Rhetoric gone bad: Goebbel's propaganda Red Army produces not resolve among Germans, but guilt

In Richard Evans' "The Third Reich at War," Richard Evans' claims:

The last two years of the war were filled with atrocity propaganda emanating from Goebbels's mass media: the Red Army in particular was portrayed, not entirely inaccurately, as hell-bent on raping and killing Germans as it advanced. Yet the effects of this were not what Goebbels intended. From from leading to a strengthening of resolve amongst ordinary Germans, this propaganda only served to reveal deep-seated feeling of guilt that they had done nothing to prevent the Jews being killed

. In 1944, the SS reproted that Goebbels's propaganda graphically portraying the lootings, killings, and rapes carried out by Red Army Troops in Prussia, (following is quotation from the SS report)

in many cases achieved the opposite of what was intended Compatriots say it is shameless to make so much of them in the German press... 'What does the leadership intend by the publication of such pictures as those in teh National Socialist Courier on Sunday? They should realise that the sight of these victims will remind every thinking person of the atrocities we have committed in enemy territory, even in Germany itself. Have we not murdered thousdands of Jews? Don't soldiers again and again report that Jews in Poland have had to dig their own graves? And how did we treat the Jews in the concentration camp in Alsace?... (The opinion of numerous people from all classes of the population.)

Here's Calvin College's website with Nazi propaganda material, including posters: http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/ Poster of Red Army soldiers raping a German woman: http://robertlindsay.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/art057.gif Original website of the poster: http://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/cool-nazi-era-photos/

Christopher Hitchens' essay on Gatsby

Teaching Gatsby? See Christopher Hitchens' recent essay in Vanity Fair!   vnty.fr/JzSNli

It contains an argument about why it's a definitive American novel and has some great examples of old-school analysis:  

There are two key words in the book. They are “pointless” (and its analogues) and “careless.” They recur with striking and mounting emphasis as the narrative shakes off its near-permanent hangover. A dog biscuit at Tom Buchanan’s adulterous and nasty gathering is represented as “decomposed apathetically” in a saucer of milk; Myrtle on the same horrid occasion “looked at me and laughed pointlessly.” At Gatsby’s bigger but even hollower party, there’s a cocktail table—“the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.” After “a somehow wasteful and inappropriate half hour,” Jordan Baker wants to leave. In New York one hot evening, Nick notices “young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.” Driving through Central Park, Gatsby “came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.” Is there a line more expressive of vicious tedium than Daisy’s petulant demand: “What’ll we do with ourselves this afternoon, and the day after that, and the next thirty years?” If there is, it’s the earlier pettishness when she insists on knowing whatever it is that people do when they make plans. Even the great cars are bored and affectless: “The dilatory limousine came rolling up the drive.” When Tom talks about getting gas, “a pause followed this apparently pointless remark”; when the stop for gas is made, the expression on Myrtle’s face at first seems “purposeless and inexplicable.” In West Egg, Daisy dreads “the too obtrusive fate that herded its inhabitants along a shortcut from nothing to nothing.” As Nick takes his penultimate leave of Gatsby, he quits him “standing there in the moonlight—watching over nothing.” Here is the full-out horror of torpor and morbidity and futility and waste, saturated in joyless heat and sweat. Gatsby came out in April of that year of grace 1925: the cruelest month seems right.

