ah … this last makes me feel a whole lot better about those (not infrequent) moments when i’ve found myself out to sea inside a text, only to be re-oriented by a student’s apt insight … in those times of confusion, i’ve found it most helpful to throw myself on the mercy of the room … and i usually get it …
also … it was a student waybackwhen who taught me how to set up a webpage … (& i still have pleasant memories of those pre-yahoo geocities days)
i’ve been putting together a soundtrack for tim o’brien’s The Things They Carried … which aplit will be reading later in the semester … so far i’ve got
University of Minnesota Fight Song
Lemon Tree - Trini Lopez
Barbarella - Ferrante and Teicher
The Ballad of the Green Berets - S Sgt. Barry Sadler
Dang Dan Cung - The Perfume River Traditional Ensemble
Firefight - Bill Ellis
Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival
Ma Vu / Du Xuan - The Perfume River Traditional Ensemble
Nowhere to Run - Martha Reeves & The Vandellas
I Ain’t Marching Anymore - Phil Ochs
Boonie Rat Song - Chuck Rosenberg
Lemon Tree - Peter, Paul And Mary
It Don’t Mean Nothin’ - Sarge Lintecum
The Moving Cloud - Pham duc Thanh
i’d like to get some more tunes & even some historical spoken word bits … any suggestions?
Update 1.0: just found an mp3 of jfk reflecting on the diem coup 11.4.63 … this will be my starting point … the serious matter is interrupted by one of the kids (john-john?) & jfk has to help with some homework or a reading question … then back to the bloody business of the coup … priceless
Update 1.1:: i asked for help from some online english teachers (the talkies) & received a mountain of suggestions … some big fans of Alice’s Restaurant, CCR, The Doors, Dylan, John Prine … i’ve decided to add Country Joe & the Fish’s “I Feel Like I’m Fixing to Die Rag” … Phil Ochs’ “Talking Vietnam Blues” … Kate Smith’s “God Bless America” … The Animals’ “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” …
sophomore writing conferences … going on all this past week and - with a brief break for Street Scenes - moving on to the end of the month …
every day i meet with five sophomores … five minutes each … during which each tells me of strengths, weaknesses and goals for writing over the rest of the semester and in some cases the rest of their lives (some aspire to the writing professions) …
i take quick notes as many repeat what they’ve already written there in their folders about strengths weaknesses and goals … so there’s something a little redundant about this … about the information passed from them to me … but there’s nothing redundant about the meeting … the me listening to the actually-speaking them … in which there’s a possibility … that i might learn something i hadn’t known … that this or that student realizes i’m trying to understand … how writiing works or doesn’t for him or her …
and i am … trying to understand … i’m learning that these conferences are more for me than for them … i’m learning that i need to do more with and for their writing purposes … i’d like to say just write, kids … because that’s the only way it happens … i wouldn’t be able to read everything they wrote … but would i need to? couldn’t they show me what i needed to see?
i suppose i’m thinking about something like a portfolio process … i’ve done it in the past … what stopped me … & when? … no matter … could it work better electronically than on paper? via wikis? blogs?
i was happy to receive a quick response yesterday to my inquiry about the editorial manipulation of franklin’s passage in our american literature textbook … my correspondent was candid in noting that the company had used conservative guidelines … that by removing the word “venery” (and the entire definition of “chastity”) from the text, they were sparing teachers the uncomfortable task of having to speak the word “sex” to their classes … i’m informed that the book’s editors have been asked (and intend) to reinstate franklin’s words in future printings of the text … since their omission now causes more awkwardness than their inclusion …
actually … that last part doesn’t quite express my position, since i never felt that awkwardness … in fact, as you might guess, i relished the approach of that moment in class when a student would ask, “why isn’t anything written there?” … one of those transparent moments … one of those man-behind-the-curtain moments … when we can see how fragile is the human word … how easily bent broken scratched destroyed … for whatever reason … for whoever’s purposes …
While plenty of professors have complained about the lack of accuracy or completeness of entries, and some have discouraged or tried to bar students from using it, the history department at Middlebury College is trying to take a stronger, collective stand. It voted this month to bar students from citing the Web site as a source in papers or other academic work. All faculty members will be telling students about the policy and explaining why material on Wikipedia — while convenient — may not be trustworthy.
Project-based learning is based on the constructivist learning theory, which finds that learning is deeper and more meaningful when students are involved in constructing their own knowledge. Students are given the opportunity to select a topic that interests them within the required content framework and then they are responsible for creating their project plan. Rather than a lecturer, typically, the teacher’s role is that of an academic advisor, mentor, facilitator, task master and evaluator.
