About the blogging, personally, i feel like blogging=homework. Since I have to think about my grammar, idea and stuff, it takes more than 15 minutes to write one blog. Actually it takes more than 30 minutes! But i like when you said only English blogging is going to be graded! When all the teachers started to assign blogging for each subject, i will hate this blogging stuff with my passion. Also, personally i want my blogs to kept private. (This is just my very very personal opinion!) Also you said ” The policy will begin with this year’s grade 9 class. They will continue blogging about their “educational journey” until they graduate in grade 12.” I think this is good idea but……. um….. anyway, when i think about blogging, for me it is little bit of pain, since i’m really bad at writing and pratically bad at everything that is related to writing.
I think i wrote so much nonsense sorry!!!

Please do tell about the “different route” you tease us with, you vamp (I’m a “good idea” vampire.)

Linzel–
I didn’t touch on this enough in my sketch on this post when I said only this:

it’s a four-year “writing workshop.” It encourages student construction of their own interdisciplinary meanings, the return of the parts to a student-synthesized whole.

So the idea, stated more fully, is for students to be assessed for how they re-constitute in their blogging the meaning of the whole world we so depressingly dismember in our schools. They write more from wonder and meaning-construction–the “What’s it all about, Alfie”–than from rehearsing the “correctness” of content.

I see your point about excluding all but English teachers. That’s not the idea, anyway, exactly. The idea is more for a sort of exploratory writing mentor to “assess” in its beautiful, classic, “sitting with” sense, the directions students independently take in the world of holistic, interdisciplinary “reading the world of idea”–coaches on the levels of finding and pursuing self-compelling questions, and writing about them effectively.

If those “exploratory writing mentors” are science teachers instead of English teachers, that’s fine indeed. Perhaps they should be. (The bugabear of which “class grade” this work applies to points to English, though, doesn’t it? grrrr…ading s&@)ks sometimes, doesn’t it?)

And there’s no reason all teachers couldn’t read whatever and whenever students wrote about their particular discipline. But really, to me, this is not about reading and assessing for correctness of disciplinary content as much as it is, again, mentoring a writerly comfort with testing ideas, questions, impulses, epiphanies.

The poet Keats famously got his “history” wrong when he wrote about “Cortes, / Silent, upon a peak in Darien” in “On First Reading Chapman’s Homer.”

But the poem itself is a wonder and timeless, despite the fact that Keats would have been docked a few points on his history test for saying “Cortes” instead of…gee, “Pizarro,” is it? Or some other inert name?

Back to your concern about exclusion of all content areas, though, I’ll repeat: students will be guided toward re-weaving the fabric of learning we’ve all unraveled into separate content areas. Galileo, astronomy, poetry, and the student in the center of it all, ideally writing for pleasure and discovery more than “demonstration of correct learning”–really, to be frank, learning to become a bit philosophical and alive to the miracle this all is, and show that coming-to-life in four years of writing towards it–that’s what we’re looking at.

The grammar, correctness, and assessment for more academic things we can still use traditional assessment for. Blogging is different.

This whole conversation started with a “Teacher Think-Aloud.” Our goal is for the learners to go through four sustained years of a very similar “wondering aloud”–and “wonder” is a wonderfully polyvalent word.

Am I making sense?

Actually, Chris Watson and three of his Hawaiian learners skyped with some of my own learners for about 3 hours this Sunday morning (in shifts), and we had this conversation. It’s like the young ones had never considered that the topics of the classroom could be worth wondering about. They seemed to see that, looked in a non-”schooly” way, they are very much so.

And this is the pilot class of ninth graders that will begin this 3.5 year blogging journey at our school.

Thanks so much, both, for your input.

I’ll edit and podcast the student voices as soon as I can.

C.

Cheers