blog anytime. I can only edit my www.mshogue.com website from home. Sometimes I want to publish up-to-the-minute announcements. I can use my blog for that.
• Peers, teachers, parents, mentors, or anyone, can post comments on our blogs. This is one of the main reasons I wanted to move from static websites to blogs. Comments connect us. When students generate content (a book review or a journal post) and publish it, a comment means someone has read their work and is engaging in conversation about it. This means a lot to them and for me continues to drive a wedge into our old idea of audience. I want student to write for everyone, not for me, so that eventually, they’ll write for themselves.
• As the teacher, I have much more administrative control over the blogs than I did over the websites. This is nice for our tech specialists. They don’t need to devote as much time to us as in the past. On the downside, it means I devote a lot more time. C’est la vie, I guess. No system is perfect.

There are some disadvantages to using Blogs over Websites:

• A blog is a truly linear looking format, whereas students websites were a bit more fluent. That is, there was a more natural “back and forth” linkability in the websites. This class of 2013 has not had the Website experience, though, so they don’t know the difference. They love their blogs.
• Our students can only edit posts and pages prior to publishing. They cannot go back to revise once a page or post is published (made public). This is a tremendous disadvantage in teaching a recursive writing process, but is a fact we have to live with due to the law. Because of this situation, students are encouraged to compose in Word first, to run spell check, to share with peers when needed, or teachers when needed–all before submitting for review. The blue submit for review button is one we only click after serious consideration. I’ve told my students that they don’t want their work wandering out in the world sleepy-headed  in its jammies. They want what they write to go out in public well dressed with its hair combed and its face fresh. They get the idea. We will work hard on knowing when to push the blue button.
• There are limits to how much students can customize. This is good and bad. I like how their websites of the past were truly unique. I’ve had over 500 CE0 students in the past and each student created an individual website. No two were the same. This is not so with blogs. This year, students can choose from about 20 themes. We upload the themes for them to choose from; they can’t go out and get their own. We will try to add more later, so the choice is wider. Most students are happy with the variety of themes. Others wish they had one all their own or that they could customize their theme.  The upside of this limitation is that students really won’t have a reason to play around with customizing, which some did to a distracting degree in years past. It is true that messing with code is good play because we can learn a lot from doing it. But if our goals are to write and communicate, then the theme is secondary to that.
• Getting things set up in the beginning took an incredible amount of time, probably 30 hours, no joke. In the future, this work could be done in the summer, not during the school day like this year. Also, in the future we won’t have to learn as we go or create lessons as we go. We’ve already done this–next year should be a breeze.

Right now, despite the time it takes to review and publish, I am pleased with the change. What’s more important, my students love blogging. Their cyberjournals sound a lot like their peers’ from the “old days,” which means that while the tools have changed, the pedagogy has not. We still learn best by making it public, by passing it on, and by peer review.

Henry Jenkins from MIT predicts that we are facing a change in culture comparable to the Renaissance, which he says will proceed from a convergence of media. Technological Convergence, says Jenkins, has come from the digitization of all media content. “When words, images and sounds are transformed into digital information, we expand the potential relationships between them and enable them to flow across platforms,” he says. Those who are using Web 2.0 tools are leading the revolution.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman believes these changes will stand with Gutenberg’s printing press in impacting the world. Friedman says we now have a “global web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work irrespective of time, distance, geography and increasingly even language.”  That platform, Friedman says, “explains more things about what’s happening in the world today than any other framework.”

As a result, Friedman argues, we have to horizontalize ourselves and adapt to this new platform that more and more people can plug and play on.  He describes the process of horizontalizing as “having to learn to adapt our business practices and study habits,  our innovative approaches to this new platform, because we’re going from a world where value is created in vertical silos of command and control [top down] to a world where value will be created increasingly horizontally by who you connect and collaborate with.”

The phrase “value will be created increasingly . . . by who you connect and collaborate with” struck me most profoundly.  My personal experience with horizontalizing began in the late 90’s when I joined a lively and engaging group of English teachers via a list serv. In 2001, I followed Ted Nellen’s lead and started CyberEnglish at SFHS, a class that expressly strives to be horizontal: make it public, peer review, and pass it on. Ted is a genius! He understood convergence long before nearly everyone I know.

When Pat Schulze (from South Dakota) and I (from Wisconsin) used a Moo on Saturday mornings to plan a new unit, we were horizontalizing and we didn’t even know it. We just knew that what we were doing was really, really cool.

More recently I have seen how Web 2.0 tools like Blogs, Wikis and Nings allow us to connect and collaborate irrespective of time, distance, or geography. I manage two Nings and belong to four others. I cannot believe the collective wisdom in those Nings, wisdom freely shared.

Vertical silos have failed me for a long, long time. I realized back in those early list serv days that the people who can most teach me what I need to know are not my bosses. Because we are so stridently homogenized in our geographical space, even my peers, who are fabulous teachers, have not been the catalysts for change I have needed.

It is my Ning friends, my Blog buddies, my global connections who continue to drive me. They’re my teachers. Some days, maybe I am their teacher. We plug in and play in the wealth of ideas that the Web freely gives us, like genius flowing so fast through our fingers we cannot hold it all.

