Beyond School

Pageflakes - your free student and teacher start page

• I am a complete idiot for not reading Will Richardson religiously. Pageflakes for students and teachers is powerful stuff.
  - post by cburell

Weblogg-ed » Using Pageflakes as Student Portal

• A gem from Will Richardson on classroom use of Pageflakes. I see a migration coming.
  - post by cburell

Extracurricular :: For technologists who do their homework : July 2007 : THE Journal

• From the article:

  The benefits of integrating technology into K-12 education are being demonstrated nationwide. Here is an illustration of the quantitative impact Texas’ Technology Immersion Pilot has had on the Floydada Independent School District. - post by cburell

Borderland » Blog Archive » Teaching the Controversy

• Note the “habits of mind” approach to ‘teaching the controversy” instead of “indoctrinating.”
  - post by cburell

It’s summer. Let’s enjoy a poem, and the “pleasures of the text,” as some theorist I’ve forgotten from college once said. Cross-posted from an AP Lit workshop Ning I’ve started with other workshop teachers. What’s interesting is that Leah and I read the same poem, but took away two radically different meanings. Would love you literary types to play along with your own opinions in comments.

And yes, I know. “How school-y.” Nobody’s saying that pleasure should be sacrificed on the altar of “citizenship”; my thrust lately is that the reverse should not continue to be the case in our schools, our culture, ourselves.

Here it is:

“Textual Openness” in Heaney’s “Clearances #5″: Two Teachers, Two Interpretations

Poem:

Sonnet by Seamus Heaney
From Clearances - 5

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

Prompt:

Heaney’s sonnet is less obviously sonnet-like as we read it. How does the form work here? What is the effect of the rhythm? the imagery? How do they combine to create the tone?

Response 1: Leah

The Voyage That Never Set Sail

What a great poem!

Initially, the poem establishes the speaker’s hope for change and life within this relationship (imagined as the act of folding the sheet, a joint project that ties the lovers together). The repetition of sounds and words in the opening lines suggests the repetitive cycle of this relationship. Instead of rhyming, the first four lines end with words that are fragments of one another: “line/linen” and “them/hem.” In the first case, the word grows through their folding, and in the second, the words shrink, which shows that each moment of growth is followed by retreat.

He imagines at the outset that something will be different from what has always been, that the sheet will be wet instead of dry. He imagines the sheet becoming a sail, a vehicle of movement and change. That he imagines the sheet will be wet (water being like the ocean, a site of movement. water can also be seen as a source of life and renewal) also suggests the possibility of voyage. His hopes are thwarted with the realization that the sheet is dry with the onomatopoeic and aggressive “thwack.” Things are as they always were.

The syntax that follows is awkward: “For a split second as if nothing had happened /For nothing had that had not always happened/ Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,” which suggests that the condition of possibility motivating the poem is no longer available. It is difficult to read those lines, and the syntax forces the reader to slow down. He takes the phrase “touch and go,” which in the cliche suggests volatility, and ironizes it, referring to the action of coming together and moving apart inherent in folding the sheet.

I find the tic-tac-toe imagery particularly interesting. A game of tic-tac-toe is competitive, as any game is, but it is also predictable. When adults play this game, the moves are limited and predictable, and no one usually wins. That seems to be a fitting image for the aggression underlying this relationship. The sewn-together flour sacks, which can be seen as a synechdoche for the couple’s bed and therefore relationship, suggest their poverty and the impotent aggression of their relationship (I imagine that the sewn-together flour sacks might look like a tic-tac-toe board). What is the significance of the fact that she sews them together? What is her role?

I think Heaney is self-consciously playing with the sonnet form as love poetry and as a source of epiphany (what seems to happen here is a non-epiphany, if that makes sense). The first line suggests that the poem will be in iambic pentameter, but the substitutions starting with the first word in the second line immediately call the form itself into question. I find the substitutions make the flow of the poem halting, tentative, and uneasy, which might reflect the speaker’s attitude toward the relationship and toward encapsulating it in a sonnet. The only source of true unpredictability in this poem is in the speaker’s inability to use the sonnet form to describe the dynamics of this relationship.

