Yes, I use technology in class, but I’m also an old-school fan of paper. Scroll down for a photo of what I sent home with students yesterday for the coronavirus break.
Paper paper everywhere. Distance learning doesn’t mean high-tech for me.
Yesterday at 3:35 pm, my school released until April 1st in an attempt to control the spread of the coronavirus. The night before, I was sitting at my dining room table preparing plans for students to accomplish over the break. Just because we’re not in school doesn’t mean we’re not learning.
My plans involve students creating a journal/scrapbook that will document their experience in this once-in-a-lifetime global event. About every other day, they will write a half-page to one page journal entry on what’s happening in their life, this local area, the nation, and world. They are also to collect some kind of artifact or memento each day they write… a photograph, a newspaper clipping, sheets of toilet paper???
I also sent them home with an AOW (article of the week) assignment on recent advances in bionic prosthetic limbs. No, it’s not pandemic-related, but that’s probably a good thing; we don’t need to dwell on the coronavirus 24/7.
My plans also call for good, old-fashioned textbook reading and response. Juniors are reading three classic Robert Frost poems, “Mending Wall,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “Birches.” When we return, we’ll read the ultra-popular and oft-quoted “The Road Not Taken.” Seniors are beginning a study of Medieval Period literature. They’ll be reading “Sir Patrick Spens” and “Barbara Allen.” When we return, we’ll tackle some Chaucer. My Composition students are reading Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through Itover the break.
Taking a slightly different route, my Novels class is writing a Southern Gothic short story, the culminating activity in our study of this genre.
My school administrators encouraged teachers to send paper assignments home with students as 47.8% of our students do not have internet access at home using a computer, laptop,or Chromebook.
Here are some handouts I prepared at my dining room table Monday night. I arrived at school early enough Tuesday morning to make copies for my classes. I checked out textbooks “just in case” to students last Friday and gave them class codes for Remind messages on Monday.
I also like the idea of putting learning materials, a ten-day schedule, and instructions in their hot little hands instead of assuming all electronic messages will be received and/or acknowledged. I’m also keeping in touch with students via Remind, a messaging app that feels like a private Twitter for groups.
Thanks for reading! How are your “coronavirus break” distance learning plans going? Feel free to leave a comment below. I’ll be doing some writing alongside my students, so stay tuned for future posts about our journal/scrapbook activities.
Thanks to educator Kelly Gallagher for tweeting a link to this video. Global health specialist Alanna Shaikh speaks candidly about the coronavirus and COVID-19 with honesty and practical insight. I showed it on Friday to one of my high school classes (mostly juniors). They listened intently and left my room calm and collected. It had been a hectic Friday and this TED Talk added some clarity to the situation. Take a look-see during your plan time today if possible.
Thanks for stopping by during this busy time! Chime in with how your school is dealing with the coronavirus and COVID-19. My school is still in session and no adjustments are in the works at the current time. I have been told, however, to begin planning two weeks of lessons that can be supplied to students either online or by mail.
For one, students don’t edit themselves as they write. The writing is not revised later either. It’s not even graded. It’s simply an opportunity for students to put thoughts down on paper. Much of what students need is merely practice writing and low-stakes opportunities give students the practice they need.
I like all these reasons for incorporating low-stakes writing into my teaching, and I do use a handful of activities such as the One-word Summary, Kelley Gallagher’s Ten Percent Summary, and First Impressions Free-Writes. Still, it never hurts to add to the repertoire. In addition to providing writing practice, “Take a Line for a Walk” provides an easy and effective way to help kids read a difficult text or establish prior knowledge about a particular subject.
For my senior English students, we used “Take a Line for a Walk” after an initial reading of the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Seafarer. For my junior English students, we used the activity to review and establish prior knowledge about World War I in preparation for our reading later this week of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “In Another Country.”
One of my students responds to the writing already on the page in this low-stakes writing activity.
Here are the basic steps I used with my students to “Take a Line for a Walk”:
Have students read the text independently or read it aloud, whichever is customary for you.
Once all are finished reading, ask students to find a line, sentence or two, or an idea from the text that stood out to them as they read and write it down word-for-word at the top of the sheet. For example, what line made them sit up and take notice? Which line or two jumped off the page as they read the text?
Once all have recorded their “stand-out” sentence or two, ask students to respond to their passage on the lines below it. Write a sentence or two or three to reflect on: why the line stood out to them, what connections they made to the line, what the line made them think about or ask. This is very loose. All they need to do is respond in any way they see fit.
