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.

What assessment will you use to help you choose materials for your class?

When I heard it, I wondered how I would answer it. I also wondered what the question implied.

I think the intention of the question was to get a new teacher candidate to think about how to assess varying reading levels of students in order to choose appropriate materials, but I’m not quite sure.

I have heard the word assessment in a variety of contexts in our district a lot in the last couple of years. I used to think it was a new, less emotionally crippling word than “test,” which can, by its very utterance, push anxiety ridden students to the edge. But now I think the word assessment means much more. I’m just not sure what it always means.

The question was compelling for a couple of reasons, but the first thing it made me think of was that there may actually be a test that could be administered to let a teacher know what materials to select for a class, and that, somehow, disturbs me.

The question was the seed for a wild notion in my overactive imagination. I imagined a government/corporate conspiracy where teachers are just embodied voices, symbols really, channeling pre-designed curriculum, using pre-made assessments, handing out provided materials, all of course chosen for some larger purpose. That of course is ridiculous, right?

I have, over the last ten years or so, worried that the role of the imaginative, creative, thinking teacher has been diminished nearly to the point of irrelevance. And the implication of a test to tell me what to teach only amplified that fear. How do I choose materials for my class, after all? How do I assess the situation?

I want to think that the relationships I develop with my students help me know what is right for them. I want to think that my knowledge, expertise, and experience help me know what will work and won’t work for my students.

And yet I recognize that all of that takes time. It takes time to get to know my students, especially my freshmen, who are all new to our school. I takes time for me as a teacher to become experienced. What about new teachers? It takes time for us to all learn how to learn together. Maybe some students cannot afford all this time.

Our student population is less and less homogeneous all the time, in terms of their ability to learn. We have students entering ninth grade who read at a 12th grade level or beyond and some who struggle to read at a 4th grade level. How do I manage that?

The truth is, even if there were a test to tell me which book is best for a particular student, I would still need to make daily choices about how to connect with him or her.  When I recognize frustration,  disappointment, and struggle, I must decide how to manage it. I must decide the next step, the best way to make things better. And all of this takes time.

But that is the art of teaching, the art of assessing the situation. And that human interaction, that human connection is why teachers can never be irrelevant and why no test can tell me as much as I need to know about my students.

But also, that’s what people with cell phones do: they carry them with them (even, believe it or not, into public toilets). So, we are becoming “always connected.”

I sometimes wonder if this is a good thing or not. When we go to northern Minnesota in the summer, one of the things I like best is that we are essentially cut off from “civilization.” The world goes on and we are oblivious to its passing. Instead we pass time sitting by the campfire–day or night, fishing, playing cards, snoozing in the afternoon sun, or taking a walk in the woods. We care not who might be trying to call.

Back in civilization, the reality is that not many are really trying to call us. We may get one call a day or less. We’re not like some we see in commercials, in movies, or in public who seem literally connected to their phones, always talking, messaging. Still we are aware that our phones are an extention of us now.

For me, this idea of being connected goes beyond having a cell phone. I am connected via blogs, nings, and discussion lists to people all over the world.

The other day one of my freshmen asked, “do you have a lot of friends, Ms Hogue?” The answer is that locally I have about four good friends with whom we go out to dinner, to events and even on vacations. But I also have professional colleagues via the Web who really are friends. I have met some of them, but others I know only from avatars or posted pictures. Nonetheless, we share a passion for English education, for technology integration, for journalism, or poetry, or whatever it is.

In this way, the Web allows us to be connected to people we would never have met otherwise. The Web brings our world–as telephones originally did–closer together. It connects us, links us, empowers us.

What students begin to see are patterns and repetitions, which are, of course, (theoretically) clues to the meaning of the passage. I ask students to consider dominant patterns. Ask them to discuss what they might mean.

I copied the url for Google News into Wordle because I wanted to see if any dominant patterns would emerge.

I don’t know about you, but to me, the news seems to be filled with violence. Just “wordling” the news daily would be a great springboard for discussion.

But it would also be a good tool for finding dominant word patterns in a literary passage.

I read your blog frequently for inspiration to share with our English teachers. Today I went to it to mine for free advice. Since I didn’t see any posts alluding to this question, I thought I would ask you directly.
What qualities do you think are necessary for an effective English Dept. chair in the era of Cyber-English? I’ve just been approached to consider serving as an interim English Dept. chair this year and would really appreciate some insight from someone not even remotely connected with our school.

This is such a great question, Pam, and it hits home with me. I was department chair at our school from 1995-2003, when our principal decided department chairs were expendable. CyberEnglish, for me, was born in 2001, so I had two years to be the kind of person you’re asking about. I failed dreadfully.

For one thing, when we began CE, or when I began CE, the rest of the department believed that CE would have two main results:

• force teachers to change the way they teach (they would have to learn new technologies)
• create a division in the “fun-ness” of classes, CE being the fun class and the others being the “boring” classes

I truly think that the rest of my department at that time felt threatened by CE. I was treated with some subtle hostility, and my protection mechanism was to retreat to my sanctuary and do what I knew was right. I had few tools to help me convince my department, other than my anecdotal experience that CE works.

If I had been in the same place today, I would be engulfed in a rich, tech savvy Internet community that is screaming the value of technology integration. There are so many resources to support CE now, that my gentle bombardment of the department with the truth would be impossible to write off as the ravings of a English teacher turned computer geek.

I think of the book Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will Richardson that is so compelling about using Blogs and Wikis. Bloggers like David Warlick, Bud Hunt, Ryan Bretag, Ted Nellen, Gail Desler, and Scott McLeod are voices that cannot be ignored.