George Hillocks on bad goals and objectives

In the Introduction to his book Teaching Argument Writing, Hillocks talks about bad objectives, good objectives, and how each calls for a different instructional sequence. Bad objectives can lead to ineffective teaching. Some bad goals and objectives: Students will write a persuasive essay about a school problem of concern to them. Students will explore the imagery of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." The class will discuss the various conflicts that Trueson faces in Light in the Forest. Students will study the meaning of twenty vocabulary words. Students will write an essay analyzing Mark Antony's funeral speech over Caesar's body. "These objectives are all either assignments or stipulations of how class time will be spent. They do not stipulate what students are to learn. Furthermore, they do not indicate how the learnings, whatever they are, will be assessed. Consider the final objective... My guess is that this is either an assignment or test item for students after they have read the speech alone or in the classroom. More importantly, we need to ask what instruction prepared students to make the required analysis of Antony's speech. If the instruction simply involved some classroom talk about the speech, talk that supplied some analysis, then the objective is merely about recall. Can the students remember what the teacher said about the speech and how it uses irony to undercut Brutus as an "honorable man"?" Here's a better version of the same objective: "Given an unfamiliar passage, such as Mark Antony's speech at Caesar's funeral, students will write an essay identifying the uses of irony and interpreting its impact on the meaning of the passage." "This objective requires a totally different instructional sequence.... The focus will not be on remembering the teacher's interpretation of a passage but on learning how to interpret irony." "Shaping objectives in this way demands a reconceptualization of teaching and even the curriculum. Neither can be any longer simply a matter of covering topics or works and making assignments and hoping that some of it rubs off on students. It becomes necessary to ask, How will what we do in class today help students become more expert in dealing with specific tasks tomorrow?" Here's a better objective for arguments of fact: After independently examining a set of data concerning a certain problem, students will write an argument about what the facts of the matter are. The argument must provide a claim with support including four to five pieces of evidence, warrants explaining how the evidence supports the claim and is relevant, qualifications about the limitations of the claim and warrants, and counter arguments dealing with possible opposing views.

Can Daydreaming Promote Academics?

USC assistant professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang co-authored a paper, “Rest Is Not Idleness,” which examines the neurobiology of the brain at rest or in “default mode.”  The article suggests that diminishing opportunities for young people to look inward and reflect could have negative effects on their well-being, morality and academic success.

A child with a wandering mind in the classroom may perform poorly on the task that requires concentration. Part of helping the child to focus better, the research suggested, is to help him or her learn to manage inward and outward attention more appropriately. Attending to tasks effectively is essential for gathering new information from lessons. But the reflection a child may learn to engage during mind wandering also is potentially critical for healthy development and learning in the longer term.

Immordino-Yang argued that teachers need to distinguish between a loss of focus and mindful reflection, teaching students skills for constructive internal processing and productive reflection. She also warned against an overuse of social media among teens, which appears to be harmful to the development of the higher-thinking abilities and associated benefits.
“Consistently imposing overly high-attention demands on children, either in school, through entertainment or through living conditions, may rob them of opportunities to advance from thinking about ‘what happened’ or ‘how to do this’ to constructing knowledge about ‘what this means for the world and for the way I live my life,’ ” she said. 

http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/34757/can-daydreaming-improve-academics/

Every assessment choice is a value judgment

Howard Gardener replied to a NYT article "Nonfiction Curriculum Enhanced Reading Skills, Study Finds" (published March 12, 2012) with this:

It is instructive to know that second graders who received a Core Knowledge curriculum performed better tahn comparison gropus on measures of reading. But every choice of curriculum -- and, more important, every choice of an assessment measure -- entails a value judgment. Those educators who selected a reading program that valued fictional works (NOT those who chose the Core Knowledge Curriculum in the study) presumably thought that was an appropriate emphasis. It is now up to those educators to provide measures that might reveal better performances on their currciulum -- for example, richer imagination by students or a greater liklihood of reading books of any sort outside the school environment.

Today I was part of a discussion about rearranging curriculum so that teachers can measure student growth in writing. One teacher, Jim, noted that one unintended side-effect of this kind of thinking could make him shy away from asking kids to engage in complex, messy writing assessments which might blow up in his face, but might also yield some really good thinking and writing. Jim said, "I would be tempted to stick to the things that I know would show results." When you build a rubric, or an assessment, you're always drawing boundaries around what's important, what's worth looking at in student writing, and what's not relevant. When you build a common rubric to measure writing over the course of months or quarters or years, there's a lot that you're leaving out. There's also a tremendous advantage of naming the things that count. The goal is to keep this teeter-totter balanced.