Response 2: Clay

Heaney’s sonnet is less obviously sonnet-like as we read it. How does the form work here? What is the effect of the rhythm? the imagery? How do they combine to create the tone?

Beyond the 14-line trait, I’m hesitant to classify this poem as a sonnet at all.

The argument, if there is one, develops along neither Petrarchan nor Shakespearean lines (quatrains + couplet or octave + sestet), but instead seems to break down into these units:

• lines 1-7: the unknown persona, while folding linen with a nicely ambiguous “her,” expects “damp” linen, “but” finds it “dried-out”;
• lines 8-9: he and she, while folding, meet and retreat “as if nothing had happened”;
• 10-14: that “as if” is extended as an emblem of the relationship between the persona and, with clues from the final line, a “she” this reader assumes is the persona’s mother.

Likewise, there’s no traditional sonnet rhyme scheme:

a
b
a slant
b

c
d
e
f
f slant (or is it c slant, or d slant? Fun.)
f

g
e
g
e slant

–this is fun, so I’m going to follow these rhyme divisions for a second to see if they add meaning. Hm. That’s interesting. To make it more visual, here’s the poem given stanzaic breaks according to rhyme:

The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem

And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack.
So we’d stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened

Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she’d sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

–does rhyme add meaning here? It certainly divides the “argument” differently than my original 1-7, 8-14 reading. Now the argument is:

• 1-4: “I” exected damp as I folded with “her”;
• 5-10: but there was no moisture; this dry folding brings “us” “hand to hand” “as if nothing had happened,” which characterizes “our” relationship;
• 11-14: “our” relationship is sadly paradoxical, a “coming close…by holding back,” apparently because “she” - his mother now, we imagine - has been “dried-out” by the poverty and hardship of her life.

“What is the effect of the rhythm and imagery, and how do they combine to create the tone?” teacher asks. What a nice, challenging question.

Let’s see. The first line is perfect (and lovely) iambic pentameter, but the next line breaks that spell, intentionally for sure, most notably in the trochee (?) ending the line (”IN them”). The third line adds an extra syllable to further destroy the perfection of the opening line. In this increasing rhythmic breakdown, sound enforces sense: all is not as perfect as the first line suggests it could (should?) be.

“Diagonally” (l.5) is interesting in the sound-sense connection as well. Rhythmically, it doesn’t fit the iambic well (Latinate words are so often anathema to verse). But it works to “cross,” as diagonals by definition do, the tone of this poem like the “cross-wind” in the simile in the next line, and the “x” in the penultimate one.

More examples like this abound: the broken rhythm of line 6 supports the image of the “cross-wind;” “as if NOthing had HAPpenned,” in lines 9-10, have no music at all, as full of “nothing” sonically as the sense of the phrase. Several more examples follow, but the final line is the most notable: again, an extra syllable ruins the basic meter, and the natural stress of “RIPPED-OUT FLOUR SACKS,” four in a row*, points to the sad root of this “crossed” sadness.

Perhaps the son himself is the deeper root of the mother’s sorry state, the heaviest “cross” for her to bear: he’s an “x,” after all (l.13), which is a cross of sorts; and that mysterious “she was o” metaphor might point to her maternal responsibility for him, the “o” being a classic symbol of the female and the womb. She “bore” him from her womb, and poverty makes him still her “cross to bear.”

You know, I didn’t care for this poem particularly after the first two or three reads. Now I do. Something to share with my students to try to take the “anal” out of the “analysis.”

—

*What are those again? Trochees? Spondees? Do students have to know the jargon to please the AP scorers?

Reflection Question:

What do you think about the differences between these two interpretations? Is one more “right” than the other? Is a third interpretation different from these two validly possible? What else do you notice or think?

Afterwords: Dialog b/w Leah and me

Me:

Wow, Leah. Nice!

In the first case, the word grows through their folding, and in the second, the words shrink, which shows that each moment of growth is followed by retreat.

–nice description of nice, close reading.

I just read the rest of your interp after pausing to quote that line above. How interesting the differences in our interpretations! And better still, how interesting that both are valid (well, I hope you agree mine is valid too; I certainly see the justification for yours).