Studies from PEW/Internet and the National School Boards Association give credence to what CE teachers know and do in the classroom.

Videos like Pay Attention and Learning to Change–Changing to Learn (posted in Polliwog Journal) help teachers see that change is NOT an option.

The CE department chair no longer needs to feel alienated. I imagine that in many districts the directive to change is coming from administration, not just the department chair. In a way, the situation in 2008 is perfect.

And yet, the main thing is to (and I hate this phrase) “walk the walk.” The CE department chair must be a teacher for the department so that they can be teachers for their students. The CE department chair must use and play with all the new tools. She/he must read the blogs, must read the books, articles, surveys, etc. She/he must have a passion for technology in education, but especially in English where it so perfectly aids teachers in their academic goals to increase language arts skills and higher order thinking.

I am no longer department chair, but in the past few years I have had more success than ever in convincing my department that integrating technology is imperative to our success. Our roadblocks now come from other, less manageable sources (see my post on blocking).

Best of luck to you, Pam.

Thank you Ted Nellen for the link to this video, “Learning to Change-Changing to Learn,” which is further validation of everything I believe about the future of schools. I am so proud to be a CyberEnglish teacher, which I owe again to Ted and his vision.

We’re a revolutionary classroom, and yet, we are not anywhere near where we could be or should be. And our classroom only engages one quarter of our students for one year.

Nonetheless, I am excited to be a teacher in the days when people are actually talking about radical and true change in schools. We think we’re past the one room school, but we’re not. We’ve got big box schools instead. One building, isolated from the world, isolated from community, teachers isolated from each other, with books that are prescriptive, with curriculum that is so standardized that it stifles creativity.

Arrggghhh! No wonder kids are bored. School is such a drudge compared to their outside-of-school life.

The teachers and leaders in this video say some really smart things that every educator should not only be listening to but also finding ways to make real changes for the students in their own schools:

• We have to develop a narrative that sustains 21st century learning.
• Kids are very rich content developers today through their social networking sites; they’re big communicators through email, instant messaging, and text messaging, and yet all of those things are banned from their schools.
• [Schools of the future are about] relationship, community, connectivity and access.
• The “nearly now” [Facebook, Twitter, etc.] is a great place for learning–allowing time to reflect, retract, research.
• We’ve got a classroom system when we could have a community system.
• Skills of future call on [students'] artistic abilities, abilities of synthesis, ability to understand context, to work in teams, their multidisciplinary, multicultural, multilingual abilities.

And my favorite:

• “Now we’re looking at a whole different range of schools that are producing ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff like their culture and to build schools like that is a whole other challenge . . . . it’s a very exiting time for learning. It’s the death of education but the dawn of learning.”

The idea of “ingenious, collaborative, gregarious, brave children who care about stuff” is a heartbreaking idea. It’s heartbreaking because this is how kids are born. This is who they are as children before they go to school.

It is a moral imperative for us to make our schools worthy of them.

Spurred by a creative nonfiction writing assignment for English 11, I wrote Rebby Lee, a personal essay. It seemed to want a home beyond the paper page, so hurling words was born.

I recently created a unit for my juniors called Writing Letters That Matter, for which teams of students research a political issue that they care about and write a letter to one of their national or state representatives. It’s a neat little unit and it meets all kinds of standards (not that I care that much about standards, but you know).

And because I like to integrate web resources, I have all kinds of links embedded into the unit plans. So it was with this in mind that I thought, “Oh, cool,” this morning as I listened to the story about Street Team ‘08 on NPR. Street Team is an initiative of MTV that gets college students across the nation to cover local issues as “citizen journalists” and blog, podcast, etc. about their experiences. The hope is that these embedded “journalists” can both explore political issues important to young people and also generate disscussions via Web 2.0 tools. Eventually they hope to get young people to care enough to vote.

Earlier in the year, I had hoped, in a class Blog, to show my English 11 students that bloggers are becoming truly democratic voices and this Street Team concept only reinforces that. This all sounds great, right?

Here’s the bad part. Today, when I got to school, I tried to get to the Street Team ‘08 site, but it was blocked due to its content: digital music, etc. And this is the story of the year: block, block, block;  federal law prohibits . . . .  I feel like all I hear this year is “no” or “we can’t.”

I still do not fully comprehend the vast paranoia about kids and the Internet. I know there are predators out there. I know that serious and dangerous situations have occurred.  But I also know that if we blind our kids and muffle their ears and refuse to teach them how to be citizens of the Internet world, they will be at a far greater risk than they would be than if we were brave enough as a nation to acknowledge that our kids are digital kids anyway who will find all kinds of ways around our blocks (ever meet a kid who has defied his parents’ ultimatum?) and will be in that world whether we like it or not. We would be wise to teach them how to navigate safely. And some of us like that world, the Internet world, fraught with danger as it is.

Is the real world not also fraught with danger? How many of us, as parents, actually fulfill our “promise” to lock our kids up until they’re 21. Of course we don’t. It’s silly.

In the same way it is silly to restrict Internet access in schools and thereby restrict teachers’ ability to teach their students.

Democracy is best when people engage with other people in discussion about who we are as a people and what is best for us and who will best lead us. The truth is that many of these discussions happen online these days.

Juniors are primarily 17-year-0lds who are on the cusp of full citizenship, ready in only a year to vote. How can I explain to them how important it is to write letters to their representatives when those same representatives do not respect their right to know? With all the new laws, are we protecting our children or are we muting their voices?