Rhetoric: a political speech that was "a feat of mass hypnosis"

Goebbels' "Total War" speech in Febuary 1943 after Germany's defeat to Soviets at Stalingrad is thought to be a masterly work of political rhetoric. It's also an interesting example of how different audiences heard very different things. Some thought the openness about the serious nature of recent German loses was inspiring because it was honest. Others felt that the call for total war and end of luxury was absurd because standard of living was so low. Others noted its hypnotic effect on the audience. Here's a translation of he speech: http://bit.ly/KXzmQo See Richard Evans' The Third Reich at War pp 424-432.

Curriculum idea: does a liberal arts degree makes sense anymore?

I ask my junior AP Language students to write a synthesis practice paper on this topic, using a series of articles from Writing from Sources. But here are two more articles debating the topic:

Frank Bruni's initial op Ed piece in the NYT (April 29, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-imperiled-promise-of-college.html


And a response from Cheryl Greenberg, history professor from Trinity College.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/02/opinion/invitation-to-a-dialogue-a-liberal-arts-degree.html?_r=1


The "Sunday Dialogue" of the NYT is supposed to be about the same topic.

Sent from my iPad

"Draft" blog series and David Brooks' "innovation"

A couple more things to check out:

A NY Times-based blog series on the art and craft of writing.  (“Draft features essays by grammarians, historians, linguists, journalists, novelists and others on the art of writing — from the comma to the tweet to the novel — and why a well-crafted sentence matters more than ever in the digital age.”) Today’s is by John McWhorter, last post by Stanley Fish,  Teaser: 

The latest word on the street about English in America – always bad, it seems – is that the shaggy construction of texting and e-mail spells the death of formal writing. Yet the truth about English in America – always sunnier, in fact – is that the looseness and creativity of these new ways of writing are a sign of a new sophistication in our society. This becomes clear when we understand that in the proper sense, e-mail and texting are not writing at all.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/23/talking-with-your-fingers/#

Second, Tuesday’s David Brooks’ article about “innovation and the limits of competition”.  I’m planning on using it with the college essay and with Death of a Salesman.  Teaser:

One of his core points is that we tend to confuse capitalism with competition. We tend to think that whoever competes best comes out ahead. In the race to be more competitive, we sometimes confuse what is hard with what is valuable. The intensity of competition becomes a proxy for value.

In fact, Thiel argues, we often shouldn’t seek to be really good competitors. We should seek to be really good monopolists. Instead of being slightly better than everybody else in a crowded and established field, it’s often more valuable to create a new market and totally dominate it. The profit margins are much bigger, and the value to society is often bigger, too.

Now to be clear: When Thiel is talking about a “monopoly,” he isn’t talking about the illegal eliminate-your-rivals kind. He’s talking about doing something so creative that you establish a distinct market, niche and identity. You’ve established a creative monopoly and everybody has to come to you if they want that service, at least for a time.

His lecture points to a provocative possibility: that the competitive spirit capitalism engenders can sometimes inhibit the creativity it requires.

Think about the traits that creative people possess. Creative people don’t follow the crowds; they seek out the blank spots on the map. Creative people wander through faraway and forgotten traditions and then integrate marginal perspectives back to the mainstream. Instead of being fastest around the tracks everybody knows, creative people move adaptively through wildernesses nobody knows.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/opinion/brooks-the-creative-monopoly.html

Happy Thursday!

A Quartet of Articles

Good morning!  Obviously, yesterday’s PSAE day gave me too much time to get stuff together to send you:

Remember “Is Making Us Stupid?” published in the Atlantic a couple years ago?  They’ve just published “Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche.  It’s free online:  http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/is-facebook-making-us-lonely/8930/   It’s not short, but it would be an interesting thing to look at with kids about how the author spins together narrative and research.  The author’s weaving of an macabre introductory narrative through the essay is pretty cool – it’s about an ex porn star who dies with her computer on and isn’t found in her apartment for days.

