LitLife Blog

My vision for language arts educators is that they are intensely equipped with the skills and tools that they need for teaching the children of tomorrow.  Included in this is the ability to truly see, and meet the needs of each and every student.  That these teachers are able to look at their students and imagine levels of support that are in direct response to what each student needs.In addition, my vision for language arts educators is that they maintain a burning desire to be active learners who continually look to educate themselves.  Teachers of reading and writing should be that- readers and writers, so that they can speak to students in authentic and effective ways.  Life-long learning is at the heart of true teacher of language arts.

Lastly, my vision for language arts teachers is that they continually strive to create an environment that motivates and engages students to pursue interests, passions and ideas inside of reading and writing- an environment that respects each individual and leads them to their highest potential- an environment that builds the individual independently and builds the community collaboratively.

You can download copies of the handouts from Pam’s presentation from LitLife’s website at:

http://www.litlifeinfo.com/innovations_in_professional_development/seminars.html

Or simply go to the LitLife website at www.litlifeinfo.com, click the Innovations in Professional Development box, and click Seminars.

Please also feel free to contact Pam at pallyn@litlifeinfo.com, and she can arrange for copies to be emailed to you.

The other night I collapsed on the couch with my husband and popped in our latest Netflicks arrival, God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan.

Documentaries seem to have a poignancy all their own, and this one was no exception. The fold of a child’s narrow leg, the struggle to choke down the painful knot of sorrow and do so with grace, the torn soles of feet that have traveled a thousand miles to safety…the reality of it all is enough to send one charging into the world. But despite the darkness of their lives, these boys soaked in each new experience. They knew the value of a kind word and a simple gesture. They wondered why here in America we pass each other by without a nod or a glance.

Those boys lingered in my thoughts as I entered a high school classroom the next day. We were having a Socratic seminar, the goal of which was to foster true collaboration between the students. At the end of the class, a student stayed behind. I thought perhaps he wanted to continue the discussion or seize that last opportunity to make a point. I was wrong. He just wanted to say that he “valued our time together.” Oh, he enjoyed the discussion, but for him, it was simpler. He just appreciated the warmth of our handshake and the acknowledgment of the other.

So, at the end of a long week, I smiled and said to myself, “they’ve got it right, I think.” The “lost boys” had lost their families, their homes, their innocence, but not their humanity and not their certainty that the moment counts. They would find a friend in that young man from class. He too, seemed impervious to the demands of a world that says move faster, do more, look ahead. They were a refreshing reminder for me to “linger longer” in those simple moments of connection with others and to resist the inertia which sweeps us past moments that count.

Jan. 1, 2009, NY Times 

For weeks now, I have been watching my children endure life in the fishbowl of the holiday season. On hiatus from school, they swim patient laps around one another in the cramped space of a family.

I don’t envy this. I know from personal experience that the last thing you want, in that awkward decade when you are trying to figure out who you are and where you are headed, is the pressure of being under the constant observation of cranky grown-ups who wonder why you aren’t unloading the dishwasher for them more often.

My daughters cope with having to live around me in much the same way that I remember dealing with my mother. They sleep in. They stay up very late. They put gasoline in the car just often enough to neutralize criticism.

Watching these delicate negotiations makes me glad to be past that stage of life. Most of the time. But there is one thing I notice my daughters doing when they hang around the house that makes me ache, with a terrible yearning, to be young again. They read.

Or more precisely, they read like I did when I was a girl. They drape themselves across chairs and sofas and beds — any available horizontal surface will do, in a pinch — and they allow a novel to carry them so effortlessly from one place to another that for a time they truly don’t care about anything else.

I miss the days when I felt that way, curled up in a corner and able to get lost in pretty much any plot. I loved stories indiscriminately, because each revealed the world in a way I had never considered before. The effect was so profound that I can still remember vividly the experiences of reading “Little Women” (in my bedroom, by flashlight) and “Mrs. ‘Arris Goes to Paris” (in a Reader’s Digest condensed version at my grandmother’s) and “The Diamond in the Window” (sitting cross-legged on the linoleum amid the stacks at the public library). And a thousand others. After each, I would emerge a changed person.

