Beyond School

Bing, Cheryl, Cindy, Patrick, Lynne, Christina:

I just replied to your comments on the “Missionary Summer” post (sorry, finals prep week). We’ve got the makings right now for a pretty diverse Language Arts collaborative network, just amongst ourselves (plus Chris in Honolulu, who’s traveling in Latin America right now).

I hope we can transfer these talks to the group I made on the Classroom 2.0 Ning. The forums would be a good place for our discussions to branch like the tree they’re sure to become.

There’s so much negative press about 1:1 schools right now. Here’s our opportunity to plan a few learning experiences as counter-examples to the naysayers.

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I use the term blog-writer advisedly.

I’m catching up on responding to all my learners’ blogs, using Diigo to leave “teacher-y” comments on sticky-notes that only they can see–which also makes for a great collection of sentence-correction examples on my teacher Diigo bookmarks page–and I come across this post from Lynn:

Quiet Souls: the Living Dead

All Quiet on the Western Front, otherwise known as “the greatest war novel of all time,” is a notably bitter book. I found [myself] making sour smiles as I read–the book had hit the bull’s eye. All Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates the war from the soldiers’ point of view. The book shows how war can take out the souls of human beings and leave them only with their “animal instincts.”

“By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it….It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowing how. If it were no so, there would not be one man alive from Flandres to the Vosges” (56, Remarque).

This second instinct seems to be a key element for survival, but it is also destroying them as well. Men step away from their emotions and rely on their immediate needs, just as Muller does.

“They would fit me perfectly. In these boots I get blister after blister. Do you think he will last till tomorrow after drill? If he passes out in the night, we know where the boots–” (18, Remarque)

Muller, in this passage, sounds very cold hearted: he asks his friends when his comrade would probably die. But it is understandable, because civility is not a major concern in war. It is blind killing, without any reasons whatsoever, that matters; it is the soldiers’ paramount responsibility to simply kill the enemies. Thus, the soldiers becoming the living dead–a soul without a soul. They become completely senseless to what civilization has taught them. Instead, they listen to the inner primitive instincts: the strive for dominance, the strive for power, the strive to survive, and mostly, the strive to kill.

Ironically, the authorities glorify this tragedy into what is known as “essprit de corps (26, Remarque)”.

“We became hard, suspicious, pitiless, vicious, tough–and that was good; for these attributes were just what we lacked. Had we gone into the trenches without this period of training, most of us would certainly have gone mad….But by far the most important result was that it awakened in us a strong, practical sense of esprit de corps, which in the field developed into the finest thing that arose out of the war–comradeship” (26,27, Remarque)

As these soldiers become empty shells with no souls, the war goes on. The post-war trauma, the in-war trauma is maybe just enough to take the life out of someone.

Image from Flickr

The quality of Lynn’s writing is obvious, but what isn’t obvious is how she has applied so much of the sentence styling that I’ve been urging my learners to experiment with–with predictably mixed results. (To see the also-mixed student-produced mini-lessons on the sentence patterns I’m trying to make them use, see this link on the 1001 Flat World Tales wiki.)

I’m sharing this as an example of how student blogging can be used as a way to teach writing skills, a la the 6 Traits of Effective Writing and The Art of Styling Sentences, while still avoiding the “blogging as homework” pitfall that comes with assigning the content of the blog-posts. It’s part of the on-going quest to find that magical combination that transforms homework into authentic writing, while at the same time prevents that freedom from being sloppy, non-developmental free-writing.

Earlier in the year, I think I erred in giving students too much freedom to choose their topic. I’d hoped they would rise to my exhortations for them to find one idea from a week’s worth of schooling–in any subject area classroom–to write about and make meaningful. Most of them didn’t, which is a sad reflection on the relevance they find in the ideas at school–and on the students’ intellectual maturity level as well. But I don’t want to let this preference to “write about [the pop culture equivalent of] their cat, Fluffy” (to quote one of Chris Watson’s students in Honolulu) push me into assigning teacher-directed “answer my question” homework.