I especially love the different directions we took the “x and o” metaphor, and also the identities and relationship of the two characters in the poem. This is a great example of textual “openness.” It made my day. I’m going to share it with my students, after having them do the exercise first.

It’s wonderful what happens when the reading is close and detailed, focusing on specific words, phrases, lines, patterns, as you do. Thanks for that!

Leah:

Thanks, Clay! I absolutely see your reading. The more I look at the poem after reading more your response, the more I wonder why I saw this relationship immediately as a relationship between lovers, not mother and son. I absolutely see that it could just as easily be mother and son, which would change the whole cast of the rest of the poem for me. The pain of the poem in that reading is so much more striking to me.

I love what you had to say with x’s and o’s, too. It just goes to show you how much your initial impression of a poem drives how you make sense of all of the details of the poem.

Me:

The funny thing is, though, that I’ve been daydreaming the poem as you saw it, and to me, _that’s_ more painful and poignant. Imagine being the husband whose inability to provide even basic bedding for his wife makes her so care-worn and dried-out.

This really has been one of the most enjoyable lit experiences I’ve had in too long, outside the classroom.

I look forward to more

It’s so cool. When you think of the potato sacks stitched together to make the sheets, the grid-like imagery supports _your_ tic-tac-toe interp. AND your interp of the relational identities, period.

That _doesn’t_ mean I don’t like the “cross” reading. Beware false disjunctives, saith the logician.

[Note: Bloglines users won't see the student example embedded below. I wonder what aggregators do show them? Drop a comment and let me know?]

I just finished reading and responding to the first summer reading assignment for next fall’s AP Literature class. It was just a warm-up, asking them to read David Sedaris’ “Us and Them” from the Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim* collection of memoirs. If you haven’t read this story, I can’t recommend it highly enough, from an English teacher’s perspective. Of all the Sedaris stories I’ve read — and I’ve read most of them — this one qualifies Sedaris to me as a “literary” writer, in the highbrow sense of the word. Beneath the vulgar surface of low humor are quite a dazzling number of literary tricks and trap doors, all there for the discerning reader to enjoy alongside the jokes about turds and other crowd-pleasers.

I like assigning this story as a first class reading especially because it’s a litmus test that separates the skilled from the less-skilled readers. Sedaris writes with a double point of view — himself as an adult writer remembering an experience of himself as an eight-year-old. The child’s point of view dominates the narration, which concerns a family ostracized by its community because this family (the Tomkeys) “doesn’t believe in television.” The child narrator reflects the TV-worshiping pathology of the “normal” community, and tells the readers how “puny,” “stupid,” and undesirable the Tomkeys are with a wide array of damning words. And the less-skilled readers fall for one of the best tricks in the “literary ” authors bag: the unreliable narrator.

You can count on more than half of most classes blindly parroting the third-grader’s opinion of the Tomkeys. Uncritical readers, they swallow whatever whatever moral judgments they hear from the narrator–even if he’s an eight-year-old. The power of the printed word to kill thought: “It’s true because the book says it’s true.” A scary irony there, how books can as often close our eyes as open them.

The skilled readers, though, don’t fall for the unreliable narrator trick. They notice more than what is “told” in the story; they notice what Sedaris, the adult author, shows. And the images he shows of the Tomkey family, contrary to the herd-like judgments bleated by the vindictive and petty-minded “normal” community, are all too admirable. The Tomkeys are actually the healthiest and wisest family in the neighborhood, ostracism and all. It’s the couch-potato, consumerism-drugged “normal” community that’s sick.

This is just the tip of this eight-page story’s virtues, but for my purposes here enough. The story is a wonderful vehicle for letting students (and any readers beyond school) discover something important about themselves: namely, whether they think with their eyes, which requires the consciousness to really see and reflect on experience rather than sleep-walk through it, or instead think with their ears–which is not thinking at all, but the flaw of all blind followers. It amazes me how many of my students finish the story and join in the damning of the Tomkeys (the title’s “Them”) with a fervor and complacency that makes the “Us” quite frightening.

