Beyond School

In one of the great ironies of my life, I’m probably the only HS teacher at KIS not to have a 1:1 classroom, since I teach only AP Lit for seniors - the only grade level not required to buy MacBooks for school this year. But yesterday, I jumped in anyway with a project that incorporates the constructivist and 21st century literacy / web 2.0 ideas of having students create a “legacy product” for their assessment, instead of turning in stale homework to teacher.

Here’s the scoop: We’re reading Shakespeare’s greatest and most difficult tragedy, King Lear. The syntax and diction of the play are over the students’ heads, with a couple exceptions, but they have to become proficient at reading 16th century English for the AP Exam. So that’s the learning objective: give them practice at accurate comprehension of 16th c. English.

So here’s the “Constructivism 2.0″ project to work toward that goal:

1. I created a wiki on Wikispaces (free for teachers), entitled “King Lear Street Talk.” We’ll use this wiki to create a student-written modernized prose translation of Shakespeare’s play. (Setting up the wiki took only ten minutes, max. An eight-year-old can do it.)

2. In teams of two, students have to write a translation of one page of the play into today’s English. Accuracy counts, and so does the quality of the script they’re re-writing. If any team has a disagreement about how to translate any section of their page, they have to cover their butts by explaining, in the wiki page “Discussions” page, what they disagree about. Pedagogically, we all know that to translate archaic language into modern language, we have to comprehend that archaic language. So this is practice and close reading and comprehension on a line-by-line, focused level.

3. We’ll keep translating the play until we have the full 5-act play translated. We’ll publish that as a free e-Book using Lulu.com, which anybody can download to read.

4. We’re also going to record “radio performances” of our modern translation of the play on GarageBand podcasts, and upload them to Librivox.com, a literature podcast site that is a library of readings of copyright-free, public domain world literature. Senior citizens, blind people, and people who just like audio-books use this site to listen to 1,000’s of different titles. This can also be used by future classes as an intro to the tragedy - ESL students, younger students, and others can benefit by listening to these podcasts before reading the original version. So the students are becoming teachers of future students with this product.

So this will give students practice in all the AP Lit and Language Arts skills on our Standards and Benchmarks - reading, writing, speaking, listening, critical thinking (which comes when they debate opposing interpretations with their teammate, as well as when they decide how to act out different lines when they record their radio play podcast).

But instead of doing that in the old, stale way - handing in their translations to teacher, and performing a giggly mess in front of the class - they’re making a real product that they can share with the world, and - for the excellent performers - mention on their college applications as an example of their best work as part of their “digital portfolio.”

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[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

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[Update: For the record, this is a spoof. Watching it, it even spooked me. Interesting. Hover your mouse over the screen and watch the character.]

Voki’s kind of cool. Just found it. Think of the possibilities.

Get a Voki now!

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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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cac.ophony: Aristotle and Powerpoint Annotated

• Anthony’s comments about lending narrative structure and “juice” to Powerpoints is just what my students need to hear. I’ve been coaching them on their oral presentation skills, and trying to get them not just to transmit information, but to find the “wow” in the subject they’re presenting so that the audience enjoys it. Aristotle to the rescue?
  - post by cburell

Writing Strategies (6Traits pdf’s)

• Some very nice 6 Traits writing rubrics here that include activities for each trait. Very handy for writing workshops and the 1001 Flat World Tales especially, since classes around the world could use the warmers and activities on the 1001writers blog to see each others’ moves. (Right now we share 6 Traits rubrics, but not exercises and warm-ups. This might remedy that.)

  - post by cburell

Literacy is All: Homework Debate Heats Up, Again Annotated

• What a pleasure it was to stumble upon this blog today. I love the concluding lines, and, if you read Pat’s entire post, the evidence she musters to call for less homework for our students.
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