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My Poetry and Commentary on Life

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  • Rosenblatt Redux

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    “One of the banes of educational systems today is the pressure on the teacher to work out neat outlines of the ideas about literature that his students are to acquire. Once such a plan is made, there is a great temptation to impose it arbitrarily. The teacher becomes impatient of the the trial-and-error groping of the students. It seems so much easier all around if the teacher cuts the Gordian knot and gives the students the tidy set of conclusions and labels he has worked out. Yet this does not necessarily give them new insights. Hence the emphasis throughout this book on the teacher’s role in initiating and guiding a process of inductive learning” (Rosenblatt 1995, p. 232).

    It is easier to simply tell the students what I think. It is harder to listen to what the students are saying about the text and help them make the connections go a bit further. It is tempting to make their statements, force their statements, into forms which I saw before they started to talk about the text. I have discovered (originally through teaching “Twelfth Night” using performance) that if I allow the students to learn the text with me, rather than from me, then I will come to a better understanding of the text: a social construction if you will. Thereby we both gain in the extension of our knowledge about and around a text. Last Monday I suggested to my UTeach student that she watch what I did in second period, then make an attempt on her own during third. Yes, kind of a sink or swim method, but I provided lots of water wings, and I was there if she started to drown. What was interesting, and what relates to the quote from Rosenblatt, was rather than listen to what the students were saying, and letting/allowing them to go where their conversation about the poem led them, she tried to force them down the same path my second period students travelled. Not to say that my second period did not discover something about the poem, but third period were finding something else out. And that is hard to do; I think, like all humans, we get trapped by the first thought we have about something. We tend not to look for alternatives: why should we, we have an answer that works, which is why I think we are so easily trapped by our tacit ideologies. It is easier not to think. “The first man to see an illusion by which men have flourished for decades surely stands in a lonely place,” wrote Gary Zukav according to my daily quote calender a few days ago.

  • Read a "F- -ing" Book

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    Letting the students read widely books of their own choosing as oppossed to telling them what to read: what an idea! It is a shame that after 70 years this is still considered radical in the English classroom. “How can you tell if they’ve read the book?” Is the question I get from my peers. It is always about testing, not really assessement, but a way to prove that the students have done what they were told to do. When the focus becomes a matter of checking to see if they have actually read the book, the students find easy ways to get around it: Sparknotes. My current UTeach student (a kind of student teacher) confessed to me that she went through her AP English classes in high school without reading any of the required texts, she relied solely on Sparknotes. Stunning! That she would tell me this, and that after that kind of experience as a high school student she became an English major! Arrrrgh!

    “To reject the routine treatement of literature as a body of knowledge and to conceive of it rather as a series of possible experiences only clears the ground. Once the unobstructed impact between reader and text has been make possible, extraordinary opportunites for a real educational process are open to the teacher.” (Rosenblatt 1995, p.70). Since I finally let go of the main texts in my class ( I still begin each class with a poem or a passage of prose, or exemplar essays when we are writing), and my students read what they want, I think I have lessened the amount of “cheating” that goes on in my class. Of course it can still happen, students will read sparknotes on a “classic” and then come in to talk to me about it. But for the most part it is easy to tell, they have a superficial grasp of simple plot lines and character. In a way I think they have to think harder in order to get out of reading a book, than if they had just read it. On the whole I think my students read more and get more out of my class because they encounter texts on a more visceral level than if we all read the same book together. They react on an emotional level, getting angry or happy depending upon the connection they make with the book. When a student will not stop talking about the book they finished, even after I try to move on to another student, I see that as a measure of success; the student wants to talk about the issues stirred up in them by the book. Additionally several of my students after finishing a book, when they discover there is a sequal or another book by the same author ( I am thinking specifically about Walter Dean Myers) they show a level of excitement that rarely happened back when I taught whole class novels. It is this excitement that will more likely lead the students into the world of literature and all of the attendant perks of that world, than any teacher reading and explicating a book at a classroom full of children.

  • Voices

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    Maybe it is just that I have been teaching through the emergence of the translation/critical literacy that much of what Myers talks about seems fairly obvious. Not to say it is not important. The conflict with the decoding/analytic literacy is that it is not dying very quickly. My students have had the idea that they cannot use “I” in their papers pressed so deeply into their brains that it often requires the persistence of a diamond miner to pull that idea out of their writing. Today a student who failed the exit level TAKS by two questions came to me (mainly because the admin is calling them in one at a time and telling them how far off they are and then telling them to go to their English teachers) he was worried about the essay portion. He wanted to make a three; he seemed to think that his writing sounded too much like his manner of talking. I found that disturbing since one of the things that is supposedly a highly valued quality on the TAKS is “voice.” Of course, what qualifies, as voice is not necessarily what the students see as voice. I am not sure myself what it is supposed to mean. I don’t think it is simply an awareness of audience, which seemed to be the definition at a workshop I attended recently. Maybe I am naïve, but I think that one can sound like the way they talk and still move from one speech event to another no matter how “formal” or “informal” the event may be. Yes, there are expectations of tone and diction, but the main personality that one projects can still be the voice of any type of writing, whether it be an academic essay, a poem or an email. “I yam what I yam,” Popeye said.

