sundaes

Up against the limits of my PC again, so I worked on setting up a wiki and finessing my Xtranormal clips.  I created a nice harmonica-laden background for Huck, which made me happy.

How will I use some of the things I’ve learned this week in the coming semester?  Let me count the ways.  (Thanks, Elizabeth Barrett Browning.)

1.)Website:  Continue developing it and playing with it.  Because of our work with picmonkey, etc., I now have a vision of creating a Barbie slideshow, in which I dress her up (in paper costumes, if need be) as some of the female characters in the literature we read.  I already have a Scout Finch in mind, as one of my students gave me a Barbie whose hair she’d hacked off; all I need are some overalls.  (Maybe shoulders-up shots would save time on this project?) There’s also Lady Macbeth, Aunt Polly, Curly’s wife in Of Mice and Men, and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby.  What a blast!  To think that several days ago I would not have been able to fathom this…as several days ago I didn’t have a website.  LOVE this photo-tweaking stuff!  Just hope Annie Dillard isn’t offended.

I am also interested in setting up an RSS feed to one of the poetry sites, like 180 Days of Poetry, in which a new poem appears every day.  (Is this legal?)

I guess my largest concern is maintaining the site.  Once school starts I have very little “free” time to play with things like this.  I may have to build it into my schedule or pay my dog to do it.  Or Robbe’s dog, who seems brighter than mine.

2.)wiki:  I have begun a wiki and linked it to my site.  I don’t fully know how I will integrate this in my teaching this coming semester, but it seems clear that it will be a great addition to the curriculum for my Accelerated kids.  (Too bad I didn’t have it up and running in time so that some of their pre-course stuff could go there.)  I am envisioning one question/week, which they have to answer on the wiki, and respond to one another’s.  (Is this kind of like CCV’s old-timey Discussion Forum, Lisa?)

3.)Xtranormal:  I am totally in love with this.  It plays right into my goofiness and demented sense of humor.  I can see creating one of these for each major piece of literature…I do wish that I could add costumes, though, like one can on toonlet—It’ll be hard to do Beowulf justice without a boar’s head helmet. 

The two I have done this far took me a long time; I am hoping that I will speed up as I become more familiar with the options and the timing.

4.)blog:  I have added a link to my blog from my website.  If I am able to keep it up it might be an interesting “place” to communicate with parents about teaching in general.

5.)Finally, a WebQuest:  I am still hoping to start (and finish) a WebQuest about banned books and censorship, centered on Huck Finn.  Maybe next week?

Plate is decidedly full; luckily, it all feels kind of like dessert.

clean sweep

Deep sigh of relief today, as I abandoned something--even though I was attached to it--and made a choice in favor of practicality.  This is exactly, now that I think about it, what I have been doing in the garage for the past week:  throwing out things I will never use again and making room to organize the things I do use.  Is this what adulthood is like?

I can't resist, though, holding onto some of the frivolity both in the garage and website.  Elvis in a flurry of hearts and Annie Dillard with a Dali mustache make me laugh, which is one of the most important elements in my workday.  (Did I just mention adulthood?  What's that?)  It's tough in that being goofy actually takes more time than being straightforward, but I think it's an OK trade-off, as my site will more accurately reflect my sensibility.

My poor students...[shakes her head].

Now, though, I am a bit panicked about getting everything done by Friday.  I think I will have to hunker down and really work on getting everything in so that I also have time to play with Xtranormal.  (How about a poem of the week recited by an avatar?  Or a snippet of dialogue from Romeo and Juliet?)

16 contractor bags of trash later, I have a neatly swept garage and only one diorama of 50s dolls arranged in a wedding scene.  (Possibly the creepiest thing I have ever seen; I couldn't get rid of it.)  Website likewise tidier, with just a few mouse droppings in the corners.  And it's only Wednesday---though, as Robin would say, Friday is the day after tomorrow.

Vertigo in March

I’d like to invite Tom March over for coffee—though caffeine may be the last thing he needs:  his writing reads like the writing of someone who waves his arms around when he talks.  One of the first things I did after reading his article was to go to his other writings and read “Intriguing Ourselves to Death…”, in which he narrates his own meanderings through the web and the tangents he followed.  His ultimate message there is that we don’t allow kids this same opportunity to pursue and solidify their own interests, as we are so busy containing them in our structures—structures which are no longer tenable as the very tenor of communication and learning shifts. 

In the abovementioned article, I also liked his insistence on letting kids play; he maintains that this is one of the most productive means we can provide for kids’ learning.  The problem with this is that it feels unstructured and therefore “dangerous;”  in this age of mandated testing and even merit pay (!),  teachers are under such pressure to “produce” “good” “results” that the element of play—which, truth be told, I value more than almost anything else I can do with my kids—gets lost by the wayside.

