Taking the First Step

One of the many things that I thought I would do when I became a reading coach was write a newsletter for teachers.  Inspired by the strong female characters Lizzie and Lydia in Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed, I started that newsletter today.  My problem is that I have never written a newsletter before and I’m feeling less than confident.  I chose a template,  inserted clip art of books, added information about the book club that will start meeting in January,  added my contact information, and copy and pasted the mission statement from the district website.  Time to write a few articles.  I’m stuck though.  What do teachers want to read?  What should I include in this newsletter?  What can I write that will be valuable to the teachers who read it?  In Lamb’s novel, Lizzie works tirelessly for change.  Because of her work the lives of many women were improved.  Now I realize Lizzie is a fictional character, but I want to be like Lizzie.  I want the work that I do to improve the lives of many children.  I want every child in my school system to know what it means to be a reader, not just a person who can read, but a person who does read –a person who reads, writes and thinks.  I want to creat a newsletter that will help me achieve this goal.  Today, I took the first step.  Tonight I am going to do what Katie Wood Ray recommends we have our students do when preparing to write.  I am going to immerse myself in newsletters.   If you know of a great literacy newsletter that I should include in my immersion stack, please share it by leaving a comment.

What Does the Future Hold?

“I hate to read.”

“I don’t read.”

“I can’t read.”

“I’ve never liked reading.”

“I’ve never been a very good reader.”

These are all statements I have heard this week. Because I have always been a reader, I find it hard to believe that anyone would say these things. I can’t imagine not wanting to read, not liking to read or not being able to read. Even more surprising to me is that these words are spoken with no shame. Especially when these words aren’t coming out of the mouths of students, but out of the mouths of their teachers.

What does it say about our education system when our teachers are saying things like this? These are teachers who went through the system, graduated from high school, graduated from college and many times have even gotten their Masters degree. How were they able to do this without reading? How can a person spend so many hours of their life doing all the reading that is done in school without becoming a reader? What happens when a person who views reading as something that must be tolerated is given the responsibility of teaching the next generation? I can’t help wondering if this isn’t the problem Rodman Philbrick had in his mind when he wrote The Last Book in the Universe. What is going to happen to our world if we continue to allow ourselves to hate reading? What is going to happen to our world if those who are responsible for teaching children don’t understand why reading is important?

Healthy Patients Make for Mediocre Doctors

He had just come from a faculty meeting, and it was clear from his demeanor that things had not gone well.

“What happened?” I asked.

“I listened as long as I could,” he said, “but they could not get off their blame-the-the student shtick. Finally I said that they sounded like doctors in a hospital saying, ‘Don’t send us any more sick people–we don’t know what to do with them. Send us healthy patients so we can look like good doctors.’”

Parker J. Palmer shares this anecdote in his book The Courage to Teach. He carries the analogy further by sharing how it helped him come to this crucial understanding about teaching:

The way we diagnose our students’ condition will determine the kind of remedy we offer.

He goes on to say that we spend little time thinking about the maladies that our teaching is meant to cure and that we allow our treatment to be shaped by the thoughtless stereotypes we have of our students. Palmer’s thoughts on this remind me of the other book I’m reading, Never Work Harder Than Your Students & Other Principles of Great Teaching by Robyn R. Jackson. The first principle in this book is to start where your students are. As I read her thoughts, I couldn’t help thinking about how important it is for us to value our students no matter where they come from. When we don’t value them for who they are, it is much like what Palmer’s friend says. We are like doctors who don’t want to work with sick patients. It is important for educators to stop seeing the students who enter our classrooms as deficient. We should be like House and his team. We should embrace the maladies of our students and work diligently to find cures. When one remedy does not work, we need to try again until a cure is found.

We need to work together to diagnose our students’ maladies and work together to cure them.

Plea for Help

I have been asked to compile a list of must reads for high school honor students. This list will be used as a resource for teachers to consult when compiling their summer reading lists. Since I have spent most of my career in elementary and middle school classrooms, I’m not sure that I am the person for the job, but I know that some of you out there in the blogosphere are high school teachers and you will share your wisdom with me. Please tell me what you think. What books (both classic and contemporary) do you feel are must reads for high school students?

Writing Assessment Day in Tennessee

Today is writing assessment day in Tennessee. All across the state of Tennessee 5th, 8th and 11th graders will take 35 minutes to write to the state selected prompt. Writing assessment day happened to fall on February 3rd in the year 2004 as well. How do I know? I wrote about it in my journal. I always loved to write as my students were writing and they always loved for me to read what I had written. Here is my journal entry from 2004. What a great year!