That’s why there is such a fuss about teaching evolution. The fuss is about whose indoctrination will win. The fuss should be about letting children learn to evaluate evidence and come to their own conclusions, But that would mean there wasn’t a right answer and schools always know the right answer. Wrong answers are never discussed.
just between us, i’m having way too much fun being some kind of web-divo … teaching and learning from my colleagues who have allowed me to set up discussion boards for them … it’s good to know that i’m helping some adventurous teachers take their own first steps into web 2.0 possibilities … it’s fun to work at solving the little problems that come up (& hoping the big ones never do) …
i did have a chance at last to speak to a representative of this Major Textbook Company … had a little bone to pick … have had it for quite a few years …
you see there’s this scrap of a passage from Ben Franklin’s autobiography … the part where he tries to make himself morally perfect … he lists twelve desirable virtues and briefly describes each … but when we get to CHASTITY there’s no description … just a big white blank space …
when i asked my class this year why there was nothing printed there, they said something like, “Well, Franklin knew that everybody knows what chastity is, so there was no need,” they said “Well, maybe he was kind of shy about that.”
i, of course, had to tell them that Franklin had written something but that someone had taken it out … of course, i read to them what had been left out:
Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation.
and we had that conversation … the conversation that someone somewhere doesn’t think students should have in english class …
ok … so i pointed all of this out to the representative of this Major Textbook Company … he gave me his card, said he’ll look into it, said i should email him in a few days (& i will) (because i’ve been really curious and cynical about this for years & to finally approach an answer .. corporate though it may be …is about all that i can bear) … i’ll let you know how it turns out
our english department met today with representatives of a Major Textbook Company … not one … not two … not three … but FOUR representatives of a Major Textbook Company … bearing mountains of hernia-inducing tomes, a big box of cookies, and something else in a box on each desk …
they want our business … (more precisely, to continue with our business, since we presently use their old now-out-of-print series) and they presented us with a whizzbang tour of their current literature series … it was all kind of overwhelming for an end-of-day meeting … but this is what i made of it:
the focus was on 1) organization of the texts and 2) technological elements of the new series and 3) integration of all elements of their series (lit - grammar/comp - and tech)
i’ll focus on my course area: the american lit text
1) the book contains most of the same selections as the present text … it has been adapted to the specs (the look & structure) of their new series … this is what bugs me now and has been bugging me for some years: the reading selections seem to be drowning in a sea of pedagogical peripherals … they seem to be barely holding their own against a phalanx of literary analysis exercises, writing “workshops,” vocabulary development, and grammar add-ons … oh, the good old questions at the end of the reading are still there … but they seem to have spawned some god-awful mutant offspring … need i say that i’ve never found these “teaching” aids of any use … the books seem designed to be teacher-proof … i can imagine that if some schools or districts require departments to be on the same page on the same day doing the same things then this textbook would be a great help …
and they are very expensive …and they are VERY heavy …
2) the technology elements involve
a) a “completely customizable” test bank,
b) online submission and scoring of student writing (with immediate feedback - take that, you slacker teacher!),
c) a dvd of Actual Living Writers talking about their work,
d) an option for students to have full access to an electronic copy of their complete text …
all of this is fine … will i ever use it? not likely … the problem? … i don’t know .. this is just too much … and it doesn’t feel very congruent with my approach to teaching … for one thing, i almost never give the kind of tests the test bank offers … another thing: i took the essay scorer for a test drive & recieved such useful feedback (under “Audience and Purpose”) as: While a position may be stated, either it is unclear OR undeveloped … hell, i coulda writ that … and i’da been more SPECIFIC.
i don’t know … this is just me rambling here … i’m not in charge of anything … and i bear no ill-will toward any of my colleagues who feel differently about these things … i will not stand in their way … but i don’t like this stuff … my students don’t need all these bells & whistles … my students need constant close encounters with all kinds of real literature … real literature in real books … who has ever fallen in love with thoreau’s work by reading the scraps of passages these texts provide (smothered in gorgeous big color shots of walden pond)? who?
seems to me that these anthologies make things “easy” for teachers while they reduce “reading” to the blandest & most forgetable of experiences … a brief text by some famous writer hemmed in on all sides by the very visible gears of this pedagogical machinery … where’s the love?
students need to read and think and speak and write about real writing real books … the raw stuff … what is all this other? i just don’t get it.