That said, I remember thinking as I read/viewed the “flipping the classroom” article/snippet that I have already flipped in many senses, psychiatrically and …J/K, as the kids would say.  (No, actually, they would scoff at me, because that one is passé.)   Even though I am decidedly Old School, I hope I put a lot of emphasis on kids’ experimentation and taking risks for the sake of ideas, to paraphrase Adrienne Rich.    One thing that I learned today is that I am as quick to shut down or become discouraged as many of my students are when faced with an unfamiliar challenge.  Learning curves produce vertigo in me as they do in my kids.

the mattress

Someone has dumped a mattress and box springs right on Putney-West West line.  Not too long ago, there was a TV there, and before that, a stuffed chair in a lurid orange.  The already overworked road crews must have to take care of these leavings, and I imagine the Putney faction and the Westminster West guys fighting it out.  Seeing this mattress, though,  makes me seethe with a sort of impotent rage at the pure sloth and the careless disregard for others that now soaked mattress demonstrates.

My several frustrating experiences today brought out similar emotions--though not because of anyone's sloth or careless contempt.  There is nothing quite as stymying as having something to do and not being able to do it, especially, somehow, when said task involves a PC.  My partner even tried to help me find the right place on the site to enter my homework while simultaneously wiping chocolate chip cookie (not a euphemism in this case--it was a real cookie) off Leo's butt, but to no avail.

Why are tech experiences more frustrating than soiled mattresses dumped in a serene landscape, even?  I think they bring me  f2f with my own limitations--limitations which hopefully will be fewer as I experiment.  (A new PC would help, of course, as well.)  I think my learning goals should include yoga and maybe more familiarity with the sites we are using, so that I don't throw a chocolate-chip-cookie-fit (euphemism) when something goes wrong.

On the flip-side, how delightful to be in a class with such engaging and engaged women; that should ease the sting.  Now if my classmates would just take care of the mattress.

Thanks, Jade

I was reading my freshmen’s last papers of the course yesterday with some mixed feelings—mixed because it was a gorgeous day outside, my tomatoes are still in pots, and I was grumpy about having to spend so many hours reading about Odysseus, much as I love the man; and also, fleetingly, excited as I thought about next September.  I hope to have many of these same kids in Accelerated II, and it struck me as I was grading that I should do a project which centers on journeys.  Because of my peculiar passion for the work, my students can tell you about Odysseus’ odyssey in nauseating  detail, from each of his dalliances with nymphs to his dissembling in various locales.  The Odyssey is possibly the richest work I know.  I have read it in a tent during a weeklong downpour on the Gaspe Peninsula, while waiting in traffic on the way to the city, on the plane to MT.  I reread it each summer, whether or not I have just taught it.

I have never really thought about the curriculum of English II as being “about” journeys except, naturally, Huck Finn.  But there’s also Catcher in the Rye (while largely in NYC, it’s an odyssey of the mind and soul), The Great Gatsby (Gatsby’s odyssey into the upper class), Of Mice and Men (a failed odyssey), The Crucible (yikes)…and then Macbeth…Hmmm…scotched again, but I can figure that out.  And I am not familiar enough with The House on Mango Street yet to say how/if that could fit.

How cool would it be to create a webquest that somehow linked all these works as journeys?  This occurred to me as I was reading Jade’s paper about how other literature has borrowed, consciously or not, from Homer’s work.  A million things have happened between Jade’s paper and now, but once school is out –Friday is graduation!—I will be able to think more about it.  Should it be summative or should each work be covered as we finish it?  Can I base it on The Odyssey?  (Not all classes read all 462 pages.)  If the latter, I think it would be cool to find parallels to the encounter with the Underworld, e.g., and Odysseus’ meeting with the blind prophet Tereisias. (Mr. Antolini, in Catcher, comes immediately to mind.)  Finding links to contextual/cultural information would also be so cool—the South during slavery, of course, but also the “roaring” ‘20s (Gatsby), NYC in the 40s/50s (Catcher), etc.  

(I note as I type that if this were a student’s paper I would circle the numerous uses of “cool” and write “rep.” in the margin in purple pen.  Oh well.)

Other things I’d like to do?  I feel like I’d like to create a playlist for myself of all of the great tools I’ve been hearing about in class and elsewhere.  (Last week, I heard about thinglink.com, a site which apparently allows you to create narrative time-lines with graphics.)  How many bazillion things do I not yet know about and don’t currently have time to experiment with?  Maybe the summer session can provide some playtime, Lisa?  

And yes, I’d like to have a website for my class…Hard to think about when I have my advanced writing seminar students’ portfolios still to grade, senior grades due Wednesday, and two sets of exams to amend, collate and then grade in the next few days.  I really look forward to thinking about how to do my job better, which isn’t always easy or practical when in the throes, paradoxical as that may sound.   

Arresting Pavlov

I am writing this at the Montshire Children’s Museum, a great spot for thinking about how —as the article said—to “spark our curiosity and sense of wonder.”  (Partner and toddler explore while I write.)

