Back to School!

I'm not sure whether this is quite the right venue for this post, but I figure I've got this blog and I have things to say, so I'm going for it!

I felt a lot of anxiety going back to school earlier this week. Each year, the nervousness and anticipation seem to be slightly different. Year 1 was terrifying; year 2 was better, but I worried over having several different courses to teach. This year, I have a much simpler teaching assignment and I was excited both to be working with 9th graders, whom I adore, and about some of the specific units and lessons I have been planning. Yet I just felt there were too many unknowns about the year for me to feel 100% invested in returning to the classroom. Between a new person in the department, a different curriculum team dynamic, new administrators, a new evaluation system, Common Core standards implementation, and year 2 of the 1-1 laptop program, it was all very overwhelming.

And then I stepped back in to the classroom.

Sure, there were some technical issues that needed to be addressed. But I felt, by the third class out of the 600 classes I will teach over the course of the year, that I was exactly where I was supposed to be: with kids, talking about literature, challenging them to dig deeper and push themselves out of their comfort zone. I felt extraordinarily gratified that the lessons I had thought about over and over again were working, or at least they seemed to be! Light bulbs were going on around the room and students seemed happy to be in my classroom. Another teacher describes her job at our school as "Camelot." I think I am starting to understand why she chooses that particular moniker.

I've spent this first fall weekend with a perfect balance of activity and calm. A very literary college friend of mine is visiting from out of town, and we spent Saturday doing some pretty nerdy and awesome things. First, I woke up early, so I went for a run in the cool of the morning. We then went over to Porter Square Books, where I treated myself to three new reads, all on sale. We'd planned to spend the day out in Concord visiting Orchard House, the home of Louisa May Alcott and her family, and walking around Walden Pond. The weather could not have been more perfect for us. Orchard House was wonderful; 80% of the objects and furniture in the house belonged to the Alcott family. My friend and I had a delicious lunch at a diner in Concord Center, and then we walked around Walden Pond. The only thing missing from the day was a trip to Emerson House, but that just gives me an excuse to go back to Concord again soon.

Both Orchard House and Walden Pond made me feel at peace. The love of the Alcott family members for one another was, remarkably, still palpable in their home over a century after they lived there. Although transcendentalism is not my favorite reading material, evidence of Henry David Thoreau's grand experiment in living deliberately stirred me to think about purpose in my own life. How could I not reflect proudly on my chosen life path on such a beautiful day, standing where 2 great thinkers once stood. I found myself thinking about this for the rest of the evening.

Plaque commemorating Thoreau's cabin

Site of Thoreau's TEENY cabin

View of Walden Pond from near the site of Thoreau's cabin

As peaceful as Walden Pond made me feel yesterday, I was also looking forward to checking out the Cambridge Carnival today. This Caribbean-centric street fair in Kendall Square, near MIT, began with a parade outside Central Square in Cambridge. The energy of the dancers, the colors of their costumes and "floats"--really just larger costumes, probably very heavy, worn by brave group members--and their pride in their countries and cultures just made me feel ALIVE. On YouTube, you can watch a very poor quality video that I took, just to get an idea of the scene. Suffice it to say, it was loud and colorful!

The juxtaposition of these feelings and emotions mimics how I feel about going back to school tomorrow for day 3. I'm not at all dreading the morning wake-up because my place IS in the classroom and I feel as comfortable there as I felt sitting on a rock beside Walden Pond yesterday afternoon. At the same time, my enthusiasm for working with my students is like the energy of the Caribbean dancers I saw at the international festival today. I'm just EXCITED to see them tomorrow, and to be working with them this year! I hope that other teachers have been as happy about the start of the school year as I've been. Welcome back, everyone!

Classroom Rules for Laptops

I have to figure out how to design this so it's visually appealing, but next year I'll post 3 simple classroom rules for laptop use:

Remember the ABCs of laptop use:

Keep laptops AWAY until you're told
Keep your BATTERY charged
Finished? CLOSE your lid

Design help welcome :-)

9th Grade Research Unit - A Dip Into Project-Based Learning

This year, the 9th grade teachers are revising the I-Search paper we've done with our students in the past. I'm hoping to dip my toes into project-based learning.

