point of view and multiple choice questions

I know writers of multiple choice questions cover themselves by including verbiage such as: which choice best identifies...

Even so, I wonder how aligned that kind of question is to the spirit of a lot of good literature.

I just finished reading Mockingjay. It's intense, ambiguous in some ways, very rich material for discussing what one would do in one of the many difficult, no-win situations in the story.

So I started thinking about Suzanne Collins's point of view and purpose-- how she might express these if she were talking about her work, and how a multiple choice question writer for a major high-stakes standardized test would write a question... and how the multiple choice question writer would decide to write the correct answer, the one that best identifies the author's purpose (in one question) and point of view (in another).

And why it is considered valuable for a student to "correctly" choose the question-writer's best answer and not be allowed to compose a response that states and explains what the student sees as the author's positions.  Of course that kind of stuff can't be graded by a machine and it allows for too much difference of opinion.

I'm kind of rambling here, but the thought that started this is:

I think lots of good fiction writers write to tell a great story and also to get their readers to think about ways of being and thinking vicariously. A reader's readiness ( on innumerable levels) will affect a reader's responses.

Our education system, our assessment "system" is obsessed with what isn't worth measuring (or isn't measurable), but is immeasurably worth pondering and discussing.

I wonder what Suzanne Collins would say about this, about why she wrote these three powerful books.
a) to make readers distrust absolute authority
b) to make readers shun violence as a solution
c) to make lots of money and increase her fame
d) to make readers value the lives they have and live them as fully as possible

Why our students don't learn what we think we teach

one of the most important videos I've ever seen.

why our students don't learn what we think we teach

master learner

not just a trendy phrase

but an attitude
an accomplishment
and an aspiration

how I learn and why I'll talk more about it in 2010-11

just had a realization as I read

Medium does matter. And the textbook is generally a medium that inspires neither motivation nor imagination.

Increase Student Engagement by Getting Rid of Textbooks

In this new school year, I decide that I will consistently pursue reference to my learning online as often as possible, coupled with discussion opps for how and what students learn (& wish to learn) online.

Last year I remember thinking quickly, should I talk about my own learning? I usually decided No, since it was "off topic."

But I think learning is always "on topic" so I am going to follow my gut and use my own examples to spark students' interest and action.

lovers of literature, and makers

Manuel Garces, Jr. wrote:

How can we foster dialogue and questioning among students as an essential instructional practice?

I treat my kids as lovers and makers of literature, from day one. We speak in the language of book lovers and poetry lovers. We name the qualities of good literature. We look at issues and questions raised by our readings. Reading and writing and talking fill the air, always.

lovers and makers of literature

I'll be using this as part of my personal jdt*armory.


* joie de teaching-- how I will protect my heart from the corrosive effects of those who see teachers as the UPS people of education

great week

I sent the following in an email to Dar. I want to share it with our blog. It's got some very "inside my head" sections, but we'll live with that.

I have had such a thought-productive week. Last summer I became aware of the English Companion Ning. I must have joined it and then done nothing more with it.

This summer for some reason I bumped into it again, tried to join, discovered I had already.... So then I saw the ECNing is having its first ever Webstitute (via Elluminate) on 13 and 14 July. So I signed up to "attend." It was excellent. Mostly the speakers were about technology and connections using the web with students. I learned and learned and learned.

I created a second Twitter account for educational use. Currently I'm using it to follow some of the education people I was already following; I added some people I met at the webstitute. One of the wonderful characteristics of many outstanding teachers is that they are so generous with their time and wisdom.  In her keynote presentation, Laura Nicosia talked about Diigo and described how she finds it useful. and now I am crazy about it. We are following each other on Twitter. 

Sunday I'm joining a 2-week-long online discussion of a book co-written by Releah Cossett Lent (who wrote that cool book Dar also liked) and Jimmy Santiago Baca called "Adolescents on the Edge."

One of the most valuable aspects of all this online professional feasting is that it removes all the horrible, depressing parts of our job from my immediate concern, and it spurs me to have ideas and questions and joyful anticipation of the coming school year.

I am going to protect that feeling/attitude fiercely when we return to school and have our trainings and information and dictates from the great omniscient bureaucrats. I am going to let that part of the job lightly intersect with my being but not penetrate. I am going to protect my teaching joy fiercely. The feeling is too wonderful to let it be shut down.