Starting the whole-class blog for my history class’ World War I to World War II unit, in which they were assigned to write about whatever topic from the week’s student lectures on a reflective, reader-response level, showed me the light. Their posts on this blog were instantly of a higher order of thought than my English classes’, in general, after four months of blogging.

So for the rest of the year (we end in about four weeks), I’m having my English students write about whatever scenes, passages, or lines from our novels that they want (though sometimes within thematic limits that I set). And I’m having them apply new skills–quotation integration and close reading commentary–in these posts.

Actually, come to think of it, Lynn’s post was in response to one of those more teacher-directed assignments. But still, she chose her passage, and she applied those skills.

Go to her blog, and judge for yourself whether her writing was better before I changed the rules and made her write about literature-related topics, or whether this post marks a leap in the general quality of her blog-writing. I’d be curious to hear what you think: could she handle freedom, or did the teacher limits help her grow?

And to “think-aloud” a bit more, I’ll add one more thing I’ve noticed as I’ve read my students’ blogs tonight: though they weren’t, as a rule, choosing to write about Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, or All Quiet on the Western Front, the few students who did write about these works unanimously found them enjoyable, and their sentiments were echoed in other students’ comments to these posts.

Which means two things to me: first, if they like what they’re reading in the English class, then assigning them to write about these works could be enjoyable for them–as long as I don’t kill that joy with stultifying requirements to write the dreaded 5-paragraph essay; and second, it’s really important to select readings that they will enjoy. I know this latter point sounds obvious, but I’ve seen too many teachers assign novels and plays that I can’t stand to teach any more than students can stand reading. But that’s a different topic. For what it’s worth, in any case, 15-year-olds in Korea–many of them fluent but first-generation English speakers–not only could handle Gulliver’s Travels, Candide, and All Quiet on the Western Front; they also enjoyed handling them.

Which strengthens my opinion that we deprive kids the experience of great literature because we insist they can’t handle it (or, if we’re moralists of the Puritanical stamp, shouldn’t handle it). And we teach them kiddie-literature instead.

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Maybe it’s because I’ve been wearing too many hats lately: unofficial Tech Coordinator and adviser to our admin, English dept chair, classroom teacher, Moodle and WordPress MU administrator, significant other of a good girl who deserves a good Other;

Maybe it’s because that $100 Thai massage during Spring Break a couple weeks ago aggravated my spastic lower back which, coupled with the sneezing and croup-coughing fits brought on by a sudden and severe bout of bronchitis, led to paralyzing spasms with each–and there were dozens per hour–sneeze and cough (and this on a small, primitive island bungalow in the Andaman Sea);

Maybe it’s a simple and predictable onset, after my “radical” experimentation with classroom blogging, wikis, flat classroom collaboration, and so forth, of a “Thermidorean Reaction“–a period of questioning the Revolution, so to speak;

Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching (and thus eating, drinking, and sleeping) the satires of Swift and Voltaire all month, and seeing Yahoos and Panglosses everywhere I look–including the mirror;

And maybe it’s the simple arrival of the spring.

Whatever it is, it’s kept me away from this weblog for two or three weeks. And I find this act of sitting back down to write a post strangely alien.

I’m thinking of Jeff, who seems to have been asked to “log off” for a week to experience life without blogging. I’m thinking of the “Secrets of Success” meme that he and Scott were both kind enough to tag me with before I disappeared to Thailand. (If you haven’t read Scott, you really should. Very nice style and substance, and a decent guy to boot, from the few emails we’ve exchanged. Writerly.)

There’s something about that meme that disturbs me (and really, about memes in general–remember, I’ve been reading satires by the masters lately, and they’re good at presenting us with unflattering mirrors). There’s something self-congratulatory about it, something about it that reminds me of all the reasons I refused to join a fraternity in college; there’s something plain vain about it. Me? Successful? Says who? And what does that have to do with improving teaching and learning?

(Jeff, Scott, I’ve read you both voice similar misgivings about this meme thing, and know you’re both just good-natured people with better things to do than cast a cynical eye at such a trivial thing. And keep reading to discover what an arch hypocrite I can be!)

There’s something about Technorati ratings, visit-counters, and such that I’m also beginning to feel Swiftean about.