I've gathered a preliminary list of topics of interest to my students, so I have a general idea of what they might care about. With the I-Search, students researched topics ranging from lacrosse to world hunger. What I'm planning to do with the unit this year is direct students more toward issues of national or global significance, such as hunger, technology, or international relations. I'm hopeful that the topic will be meaningful to students 

I'm going to begin by dividing students into groups of 3-4 students, balancing their personalities and ability levels as best as I can. Here's how I'm hoping the project will go:

1. each group member suggests an initial problem (expressed in the form of a question--e.g., What happens to garbage once it leaves the curbside?) that the group might try to solve through research;


2. students talk through the topic choices and agree upon one that interests the majority of group members;


3. students brainstorm how they might divide the broad problem into 3-4 parts so that each group member is responsible for one part;


4. armed with an individual research question, students begin conducting research in HS Library databases, online, in magazines and books, and by contacting experts and/or leading organizations in their topic;


5. students share resources within their group, and refine their understanding of the overall problem and potential solutions;


6. each student produces an annotated bibliography, explaining how the resources the group found relate to their individual angle on the topic;


7. students write individual, 1-2 page paper explaining their findings;


8. using these findings, students work together to propose a solution to the problem they researched;


9. students present their work to their classmates; and


10. students write a metacognitive reflection on both the individual and group components of their experience.

My hope is that students will collaborate to choose a topic and throughout the research process, and that they will genuinely embrace this as an opportunity both to explore their topic and look toward solutions. Steps 8 and 9 will challenge students to creatively convince others of the solution to their problem.  I'm still working out some of the details of this project, so any feedback would be welcome!

Reflections on the Week

This post has nothing to do with technology (except insofar as I sat on my couch for two long stretches this week, refreshing Twitter and Boston.com more than I ever have before), but much to do with why I teach English--and why we teachers all do what we do. I hope readers will forgive the off-topic post, in light of the recent events that have struck our region. 



It was impossible to concentrate on my work yesterday, knowing that a terrorism suspect was on the loose a mere 3 miles away from my home. But today, things have essentially returned to normal here in Cambridge, and I’m doing the work I wanted to start yesterday. As I grade my 9th grade students’ essays on the novel Lord of the Flies, I can’t help but see the parallels between the themes of the text—the tension between civilization and savagery—and the events of the past five days.

In Lord of the Flies  a plane carrying British schoolboys aged 6 to 12 crashes on a deserted island amid an imagined World War 3. It is a dystopian premise that tests the boys’ survival skills and their civility. Not one of the children fully escapes the savagery that sets in as the boys hunt and kill pigs—and each other. When the boys are rescued by a naval officer at the end of the novel, it is clear they are shell-shocked and will never again be the same.

Golding wrote the novel in the wake of World War II, when people around the world were struggling to comprehend the evils of the Holocaust and the atom bomb, in addition to the devastation of war. Golding’s bleak vision of mankind was colored by these events, and he stated that the goal of the novel was to show that “the defects of society can be traced back to the defects in human nature.”

Many of my students took this idea on in their essays. A few weeks ago, they began their essays with statements about the existence of evil within in all people. But in a testament to their own optimistic worldviews, they bucked Golding’s views and concluded that both evil and good lie within all people, and it’s a matter of choice.

Early in the novel, the character of Roger refuses to throw a rock at a younger boy, Henry, because “invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.” By the end of the novel, Roger, “with a sense of delirious abandonment,” leans on a lever to release a rock that kills another child. At some point, Roger’s latent sadism is exposed and allowed to flourish.

At some point, Tamarlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were innocent young men, just like the fictional Roger. They followed society’s rules, and we have to imagine that before Monday, they were afraid, at least to some extent, of the consequences of the law. Then, at some point, the Tsarnaevs made a choice to do something savage—something evil.

The Boston Marathon draws people together from across the globe to compete. Residents from all over Massachusetts gather along the course to cheer them on. I felt a sense of profound sadness on Monday to know that the bombers chose to wreak havoc amidst this beautiful celebration of the human spirit. The Boston Marathon will never be the same; the rules have been broken.

But unlike the boys in Lord of the Flies,  we had the resources to fight back against the Tsarnaevs’ savage acts. The people of Boston want to see good triumph over evil. The flood of emotions we Bostonians experienced when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured alive was a blend of relief that life could proceed as normal and jubilation that law enforcement officials—exactly those who provide the “invisible protection” of society that we so depend upon—bravely and bloodlessly ended the stand-off. The people of Boston want answers, and we want justice—just not vigilante justice.