This morning on NPR was a short piece about “Poem in your pocket day” (which is Thursday, but at HC, according to the signs hung around school, Friday).  One cool idea from the program – a high school teacher from Oklahoma says that he’s having kids write poems in sidewalk chalk in the courtyard of his school so all kids read them during lunch.  http://www.npr.org/2012/04/25/151339990/celebrating-poem-in-your-pocket-day

Sibyl passed the hard copy of NCTE’s policy brief entitled “Evaluating English/Language Arts Teachers” to me.  This reads a good corrective to all the news about “value added research” that we’ve been reading.  If you have only 3 minutes, check out the “Dimensions of Teacher Quality” on the third page.  Not to brag, but our CPPs have it pretty much right.  http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CC/0213-mar2012/CC0213Brief.pdf

Heather sent me this USA Today article yesterday about “essay grading machines.”  “Study: Machine scoring of essays shows promise”  http://usat.ly/IklU8s   Here’s an interesting bit:

  Jeff Pence, an English teacher at Dean Rusk Middle School in Canton, Ga., uses computer-aided scoring for his 120-plus students, since hand-grading just one set of writing drafts "with any sense of thoroughness" could take two weeks. The computer takes about three seconds to deliver feedback. So far, each of his students this year has completed more than 25 essays. …  He understands the limits of computer grading but says that teachers have limits too. "I know, as does every teacher out there, that on that 63rd essay, I am nowhere near as consistent, accurate or thorough as I was on the first three."

(Here’s another take on these grading machines (which is not a euphemism for “English teacher”) that Jan Bujan sent me.  It’s a blog post that’s linked to the original studies:  )

http://gettingsmart.com/news/automated-essay-scoring-systems-demonstrate-effectiveness/

How can I help my child to read in high school?

When parents hear a teacher's recommendation to "read with your child at home" or "help your child with her homework," they are likely to understand those processes in ways that are different than what the teacher intended. Parents often feel unprepared or inadequate to help their children with higher-level homework with reading and writing (Epstein, 2010). The Northern Illinois University Literacy Clinic has produced a Raising Readers series, which includes handouts and videos to help parents understand simple, effective ways they can support their children as readers and writers. The resources cover topics like promoting a love of reading, strategies to support comprehension, comprehension of fiction texts, reading vocabulary, what is fluency?

These handouts are available here: http://www.cedu.niu.edu/ltcy/literacyclinic/raisingReaders/index.shtml

Videos on the literacy clinci's You Tube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/TheLiteracyClinic

(adapted from Laurie Elish-Piper's article "Parent Involvement in Reading" in the Illinois Reading Council Journal, Spring 2012)

What Does it Take to Succeed in College?

In Redefining College Readiness, U of Oregon professor David T. Conley, who directs the Center for Educational Policy Research, points to four key components of college success:

• key cognitive strategies. Skills in analysis, interpretation, precision and accuracy, and problem solving and reasoning
• key content knowledge. First and foremost the ability to write well. Also the ability to conduct research and knowledge of the big ideas in each content area.
• Academic behaviors. Study skills, time management, persistence, and the ability to work in groups.
• contextual skills and awareness. Knowledge of how to apply to college, manage financial aid issues, and adjust to college culture.

(adapted from Educational Update, ASCD, March 2012)

Student Engagement

According to Wade Boykin and Pedro Noguera's research review, student engagement was a more significant factor than the amount of instructional time or structural factors, such as student-teacher ratio, in students' achievement in math and reading. These authors say there are three levels of engagement.

• behavioral engagement is "on-task" behavior in class that includes persistence, asking questions, taking part in discussions, and knowing when to ask for help when they are stuck.
• cognitive engagement can be seen when students show deep involvement and effort to understand a challenging concept or issue or acquire a difficult skill
• affective engagement manifests itself through a student's high interest level, positive affect and attitude, curiosity, and task involvement.