  • Applebee Haiku

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    The present is a present
    presented by the past
    to present the future.

    No this does not follow the syllable count. Oh, Well.

  • Taking Part in the Talk

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    “The most comprehensive curricular conversations occur when students discover interrelationships across all of the elements in the curriculum, so that the parallel but independent discussions of an episodic curriculum begin to echo back on one another.” (Applebee 1996, p. 77)

    I love the idea of knowledge-in-action, as learning to take part in the conversation of a domain of knowledge, and ultimately in the conversations that occur across domains of knowledge. It reminded me of Heath’s (1984) ways of knowing that we all bring with us to school, or the conversation, from our cultural groups. In order to take part in the conversation of a group we must learn the discourse(s) which make up that conversation. Last night I attended a wine tasting party at a friend’s house. I have always liked wine (go ahead snicker), but have found the conversation that revolves around it to be silly and pretentious. There is a fairly stable terminology/metaphors one can use when talking about the wine. Everyone takes it very seriously, but I have often wondered why do we have to use those specific descriptions: chocolate, berry, apple, gooseberry (whatever those are). I read once that J. Mcinerneyay wrote a wine column where he described the wines he was reviewing using actresses rather than the traditional terminology. I thought at the time, why not? Yet, that idiosyncratic terminology would not allow one to become part of the larger discourse community.
    In the same manner, integrating the curriculum, whether on a large scale across multiple conversational domains, or on a smaller scale within the conversational domain of a subject area, becomes a way for the student to become a part of a larger and longer ranging (in time) discourse community. This idea is similar to slowly becoming more adept personally with the discourse of doctoral language and literacy studies. When I started this two years ago, people in class were tossing words, and phrases about as if they were frisbees in the park. Much of the time I was befuddled by the language. When I went over the readings, I got it; but the conversations about the topic were obviously reaching back across other classes and other books that were not part of the required reading for that class, yet were pertinent to the discussion. I was hearing echoes of previous conversations which I was not a part. Over time I have become more comfortable in the discussions because I have learned to better take part in the conversation and to make the connections by becoming more conversant in the language of the domain.

  • So Say Us

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    “past literacy practices have served different national goals, different markets different contracts, different tools, and so forth. It is clear that the k-12 teachers of the United states are being asked to aim for a new standard of literacy for all students and that this new standard, like others from the past, results from a convergence of new insights into texts, new models of learning, and new national needs – – in this case, the new demands of contemporary economic problems and the workplace, the new demands of pluralism and diversity in our democracy and the new demands for new supports for personal growth.” (Myers, p.117)

    New literacies emerge over time. I think that to insist upon a type of literacy (the internet, visual, print etc.) is to insist upon a literacy that is already past. I wonder, (without losing the importance of all of these qualities: “the new demands of pluralism and diversity in our democracy and the new demands for new supports for personal growth”), why we must impose our version of what we think it means to be literate. There are numerous ways of knowing/being literate. (Heath) When we as academic literates look about the world and demand that we know how to know better than others (now there is a word), we are making huge assumptions about our ability to predict what is coming down the road. When we do this, it is also to cooperate with and reinforce the demands of the hegemonic structures, which control and oppress all of “the new demands of pluralism and diversity in our democracy and the new demands for new supports for personal growth.” As I said in a comment on another classmate’s blog, I insist (yes, I am aware of the irony here) that there has to be an underlying literacy that is common to all of the literacies as they are elaborated in Myers and others. It is the underlying literacy, how we read anything (from books to people to the world), how we make meaning out of the barrage of symbols we are inundated with everyday, that should be what we try to help our students learn to manage. What that literacy entails, I do not know. I guess it goes back the question in our first class: what does it mean to be a better reader?