It is still possible that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not survive; he is at the hospital in critical condition as a result of the wounds he suffered on Thursday night when he engaged in a shoot-out with police. And no answers he provides to investigators about the motives he and his brother had for their actions can bring back the lives of Sean Collier, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, or Martin Richard. But a little bit of insight might just help us all understand how a young man could do something so savage--and perhaps prevent it from happening again.

I recognize that literature can't solve problems. But it can bring us together and it can help us to ask the right questions. Things will never be the same for young Ralph in Lord of the Flies, nor will they be the same for us here in the Boston area. We must ask "Why did this happen?" and "How can we heal?" And we have to try to answer these questions together.

Wikipedia & Learning

I feel pretty conflicted about Wikipedia. I use it almost daily to quickly look up information, for use in school (basic facts about everyone and everything, from Antigone to zebras) and at home (TV episode guides, definitions, and much more). I've edited articles (and am apparently one of few women who have done so). So I feel terrible that I have to tell students over and over again that they can't use it in academic writing--particularly because I know the editing community is pretty good at catching errors! Just check out the revision history of a controversial article and search for vandalism; errors are sometimes found and reverted instantly by the site's and eagle-eyed editors. Here's the past 500 edits of the article about Barack Obama, for an example.

When the site blacked out in early 2012 in protest of SOPA/PIPA, I definitely noticed. I felt inconvenienced. But I worried more about what would happen if those bills passed. The idea that "Information wants to be free" is, to me, at the very heart of what we do as educators: we democratize learning by sharing what we know with our students, at no cost to them. I love that the internet provides access to information at little/no cost to people around the world.

Yet we have to train our students how to curate information for themselves. We will not always be there to provide resources for them. So, I'd really like to use this course to focus on how to effectively impart what the Partnership for 21st Century Skills calls Information, Media and Technology Skills. It is incumbent on me, as an educator, to teach students how to evaluate source credibility, author or organization bias, and usefulness of information. I learned these skills through experimentation and, as an undergraduate journalism major, through formal training from my own teachers. I don't want this to be left to chance for anyone else. I am committed to showing my students how to exploit their enviable access to information, gather and sift through their findings, determine what is useful, and manipulate it to maximum effect. My goal: for students to know exactly when they should look for things on Wikipedia, and exactly when they shouldn't. For students to know how to perform advanced Google searches that allow them to exclude commercial results. For students to understand that websites they visit may be biased--and identify which ones are. For students to be able and willing to go beyond Google and Wikipedia when they have to. And for students to become passionate about finding, taking in, and transforming information in order to express their own new and innovative ideas.

My Goals for the Course

I consider myself to be pretty skilled with technology, so I'm hoping to take this course as an opportunity to really drill down into why I should be using technology in my classroom, and how it will improve student learning. I do see it increasing efficiency for certain activities but it is hard to keep kids organized when they have multiple web accounts, untitled and "loose" Google Docs (i.e., docs that are not placed in folders), notebooks, and handouts to keep track of. I would like to explore ways to help kids improve their own organization, and perhaps help myself too. My Diigo bookmarks, for example, are using far too many tags. I need to simplify, and I need to help kids simplify!

For specifics, I'd like to learn more about Moodle, as a possible replacement for my Google Site. I'd like to branch out into technology that is more involved OR uncomfortable for me, including ways to flip the classroom. And I'd like to use technology more to have kids interacting with each other. I have students blogging this year, but I want them to read each other's blog. I need help figuring out the logistics to do that. Lastly, I use Evernote to save my lesson plans, but I want to explore whether it would be a good platform to share class notes with my students. It is possible that Moodle will obviate both my Google site and student notebooks in Evernote, though I won't know this until I try. I'm hoping to draw on the expertise of colleagues as I figure it all out.

Finally, I'd like to see students on task when their laptops are open because I have given them such a compelling assignment that they can't help but want to do it. Since not every student will be engaged in every lesson or activity, this may be somewhat of a pipe dream, but I am hopeful that students will use their laptops for learning, rather than gaming, shopping, or chatting with their friends during class. I think this course will guide me toward discovering new ways to engage students.