Writing Assessment 2/3/04

J. quickly begins tracing her hand to use as a prewriting planner. She fills the fingers with details and ideas quickly.

D. begins a web, checks the word wall for words, and then works frantically to plan her story. (Please note: the word wall is covered up for the writing assessment. Students still look that direction when writing though.)

S. does a quick prewriting and jumps into her story.

T. looks around the room for a few minutes. I can see that her mind is working out the details of her story. Soon she is writing. She may use up an eraser before she finishes, but she has a lot of determination on her face.

V. stares at the word wall searching. I’m not sure what he is searching for, but he is searching. He stops and writes for a few minutes only to stop and stare intently at the word wall again.

Z. looks around the room as if he is grasping for ideas. He sees J. tracing her hand and decides to do the same. He notices that D. is looking at the word wall. He looks at the word wall. I wonder what he is thinking. Is the asking himself why he should be looking at the blank word wall? Is he sondering what D. is looking at?

10 minutes pass – They are all still writing.

J. and D have finished planning and are busy drafting.

I think M. is finished he is looking at his paper, possibly reading it. His pencil is making a mark in the upper left hand corner — too far up to be part of his story. He lookds at the clock. His finger goes into his mouth and stretches his cheek out until I fear a loud popping noise is about to be released. Fortunately he slowly removes his finger and looks back to his paper. He erases something toward the top of his paper. He writes. He looks up to catch me looking at him. He holds his pencil in ht writing grip, but does not write. At least he has learned to look like he is writing.

Z. peeks over to D.’s paper. I think he wants to do well, so he looks to his peers for examples. He continues to write.

T. yawns and stretches noisily drawing my attention across the room. He glances up from his writing and catches me looking at him. Turns to the second page and continues writing.

M. catches my eye as I scan the room. I smile.

V. bites his nails and looks to the word wall for guidance.

I can’t help myself, I must take a walk to see how much M. Has written. HE stares at the clock. I don’t want to distract anyone so I decide to stay here. I can see M.’s paper when I collect the papers.

Everyone is still gripping their pencil and writing. Even M.

D. and J. take a brief rest to soothe their aching writer’s hands.

D. Stretches.

T. seems deep in thought. Is she planning her next move?

V. stops. He sits back in his seat to read his work. Holding it in from ot him like a newspaper at the breakfast table, he reads. Ah, it must be a revision, he sits back up armed with an eraser, he gets back to work.

B. is finished, he peeks at me over the stack of newspapers and remembers to keep his thoughts inside his head.

5 minutes left.
C. sits hands on each side of her head as if she is holding it up by the ears. She is finished. She stares down at her desk, and then she begins running her fingers through her hair.

The silence begins to be broken by the sounds of squirming 5th graders.

D. J. S. T. V. M. K. M. H. T. and J. still have pencils moving.

Times Up!

Good luck to all the students and teachers who will participate in the writing assessment today.

The Crazy Professor

I heard about The Crazy Professor at last month’s Middle Tennessee Literacy Coach’s meeting. I love this video. It is so cool that there are wonderful teachers in the world who are willing to share what their successes with the rest of us.

From the Nightstand

We were granted another snow day today. Naturally, when I woke up I reached over to the nightstand and picked up a book. I figure a snow day is a perfect excuse to finish of a good book. Today’s selection was Invitations to the Worldby Richard Peck. Which is a book that has been taking up space on my nightstand for way too long. It feels good to finally be finished with it, but I am tempted to go back and reread it from the beginning. Here are a few passages that I marked as I was reading. I’m sure there are many more that are worthy of mentioning, but these are the ones I marked.

Children whose lives were already disfigured by poverty, wealth, or some other affliction saw school as a clean, well-lighted place with teachers empowered byt the system and kind of droning routine the young demand. For some of us the standards of school were a clear echo of the values of home. For others school offered the only safe haven. Above its portals were invisibly carved the unspoken motto: FORGET WHERE YOU CAME FROM, ENTER HERE AND LEARN.

This made me think. I have mixed feelings about this motto. Part of me wants to say that it isn’t fair for us to expect our students to enter school and leave themselves behind by forgetting where they came from, but another part of me agrees with this motto. I have been saying for years that teachers need to stop judging students and categorizing them based on where they come from. I have to think if school was a place were we expected all students to succeed instead of assuming that some won’t, we would accomplish more. I guess I would like to change this motto. Instead of posting it on the portal of the school, I’d like to post it above the door from the teachers’ lounge: FORGET WHERE THEY CAME FROM, ENTER HERE AND TEACH.

…the basis of all real learning is fear. Fear of the consequences of not learning, ….