Once everyone is finished, have students stand up, leave their own page at their desk, grab their pen, and move to another desk.
Once everyone arrives at another desk, have all sit down, and continue the conversation that’s been started on the page at their new desk. Do they agree with the thoughts? Disagree? Have a connection to something that’s been written on the page? Does the writing remind them of another situation, text, or experience? Again, this is a loose activity. The point is to read, respond, connect, and write it down.
Repeat step six two or three more times, depending on your class size and the length of time available. I’ve used this strategy twice and I decided to have students move around the room three times on both occasions.
Once you’ve finished, have students return to their original seats and skim through the writing that has been collected.
Ask a few students to share their written conversations, including any especially interesting or insightful comments.
I liked using this activity because it added some variety to our normal reading and writing routine. It also got kids moving around the room, reading and writing informally, and then discussing the ideas as well. I definitely plan to continue to use it occasionally to add more low-stakes writing activities (and therefore, informal writing practice) to my classes. Like I said, it’s a keeper.
Thanks for reading again this week! Have you ever used “Take a Line for a Walk?” Feel free to share your experience with this and any other low-stakes writing activities you’ve found effective in your literacy instruction. Become a follower and for more road-tested writing lesson ideas. In fact, here’s a link to a post titled “My Number One Most Effective Writing Assignment Ever: Gallagher’s AOW.”
This is educator and innovator Austin Kleon’s book, Steal Like An Artist.
Happy Friday Eve!
This is a quick pic of Austin Kleon’s book,Steal Like An Artist. In this book, Kleon, the inventor of black-out poetry, discusses creativity, the values of unplugging from technology to create, and tips for producing more.
He offers up some solid ideas that I found particularly helpful. Here are two:
Don’t throw any of yourself away. If you have two or three real passions, don’t feel like you have to pick and choose between them. Don’t discard. Keep all your passions in your life.
I love this idea! I often feel like I have no focus with my writing. For example, on my personal blog, I write about travel destinations and parenting. I also have some personal narratives and short stories along with some more serious education-related essays that I’ve reposted from this blog. But that’s not all! I’ve also posted three random reviews of Ed Sheeran concerts I’ve seen. I’ve often thought Wow, I need to focus. Reading Kleon’s advice to keep cultivating all these parts of my writing was reassuring. I need to trust that all these topics have a reason for being explored. This next tip is closely related:
2. Don’t worry about unity from piece to piece. What unifies all of your work is the fact that you made it.
Ahhh! That’s so good to hear! To know that there are benefits to writing about myriad topics. Again, I love how Kleon believes branching out and cultivating a variety of works is perfectly okay. That’s a good thing that someone with diverse interests like me needs to hear.
Thanks for stopping by! Kleon’s book is worth a look-see, not only for your own use, but for use in the classroom to cultivate and encourage creativity. Follow my blog for more posts about teaching ELA in a high school classroom. Here’s a recent post: Treasured Object Poems: A favorite poetry activity for all grades
Teachers stack idea cards into like piles at one of the sessions I attended at Write-to-Learn 2020. This was part of another critical literacy activity that I’ll share with you soon.
This classic organizer worked for me at the 2020 Write-to-Learn Conference
One of those tools is the Alphabet Brainstorming Chart shown below. Here’s a link to a similar handout that’s ready to use.
How to use this organizer:
Find a new topic you need your students to explore. “Critical literacy” was the new topic used to demonstrate how to use this chart in the classroom by our presenters, Dr. Lara Dieckmann, a teacher at Harrisburg (Mo.) R-VIII School District and Dr. Christy Goldsmith, assistant director of the Campus Writing Program at the University of Missouri. Critical literacy was a term I knew nothing about; however, it was still a topic I could still ponder, as in “I don’t know what critical literacy is, but I think I know what it might be about.”
Divide students into groups. Choose group size based on your needs.
Tell students to think about their topic and write a word or phrase that they can connect with the topic — one for each letter of the alphabet. You can see the words I connected to critical literacy in the photo above.
This activity encourages students to evaluate what they already know or think they know and enter their thinking into the squares.
Let students talk among their groups and share their ideas or words. This activity is about more than prior knowledge. It’s also about sharing ideas and getting kids talking about the topic at hand.
When students and groups are finished filling in the chart, go around the room and share out and discuss what students know about the new topic.
I like this chart much better than KWL charts, which have always seemed so boring to me. It has a game-like feel to it. And besides, with a KWL chart it’s really hard to come up with things you want to know about a new topic.