(notes from Education Update, ASCD, March 2012)

Professional development focus of informational texts

Something else is interesting in that article in education week that I've posted about recently. " New York City singled out informational text as this year's focus and it's work to get ready for the common core standards in English language arts.". I admire a single year-long focus like that. I think that you can get a lot of information discussed with single focus like that. "the district conducted professional development aimed at helping teachers think through how to create instructional units and tasks reflecting the shift in the standards. To support that work the 1.1 million students district set up a digital common core library that includes 13 bundles of sample activities lesson plans and other resources for instruction based on information text."

Five titles for 10th grade nonfiction

The teacher referred to in my previous post uses the nonfiction books in her 10th grade class.

Branded by Alissa Quart

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich

Blood Diamonds by Greg Campbell

Bitter Chocolate by carol Off

Geeks by Jon Katz

Rhetoric, not literary analysis becomes the new focus in English

The common core asks for more nonfiction texts, specifically "high quality complex information texts.". Education week ("Schools begin shift to information-text instruction" by Catherine Gewertz, march 14, 2012) addresses the need for new kinds of PD. ("Most teachers are to taught how to teach reading", the article quotes one NY school official.).

What is especially interesting to me is the picture of what teachers are doing with texts. The article begins, "In an English language arts classroom in Iowa 10th-graders are analyzing the rhetoric in books about computer geeks, fast food, teenage marketing, working poor, chocolate making, and diamond mining... Students are dissecting the sources, statistics, and anecdotes the authors use to make their arguments in books... And film documentaries.". The same teacher, sarah brown wessling, the 2010 National Teacher of the Year, says, "we spend a lot of time talking about attributes of nonfiction, like how to read an interview. Or how to tell the difference between fact and opinion."

This is rhetoric curriculum spread throughout the 4 high school years. I think that's a different thing than saying that teachers must teach more nonfiction. Instead, it means teaching rhetorical reading, reading for argument, for tone, for bias, and for author's purpose.

The article references an online teacher toolkit developed by the state of Oregon and NY's teacher resources which can be found in this issues links page at edweek.org/links.

Twitter in the classroom

Education Week picked up a Tribune article about two Glen Ellyn 1st grade teachers using Twitter in the classroom. In one classroom the end-of-day class meeting is a Twitter session where kids tweet. The teacher says that it keeps communication open with parents and helps children learn typing, spelling, and reading. Another teacher who has her kids blogging says that it's important because kids see this as a thing that adults do and that it's a way to teach young children that computers are not just about games.

ESpark founder David Vinci is quoted.

"twitter evolves as tool for little ones to tweet about class activities" by Michelle Manchir

Distracting e-books, Teacher Eval screw-up, lying "truth-o-meters"

Three articles published in the last couple days

“Find Your Book Interrupted… By the Tablet You Read it On” by Julie Bosman and Matt Richtel NYT 3.5.12

Teaser: “People who read e-books on tablets like the iPad are realizing that while a book in print or on a black-and-white Kindle is straightforward and immersive, a tablet offers a menu of distractions that can fragment the reading experience, or stop it in its tracks.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/business/media/e-books-on-tablets-fight-digital-distractions.html

“Hard-Working Teachers, Sabotaged When Student Test Scores Slip” by Michael Winerip (NYT in the “on Eduction” column) 3.5.12

This is about some unintended consequences involved with NY’s “value added” teacher evaluation system. Four teachers who seem to be doing a great job are all shown – by the test, at least – to have taken AWAY value from students. Learn about how “numbers lie” here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/05/nyregion/in-brooklyn-hard-working-teachers-sabotaged-when-student-test-scores-slip.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=hard-working%20teachers&st=cse

“True Lies: Media umpires confront the challenge of dishonest facts” by Eric Zorn Tribune 3.2.12

Interesting for all, but especially for rhetoric, AP Lang, expos… This article comments on the group of new “fact-checking” websites run by various media outlets. Things like Truth-O-Meter and PolitiFact and the Washington Posts “Pinocchio” awards (the cleverest of the bunch). Are these meters too dumbed-down?

http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/03/truelies.html

What is Literature Good For?

What is Literature Good For?