This has nothing to do with the way I “read” these days, with piles of books sitting forlornly on the night table, skimmed and dog-eared and dusty as they wait listlessly for me to feel a compelling urge to return to them, to finish “Beginner’s Greek” or “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” or even, God help me, “Midnight’s Children.”

That I can be sitting here now in another room two floors away from those half-digested stories and be engaged, without longing for them, in an entirely different activity is not something I would have believed possible when I was young.

I am not sure when or exactly how I started merely reading books instead of living in them. I could make the usual excuses about how I no longer have the luxury of time to give in to my imagination; when I sit down with a book, I feel the pressure — of unfinished work, unfolded laundry, unpaid bills. But I suppose the true reason is sadder. It’s an inevitable byproduct of growing up that I formed too many opinions of my own to be able to give in wholeheartedly to the prospect of living inside someone else’s universe.

Unfortunately there is only a narrow window of time, after one learns to read but before one gets old enough to read critically, to fully appreciate the sweet sadness of “Mick Harte Was Here” or the orphan’s longing in “Taash and the Jesters” — I read that one eight times the summer I was 10 — or the trapped restlessness of being the teenaged “Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones.”

Among my three daughters, whose ages are 19, 17 and 11, I see signs of an inevitable progression toward being skeptical readers.

I fear Zoe, the oldest, has completely lost the childhood gift of being able to suspend disbelief. Last week, in an attempt to delay the transition, I dug out for her one of my favorite frothy romances — an Elinor Lipman novel called “The Inn at Lake Devine.”

But results of that experiment were mixed.

“How was it?” I asked a few days later.

“I couldn’t stop reading it,” she said, before adding, with regret, “but I knew from the beginning how it would turn out.”

Ella, my middle daughter, has been taught in high school to be an analytical reader. I have mixed feelings about this: good preparation for taking standardized tests, but bad for someone who is trying to revel without reservation in the absurd plot twists of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” It took me hours to persuade her it was O.K. to turn her back on everything she had learned in science class about the time-space continuum.

Clementine, who is 11, is the luckiest. She’s still young, so she was able to leave the rest of us behind for whole days this year when she was off somewhere else, inhabiting the world of a sign-language-knowing chimp in “Hurt Go Happy.”

Currently, she totes around the house one or another of the doorstopper-heavy volumes in Stephanie Meyer’s vampire-loves-mortal-girl series. She comes to the dinner table wearing the hollow-eyed, devotional expression of someone who has just glimpsed something wonderful in a distant land.

Although there is much about the vampire books to make an adult reader roll her eyes — Edward is too controlling and Bella has the sort of low self-esteem mothers hope will never plague their own daughters — I understand the appeal. At Clementine’s age, I too would have been able to smell Edward and feel the delicious iciness of his breath on the back of my neck. And at several hundred pages apiece, the series of four easily would have carried me through winter break.

E-mail: Slatalla@nytimes.com

Most Textbooks Should Just Stay On the Shelf

By Jay Mathews
December 15, 2008

Most people think textbooks are important. Schools that don’t have all of theirs might find themselves accused of dereliction of duty. The Washington Post, for instance, was aghast last year that several thousand D.C. schoolbooks hadn’t yet left the warehouse when classes began.

My colleague Michael Alison Chandler underlined this in her story two weeks ago about an effort by some Virginia teachers to break the $8 billion-a-year textbook industry’s tight grip on science instruction, which often stops abruptly about the time Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity in 1905.

The fact that such obsolescence is tolerated shows how much faith we put in textbooks. So does our acceptance of the difficulty most students have reading through a standard textbook without falling asleep. Reid Saaris, founder of the D.C.-based Equal Opportunity Schools Organization, remembers teaching 12th-grade history in Beaufort, S.C., with a particularly tedious required text. The few seniors who chose his class usually did so for inappropriate reasons. One year, five boys showed up, gave Saaris disappointed looks and said they had enrolled only “because of the hot lady who was supposed to be teaching the class.”