There’s something of the Caste System in the edublogospyramid that says “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” to me as well. Have you noticed how the admin edubloggers seem to sequester themselves in the admin edublogosphere, while the EdTech bloggers echo in their level, and rarely pipe in with actual teachers? Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s my impression. And it’s not surprising: institutional habits die hard, and transplant easy. It’s not much of a leap from the physical building to the virtual space for 20th Century power structures. The “democratic” nature of the blogosphere is illusory to some degree. There are exceptions, of course.

We see the term “echo chamber” tossed about a lot in this sphere, and my Bloglines edublog folder confirms it these days. It leaves me with a sense that we’re all trying to master the contours of an avalanche in motion. Web 2.0 tools are popping up and propagating like viruses in Hydra’s heads, and the pace is too exponential for classroom practitioners to handle in any sort of reflective way. The ICT and Edtech specialists have the luxury, it seems, of being paid to keep up with all of this because it’s their content specialty. But this English and history teacher can’t possibly integrate in any thoughtful way the tiniest fraction of the things being touted in the Edtech specialist blogs, I would argue. To even try to do so would lead to more and more instructional time being devoted to training in the latest widgets, rather than developing skills and content knowledge. And it would drive the kids crazy. (Trust me, I’ve found that line a few times in the last few months.)

And the often-written arguments against the necessity of “knowledge” in the age of instant access to facts–”Why do they need to know the causes of WW II when a Google search will tell it to them if they ever need to know it?”–has also set off alarms in my teacher’s head recently. I hope I’m misconstruing this line of reasoning and doing it an injustice, because otherwise, I am increasingly opposed to it. It seems to mistake factual knowledge with deep understanding; it also fails to take into account the simple intellectual pleasure of reflecting on, and making meaning about, all of that data so easy to dig up on Wikipedia. There is an aesthetic value to Understanding Content that can’t be experienced simply by using the web to “get the facts.” We shouldn’t rob students of that intellectual pleasure. It’s priceless, and makes me richer than many of the millionaire parents at my school who just can’t buy this pleasure–and it shows in the quality of their conversations.

I’ve been thinking about student blogging, too–from a teacher’s point of view. I’m no expert, so this is not a judgment, but rather an observation: student blogging in itself is nothing to cheer about. Lousy student blogging is just lousy writing–virtual graffiti of the worst sort. Lousy blogging assignments–blogs as new bottles for sour milk, just a “non-traditional way to turn in traditional homework”–are also nothing to cheer about (in fact, they make cheating dead easy for students, since they can mimic other student responses rather than do the reading).

And then there’s the grading load: how many other of you classroom teachers out there have assigned a quota of weekly blog entries to your students, and discovered that you couldn’t keep up with assessing and responding to that sort of volume? What are your solutions?

I really would like to have conversations with actual high school teachers about their take on the student blogging question–any takers? I suspect many are asking similar questions after venturing in to this world. If anyone knows any blogs, wikis, or (egad) Nings (this week’s Thing, which yes, I’m exploring) where such conversations are happening, please let me know.

I am not saying that student blogging is fruitless. I’m actually happy with a couple of new approaches I’ve implemented:

One is the whole-class history blog, in which all 50 of my history students are authors writing on self-selected topics relating to our class content. It’s much easier to manage and grade than individual blogs, and by and large the freedom of choice they have has made the readings quite interesting. It’s my first experiment with a whole-class blog authored strictly by students, and I think it holds promise. One area I need to improve is to build in student responses to each others’ writing. But really, the blog’s purpose is secondary to the companion wiki-textbook they’re making (I’m quite happy with this project, by the way). In a perfect world, they’d be selecting the top 5 posts per week in some well-managed process, but I haven’t had made the time to design that process. (You won’t see a lot of my comments because they’re posted as Diigo sticky-notes, which only my students can see.)