Carol Jago, in her recent book With Rigor For All (Heineman), cites six contributions that the study of literature makes to student development:
1. intellectual curiosity as the content of great works of literature offers them teh ways and means of delving into stories, and through these stories, of having a vicarious experience of the human condition far greater than any of them could ever acquire on the basis of luck and firsthand encounters
2. cognitive skills through the study of literature that supports the critical reading of all texts, the precise use of language, and the creation of sound arguments
3. aesthetic sensitivity that helps them recognize and respond to art
4. an intra- and intercultural awareness by reading texts from both their own and other cultures
5. an ethical sensitivity that includes the ability to regulate conduct according to principles and the ability to deliberate about issues both in their own heads and in dialogue with others
6. an existential maturity that allows them to behave as civilized human beings in a world where others are not always so inclined.

Jago draws this list from Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives by Marshall Gregory (2009). According to Gregory, existential maturity “is more easily defined by what it is not than by what it is. It is not self-centeredness; it is not unkindness; it is not pettiness; it is not petulance; it is not callousness to the suffering of others; it is not back-biting or violent competitiveness; it is not mean-spiritedness; it is not dogmatism or fanaticism; it is not a lack of self-control; it is not the inability ever to be detached or ironic; it is not the refusal to engage in give-and-take learning from others; it is not the assumption that what we personally desire and value is what everyone else desires and values” (57)

What's Going to Be on the New Common Core Test??

I had the opportunity to chat with Carol Jago, past NCTE president and PARCC and NAEP member, last week over lunch. She’s sitting on the committee that’s currently figuring out what the yearly Common Core test will look like. As far as I can recall -- and I should say that there was a glass of wine or two involved over lunch -- there will be two tests: one at the end of the year (May/June) that will feel like an AP Language multiple-choice passage analysis test with a focus on challenging texts – and the examples she gave really were challenging. This one on computer, probably computer adaptive. Another test earlier in the spring (April) will be an "integrated reading and writing task," a writing test that asks kids to create an argument after reading multiple texts – again, it sounded like the “synthesis question” on the AP Language test. This essay test will likely be graded – at least partially – by computers. Again, she offered some pretty interesting examples that involve a range of text types, even paintings.

As far as I’m concerned all this is good news, a good focus on reading challenging texts, argument, analysis, and synthesis. OK… I’m a little concerned with the computer graded essays! But right now, with a couple pounds of essays to grade this weekend, I'm willing to see what those computers can do to provide feedback about things like focus, development, and organization.

"Top Teachers" in NY's Teacher Data Reports

Teacher rankings are out now in New York. The teachers' union has fought for more than a year to block the release of the ratings, taking the fight to the Supreme Court. All of this comes about because of a state-mandated overhaul of the teacher evaluation system that the state promised Washington in order to qualify for $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds.

At the top, according to the New York Times today, is Walter Galiano, Jr., who, now an assistant principal, is traveling in Italy. Alison Epstein, another teacher at the top of the city's Teacher Data Reports, has been transferred to a gifted class from teaching special education in small class settings. "It's definitely a benefit to have a smaller classroom," she said of her class of 17, "because you can differentiate so much easier."

The rankings come with asterisks and margins or error. (See an example, teacher names and naked statistics here.) But they purport to tell the truth about which teachers are adding value to students and which ones are not. The "top teachers" themselves interpret the results differently. Epstein says that it's largely because of class size that allows her to focus on individual students. Another teacher at the top of the list, Natalie Guandique, who has also left the classroom to finish a master's degree at Columbia, attributes her success to having high expectations for her special-education students. "I came in and said, 'They will learn this,'" Ms. Guandique said. "It may take us a longer time and we may have to take a different path, but they will learn what the other students are learning."

What do these "top teachers" have to teach us? It's a tantalizing question. Is it differentiated instruction? Is it a "can do" attitude? Would a close examination of their classrooms, their attitudes, their assessments, their opening-class routines demonstrate something reproducible? My mind reels at the notion that we could watch the game film of these teachers in action and learn some valuable tricks to spread to other instructors, like that poor teacher with a 2% rating. It could be the case that there's a treasure chest of information there.