i write … while they write … they are seniors in ap literature … they are thinking about hardy’s convergence of the twain … thinking about "how the poetic devices convey the speaker’s attitude toward the sinking of the ship" … one writes, "Thomas Hardy saw the sinking of the Titanic as inevitable" …
it’s cold … up here … as well as down there where "cold currents thrid" … snow out my window, but sunshine, too … i’ll need a sweater pretty soon … the sophomores have begun Huck Finn … i could probably sum up my teaching career with that line: "the sophomores have begun Huck Finn" … the sophomores are always beginning Huck Finn …
this past week i’ve set up discussion boards for some of my colleagues … a religion teacher, a spanish teacher, an english teacher … this is why i reconfigured my website … to allow for this .. . and now it’s happening … so far, without much trouble … and i’ve been learning, too, about the inner working of the program (phpBB) … it is, so far, a breeze … & i’m way too proud of myself for having trouble-shot a few simple problems & solved them (sometimes via the kindness of some strangers) … it’s fun to learn stuff
There’s this thing called Web 2.0. It means that the old web (1.0, or the “Read Only Web”) is now the “Read/Write Web.” It means that the kind of web-publishing that used to require some fairly complex coding skills (like knowing html) now only requires an ability to point and click. And that’s an important change in the way The Web works for us.
WHAT IS A BLOG?
A blog is an easily updated website. It primarily consists of “entries” which can be “posted” and read from any computer that has an internet connection. Readers of these posts can comment on them (or not, depending on what you as blog owner have determined).
Some places offer free blogging. One of the most popular is the Google-owned Blogger at http://www.blogger.com/ . A more educator-friendly service is James Farmer’s Edublogs at http://edublogs.org/ . This is a great service that offers teachers blogs without advertisements. Students are offered blogs at http://learnerblogs.org/ . Another very good free service is WordPress at http://wordpress.com/ .
Our Edline setup fulfills some of the functions that blogs might offer: posting homework assignments, making course announcements, etc. But blogs have the advantage of being much more user-friendly, interactive through the comment function, and open to multi-media (sound and video) posting.
Students could be required to have their own individual blogs, on which they could post their own written work (teacher-assigned or freely determined). This work could then be commented upon by other students and the teacher before a hard copy is printed for submission. Or the work could be evaluated as is on the blog. Students could create their own digital videos, upload them to YouTube.com at http://youtube.com/ , and then post them at their blogs. Students could upload their own photos to Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/ and then post them on their blogs.
I’ve also toyed with the notion of assignment-specific blogs. For instance, when we read The Great Gatsby, students could be assigned to create Daisy’s, Gatsby’s, or Nick’s blog … and would be expected to write their entries from that character’s point of view.
A wiki is a web page that can be edited by anyone (or as determined by it’s owner). The best known is probably Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page .
See the intro to Mark Wagner’s wiki movie at Download .
In his movie, Wagner visits David Conlay, who uses wikis for his classes. To see many of the pedagogical possibilities for this technology, visit that most excellent wiki at http://aristotle-experiment.wikispaces.com/ .
Wagner also has an excellent intro to many aspects of the Read/Write Web at Download .
WHAT IS AN RSS AGGREGATOR?
It took me a long time to figure this out, but now I’m wondering how I watched the web (especially the many blogs I read regularly) without it.
An RSS aggregator pulls together updates from many different websites, so I don’t need to visit each individual site to see what’s new. I just go to Bloglines at http://www.bloglines.com/ or Netvibes at http://www.netvibes.com/ . The latter is currently my favorite … very very cool.
WHAT IS DEL.CIO.US?
You know what a BOOKMARK is, or a FAVORITE, right? It’s a function of your web browser on your own computer that stores your most frequently visited and favorite websites. Well, del.icio.us is a WEBSITE that allows you to gather and tag your favorites so that you can have access to them from any online computer AND you can share some or all of these bookmarks/favorites with others. For example, all links mentioned in this handout can also be accessed through my del.icio.us collection at http://del.icio.us/btocarm/for_carmel and you can see all of my bookmarks at http://del.icio.us/btocarm .
[To allow the links in this handout to come to life, I will email it to everyone. So all you’ll have to do is click on the links in the email … and you will be brought straight to that site.]
a little tired … when i turned in my grades yesterday afternoon and posted them online for parties all to see, i felt like it should be friday … right then … but it wasn’t …
and you’d think this would have stretched out the week …that today and tomorrow would seem just … too long … but they haven’t, in fact … because i’ve been busy and happy with whatever it is the classes are doing … the seniors working sonnets … the sophs working poe … lots to do …
but one thing got me weary today … a controversial thread at the wendell berry yahoo group began a slide towards invective … i felt i needed to step in … & called for an end to the thread and clicked us over to a moderated list … with me reading all posts for approval before sending them out to all … i expect silence on that list for awhile as folks sort themselves out a bit … & that’s ok
but come to think of it … i am kind of tired … some around here are getting sick … some weird respiratory thing … not me …not yet … and tomorrow is, in fact, friday …