If I had been given a KWL chart to fill out about critical literacy, I would have been lost. With this ABC chart, I was able to come up with more ideas to discuss than I thought I could. I can see how it can be a confidence-booster with kids. It was also good to hear other ideas from my group members.
And finally, the best thing about this ABC Chart is you can make it a game!
Switch it up by…
Giving a prize (or just designating a winner) to the first group that fills in all the squares.
Giving a prize to the group that fills in the most squares in a designated number of minutes.
Giving a prize to the group that fills in “X” with the best phrase that fits the topic.
Sort It! Map It! Exploring Critical Literacy
I received this handout during a session called “Sort It! Map It! Exploring Critical Literacy, Pedagogy, & Writing Process” taught by Dieckmann and Goldsmith.
The presenters readily acknowledged the original source of this classic organizer.
I’m looking forward to using this organizer with my seniors in a few weeks when we begin our Medieval Age unit in British Literature. I’ll let you know how that goes in an upcoming post.
Thanks for reading again this week! Have you ever used this chart? Do tell! Feel free to share your experience in the comments. Follow my blog to catch my follow-up post on how the chart works in my classroom. Here’s a link to another post inspired by a session at last year’s Write to Learn conference.
Students in my English III classes follow a structured peer review process called Protocol Peer Review Groups (PPRG). I learned about this procedure several years ago at a PD conference sponsored by Ozarks Writing Project. Follow my blog to catch an upcoming post (working on it now!) that will outline this process so you can use it in your classroom. PPRG was a mainstay of revision in my previous middle school classes and I was happy with how it was received recently by my high schoolers. I love how PPRG gets students talking about their work and offering suggestions using academic language.
Thanks for reading! Have a great weekend and feel free to leave a comment about how your students peer review in your classroom or about your experience with this particular method, PPRG. Here’s a link to another recent post: My Article of the Week Rubric.
My juniors finished reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. Instead of taking an objective culminating exam, they will show their learning by writing a literary analysis essay. However, each student will choose the content and the focus of their essays instead of selecting a topic from a list.
With this essay, I wanted to provide an assignment that would be individualized to reflect the lessons and insights they took personally from the novel.
To accomplish this in their essays, I asked students:
What do you want for us to see in the text that we might not have seen otherwise?
Even better, what does seeing such a thing DO to our reading and understanding of The Old Man and the Sea, or of Hemingway, or the time period, society at the time the books was published, society today, etc?
Based on their first drafts that they turned in a few days ago, I can tell that students have written on a variety of topics. Some have written about the theme of masculinity in the book, some have written about the correlation between Jesus Christ and Santiago, some have written about perseverance, and some have focused on the benefits of experience and wisdom.
But here’s another thing I can tell: most students haven’t explained the significance of those discussions. Another way to put it: they still need to explore their claims in the hopes of uncovering the greater significance of those claims.
In short, they need to ask themselves “So what?”
For example, it’s great that one student thinks that Hemingway wrote about a man with a fighting spirit and a firm determination to succeed,” as one student wrote. But so what? What was Hemingway trying to help readers understand by writing about that man with a fighting spirit and a firm determination to succeed?
It’s great to claim that Hemingway uses many examples of masculinity in the novella. But what was Hemingway’s point in doing that? So what? What does that DO to our understanding of the novel?
It’s great that you see a correlation between Jesus Christ and Santiago. But what’s the purpose? So what? What does seeing that symbolism do for our lives?
“Three other ways to phrase the So What question are as follows:
What is significant about your claim?
How does this enrich my understanding?
What are the implications of your claim?
In each case, the reader is asking the writer to look beyond his or her own navel and connect the paper’s idea to a larger conversation in which both the writer and the reader are stakeholders…
The most compelling interpretations are the ones in which the reader feels that the writer’s claim is significant, that it matters.”
On my assignment sheet for the culminating essay, I included a rubric of sorts. It contains a list of needed items in the essay: three pages, MLA formatting, two sources, in-text parenthetical citations, two direct quotes, a counter-argument.
But really, I also have another purpose — a much greater purpose — to the assignment: I would like to challenge my students to answer the question, So what?
I want them to go further than writing a claim that shows they noticed something in the book. I want them to explain why it’s important to notice that thing in the book. How does noticing that thing affect our lives? What does it teach us? Basically, tell us why it matters. Answer the question, So what?!
And to be truthful, the meaning is more important than the rubric. If a student expounds on their claim, but is short a few paragraphs in length, that’s okay. It’s more important to answer the SO WHAT question than it is to cross off all the boxes.