I worry: is this search for top teachers a red herring, filled with too many statistical anomalies to be considered useful? Would we learn anything new.... anything, say, that you wouldn't find in Doug Lemov's fine book about instruction, "Teach Like a Champion"? And I worry about the fact that all of the teachers have moved on from their "winning" classrooms. I worry about what that means about the sustainability of this kind of teaching.

I suspect that it could be, as Alison Epstein, one of the "top teachers," says, that the focus on these tests "at times detracts from the overall curriculum." The halo of pressure about the ranking, about student performance on a single test, on out-thinking and out-teaching the test has more detrimental effects than the positive effects of the ranking. "The pressure for teachers and children to perform for tests," Epstein continues, "that do not really show how intelligent a student is, or how amazing a teacher might be, is substantial."

If the goal is to improve instruction for all teachers, this seems like a bizzarre, Byzantine way to do it.

Well Said

Part of being an educational leader is having the right words at hand. That’s never been an easy thing for me. I try to go overboard with thank you notes and happy birthday emails. Sometimes I come across things that I want to remember, small “well saids.” Here are two recently. The first is from Carol Jago, who had just finished – a couple hours previously – giving a talk to the Metro English Chair group of about 110 people. The second is from Sue L of the MEC steering committee, in response to Carol.

---

From: Carol J
Sent: Friday, February 24, 2012 5:09 PM
To: David Lange; L, Susan
Subject: Thanks for a great day

I really appreciate the invitation to be a part of your professional community. What a wonderful group of teachers you have gathered together!

Hi Carol.

We are the ones to thank you! As always, you brought energetic conversation that lasted long after the event ended! Thank you for bringing important ideas right to the forefront!

You truly are a teacher at heart, and that comes through every time we are together.

Sue

Tim Ferriss' Tim Method to Convert the Nonfictionist to Fiction

Tim Ferriss is most famous for promoting… Tim Ferriss (great blog name:  Experiments in Lifestyle Design) with books like “The 4-Hour Workweek” and “The 4-Hour Body”.  He weighs in here with his list of novels that nonfiction lovers would love.  I’d add E.L. Doctorow’s “The March” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,“ both of which were devoured by hard-core nonfictionist social studies guys at school.

 

Reminds me of Jon Scieska’s Guys Read program (a web-based literacy program for boys.  Our mission is to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers.).  Website here.  Check it out for books for

 

Here’s Ferriss’ list.

 

 

I’m currently reading:  The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: A Novel  by Haruki Murakami

 

Edward Hopper "Automat"

At Friday's talk, Carol projected this picture, then asked audience members to talk to each other about what we saw in the painting. Don't interpret, just say what you see. One of the goals was to show how much more you could interpret while talking to someone else.

Next, she read us Emily Dickinson's "We Grow Accustomed to the Dark," then asked us to reread it and talk to each other about what we saw. Again, it seems that what we saw together, in pairs, far exceeded what we saw individually. We didn't have time to compare this poem to Frost's Aquainted With the Night, but that was next in the packet.

We grow accustomed to the Dark --
When light is put away --
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step
For newness of the night --
Then -- fit our Vision to the Dark --
And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darkness --
Those Evenings of the Brain --
When not a Moon disclose a sign --
Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead --
But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight --
And Life steps almost straight.

Four Books that Carol Jago recommended at today's Metro English Chair Luncheon

1. Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Yiyun Li.

2. The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht

3. War Horse, Michael Morpurgo

4. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson

Shaming Teachers into Excellence?

Bill Gates writes an op-ed column today in the NY Times (here) which responds to the recent Supreme Court ruling that paves the way for the publication of teacher ranking lists.