“Obviously, there is a lot of money in textbooks, because the publishers push them hard,” said Mark Dodge, a physics teacher at the H-B Woodlawn program, a public high school in Arlington County. He doesn’t like the fact that every seven years or so the textbook salespeople start promoting a new version. “A teacher who relies heavily on a textbook has to entirely revamp his or her course when a new adoption occurs,” he said. “It really takes two or three years to do that well. By the time you really get it polished, you begin closing in on a new adoption cycle. I think most experienced teachers go through that trap once and then move away from heavy dependence on textbooks.”

Mike Grill, a history teacher at Wakefield High School in Arlington, said his textbooks keep his lessons aligned with the Advanced Placement curriculum, but he adds primary source documents, journal articles and other original materials as often as he can. “It’s no secret that most students loathe their textbooks, so I’ve learned that the more textbook breaks I provide, the easier it is for them to come back to the textbook and get something out of the textbook reading,” Grill said.

In the classrooms I visit, it is often a good sign that the textbooks are stacked on a corner bookshelf or window sill, gathering dust. The best teachers have an ongoing conversation with their class, calling on every student, challenging sloth, praising fresh ideas, moving the group beyond the text, which covers only the state’s or the school’s curricular requirements. “In some instances, I have completely avoided using the textbooks because they presented information in such small, bite-sized chunks that it was actually confusing for the students,” said Toby Harkleroad, who taught social studies theology at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville and is now principal of St. Camillus School in Silver Spring.

My favorite teacher, Al Ladendorff of Hillsdale High in San Mateo, Calif., used our U.S. history text like a bull’s-eye on a firing range. He had us identify factual distortions and analytical flaws in the thick tome the state had chosen for us. I never got over the realization that textbooks, presented as revealed truth all those years in school up until then, sometimes had as many mistakes and wrong-headed assumptions as my own term papers.

Textbooks still make good dictionaries, with glossaries at the back. They also reassure parents, who don’t get to see teachers in action but are comforted, in a perverse way, that their kids’ schoolbooks seem just as dry and predictable as theirs were. But like the newspapers that have been my life, textbooks are creeping slowly toward obsolescence. Jay Diskey, executive director of the school division of the Association of American Publishers, said his companies are moving into “Web sites, podcasts, electronic books, software, courseware, online tutoring tips, educational games, video products” and many other ways to learn.

Big books have failed to hold the attention of teenagers leafing through the pages with music blasting in their earbuds and text messages filling their cellphone screens. Facts and ideas, in my experience, are more likely to sink in if introduced in group exercises, exploiting the adolescent urge to belong. Teachers have their classes organize book clubs, recreate the Constitutional Convention, raise animals, write and perform plays, publish online magazines.

The Virginia teachers in Chandler’s story are leaping beyond the textbook industry by writing their own chapters in biophysics, nanotechnology and other emerging fields and posting them online. They will be optional, free supplements to hardbound books.

If teachers can write their own textbooks, why not students? It would make a fine group project, with each kid doing a chapter. Debate the fine points, put them on the Web and pass them around, irresistible preparation for the final exam. Then we might not worry so much if the 800-page doorstops don’t show up on time next year.

E-mail: mathewsj@washpost.com

ASK THE TEACHER
Humorous writing has its place in school

By Ron Fletcher  |  November 23, 2008

Q. As a senior in high school who reads for pleasure, I find that many of the books assigned by teachers and the way they teach them take the joy out of reading. We’re presented with characters and authors of questionable relevance in works that seem dated and deliberately difficult. So what are teachers thinking? Why don’t teachers integrate books from more contemporary and interesting authors in the genres of memoir or pop culture analysis? Why not add a little David Sedaris as a break from picking apart the writings of Sophocles, Chaucer, or Melville?