The other new wrinkle I’m trying is for the students’ individual blogs in my language arts classes. Two things have actually happened there: first, I got the sense that writing was becoming aversive to these ninth graders because I wasn’t prescribing the topics for them to write about. I wanted them to experience writing and develop the ability to find their own ideas. Maybe that expectation is too high for ninth graders generally, or maybe it’s a cultural thing in Korea, where many (most?) kids are burned out on education because their parents make them go to night and weekend school. No wonder they can’t find ideas: their culture doesn’t give them time to actually digest any of the ideas they’re forced to cram each week. (This is quite possibly the deal-breaker for me and Korea, in the long term.)

Anyway, because the “three posts a week” policy was having the opposite effect to what I intended, and most students (save the blessed Three Percent you’ll find in any country who just Have It) were not becoming Writers at all, but instead just Students Even More Negative About Writing, AND because assessing, responding to, and grading that many posts was too much for me, I reduced the load to once a week.

That made them happy. It also made them amenable to accepting the New Rules: for each weekly blog post (which had to be longer), each student had to leave a comment on their own post, explaining why, as writers, they chose the title, idea, image, opening “hook,” etc. If they won’t write a lot–and when they were blogging more, they were generally writing poorly–then they’re going to think more about writing as they write less.

So that’s the latest on that front.

As for that meme: Do I have ten “secrets of success”? No. I do have some things that tend to keep me fairly cheerful, interested, and centered. What the heck are they?

1. Realize that everything will change, and nothing will stay the same. It makes the tough times more of an annoyance and the good times more precious. (Gee, that’s Buddhism 101)

2. Know when you Know, and know when you Don’t Know. It makes you much easier to be around, and more interesting to converse with (and could end countless religious disputes and wars). (Gee, that’s Confucius 101)

3. Deal with the cheerless as little as possible. (Gee, that’s Nietzscheanism 101)

4. Hope for the best, expect the worst. (That’s the Army veteran speaking)

5. Think of the Rest of the World for a change. It’s full of Real People.

6. Laugh at the mirror, whatever direction it points.

7. Keep your mind alive (this is easy advice for a bachelor to give: all of my free time is mine to explore with).

8. Remember wonder. “The greatest miracle of all,” according to Chuang-tse, “is that we are sitting here, talking.” (Gee, that’s Taoism 101)

9. Don’t beat yourself up. Of course you screw up sometimes.

10. Explore Asia: 5,000 years of civilization can’t be that bad. It might account for the remarkable absence of war and violence there, compared to Western history.

11. Don’t be mean: Confucius, Seneca, Buddha, and others were saying it 500 years before Jesus. It’s less the “Golden” than the “Basic” Rule for good people everywhere. (Swift would simply say, “Don’t be a Yahoo, and don’t collaborate with them.”)

(And to raise Scott one:) 12. If Life’s not precious, you’re not rich.

So there it is.

Like my kids, I’m going to blog “less, but more.”

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Barbara at Dare to Dream, whose Photo-a-Day for Schools Flickr project found the flesh [spirit] willing but the body weak for me (sorry again, Barbara), asked this question to me in a recent post.

How can we encourage exploration and following interests with our students and still hold them to some kind of timeline? Clay, you are building a text with your students so how do you handle the time line?

My answer to her there became the most thorough description of my history class’ first wiki textbook project, “A Broken World: WW I to WW II,” that I decided to post my comment to her here. So here it is:

The wiki textbook project has not been difficult to manage at all, so far (but at the same time, it’s not a very student-centered project–the only choice students got was to choose which chapter of WWI to WWII history to turn into a textbook chapter). All students have drafted their re-write of the textbook chapter (paraphrasing skills, reading comprehension, writing), added multimedia (using del.icio.us searches, rss searches, etc–research skills), made a presentation (normally Powerpoint, but that’s fine, and they’re improving impressively at that, possibly because their slideshows are published for real audiences on the wiki), then given, with their partners, lectures to the class using their Powerpoints (speaking skills). I film the lectures, capture them in iMovie immediately after, and upload them to Google Video daily.

To keep the other students learning from these student-taught classes (rather than zoning out), they are quizzed each class on the content from the prior class’ lectures. (And yes, I do some post-mortem teacher lecturing after each student lecture to clarify points and model the “presentation as storytelling” approach I’m pushing them to learn. That is filmed and posted on the wiki too, which has interesting applications for semester exam reviews, next year’s classes, and general uses for world audiences as well.)