Among many other sensible things, he says:

At Microsoft, we created a rigorous personnel system, but we would never have thought about using employee evaluations to embarrass people, much less publish them in a newspaper. A good personnel system encourages employees and managers to work together to set clear, achievable goals. Annual reviews are a diagnostic tool to help employees reflect on their performance, get honest feedback and create a plan for improvement. Many other businesses and public sector employers embrace this approach, and that’s where the focus should be in education: school leaders and teachers working together to get better.

The Paper Grading Load

As a classroom teacher, I always loved planning and instructing. I have never loved grading papers. I'm always on the lookout for good advice for being more efficient and effective at grading papers. So, I was really glad to come across this recent presentation by Carol Jago that is based on her popular book Papers, Papers, Papers. Here's a link to the powerpoint presentation, which includes two really useful things: a list of specific and compelling hints of do's and don'ts. Also, there are examples of what to write on four specific TYPES of student responses -- doesn't answer question, lack of development, etc. Good food for thought.

What is Literature Good For?

Carol Jago, in her recent book With Rigor For All (Heineman), cites six contributions that the study of literature makes to student development:

1. intellectual curiosity as the content of great works of literature offers them teh ways and means of delving into stories, and through these stories, of having a vicarious experience of the human condition far greater than any of them could ever acquire on the basis of luck and firsthand encounters
2. cognitive skills through the study of literature that supports the critical reading of all texts, the precise use of language, and the creation of sound arguments
3. aesthetic sensitivity that helps them recognize and respond to art
4. an intra- and intercultural awareness by reading texts from both their own and other cultures
5. an ethical sensitivity that includes the ability to regulate conduct according to principles and the ability to deliberate about issues both in their own heads and in dialogue with others
6. an existential maturity that allows them to behave as civilized human beings in a world where others are not always so inclined.

Jago draws this list from Shaped by Stories: The Ethical Power of Narratives by Marshall Gregory (2009). According to Gregory, existential maturity “is more easily defined by what it is not than by what it is. It is not self-centeredness; it is not unkindness; it is not pettiness; it is not petulance; it is not callousness to the suffering of others; it is not back-biting or violent competitiveness; it is not mean-spiritedness; it is not dogmatism or fanaticism; it is not a lack of self-control; it is not the inability ever to be detached or ironic; it is not the refusal to engage in give-and-take learning from others; it is not the assumption that what we personally desire and value is what everyone else desires and values” (57)

Modeling instruction after what good readers do naturally

What I really love about this section from Carol Jago's With Rigor for All (pp. 111-112) is both the reminder to tell weaker readers the "secret" (or secrets!) of excellent readers AND the paragraph which follows the list, which reminds us that the core of all these strategies is "the thinking that these tools represent."

In order both to help students comprehend demanding literature and to meet Common Core Standards, I begin with the behaviors of good readers behaviors of good readers According to research by Michael Pressley and Peter Afflerback (1995), excellent readers are extremely strategic readers. Often without realizing that they are doing it, strong readers:

• overview a text before reading
• determine what is most important in what they are reading
• use prior knowledge to make sense of new learning
• predict what is likely to come next in a text
• construct an interpretation of a text as they read
• draw inferences from what they read
• determine the meaning of words they don’t understand, especially when the word seems critical to making sense of the text
• use techniques such as underlining, rereading, note-taking, visualizing, summarizing, paraphrasing, and questioning strategically to focus their reading
• engage in an imaginary conversation with the author
• anticipate or plan for the use of knowledge gained from the reading

Although many remedial reading programs have turned these behaviors into reading strategies, each with its own catchy acronym, I don’t think this is the best method for helping reluctant readers develop the habit of doing these things naturally. Too often the strategies insert a layer of artificiality onto the act of reading. Do you keep a reading log? When was the last time you filled in a wish-bone/fishbone graphic organizer to explain relationships between characters? This is not to say that such tools can’t be helpful for making what is transparent for good readers visible to all students. But too many students think their work is done once they complete the graphic organizer. It’s the thinking that these tools represent, the habits of mind, that we want students ot acquire. Teachers need to be strategic in their use of classroom time so that students spend a brief amount of time practicing strategies and the bulk of their time reading."