I can’t help thinking of a former student when I read this. She once told me that nothing we did mattered because when she grew up she was going to be just like her mom. When I asked what her mom did, she responded by telling me that her mom didn’t do anything but sit around and watch TV all day and that was exactly what she was going to do when she grew up. When that is the future you imagine for yourself, what is there to learn?

For me, writing a novel is like making a quilt. You gather bright scraps from other people’s lives, and then you stitch them together in a pattern of your own.

This reminds me of Margrethe who is both a writer and a quilter.

…they have to be imperfect enough for improvement and willing to stand up for who they are. They have to take one step nearer maturity in an age when maturing itself has become an elective, and they must show readers the way, give them the word. … We need no novels about how to fit in. Popularity and acceptance cost too much now.

when maturing itself has become an electiveThis really stands out to me. Has maturing become an elective in our society? It only takes one night of TV viewing to realize that it has.

Those of us who were teachers don’t believe much in phases. It’s parents who can explain away their children’s behavior as phases they’re going through. Teachers are less sure. Teachers have evidence that people don’t grow up till they have to. There are people still going through puberty in senior year. A system of school that issues diplomas to people who can’t read them retards their development further, and they look elsewhere for status and identity.
There are people well along in adult life who still believe that being in the right place with the right people will mask their personal inadequacies. Long after graduation there are people voting in a bloc, counting on club membership, trying to live in the smallest world possible. In adult life there are still people searching for scapegoats and finding them.

People don’t grow up until they have to. It makes me wonder what is going to have to happen in our world for people to realize that they have to grow up.

We write for a generation who have needed language less to get what they want from adults, who in their dealings with one another have reason to suspect that the pen is no longer mightier than the sword.

We cannot make adolescent readers out of adolescent illiterates. If you have been coming to school for seven years without having to read, you’ve whipped the system and are lost to us all.

Is it possible for a student to go 7 years without reading? I say, “yes and no.” If reading is the ability to recognize words on paper and call them out, the answer is no. If reading is the ability to recognize words on paper, call them out, and think about what they are saying to you the answer is yes. When students are sitting in classrooms where a study guide is given and memorized for the test, they aren’t really reading and thinking. When all reading is done as a class and the teacher tells the class what they should think, they aren’t really reading and thinking.

Like teaching, writing is something less than a profession, but more than a job. When you aren’t teaching, you’re thinking about teaching. When you’re not writing, you’re thinking about writing.

Happily, American books for the young greeted a new century with a whole spectrum of worthy offerings, from picture books to coming of age novels. …. These page-turners powerfully documented the foreign country adolescence has become in three decades of self rule.

“Words are the only thing which last forever,” Winston Churchill once said. Somehow that truth seems truer now, here in the gray dawn of uncertain new century. Books prepare the literate for change.

Room 105 Mystery Solvers

I’m excited! Today I met with a great 3rd grade teacher. Starting Monday, I will be joining her three days a week for literature circles. She has a box full of mysteries, a cool detective hat and a desire to, “Give kids the idea that the basal is not the only reading material in a bag of tricks.” and “Get them excited about reading a new genre…..even chapter books. ….for most kids they have never sat and read a chapter book of any kind independently….I would love to see everyone do that at their level!!” The kids are all set with the terms they need to know in order to discuss mysteries and little detective notebooks. Tomorrow they will be choosing the books they want to read. I’m going to learn so much from this experience. I can’t wait!

Tennessee Tech Here We Come

I am driving to Lebanon today. Once I get there I will meet up with Beth, and she will drive us the rest of the way to Cookeville. We are driving to Tennessee Tech to present at their P16 Mini Workshop. Mini. Makes you think of small things doesn’t it. Makes you think it might be a small workshop with not many participants. Well, that is what I thought too until I received an e-mail yesterday that said there could be up to 300 people in the second session. It should be fun. I’m looking forward to the drive down with Beth and spending time with all those teachers.

Do you know who this is?

My fascination with Jesse James and Monster Garage finally paid off today. When I walked into Mr. Watts’ welding class for our weekly reading lesson, I was armed only with Love, Stargirl for the reading minute. I knew when I put it in my bag that it would be a stretch, but I thought maybe they would enjoy hearing the Perry’s Harem scene. As soon as Mr. Watts saw it though, her offered me a Popular Mechanics magazine. I asked him if he wanted to read it, he said, “No, I want you to.” I flipped it to the page he had marked. “That’s Jesse James” I said as soon as I saw this famous chopper builder kneeling next to one of his creations. Mr. Watts and all the students in earshot seemed shocked to find out that I knew who Jesse James was. It is amazing how much respect you can get from a student for just being interested in the things they are interested in and respecting the things they respect. By the time I left their class today, I decided that I would let them teach me how to weld. I can’t wait to put on the welding helmet and let the sparks fly.