That Sedaris himself belongs to a “them” all-too-often ostracized, damned, beaten, and lynched by the “moral” “us” gives an added layer of depth to this story. Sedaris, as you probably know, is gay. Students–many of whom condemn homosexuals and, in class discussions, even advocate killing them–invariably come to love his writing with a passion. To what extent, if any, this makes them less eager to spill gay blood is something I wonder about sometimes. They see the beauty of this writer and love the joy he brings them with his art. But then they hear from other social “authorities” that this same man is an “abomination” and deviant. Life.

(If you’ve every listened to or watched Noam Chomsky giving speeches or interviews, you may have noticed that he repeats the injunction to “start with what you see in the world, not what you hear authorities and society say about it” as if it’s the first step to real thinking–or to any consciousness at all. I always think of Chomsky when I read “Us and Them.”)

Anyway. I gave this litmus test of a story to my students, and asked them to respond on a Moodle forum to two simple questions: What’s the story’s meaning, to you? And how does Sedaris create that meaning as a writer? Standard stuff.

But I’ve been using Flixn a lot lately, so I threw in an extra credit option: After writing your answers to those questions, fire up Flixn and talk about the story to your webcam. I’ve never assigned “webcam reports” before. I thought some of you might find it as interesting as I did. I like four things about it:

1. It’s a way for me to put names with faces before the school year starts. I don’t know any of these students, but the webcam reflections change that. They ooze with student personality.

2. It’s a way for me to compare student writing with student speaking skills, which can inform decisions for alternative assessments and multiple intelligence differentiation, etc.

3. It’s authentic. I love writing about literature sometimes, but love talking about it to an audience that’s also reading it even more. But I don’t like writing “literary analysis” essays, as a rule, because it’s such a stuffed and chalky genre. Who does that except Ph.D.’s writing for other Ph.D.’s (or, more accurately, for tenure)?

4. Other students are more likely to watch these webcam reflections, and peer-learn from them despite themselves, than they are to read the “school-y” reader-resonse questions in the forums. You’ll see evidence of that from “Judy,” after the student sample I show you below. First you’ll see this this student’s written response (which is a pretty goodon second look, brilliant interpretation), and then her Flixn response. Then you’ll see her classmate’s very telling — and unassigned — reply to this student. (For the record, the student’s mother gave me permission to make this public by “unwalling” it from Moodle.) Here you go:

Us and Them: The Invisible Distinction

The meaning or the main theme of the story Us and Them by David Sedaris is simply the negative role of television and other modern distractions on family unity and further on the individual’s personality. In this particular story, the main character, who is only about 9 or 10 years of age, develops an interest in the neighboring Tomkeys because they don’t have a TV. The start of the whole ordeal is due to this key fact: Tomkeys don’t have a TV, so therefore they are different from the rest of the society. The narrator pities them for their lack of common sense, and blames this on the absence of a TV. He believes that the Tomkeys are “ignorant and alone,” but what he doesn’t understand is that he is the one who is ignorant and alone. It seems as if the narrator’s family dislikes the Tomkeys for what they are. They are united, whole, and are a true family, because they know how to spend time together at the table and on the weekends. They actually talk to each other because they don’t have a TV distracting them from having quality time. Others, like the narrator and his family, see this as being “uninteresting,” as the narrator puts it. The narrator has been fed with false family images by the TV, and believes that a family unit should be fun, interesting, and attractive, and doesn’t understand why the Tomkeys are so ordinary. Also, we can see that the TV has altered the young narrator’s personality. He is unable to make friends (even though it is partially due to the frequent moving), and is indifferent and almost so apathetic that he hopes “that in walking around after dark I might witness a murder.” He sees a murder as entertainment, because he saw so much of it on TV. The TV, as can be seen from the narrator’s attitude, has corrupted the audience by feeding false images, and further on caused people to compare real life aspects to what is on TV.