So I'm working a bit on "protection strategies."  I think I must sound way over the edge, but I'm not going to go back and edit for clarity. We can talk. That's quicker than re-writing about how I feel.

voice

» The Week in Tweets for 2010-04-19 Bud the Teacher

• @ddraper So long as teachers believe that someone needs to "give them a voice," they/we won't have much of one. @bcrosby in reply to ddraper # 

I have learned so much this week: diigo, more twitter, tweetdeck, slideshare, google docs, more. Will elaborate later.



wow.  love it.

Alfie and Doug

I'm reading the available free Kindle sample of Alfie Kohn's Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community. I will be buying the book.

First, our blog is officially about our thoughts and experiences with Doug Lemov's Teach like a Champion. Weeks ago on an ed blog (or somewhere on the net) I read Kohn's observation about Champion, that it was about compliance. I won't elaborate now, because that's not my point. I could see Kohn's objection. I am suspicious of anything that leads toward mere compliance-- my own or someone else's.

But I had read enough of Champion to think that isn't what it's about.
Lemov and the teachers he cites are intense about having their students listen, learn, remember, demonstrate learning. Education is a matter of "life or death." In order for this listening, etc. to occur, each student must be giving maximum attention to the class activity.

My sense, what I value in the book, is that it shows me or reinforces ways to increase the probability of my students getting from me what they need, sharing with each other, remembering, being confident... because class activities occur where students are paying attention to the activity. For me that's the value. Last year's classes were ok, but... I'm not pleased to acknowledge that inadequate attention from many students kept the whole class from getting the maximum learning. Frequent (and often useless, stupid) interruptions (bathroom, talking, lead breaking, dress code, lack of materials, someone sneezing.... an endless and unpredictable menu) fragmented momentum and focus.

So what I want and need is to be reinforced that some of what I am doing is on the mark and I want  more options to consider. I'm used to what I do and it's quite effective. But in the flurry of the school year, I seldom have time to cogitate on significant alternate ways of being. I want Doug's and Alfie's help (and Frances's and Dar's and Cynthia's) to get some alternatives well-thought out, and to summon and nurture the inner energy necessary to do differently what I know I already do more than adequately.

sorry if this is vague to a reader. I guess I am writing to get my thinking moving rather than to describe or persuade another.

Back to Lemov and Kohn--

 I am unwilling to accomodate discipline practice that I philosophically disagree with: specifically, discipline practice that is based on the belief that students cannot be trusted, do not care, etc. I don't believe that, and I cannot treat anyone else that way. And I refuse to be be treated that way myself. What Kohn says strengthens my resolve to assert my belief, rather than just give in as I have been doing (with my style used quietly in my class, but not articulated to admin or parents).

still working out my thought on this,
scared to put it out there in case I fail
or give up,
decide it's too much trouble,
the kids won't like it anyway,
on and on ad nauseum,
ad nihil

putting it out there because I really do believe it
that it's worth the effort
that I can do it
that it is what I believe will be best for all directly concerned

and anyone not directly involved doesn't deserve a say.

~ I untied the string ~
Robert Graves "Warning to Children "
Read the complete poem. 

KWL for teachers

for thought:
a-kwl-interlude

“K.W.L.”
by Ms. W, Ms. V, Ms. FB, Mr. K

I know.
I want to know.
I learned.

I know teaching’s hard,
I know the kids are far behind,
I know the challenges I face,
I know it pays to be kind.

I want to change their world,
I want to open their eyes,
I want them to learn how to learn,
to keep their eyes on the prize.

I learned how far I could be pushed,
I learned to hold back tears,
I learned to keep my cool,
I learned to face my fears.

I know I am a champion.
I want to be a champion.
I learned to be a champion.

Alfie Kohn interview

I'm listening for the second time to an interview with Alfie  Kohn.

"Kids don't learn to make decisions by following directions. Kids learn to make decisions by     [wait for it...]   making decisions."

Yup. even bad ones (kids, decisions, either).


more to come as I continue re-listening.
Alfie Kohn interview


You can download the interview as a podcast and listen to it at your convenience in iTunes.

so many layers to this job-profession-calling

This has my mind today:

If we lack the language, and therefore the awareness, to right the imbalance between the vocational and the civic, if education in America—despite the heroic efforts of individual teachers—is no longer in the business of producing the kinds of citizens necessary to the survival of a democratic society, it’s in large part because the time-honored civic function of our educational system has been ground up by the ideological mills of both the right and the left into a radioactive paste called values education and declared off-limits. Consider the irony. Worried about indoctrination, we’ve short-circuited argument. Fearful of propaganda, we’ve taken away the only tools that could detect and counter it. “Values” are now the province of the home. And the church. How convenient for the man.

