Bud the Teacher

I read banned books

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

I wonder if there’s a button with the slogan “I surf an unfiltered Internet,” or “I read filtered blogs.” Maybe “I read blocked blogs,” is better - more alliterative.

Along another line, perhaps a button with the message “I’d trust my kids in Al Upton’s classroom,” would be a good slogan, too.
Any graphic artists out there? I’ll buy in bulk.

Clay Burell’s challenged me (or tagged me, or whatever) to engage a meme that he’s passing along.  I might.  I’m bad about memes.  I don’t mean to be.  (And I am thinking about a good passion quilt image and will post one.  Eventually.  Thanks to all who tagged me.) But I did want to encourage you to read his post.  Mostly because of this idea about teaching Lolita:

I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it - and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.

As a high school language arts teacher, I encouraged my students to pick many of their own books in consultation with me and other trusted adults.  I would encourage you to do the same.  But that’s another post.

But when you do decide to read a book together, I’d ask that you never insult the intelligence of your students, emotionally or intellectually, by hiding the world from them through picking “safe” books.  Safe choices are pretty much always about you (or your administrator, or your school board) and not about your students.  They live in the worlds being represented in literature.  Many educators live in these worlds, too.  Let’s not pretend otherwise.  Instead, let’s challenge students to engage ideas and concepts that are weighty, essential and enthralling.

Let’s ask them to dream and to dare and to risk by talking about difficult ideas in safe places.  Let’s ask them not to agree with the stance of a particular author or book or teacher or administrator or board policy, but instead to struggle through finding their own way.  With help, of course.

Most good teaching is all about finding balance.  Safe and scary.  Old and new.  Today and tomorrow.  Child and adult.  Easy and hard.  Choice and “have to.” Too often in schools, we lean way hard on one side of the teeter totter and completely avoid the other side.

What fun is that?  And what good is it for anyone?

One of the frustrating bits about working in technology rather than in language arts for the last ten months is that I haven’t really had a good reason to keep up on all the great YA literature out there.  I’m not in a position to recommend books to students at the moment - so I’ve gotten a little bit out of touch with the YA world.  I was reminded of this this morning when Phil tweeted that he was headed off to a teen literature conference. I love going into the libraries in our schools and spending time with the displays of new and popular books.

But I really miss book talks with students. Those conversations in front of bookshelves where we try to match their interests with the right book or books are wicked intense and always a fun challenge.  Talk about a rush.

While I can’t necessarily meet my need to talk books with teens at the moment, I can at least catch up on my reading.  I happen to have a book store gift card and a desire to make a donation to a school library (after I read the book, of course).

So, dear readers and teachers of reading, what should I purchase?  I’m looking for something newish - the last six months or so - and I’m aware of Twilight and the Uglies.  I’d love something a little unconventional, perhaps ARG-ish (And I know that the sequel to Cathy’s Book, Cathy’s Key, comes out in May - so I’ll be getting my hands on a copy of that, too, I hope.), or a good graphic novel (I really enjoyed the Invention of Hugo Cabret, as did the students I shared it with.).

Please share your recommendations.  What are you reading with students?  To them? For you?  Can’t keep on the shelves?  Wish you had a copy or two of?  I’ll buy the book that I like the best and tell you how it goes.  Thanks!

Last week, I received a review copy of Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America.  Thought it was worth taking a minute or two to say that I’m definitely a fan of the book.  I’m impressed with the way the author, Donna Foote, has captured the different teachers, students,  administrators, and classrooms and painted them as actual human beings dealing with complex issues and feelings as opposed to one-dimensional cogs in the educational machine.

While the book’s set in Los Angeles, I recognize many of the folks, or at least the types, she’s written about.  Kids who disappear.  Teachers who will do anything to see their kids do well.  Teachers who burnout.  Administrators who try too hard - and aren’t successful.  The folks who show up because they’re supposed to, but who’ve given up.  I appreciate the portrait.  It’s real and honest and captivating and certainly not pretty.  A fine example, one with which I’m more familiar than I’d like to be, is this paragraph, a stream of consciousness from one teacher struggling to figure out how to help a student he noticed was cutting herself:

Who am I kidding?  I don’t know what I’m doing.  The fact that it’s left to me to identify a girl who is on the verge of killing herself is ridiculous.  You can fake the teaching, but when it comes to this stuff, you can’t.  How can it be that I’m the one diagnosing or even realizing that this girl is in trouble?  I don’t even know who her guidance counselor is.  If something happens, I could be held liable.  I don’t know who to go to.  And if I don’t write it on my hand, I won’t remember to even report it.  It’s crazy.  Oh God, I hope she’s okay.

I’ve been there.  Ignore the TFA aspect of this book - it’s an eye-opening account of what it means to be a teacher in a dysfunctional school in the United States.  Or maybe in any school in the United States.

As for TFA - any alumni out there want to comment on the program?  While I dig their goals, it doesn’t seem to me like the program is necessarily going to result in systemic education reform.  Although, I might be getting cynical on the whole idea of education reform - small group of committed citizens, right?   And perhaps TFA, as only a 20-ish year old organization, isn’t mature enough yet.  Foote, in this interview with U.S. News & World Report, talks about the “two-pronged” approach of TFA as a reform group:

TFA has a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, it will send smart, energetic, committed young people into these terrible schools. But the longer-term vision, and the one that is most likely to bear fruit, is the idea that, because TFA has culled so carefully for leaders and because these young teachers will be so informed by this unbelievable experience of teaching in underperforming schools, they will go out and make big changes.