Sedaris was able to create the meaning of the story mostly through his word choice and the attitude of his narrator. He uses words to actually imply the narrator’s personality, and the narrator’s personality further on explains why he thinks that way. For an example, when the Tomkeys spent the Halloween night on a trip, the narrator described that “they had spent the previous evening isolated at the lake and had missed the opportunity to observe Halloween.” The interesting word choice is “isolated” and “observe,” because it causes the effect of feeling as though the Tomkeys were of another place, and that they are not part of the community. They are just observers, bystanders, and foreigners to the narrator. This is possibly why the narrator views the Tomkeys as being inferior. The Tomkeys do not fit the social norm. Also, in the last paragraph of the story, the narrator says that he “protected and watched over these people, but now, with one stupid act, they had turned my pity into something hard and ugly.” How was he, a small boy, able to “protect” the Tomkeys? He just felt that way, because he believed that he was superior to the Tomkeys, and believed it was his duty to watch over them and ridicule them even more. And what was he to pity a happy family? He watched television and they did not. In fact, he feels so superior to them that he says he gave them the “gift” of his curiosity. So, when the time came for him to look back on himself, he turns for the TV with its false images, so that he didn’t have to see his ugly self, and again, is unable to regret his ugly behaviors.

Student “Judy” then replied:

honestly at first I got intimidated by the length of your two paragraphs. I was about to click the “back” arrow to go back to the forum but I found your video! It’s much easier for me to comprehend your explanation by listening to you and watching your eyes looking back at me =). I really enjoyed it!

And then she bothered to hit “reply” again to add:

p.s. I wish I had a web cam.

You don’t have to hear me characterize those two pieces of evidence, do you, reader? Look at what it says about engagement.

There’s one more reason I like this Flixn twist: it’s just more fun than text.

***

*That link, by the way, includes mp3’s of Sedaris reading from the book on NPR. And here’s a bonus for you: David Sedaris reading an essay on David Letterman

Barbara has alerted me to Jeff Utecht’s recent post about “blogging as conversation”–and made me feel a bit guilty about my own absence in many “comments” boxes to other edubloggers. (In my defense, I’m running at 1000 mph, but the world right now seems to be going at about 1010. My plate will get emptier soon–lots going on behind the scenes that I can’t wait to write about!)

Anyway, that “blogging as conversation” discussion intersects with my own recent concerns about how not to be a teacher who ruins the blogging experience for students by turning it into “just another way to turn in homework.”

I read Jeff’s article after setting up a class history blog that is unit specific — World War I to World War II only — and assigning students to write a weekly reflective post about whatever strikes them about the content for the week. I’m still learning how to set-up multiple authors on my school’s new WordPressMU blog site, but think I got it right. So the students will start writing their reflections next week, and commenting–”conversing”–on others.

My goal as the “teacher” is to refine my Sumo skills (SUMO: “Shut Up and Move Over”), and not write my own posts on this blog. I want to create those “conversations” by having all students write, read, and respond to each other on this unit blog. I hope to limit myself to the role of commenter.

This represents a further evolution of my quest for the student blogging Grail. I like this unit-specific idea. I like the collective student authorship on one blog, and the absence of the teacher. I think students might be attracted to the site precisely because I’m not dominating it. And I can’t wait to see what happens.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I might need to scaffold the assignment to help the students find entry-points into ideas to write about. Chris Watson’s use of side-bar positioned essential questions to guide student blogging on his English class blog might be the thing.

Anyway, interesting times. Any crowd wisdom is, as usual, very wanted.

(Photo: “conversazioni domenicali” by pupanna on Flickr–wonderful photo!)

Confession: I’m behind in my unit planning for history. I’m doing too much administrative stuff to stay abreast of my course-work.

But an interesting thing just happened. Faced with a history class in 2 hours and no unit plan for World War I to World War II, I found myself setting up a new Wikispace–”A Broken World“–and designing a project for a student-created online textbook, complete with embedded student video lectures and Skypecast interviews with academic experts–and it took me all of 30 minutes.

I really think that this project will be self-sustaining for the next three weeks or so, requiring little further planning for me.

I also think the students will learn much more, and enjoy that learning more as well, than if I had created discrete lessons for the whole unit.

This is only my third or fourth wiki project. The French Revolution Wikipedia and Ant Farm Diaries was, judging by student feedback, a success–but an imperfect and exhausting one for us all. The 1000 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop for my English class has also been engaging for students and teachers, but again, high-maintenance (we’re working those bugs out, though).

But this online textbook wiki? It seems like a new plateau in simplicity and design. I hope I’m not deceived. Take a snoop and tell me what you think–and steal at will (though be a nice thief and let me know how things go, and any improvements you make).