As I was reading through step IV of the “Research Cycle,”  I thought back to a professor I had in grad. school, Eleanor Duckworth, the author of The Having of Wonderful  Ideas:  And Other Essays on Teaching and Learning (Teachers College Press, 1996).  Her whole “take” was experientially-based:  She had her students think about physical phenomena like planetary orbits/rotation, e.g., by watching and charting the phases of the moon.   I was 30 and had never really thought about it, believe it or not—so the a-ha! moment was perhaps all the more momentous.  I remember her introducing a Frost poem (“Design”) by asking us what we “noticed about the poem.”  Naturally I launched into a literary analysis—years of training had made it a totally Pavlovian response:  see poem; drool; analyze—but she stopped me cold.  That wasn’t what she wanted.  She wanted me to experience the poem in an immediate way, not to detach myself from it by using lingo and yammering on about its structure.

A-ha!

I still use this technique with my students, and find that it exacts an equally refreshing shift from them.  Just the other day in Mythology, we were talking about a poem by Emily Dickinson about Abraham and Isaac.  Dickinson’s work is a perfect vehicle for using this method because the idiosyncratic structure and punctuation can be alienating to kids, but if you start with “what they notice,” it allows them to see the discrete elements and then work their way toward the whole.

Now how to translate this thinking into research projects, using the “Research Cycle.”  I am thinking about the types of online, and other, research I have kids do, from looking into the spread of hate groups to Tolkien’s sources in Norse mythology in The Hobbit.  I can see how the steps advocated in the Cycle would work for many of the projects I assign, but can also see, having read (part of) the article, that I will have to re-frame my own thinking about these assignments:  I have approached my teaching, in this sense, in the same way I first approached the Frost poem, before Eleanor brought me up short.  Too often, I have a pre-determined set of things I want them to get to, which I then relentlessly guide them toward—without letting them frame their own “essential questions” and think about how to get to an end result that is meaningful to them.

As an example of a time when something totally unexpected and stunning happened during a research-assignment, I was having my students look at hate-group activity in general (numbers of groups, their locations, etc.) the morning after Obama won the election several years ago now…When all at once, all the white-supremacist sites they were on crashed.  We figured out that Obama’s victory had caused such a surge of fear among people who frequent those sites (or who might not have ever logged on previously, but harbored those beliefs) that the volume of their posts and activity downed the sites.  Talk about a real-life experience with what I was trying to teach!  I have to believe that those serendipitous occasions, the intersections of teaching and reality, could occur more often were I to let the students themselves be more generative—though perhaps not in the totally chilling way it happened that morning.

How about using hate-groups as a topic with my soon-to-be “unleveled” sophomores?  I often assign The Laramie Project in 10^th grade; though I have never taught it to levels other than Accelerated (Honors), I don’t see why the play couldn’t work even for kids who don’t think of themselves as readers—it is made up of snippets of speech and dialogue taken from real-life interviews and dialogue among people in Laramie after Matt Shephard was murdered.  The language is as stark as the topic, and I think most students will be able to handle the content.

A hate-group research project after reading the play raises certain other dilemmas, so how I frame it is of paramount importance:  It’s a look at the organized face of what happened more precipitously (and possibly less calculatedly, depending on whose version you believe)  in Laramie.  

When I think of central questions I myself would like them to get at, they include why hate groups exist, and what external events spark a surge in their membership; what the range of hate-groups is—who’s being targeted, and why;  where they are primarily located, etc. (The SPLC, if I remember correctly, had logged an entry on their watch-list about a group which existed fleetingly at our own high school, the NHRS—“N—ger-Hanging Redneck Society—their vigilance is pretty remarkable.  It was an eye-opener for the kids to see their own community listed on the site.) 

I am going to have to think a  lot more about how to make this work, but our sojourn at the Montshire is over now with an unanticipated toddler- temp. of 101.  So it goes.  As the authors say in Stage IV (“Stating Suppositions—Hypothesizing and Predicting”), “Why do you suppose that happened?  How will the evening go?  What, if any, sleep will you get?”

CSI and arterial spray

I am trying to think of a graceful link between the interview with Vogole of the CSI and the pressing concerns of my work day, which included an 81 degree classroom, Beowulf, and 17 restive upperclassmen.  Thinking about copyright law makes my head swim; on the other hand, they completed a short research paper today on topics related to Beowulf and the Norsemen, which will probably reveal a fair number of misuses of sources despite my best efforts. 

I enjoyed Vogole’s interview and looked at her blog and the CSI afterwards—pretty amazing stuff.  (I have to go back after I’ve had some sleep and figure out why robots are such a hot topic on the site.)  One of my relatives is an “intellectual property” lawyer, and I have always been intrigued by the snippets he shares ,narrow in scope as they are, given confidentiality concerns—what a far cry from my day-to-day reality, in which I am trying to jumpstart the intellectual process.  The “protection “ is at the far end of the spectrum within which I operate.

I will be mulling over her statement that copyright is a vehicle for creativity.  Again, after I get some sleep.