Now that the early corps members are approaching their early 40s, we’re starting to see signs that these leaders that have been embedded in society are starting to rise up. If you troll the education reform movements, the big nonprofits, and philanthropies, you’ll see TFA alum[s] in their ranks. I think a real marker was laid down last spring when TFA alum Michelle Rhee was named chancellor of the D.C. schools.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone with TFA experience.  And I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.  Not because I suspect the ending’s a positive one - but because I so appreciate the humanity of the story.

    I recently finished reading Seymour Papert’s book The Children’s Machine: Rethinking school in the age of the computer, and I’ve got lots to say formally about it.  But I only have a minute at the moment and I wanted to ask a question.  In the book, Papert forwards the idea that we should have as big a body of knowledge about learning and how to learn as we do about teaching and how to teach.  (He even postulates at one point that “learning theory” is much more about teaching than it is about actually learning. And I agreed with him.  Too often, we think of education that is something that we can do to someone, rather than with someone. We certainly can’t do it for someone.)

Since I’d never actually heard of the word before I read the book, I’m guessing that it’s not a big term/idea in teaching and learning circles.  But I don’t know - perhaps I’m out of the academic loop a bit.   It seems that the term does surface in some academic arenas, and has for some time, but I can’t get a sense of its meaning in those contexts. I guess I’m writing right now to both ask about your knowledge of the term as well as to ask if you think it’s true that we spend way too much time thinking about teaching without taking the time to think about learning.  Or, rather, are we too busy teaching to bother to learn?  I’ve read plenty of posts that suggest as much, and in fact, I think I’ve said it myself.  If that’s the case, what are we going to do about it?

Papert says it, at one point, this way:

…participants thought of themselves as teachers-in-training rather than as learners. Their awareness of being teachers was preventing them from giving themselves over fully to experiencing what they were doing as intellectually exciting and joyful in its own right, for what it could bring them as private individuals. The major obstacle in the way of teachers becoming learners is inhibition about learning. (p.72 - from this page of quotes, which are worth reading) 

It’s frustrating that this isn’t a new idea, but that it’s still revolutionary.  Read the book.  I’ll give it a more formal review later. Short version: Two thumbs up.  Mindstorms is on my nightstand, now, sitting on top of my XO, which is appropriate for so many reasons.

    I haven’t read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer yet - but the books came up in conversation three different times today - in three very different locations - so I figure I should at least take a peek.  Who couldn’t resist this (from the author’s description of the origin of the series):

In my dream, two people were having an intense
conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just
your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful,
sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent
in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B)
the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and
was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her
immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please
see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.

Perhaps the best part of Twilight showing up repeatedly is that the last reference is an IM I intercepted today between two middle school students - one surreptitiously using the web to pass along a link to the author’s website.  Too cool. 

    This is a little less timely than I would have liked, but I’ve been working through quite a hefty "to read" pile.  (You can check out my online "toread" pile, if you’d like - if anything on there’s no good, let me know so I can save myself the trouble!)
    I’ve quite enjoyed reading and re-reading Stephen King’s piece "The last word on Harry Potter" from Entertainment Weekly, where he writes a regular column on pop culture.  In the piece, he speaks to the successes of J.K. Rowling’s series as well as her strengths as a writer.  (One big one, according to King, is she allowed her characters to get older.)  He also writes about how strong many kids’ reading habits actually seem to be, and closes beautifully:

But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire,
right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to
cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious
”literary novels” each year. While the bigheads have been predicting
(and bemoaning) the postliterate society, the kids have been
supplementing their Potter with the narratives of Lemony Snicket, the
adventures of teenage mastermind Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman’s
challenging His Dark Materials trilogy, the Alex Rider
adventures, Peter Abrahams’ superb Ingrid Levin-Hill mysteries, the
stories of those amazing traveling blue jeans. And of course we must
not forget the unsinkable (if sometimes smelly) Captain Underpants.
Also, how about a tip of the old tiara to R.L. Stine, Jo Rowling’s
jovial John the Baptist?

I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids
are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on
writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story
(important) and do it without talking down (more important) or
resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the
field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the
traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.

Worth your time.

    Turns out my first ever scholarly publication, an article on book clubs and preservice teachers that I co-wrote with my friend and teacher Cindy, is available for free online for a short time.  She taught me to write for journals; I’m teaching her to blog.  I think I came out ahead in the deal.

    Been quiet lately.  It’s one of those weeks that’s about introspection. 
    I’ve been writing a little, though, and I thought I’d point you to the post I just put up at the CSUWP Advanced Institute Mother Blog. Take a peek. 
    If you’d like, you can join us in our Book Club which begins in about a week and will run up until the start of the AI.  The book, Working toward Equity, is available as a free download.  It’s a book of and about teacher research.  Feel free to join in on the discussion.  Check out this post for details and a reading schedule.

    I might need to create a category just for Jonathan Lethem.  He’s doing some interesting work.  (And I like his writing.  Especially Motherless Brooklyn.)
    Here’s a link to and a description of his Promiscuous Materials Project.   Might be of interest to those of you interested in digging a little deeper into his ideas on appropriation and art leading to more art.   Basically, he’s released some of his writing for others to use in different formats.  Here’s that description:

I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories
adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced
in other voices, and I’m a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage,
and sampling.

I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay
for Harper’s Magazine. As I researched that essay I came more and more
to believe that artists should ideally find ways to make material free
and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my
own art practice reflect that belief.

I especially like that he’s published some of what’s been done with his words.  I first caught this on an interview he gave to Fresh Air, and got to hear a chunk of John Linnell’s version (at the top of the page)of one of Lethem’s songs.  Good TMBG-y stuff.