J.P.
Milton

A. You’ve pinpointed an unfortunate irony that haunts many English teachers: unwittingly dampening the sort of joy they hope to demonstrate and deepen. It’s difficult to imagine any literary works created for the purpose of classroom analysis. Yet when they arrive there, they’re often dismantled for the sake of illustrating a series of literary terms and devices or reduced to a mere mirror of the culture, time, and place in which they were created. All the king’s men cannot restore “All the King’s Men” to its sublime whole after it has been ground through the gears of a typical classroom critique. Though that sort of work has value and lends itself to tidy lessons, it should take place after a consideration of the pleasures of the page. What’s the value of marking assonance or alliteration in the margin absent the aural thrill of hearing James Joyce describe his protagonist’s thinking as “a dusk of doubt and selfmistrust lit up at moments by the lightnings of intuition?” As teachers, we have to risk a bit of foolishness in demonstrating our excitement about diction, metaphor, or the perfectly placed comma. We’re obligated to model the sort of joy we hope to inspire in our students. The disassembly-line approach to literature can prove deadening.

I agree that some light, humorous writing has its (limited) place on any high school syllabus. It’s instructive for an English teacher to hear students make the case for Sedaris’s humor and ironies, particularly when the gallows humor of Kafka or the bawdiness of Chaucer often requires a self-defeating amount of work to notice.

I’m guessing that many teachers see a brief and finite chance to make a case for serious literature, thus are reluctant to forfeit valuable time to writings that don’t require scrutiny, labor, or their instruction. More, some of us feel threatened by the ubiquity of digital media and attempt to plug the dam with dog-eared copies of “Mrs. Dalloway.” We need to accept that today’s students often prefer screens to pages, surfing to perusing. We should try to meet them on their home turf and point out the limitations and lacunae of blogs, Wikipedia, or MonkeyNotes. Then take on a John Donne sonnet and explain how mastering its challenges leads to the sort of acuity that can help one knowingly navigate not only the Web, but moments much less virtual and remote.

English teachers should be in the habit of allowing students some time to read books or magazines they choose for themselves. Rather than pooh-poohing the student who picks up “Sports Illustrated,” use that moment to recommend Roger Angell’s writing on baseball or David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis.

With recent reports from the National Endowment for the Arts indicating that fewer than half of US adults will read fiction, poems, or plays after high school, teachers have to envision the fallout of that dystopian scene, meet students halfway, and get as creative as the writers they laud.

The bell tolls for teacher
The need to trim budgets in this unkind economy means the bell now tolls for me. So, after four years, the duration of high school, I need to say farewell. And thank you. Your questions, attention, and challenges have enriched my teaching. I hope my responses provided some sense, humor, and perspective for all of us caught up in the high school years. Aware that my view is one view, the audacity of the definite article in this column’s title troubled me from the start. Well, “the” teacher is “a” teacher again, optimistic about the walking advertisement for education that is our president-elect and eager to complete The Great Hockey Novel.

Ron Fletcher teaches English at Boston College High. You can reach him at rfletcher@bchigh.edu or chat online with him Monday at noon at www.boston.com.

Kolmanskop, Namibia was settled during the diamond rush in 1908. In a few years, a bustling town with a casino, school, hospital and a theater, sprang up. In the 1950s, the diamond fever in the area slowed down and, abandoned, Kolmanskop became a ghost town. The desert dunes swept back into the buildings, including the school.

Photographs from the town show sand holding open doors in old houses, and dunes covering what were once gardens. Old bathtubs and wagon wheels rest on the sand. The town seems to show in real time how something becomes a relic, treasured by archaeologists.

Where it is: Kolmanskop is open to tourists. It is located in southern Namibia.

Bring it to the classroom: Use pictures of Kolmanskop while talking about archaeology. Discuss the magic of uncovering something from the past. Since your archaeologists can’t set off across the ocean quite yet, make a time capsule from your classroom. Or have your students write a letter to themselves, address it, and then seal it up. You (or their parents) will mail it to them in one, five, or even ten years.

