Outside of Class…

In a traditional sense, a teacher’s work is designated to the classroom and all of its practical extensions: grading, maintaining Powerschool, comments, accounting for assignments that come in late (why am I never on top of this?) communicating with parents and instructional support, attending meetings, keeping track of advisee’s various extra-academic graduation requirements. I am not especially good at any of these.

Sometimes teaching feels like accounting. This is not to say that the items I listed above aren’t important and necessary or that accounting is somehow a lesser field. I don’t believe any field of work is lesser than another.  I look at the tasks above as items of maintenance to teaching, secondary to the work of thinking, discussing, reading, and writing with young people. However, maintenance seems to consume me this year more than any other year. I could just be in a new stage of teacherly imbalance.  So here is an attempt to look outward from the walls of my class….

Last year we wrote “This I Believe” essays as part of a unit on personal writing. On his own initiative, one of my students submitted his piece to the NPR website, and it was published. This is a link to his essay which, from a student’s perspective, speaks to the issues of balance and passion. http://thisibelieve.org/essay/82813/

If you’re local to Yarmouth, you’ll recognize the photo at the top of this post. Two of the guys in the band–the Low Flying Airplanes– were some of the sharpest students I’ve had in ten years of teaching. Their strengths come not from always doing everything right and following all the rules and expectations…counting the beans, if you will, but from being creative and productive. I am working on it.

Community Book Discussion Project

Poster2010

This past Thursday and Friday were our annual Book Discussions. We choose a theme, give students their choice of novels, organize them into discussion groups, and invite members of the community to join the student-led discussions. This year the theme was novels about immigrant experiences. Here is the project webpage. Click on the book links on the left to see the student work.

http://communitybookdiscussion2010-2011.wikispaces.com/

It’s a good project,  community members always give glowing feedback. Here are some of my observations about the project and some ideas to make it better in the future:

1. Not all students are equally involved in the discussion 2. Students could be more active readers as they read instead of speeding through the books and starting to think about the big ideas after the book is finished 3. During the discussion, students approach their questions with a right-wrong kind of mentality…they check questions off the list and are less willing to contend with issues that have multiple dimensions–they want questions to be answered and done 4. The outside research that was completed this year could have been stronger…how to get students to be motivated to learn more about an issue from the reading of a novel? 5. Although we had more community members than ever join the discussions, most are moms with current students or YHS graduates. I’d like to attract a wider variety of readers.

Some Ideas to Improve:

1. Make 8-12 discussion protocols available  and require they use at least 2 at different points in the discussion. 2. This is a difficult one to work on…maybe we could organize and require pre-discussion blog posts more so students are talking to each other while they’re reading. The problem is stealing the conversation from the live discussion. 3. This issue of one right answer is maybe a larger challenge with how to approach literature overall. It seems like students at Yarmouth are more focused on this one right answer phenomenon more than students at other schools I have taught. I think this is a bigger question…One thing we did differently this year is include some discussion around the theme in our classes. We read a poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca and an excerpt of Maira Kalman’s book And the Pursuit of Happiness in blog form, both available from this link: http://communitybookdiscussion2010-2011.wikispaces.com/Kalman+Baca+Assignment We should increase this kind of discussion and written work around the theme in the future 5. Lastly keep up marketing and promotion with posters, attending the readers circle at the Yarmouth library, and encourage readers to invite their friends who are readers. 6. Use this blog as a place to collect community member feedback and suggestions for next year.

The following documents include specific feedback and reflection: student feedback2011***communitymemberfeedback2011***specific improvements for 2012

Looking ahead to 2011: If you have any ideas for possible themes, please post them in a comment. Any thoughts about the theme of journeys?

Here’s a (late) Resolution

Besides reading at least seven new books in the last couple of weeks as part of the Community Book Project, I’m a little short on inspiration and energy. So, I am going to commit myself to posting at least once a week on this blog to hopefully generate some of that energy and inspiration from my own thoughts and words.