Convergence.

Friedman also says that nobody has told the kids about the shift in technologies that have flattened the world. But it seems to me that the Facebook generation understands the tools better than their parents, better, frankly, than most adults. Teens and young adults create and share content. They text in a new language invented for that purpose.  Even the verbs are new: text, tweet, friend, etc. They upload, download, and share files. Because they use the Web tools that allow them to connect and collaborate across time and distance, they understand the uses of this new platform.

But that may be the extent of it. They manage their profiles, post pictures, tag friends, friend friends’ friends, but do my students understand that the way they effortlessly communicate and collaborate on the Web means they are already at work in the new global web-enabled platform? I’m not sure. I doubt it. If not, whose job is it to present them with these ideas?

It is mine.

As teachers, we may tell our students that they are members of a global community in unprecedented ways. But what does that mean to them? It’s an idea far too abstract for the prefrontal cortext of most 15-year-olds. To be honest, the idea isn’t even quite clear to most teachers.  Sometimes I think teachers like to tell students pretty words. Instead, let’s have them read The World is Flat or Jenkins’ Blog? I love Romeo and Juliet as much as the next English teacher, and I do think Shakespeare has a lot to teach us, but I worry that we are helping to trap our children in vertical silos when we do not help them see just exactly how their cell phones enable them to fully engage in the 21st century.

Tim Walker interviewed me for the article Turning the Page: Students live in a Digital World. Are schools ready to join them? As always, I cannot believe the company I am privileged to keep.

A Visual Representation of Bloom’s Taxonomic Hierarchy with a 21st Century Skills Frame

The graphic is very, very cool. I wish I could reproduce it here, but it would be best not to. I love how the tools that achieve the skill are shown at that level.

Doctor’s office waiting areas are great places to quietly observe our fellow human beings in action. Today I saw something that brought me joy.

A young man, in about fourth or fifth grade was sitting with his sister at the children’s table., most likely waiting for a parent. They had one of those coloring books that has activities in it, like mazes, connect the dots, etc. The sister was probably right around three years old, as she was struggling somewhat with some basic concepts of color.

Her brother was the most artful (meaning natural) teacher I ‘ve witnessed in a long time. He was guiding her through several activities with a calmness that belied his age.

When faced with one puzzle too difficult, he asked her gently, “would you like to find an easier one?”

She nodded yes.

Next they were on a page where they had to create their own pizza.

“We need to decide what we want on our pizza. What do you like?” he asked, but then quickly remembered that they needed the sauce first.

“We need red for that. Can you find a good red?”

She did, and he showed her how to put the sauce on their paper pizza. Then, like a good teacher who has engaged his student in a meaningful task, he left her to work at her own pace.

It was then I noticed that he carried back to his seat in the row of chairs a book of at least 300 pages, maybe more. I couldn’t make out what it was, but what I did observe was his urgent desire to get back to reading it.

At this point my admiration for the young teacher was so strong that I wanted to sit with him, talk with him, and get to know him, just a bit. A boy who reads big books at his age and is a kind teacher as well is an interesting kid.

But strangers do not engage children in public places, so I just sat in my seat, two rows behind him and smiled.

There they were, both learning, though no one made them. Their desire was innate, and they were having a good time.

Finally it was time for me to see the doctor and knowing that opportunities to connect with one another are rare, I decided to say something to him. We must seize our chances or lose them.

I would not tap him on the shoulder or come near him and whisper, but I would draw his attention to me, so that I could share my heart with him.

“By the way, young man…,” I said.

He looked up.

“You are a wonderful teacher.”

For the briefest second he was confused, but then, as suddenly, he understood, and he smiled.

When I began teaching in 1990, I got no tour of the school, no handbook of helpful tips, and no mentor to guide me. I got shown my room that was barely ready for school. Undaunted, I plunged into the deep end and did not drown. To be fair, I didn’t know one should expect to have a mentor.

Times have changed.

I find myself in the mentor role again, as we have a new part-time English teacher, who is not only new to our school, but new to teaching as well. What I admire about Addie is her unflappability. Truly, she seems always so calm. This is a good thing because, as you all know, the first year of teaching can be nuts. But also, I need that influence. I am easily “flapped.”

Addie has begun a blog, at my urging, to reflect on her professional development. Plus, she will be my CyberEnglish9 teaching partner this year. I know that teachers must use the tools they hope to teach, and she is excited by the prospect of using technology tools in her English classes.

What does it mean to mentor in the 21st century? It means that my role is not so much to give a tour or to explain fire drill procedures or to talk about the importance of parent teacher conferences. This is all important stuff, of course. But, it is much more important to help Addie in other ways.

• explore Web tools, like blogs, wikis, nings, Google tools (docs, reader, etc.)
• join Diigo and engage in social bookmarking
• join EC ning and explore ideas with a diverse, energetic group of English teachers from all over
• help her integrate her ideas for integrating technology into our classroom (photo story, podcasts, and more)

Mentoring means teaching, but for me, at least, it will also mean learning, and I look forward to a fun year.