  • Changing My Mind

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    Ok, a bit more on Myers’ “Changing Our Minds.” Once I got used the “/” slashed categories of literacies he was using I began to enjoy him. I like the idea of as we move from one literacy to another we lose as well as gain. The proximity of a more oral culture, the immediacy of the engagement between the parties to communication are lost or at least tempered as a signature literacy culture becomes dominant. If I did not read him incorrectly, he also seemed to allow for the continuance of aspects of one literacy to continue and play out even as another literacy had become dominant. It seems that the problems between the analytic literacy and what he proposes as the new emergent literacy ( translational/critical or was it transactional? I like translational better), is that the new literacy has not become dominant or at lest not become part of the kind of literacy employed by the dominant class. It is not yet hegemonically embedded to seem natural. He does, as Anne wrote, seem to be a bit insistent about how the new literacy should be implemented, or perhaps he is just suggesting ideas. I could be conflating what I have been reading for my Curriculum theory class with Myers, but it seems that a reading/writing workshop approach lends itself quite well to the translational/critical literacy because of its foregrounding on the reader and writer as readers and writers, reading and writing as a process, and the importance of a wide ranging acceptance of divergent voices (as opposed to the monolithic academic writing voice).

  • Once More Into the Breach

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    Work starts tomorrow. I have had an oddly easy going prep for the beginning of school this year. My room was set up, I prepped all the paperwork for the first week; I even wrote and turned in my first lesson plan five days before it was due. I feel as if perhaps I have lulled myself into a false sense of security. Last year I had the best group of students I have ever had in 18 years of teaching. I fear that they have made me feel the need to be less prepared. Although when I go over what I have done, I really haven’t done anything less than I have done before. In fact it seemed easier this year than in the past. Maybe I’m finally getting the hang of it.

    I finished Myers’ “Changing Our Minds” for Bomer’s class. Lots of things to write about from that, but I think it will have to wait. I found it interesting however that when a shift from one form of literacy to another occured it happened in the elite first. It corresponds, I think, to the way we as teachers get blasted for not teaching what we did not know was wanted by society, when we were doing quite well teaching what we were teaching. I have also thought, Each time the state changes the “test” there are dire predictions concerning how poorly the students will do. Yet, amazingly: the students do better than was expected. Perhaps both teachers and students are smarter than we are given credit for.

  • Summer Reading’s Over

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    I went up to the school today with my last load of big things: my rocker, five bean bags, the standup cutout of the three stooges dressed in graduation gowns, two boxes of books, and my two new plants. We have to report to work next Tuesday for inservice stuff. I want to spend my time writing out plans (something I have never done very well, at least writing them out so my evaluator can understand what it is I’m doing). But my doc classes are going to keep me busy, so I am trying to get organized at work in hopes that things will go easier. This working full time teaching and taking two grad classes each semester keeps me busy, not to mention three teenage children at home. The extended summer was good however. I got a lot read. Except for the adolescent novels ( which were ones I chose to read for one of my doc classes this summer) the rest of the books on the list were just for my own whims:

    Chomsky-Foucault Debate
    Democracy and Education: Howard Zinn
    Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Philip K. Dick
    The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick
    Wolf: Jim Harrison
    Teaching Community: bell hooks
    Literacies of Power: Ralph Macedo
    Stargirl: Jerry Spinelli
    The Giver :Lowis Lowry
    The Chocolate War: :Robert Cormier
    Greater than Angels: Carol Matas
    The Year of the Hangman: Gary Blackwood
    Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes: Chris Crutcher
    Tunes for Bears to Dance to: Robert Cormier
    Living Up the Street :Gary Soto
    Hope was Here: Joan Bauer
    Bad Boy :Walter Dean Myers
    Joey Pigza Swalled the Key :Jack Gantos
    The Tequila Worm:
    Before We were Free: Julia Alvarez
    The Crazy Horse Electric Game: Chris Crutcher
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows :J.K. Rowling
    The Kite Rider: Geraldine McCaughrean
    and chunks of Democracy and Education: John Dewey, and Metaphors We Live By: George Lukacs

    Work will limit any free reading I do in the fall. I guess that is why I tend to read poetry on my own when work in going on. I can read a poem fairly quickly and savor it as I go through my day.

  • Silly stuff

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    I found this site on another person’s blog. You too can be a Simpson’s character. Just go to http://simpsonizeme.com and you can be yellow too.