Finally, students self-assess their embedded lectures with a rubric my English dept colleagues made, and write goals for improvement for their follow-up lecture. They post these metacognitive skills-reflections on the discussion tab of their wiki page.

They’ll do the whole process again in a “Cold War” wiki textbook, and be graded for their lectures that time as an oral test grade (this first round is just a quiz grade for the lectures).

So the wiki textbook project is really traditional in terms of content, but offers a legacy product for future students with multimedia offerings a paper textbook obviously can’t offer.

Above all, my objectives for this project (like all my projects, really) are about literacy: reading, writing, speaking, listening, researching.

And collaborating.

Did I answer your question about time management? I get about 2 chapter lectures per 85 minute class from my students (though the over-achievers are going overboard, which is good and bad). The schedule fits what we’re doing.

I can’t imagine getting anything done, though, in a 55 minute class [Barbara's school's schedule]. Why?

* * *

For a look at one exemplary lecture, check out these two students’ lecture on the causes of World War I. Great Powerpoint, impressively clear and interesting lecture. Not bad for a ninth grader! (And we can’t wait to compare this to lectures we film when they’re seniors.)

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Phuket sunset
Originally uploaded by rosswebsdale.

Nothing like an illness to clear your head. Mine taught me a lesson in balance. I’ve been so fascinated by the possibilities of our sci-fi educational reality that I’ve forgotten to take care of myself well.

It’s also a good time for silence in other ways. Things are slowing down, getting calmer. Thank Goodness.

Chris in Honolulu, Michele in Denver, and I are wrapping up our first 1001 Flat World Tales workshop (more on that when the student publishers choose the first stories for the “blook” in a few weeks).

The World War I to World War II online wiki textbook my history students are making is coming along nicely, and since they are lecturing for at least 75% of each class session, I’m more of a coach than a teacher (you can see their lectures on the wiki, since we filmed and embedded them–come back next month to see them try again with a second lecture, and we’ll see how this improves their presentation and speaking skills).

The endless 1:1 planning meetings with my admin are also winding down, and I’m waiting, with everyone else, to hear what the business department and owner finally decide. (Which gives me time to catch up on my grading.) Bless them for having the sense to include a teacher in these discussions.

The student blogging Grail still evades but still beckons. Let it. I can’t push the river.

And I’ve taken a break from my RSS subscriptions, from reading edublogs (at least reading so many), and from constantly holding my laptop to hold other things instead. Things like books, and EunJeong’s hand.

It’s nice to be reading again: Harvard historian of religion Elaine Pagel’s Adam, Eve, and the Serpent is a fascinating look at the culture wars between pre-Church Christians concerning sexuality, the body, and gender politics. It’s my second Pagels this year. During Chusok (the Korean Thanksgiving, Buddhist/Taoist style) I read her Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, along with ex-minister and New Testament Greek professor Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ: Is Blind Faith Killing Christianity?, and learned how much closer to Buddhism and other advanced viewpoints early Christianity was, before Roman Imperial politics put an end to all of that. So Adam, Eve, and the Serpent continues this jag for me. I’ve got Pagel’s The Origin of Satan, another historical study of early Christian thought and politics, waiting after that. It all fascinates me. I wish I knew more Christians–any, actually–who it fascinates as well. All the amazing discoveries we’ve made about Christian history due to the Nag Hammadi Texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and other pre-Catholic writings burned by the victorious Roman Church, yet nobody reads them. (Or even bothers to consciously read their Bible, for that matter.) It’s a shame. “The Christianity that was, but is no more” is a Christianity far superior to the current brand, in my book. (DaVinci Code fans, there’s more history there than pop churches are comfortable to admit. Again: fascinating.)

But enough of unsolicited book recommendations.

I’m really just writing to say that I’m off to Thailand for a nine-day Spring Break. No computers, no students, no “Mr. B.” Just a guy with a backpack full of books and a snorkel, looking forward to reconnecting to more elemental things.

See you on the flip-side.

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