The Literate Teacher's Manifesto

One of the blogs I follow religiously is Peter Greene's, Curmudgucation.  Today he posted a great piece called   The Missing Link in the Reading Debate .  After reading it, I thought about some conversations we had yesterday in our staff development.  We were supposed to be looking at "data".  It seems to matter to no one that none of the people on our staff are a. statisticians, b. mathematicians, c. professional researchers, or d. interested in the slightest in becoming experts in one of these fields.  We sat in a staff meeting for a couple of hours last week while various charts and numbers and colorful graphs were thrown up on the screen, apparently all illustrating how greatly our school is failing.  Yesterday we were supposed to be looking more deeply at those numbers and charts and graphs and engaging with them in a productive way to improve our school.  Umm. No. Every one of those charts and graphs and numbers are produced by lookin...

How do I love Jane Eyre ?  Let me count the ways. Because even in the darkest moments of the novel: at the school when the children were told not to talk to Jane, living with the hateful Reeds, being lost and almost starving on the moors, living in the terrible understanding that Rochester was going to marry Miss Ingram, in trying to please St. John and live up to his completely unreasonable expectations, Jane never loses her utter "Jane-ness".  She never loses sight of herself and who she is, and she never wavers in her faith in herself.    Because the love story between Rochester and Jane is almost purely intellectual.  She never seeks to hide her thoughts and feelings from him behind the wall of femininity, and in doing that, she inspires all women to be truly feminist.  Jane speaks her mind and tells the truth, and Rochester loves her all the more because of it.   Because Jane is more beautiful in my head because she sees herself as plai...

The prompt for this posting was "A book turned into a movie and completely desecrated."  I'll be honest and say that I'm having a really difficult time thinking of any books turned movies that I really loved or really hated.  They generally don't have that much of an effect on me.  Certainly there have been a great many movies made from books that do not in any way do justice to the plot.  There are many movies I've seen that are great in their own right, even though they really departed from the book ( To Kill a Mockingbird  and The Book Thief  come to mind).  I guess the only truly abysmal book-turned-movie that  I can think of would have to be The Da Vinci Code . So, yes, I am outing myself that I have read and enjoyed Dan Brown novels.  In fact, when my hubby and I visited Italy, we took the Angels and Demons  tour in Rome.  (An entertaining and informative tour, FYI!)  I know that Brown is a bit of a pattern writer, and ...

Les Miserables  is the longest book I've read in entirety, weighing in at a hefty 1,463 pages.  And yes, I read it before the movie came out.  I've actually read it all the way through twice.  The first time I read it, I was a sophomore in college.  My American Lit professor saw me carrying it around and accused me of "just trying to look smarter."  He bet me that I'd never get through it.  Well, I am and have always been a stubborn old poop, so when he told me I couldn't do it he provided me with the incentive I needed to muddle through it. It is also by far the most difficult lengthy book I've read.   It, by Stephen King, Gone With the Wind , by Margaret Mitchell, and the North and South  trilogy by John Jakes are all of comparable length to Les Mis , but definitely much more lightweight on the readability scale.  I reread Les Mis  over the summer last year.  It was even better the second time around.  I can't s...

It's very difficult to choose just one secondary character for this post.  It would be my first instinct to choose from classic literature, but I've decided that I want to stick to reading I've done recently to complete this challenge.  I narrowed it down to two finalists: Haymitch, from The Hunger Games , and Thomas, from Being Henry David .  And the winner is... ( drum roll please )... I read Being Henry David, by Cal Armistead, over the summer.  (You can read my review of it  here. )  It was a decent read, but one of the things that really added to my experience was how gifted the author is at characterization.  The characters are some of the most memorable from any novel I have ever read.  Even characters we only meet for a page or two are incredibly well-crafted and interesting.  And Thomas bookwormed his way into my head and into my heart as one of my favorite characters ever. Not to give too much away, but the premise of the ...

You never forget your first time.  Oh, the magic, and the excitement, and the WONDER of it all.  I will never get over the Harry Potter  series.  I have students who have told me in the past few weeks (as they have been selecting their first independent reading books) that they made it through two or three, but they never finished the series, and I. Am. Horrified.  How anyone could stop in the middle is just beyond me!  JK Rowling's story arcs in the series are just so inspiring and creative, taking all of the best bits of the hero's journey and completing them for not just one character, not just two characters, but COUNTLESS characters in varying degrees.   When the series was released, and the hubbub and the furor over the books began in earnest, I was in college. I told myself that clearly this was a gimmick, and I would never read those silly books.  A boy wizard? Why does anyone even care?  However, fate and my Mythology profes...

Every year around this time, I start to get the "book challenge" itch.  I've done a 30-day book challenge on Facebook for the past two years, with generally positive response.  I've also had this blog for two years, with generally positive response.  However, it gets sadly neglected.  I wish I had more time for writing.  It somehow seems as though the fall of the year is a renewal for me, a time that I want to write and reflect. As I have done the book challenge in the past, I find myself forced to think about myself as a reader, a writer, and a learner, and those are all valuable elements for every teacher to have.  I think that completing these challenges makes me better at being a good role model for my kids.  And, as the responses by adults have generally been positive as well, I thought I would try to incorporate the challenge into being a better blogger. For those of you who have spent any time in the archives, you may find this to be a rathe...