  • Pickles

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    I am adventurous, I eat pickles on my hamburgers now,” my oldest son bragged this morning. He was being sarcastic, albeit honest, about his eating habits. His comment made me think about the importance of taking risks, unsettling the normative patterns of my life. A few weeks ago I bemoaned in this space about why I couldn’t make up my mind whether to continue in my Doc program or not. I am going to continue in the program; I will probably continue to whine and worry about it nonetheless. However, I do enjoy thinking about all the stuff that makes up my field. I also enjoy thinking about how all of the stuff that is tangential to Language and Literacy influences all the stuff that makes up Language and Literacy. In a recent article in the newspaper, the influence of friends on each other’s habits and life, ranging from smoking to depression to obesity to autism was recounted. It is not a surprise that we are influenced by those around us. I think everything and everyone we come in contact with, to a greater or lesser degree, influences us. This is not a one way shaping, we in turn influence everyone else. It is not a compromise, nor a consensus: “Superior learning lies in knowledge more widely distributed across units, with common rather than disparate interpretations. Huber, following Morgan and Ramirez, (1983), writes of such knowledge as “holographic” in that each unit carries at least a rough picture of the whole” (p. 13 Salomon and Perkins). I think it is more of a genetic metaphor rather than a holographic one, where the DNA for the whole is contained in each cell. The knowledge of the culture as a whole is determined by the mass of individuals acting together. It is not just individuals acting alone (as the Romantics were wont to say), but individuals acting in and as groups. In my class, again and again, a theme that comes up, in the literature we read, is the balance between being a part of the whole and apart from the whole. I don’t think it is an either/or binary, but rather an ongoing dance where the two parts merge and reemerge, changing and changed. “As pointed out by Damon (1991): Even when learning is fostered through processes of social communication, individual activity and reflection still play a critical role. Sometimes . . . individual activity may build on collective questions and insights. Other times, however, individual activity may need to resist the collective illusions created by a group . . any paradigm that assumes a one-way, deterministic relation between the collective and individual knowledge construction is over simplistic (Damon as cited in Salomon and Perkins, p. 17). My classes combined with all of the education books I have read, the literary-crit theory, the philosophy, and poetry, all combine to create how I have come to think about what it means to learn, teach and live. They are like the pickles on my son’s hamburger, perhaps leading to a larger view of what there is to be a part of in the world.

  • Champing at the Bit

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    The school calendar has dominated my life for the last twenty years; small changes disturb the pattern. We have an extended summer because of the Texas legislature’s decision to start school as close to September as possible. (Some push from the vacation lobby I never understood). As a result I am at the point in my summer when I am ready to go up to the school and set up my room. This normally happens a couple of weeks before we are to go back. I know, I am only getting antsy a week or so early, so it is not that big of a deal. I just find it interesting how structured and automatic our patterns become over time. Tomorrow I plan on going up to my classroom and setting up the room. They held summer school classes at my school, and my room was used. I had to take down all of my stuff, so tomorrow I will be sticking posters up and arranging desks. They normally give us a day and a half to prep for the beginning of the school year, the rest of the week is taken up by meet and greet activities and rah-rah professional development.

  • Incremental

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    there once was a shape
    made of wet sand
    it doesn’t matter what shape
    just that it was there
    and now it is not
    different people in different times
    saw different shapes
    yet still spoke as if it were
    the same shape contiguously
    now it is not except it is
    more so than previously
    because it holds its shape
    true to each who speak of it
    the past maintains the present
    the present invents the past
    to better to become itself
    together the mean of meaning
    is shaped then reshaped again
    so much sand in our hands

    (summer 2007)

  • Now What?

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    I turned in my last test for Ed. Psych earlier today. So now, except for reading ten more adolescent novels, I am through with grad school for the summer. Perhaps for good. While I love the readings and the class discussions, for the most part, I am still caught up in the question I had after my first semester: Why am I doing this? Every semester since I have started this, I go through this same questioning: why am I doing this? Perhaps my inability to come up with an answer is reason enough not to finish. The tests and papers, where I have to perform in order to prove myself, create stress because I am such an over achiever and obsess over my “failures” if I make a B. Then when I make my A, I wonder if I really deserved the grade and criticize the work I did do. What kind of sick psychology is in play there? I feel as if I am missing my children’s adolescence by spending my time reading the reams of articles required for each class. ( I was stunned when someone in class last week admitted to not having read one of the two articles we were supposed to read. This in a relatively light reading load.) It was interesting taking two classes this summer, because it seemed as if I had lots of time because I was not working full time teaching high school. Yet I had more than one classmate looked shocked that I was taking two classes in one summer session. I am acquiring debt at an alarming rate, just as my oldest child is beginning to apply to colleges, none of which are cheap, and all of which I will do whatever I can to help him go to if he gets accepted, which it looks like he will based on their student demographics. I don’t see a lot of benefits to finishing, other than I hate quitting anything. I like the idea of being able to say I am working on a Ph.D., and the idea that I will get one if I continue, but is that just my egotistic vanity that is at stake; my insecurity in my intellectual ability trying to justify itself with yet another piece of paper? One of the four truths of Buddhism is that suffering is caused by desire: perhaps I should rethink my desires? OM.

  • flux

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    are you the you you are
    when you change how much
    of any given time are you
    what you are or are becoming

    an amoeba absorbs
    what it moves through
    changing its surroundings
    and its self into itself