Your own learning life: Kolmanskop shows what happens when humans abandon an area. Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us asks what happens when humans abandon a planet. In the book, Weisman describes how nature would take over our houses, bridges, even cities if humans were to suddenly disappear. In this timely book about how humans affect our environment, Weisman asks, “Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”

The Museum of Jurassic technology is unlike any other museum. For one thing, it resides behind a small shop front on a busy street in downtown Los Angeles. On entering, you walk through a catacomb of dark rooms, each highlighting an exhibit stranger than the last.

The collection has exhibits on topics including: the ability of bats to fly through concrete walls, a theory of memory inspired by an amnesiac opera singer, a fruit pit carved with an elaborate scene, a stink ant from Cameroon, and the dogs of the Soviet Space Program. Every exhibit has a different approach for viewing. There are microminiature sculptures the size of a hair that you can only see with a magnifying glass. There is a hall of “Floral Stereoradiographs” which you view with 3D glasses so they seem to hover, filling the hallway.

As you walk through the halls, you think, this has to be fake, some kind of a joke. But curator David Wilson is absolutely serious in his mission—making us wonder at the world around us. 

Where it is: The MJT is located in Culver City, California. You can also find it online at http://www.mjt.org.

Bring it to the classroom: Even if you’re across the country, you can bring the magic of the Museum of Jurassic Technology to your class. Share images from some of the exhibits, and begin a discussion about how what we think of as “real” has changed over the years. Older students might enjoy a documentary about the MJT, available from its website. Also, check out Pulitzer Prize finalist Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders by Lawrence Weschler, about the MJT and its mysterious history.

Two weeks ago I set out to drive my son to soccer practice and I discovered one of my headlights was out.
I decided to stop by my mechanic to see if they could squeeze me in for a quick lamp change. My teenager was in the car, my cranky dog was in the car, and I am sure it wasn’t a convenient time for the shop.  But Chase took us in right away, driving the car into the bay and letting the dog into the waiting area. He happily set out to change the bulb, put the seat back in its proper position and handed me the keys.
I asked him what I owed him.
“Nothing,” he said nonchalantly.
I reached for my purse and he brushed the thought away with a gesture of his hand.  “No worries,” he said.
Now this was ten days after Barack Obama was elected.  The stock market was still a roller coaster, more banks cried for help, and our Congress was mulling over whether to bail out the auto industry.  All those around me were joyous and hopeful and frightened at exactly the same time.  Chase could have easily charged me for the bulb, his time, and the inconvenience of my arriving as the shop closed.  But he didn’t.  I prefer to think he considered the fact that I have been bringing my Subaru to him for service since my son was in kindergarten.  I prefer to think he knew his kindness would be paid in full and even if it wasn’t, he was doing a good thing.  Helping another person in a time of need.   Rather than look at this as an opportunity to cover even the smallest of expenses, he chose to reach out a helping hand.

Today, my Subaru went into convulsions in my driveway.  On the way to see Chase, it had a full blown seizure.  With 115,00 miles on the speedometer I knew I was in for bad news.  But Chase met me with a smile, took my keys and promised he would call.  And he did, with the news that oil was leaking in the engine, but that he could fix it, and it would be ready by the time I got home.  I wrote a check for $798 and drove away.  Chase’s prior kindness was paid in full.  And then some.

Two weeks ago Chase didn’t have to help me.  All around him were harbingers of doom.  Everyone was spouting fear and worry.  Even those not immediately affected by the changing economy withdrew their purchase power.  No more charitable contributions, no more lavish Christmas presents.  All the turtles pulled their heads in their shells and waited for the bombs to fall.  Chase chose to see the world as hopeful, his cup half full.  I continue to be touched by that moment, and it reminds me that our job as consultants is clearer than it has ever been.

We need to see the sunny side.  We need to be hopeful.  To see the possibilities for change that a new administration and a new Secretary of Education may bring.  We need to take our heads out of our shells and move forward in hopeful ways. We need to lobby for what we believe in.  We need to stand firm, despite the anxieties all around us, and fight for what never changes – the right to an equitable, respectful education for all children.  So look on the sunny side, folks.  I’ll be right next to you.