This week my two Social Studies classes have been discussing the importance of perspective in the study of history.  The first key in getting middle schoolers to understand perspective is for them to know what it means.  I'm big believer in word parts, or stems.  The first thing we do is break down the word perspective  into its parts.  There are two stems from the vocabulary program we use at our school in the word:  per, meaning through, and spec , meaning look.  So we know that the word perspective involves looking through something.  And I like to think of perspective as a pair of metaphorical glasses.  We wear many pairs of metaphorical glasses, which color our perception of the world. We go on to list the ways our metaphorical glasses are created: by our families, our age, our life experience, how many episodes of Spongebob Squarepants  one has seen, proportion of time spent on Tumblr, and so on and so forth.  This part of p...

I'm sure we are all very familiar with the Duck Dynasty debacle of last year, in which Phil Robertson was chastised for expounding his personal views on homosexuality in an interview with GQ magazine. Now, I have no desire to hash over any of the controversy that ensued, but to bring up a related issue which, I believe, has the potential for significant repercussions in the battlefield that is public education these days. I first need to cite this link,  http://theeducatorsroom.com/2013/12/educators-learn-duck-dynastys-phil-robertson/ , which was the touchstone that set me to this posting. When the issue began exploding on social media, and my Facebook feed was divided between people rabidly supporting Robertson for what he said and people rabidly bashing him for what he said, I felt there was a much larger issue at stake, one that would have lasting repercussions long after the frenzy over his words had faded and been forgotten.  I posted a brief status about the issue, an ...

Let me begin by offering a few disclaimers.  First, a warning.  This will probably be a long post.  It may end up taking two different posts.  But this topic has been percolating in my brain for a few weeks and is finally beginning to come together.  Secondly, I know there are some of you who read this blog because you are a parent or a student and you are keeping up with the Shakespeare unit.  I have tried to be somewhat apolitical.  But these days, it seems, the men in suits have made the personal political for me.  You see, I love my profession.  I love my students.  I love public education, and I believe that it is one of the things that has made America great.  And I am ANGRY.  I am tired of being demonized.  I am tired of being portrayed as a lazy union thug who lives off tax payer dollars and refuses to be held accountable for doing my job.  So yes, I am bringing politics into my profession.  But it is bec...

As my school's teacher of the year, I was invited to speak at our local Rotary Club for their monthly luncheon. The people there were representatives from the business community. I was supposed to talk about my school, and myself , and my teaching, and how everything is all hunky-dor y, but when it came right down to it I just couldn't stand up and lead those people to believe that everything is great in the state of American education. So I wrote this speech, which has pretty much become my personal teaching manifesto. A few of my BAT friends told me I should share it. The speech was very well-received at the meeting.  I've posted this on my FB page, and it is on Mark Naison's excellent blog,  With a Brooklyn Accent , as well as on the Badass Teachers' Association fan page on Facebook.  As a matter of fact, with 33 shares and over 700 likes from its original posting, it is probably floating around in many places. But I thought posting it to my own blog would be a g...

So after two days of introductory activities,  we really started with Shakespeare on Wednesday of last week.  The lesson setup for the first day centers around Act I:i:1-80. I give the students copies of the first 80 lines with all stage directions removed.  We first read the scene round Robin,  and they circle any words they don't know.  We go through all the words,  then reread the scene again,  still round Robin.  Then we discuss the scene and characters,  who are they,  what are they doing,  what is the setting, etc. Finally I ask for volunteers to put the scene on its feet,  and the rest of the class acts as directors. It is so important to me for the students to be comfortable and confident in this first scene that we take two full days to work on it.  It is the first opportunity I get to make sure they feel comfortable and interested,  and to let them see that it is okay for them to feel confused and to ask a l...

And we're off! (Slowly. Haltingly.  Some hitches.) Overall,  things went well today.  There were of course, a few technology glitches (fewer than last year), a few complaining kiddos (about the same as last year), and the usual problems about variations in completing the activities. I don't have a lot to write about, since by the time we talked through the directions and answered questions,  there was only enough time to get through two rotations. I will say that the pantomime scene was a resounding success, and that based on the station where the kids do a cold read of a scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream , I feel like this may be a better year for acting. The part of the activity that I love best, though, is watching the kids connect with Shakespeare.  They have to see it as something that can be accessed by everyone.  Shakespeare never intended his plays to be the sole province of academia. They were written for the masses crammed into the pit in fr...

Tonight finds me feverishly preparing for the introduction to our Shakespeare unit.  It is both my favorite thing and the thing I dread most. You may wonder about this dichotomy.  I adore this unit, and the opening activities are fantastic and really set the tone. However,  it is such a high-stress organizational task! I'm trying to remember everything we learned last year when we did this for the first time, which was a lot. But I've slept since then, and I can't shake the nagging feeling that I'm forgetting really important things. I guess tomorrow will tell the tale! The study of Shakespeare in general is very stress-inducing for me. Most of my students have never read or had any experience with Shakespeare. This unit will be their first exposure to something which will continue as a major part of the English curriculum through both high school and college.  The impression they leave my classroom with about Shakespeare and his work may very well set the tone for ...