My juniors will read and revise their first drafts during peer review groups later this week. Hopefully, reading and discussing their essays with their classmates will give them the opportunity to see the importance of answering the So What? question.
Thanks for reading again this week! Meaning is more important than a rubric. That’s a really hard idea to teach. It’s always easier to focus on mechanics and grammar; it’s harder to help kids think on paper and then communicate their thinking clearly. Have you taught the So What question? If so, please leave a comment with your ideas and experiences.
These articles are intended to round out the ideas presented by the novella
This winter, my junior English students have just finished reading The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway and are beginning to develop their cumulative essays on the novella. To prepare for that, and to build more background knowledge about the novel and Ernest Hemingway, last week students broke into groups and read one article.
After reading the article as a group (however they wanted to accomplish the reading — whether one person read the entire article or each took turns — was fine with me), they gave a short presentation to the rest of their class and discussed the four to five major points or ideas their respective article discussed.
It was a “jigsaw” style of reading the articles. My hope is that students will find the articles helpful as they determine and then develop their individual topics for their essays, which require the novel plus one other source to reference.
Here are links to the articles I gave to each group:
Fassler focuses on the recurring motif of the lions on the beach laced throughout the book. What do these memories mean to Santiago? This article interestingly dwells on the idea of memory and how our earliest memories never really leave us throughout our lives.
Reimann brings up five points of discussion in this article. The most intriguing one to me was that “some things are meant to remain a mystery.” In the book, Santiago debates the idea of whether killing the marlin was a sin or not. In fact, Hemingway never resolves this issue for the reader and this question is one that remains with the reader long after finishing the book. I like how Reimann gives validity to the idea that authors aren’t required to tie up all the loose ends in their work. Sometimes bringing these questions to light is enough.
This is actually Chapter 14 from the book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, a fun read that examines literary techniques and quandaries (such as the prevalence of implied symbolism) in an easy-to-read style. This is the longest article; give it to your most advanced readers. The book discusses scenes from the book that are highly symbolic. Students will get the author’s point that symbolism, while highly subjective can also be quite obviously implied by authors. What readers do with those symbols is what makes reading fun, spiritually challenging, and most of all, an individualized experience.
Our presentations on these articles were informal and I required that listeners take notes on the four to five major points that each group discussed about their article. I wanted them to write enough notes to be familiar with each text so the articles could be accessed later as students delved into their chosen topics more deeply.
Do you have any ideas for other articles to pair with The Old Man and the Sea? If so, please leave a comment and share your ideas.
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Treasured Object Poems
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Nonfiction is definitely my thing. Yes, I love novels and short stories, but nonfiction really captivates me. And I guess it’s because I truly believe that life is stranger than fiction. As a result, I’m starting to consider which nonfiction books I’d like to requisition for 2020-2021.
Pictured above, Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, presents an honest look at success and how it is achieved. I’m reading about six pages at a time to my elective composition class as a starter activity. My plan is to read through chapter two, and then assess whether to order for next year.
My students, mainly juniors and seniors, are engaged with the ideas in the book. Based on their written responses to some text-based questions, I know they are not only engaged, but are absorbing, considering, and applying the ideas.
Here are a few interesting lines from the 285-page book:
“In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”
Gladwell presents the arresting argument that success has less to do with ambition and intelligence and more to do with culture, family, and one’s upbringing. In the first chapters, by examining the birth dates of Canadian hockey players, Gladwell shows readers proof that there is more to success than hard work and talent.
These concepts caught a few of my students off guard quite honestly, and it goes against many extolled views about success.
The book is divided into two sections:
Part One: Opportunity
Part Two: Legacy
Within these two parts, Gladwell discusses commonly held beliefs about success and then follows that up with specific stories of outliers… “people whose achievements fall outside normal experience,” according to the back cover copy.
In addition to a reading guide and nine discussion questions in the back of the book, there are several Outliers products on Teachers Pay Teachers that I may or may not utilize. I would like to create some of my own materials for this book, but that will obviously happen after I make my decision to order it or not.
And, of course, the jury’s still out on Outliers; however, I’m thinking I’ll probably give this book the go-ahead next month when we start filling out those precious requisition forms.
Have you ever taught Outliers? Thoughts? Suggestions? Feel free to leave a comment!
Thanks for reading again this week! I’ll be focusing on Douglass and Manhunt in some upcoming posts. And, of course, I also plan to requisition some new fiction. I’ll post soon on those as well. Follow my blog to catch these future posts!