How does one “do” the humanities value-free? How does one teach history, say, without grappling with what that long parade of genius and folly suggests to us? How does one teach literature other than as an invitation, a challenge, a gauntlet—a force fully capable of altering not only what we believe but how we see? The answer is, of course, that one doesn’t. One teaches some toothless, formalized version of these things, careful not to upset anyone, despite the fact that upsetting people is arguably the very purpose of the arts and perhaps of the humanities in general.

Dehumanized

In Teach Like a Champion, the schools cited are said to be places where education is a matter of "life and death."

At our meeting Tues., I said I could understand that stance in some schools, but at our site, that essential aspect eludes me.  However, as I read this article, I think I may find-- authentically-- some of that sine qua non. I'll add some quotes after I read and re-read the article.

how much beauty

This is something I wanted to share with those I admire.

My point is this:

It matters how much beauty you create in the world. Because it sticks. Your actions have consequences. Your products, your services, your companies, your customer service techniques, these things literally raise or lower the aggregate level of happiness in the world with every act and omission.

And it will be remembered.

The code you write today may still be running in 20 or 30 years. How much happiness will it have created? How much frustration?

I beseech you: engineer beauty. Peddle pleasure. Sell happiness. We agree on happiness. We all want happiness.

using your mind in the service of others

from another blog Joy is reading:

http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/2010/06/to-new-teachers-graduation-speech-you.html

a couple quotes from the blog

Don’t expect things to be reciprocal. Kids will not always respond, will even shun you. But stick with it. Show them that you’re serious and available even when they’re not.

She takes in a room full of kids at a glance to see who needs help, thinks on her feet, knows how to respond to a wrong answer and provides the apt example or comparison to guide a child toward clearer thinking. 

more from the math teacher

from this blog entry    http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=6581

...it's incumbent on human beings to live lives of fascination and to share that fascination with others.

I used to indulge that impulse to share my fascinations pretty frequently-- origami, rubber stamps, photography, etc.  But since the obsession with bell-to-bell instruction and so-called accountability, and fear of seeming not to be teaching my students, I have stopped a lot of that kind of sharing. 

One thing I like about what Mr Meyer writes is that it is so much what my heart and gut tell me, and what we do not hear from any official channels.

There's a lot more I should elaborate on if I want you to understand my thoughts on this topic, but it's Saturday morning and I want to go do something else now.

math and us

I found a new blog to absorb.  It's by a math teacher. I watched his talk on TED

and went to his blog and have been there on and off for about 4 hours.

Here's the post (of many I could choose) that I think is for me now

http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=5781

and an excerpt; for algebra, substitute reading, grammar, literature, composition, spelling, etc.

3. This kind of algebra makes our students dumb, unimaginative, and scared of real problems. At the end of the model lesson, the coach put up our homework, which was a carbon copy of the original problem, new numbers swapped in for the old. ¶ I can't describe my contempt for this arrangement. ¶ This is how we make kids stupid and impatient with irresolution, eager for contrived problems that look just like the last contrived problem, completely lost if we so much as switch around the order of a few words. "We don't teach them problem solving skills anymore," my department head said to me. "We teach them problem types."

Algebra teachers sell students a cheap distortion of the real world while insisting at the same time that it really is the real world. The cognitive dissonance is obvious and terrible. Students know the difference. It cheapens my relationship to them and their relationship to mathematics when you ask me to lie to them.

It's like offering someone lust or manipulation while insisting that it's love. Not only are the short-term consequences devastating but it makes that person distrustful or wary of the real thing. Make no mistake. We are making an alien of algebra. We are doing real damage here.

This kind of thinking will change what I do and how I do it even more.

strategies & the use thereof

I keep thinking of new things I want to write about
things I have been pondering for years.

so here is another entry from me--

Often I think teachers use strategies (are told to use them with lots of ese kiddos), especially behavior strategies to avoid having to deal with an actual individual human being (aka student). E.g., I don't have to look in a student's eyes or try to reach that student where she is right now. I can pull a research-based strategy from my vast repertoire of strategies and use that on her, as if she were an animal I am to train instead of a human being to interact with, to teach and to learn from.

over-simplified, but important in my mind, based on my experience and what I have observed.

I'm not dismissing strategies, just the use of them to avoid the unpredictable and sometimes difficult interaction with another person.

thinking and not thinking

This weekend I have been trying not to think of school


but I can't stop thinking about learning and education.

complex

research        heart & gut

We need them both.