When the hurly-burly’s done

Via Andrea Z.

Ahh, productive stalking…Andrea asks Bud some great questions, and he gives excellent answers. This is why I loved the session he and Troy Hicks ran.

As far as stalking goes, the best I could do was bumrush Clarence Fisher after a session and tell him I read his blog all the time.

It’s Sunday morning, I’ve gotten a good night’s sleep, and I’m starting to sort through my notes and thoughts from the Nashville madness.

I just saw this over on BoingBoing, and I figured I’d rip it off as a way of starting. It’s from an interview with Zadie Smith on KCRW:

But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, “I should sit here and I should be entertained.” And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true.

As a sometime lazy reader, I can’t agree with Smith more. In fact, it was in part because of this idea that the whole Moby-Dick online book group was started–the struggle with a particular piece of reading leads to greater understanding of the work and, if you’re lucky, yourself. This is why my students “don’t read” all of Macbeth, but do spend a couple of weeks fighting with the text as they prepare scenes. Discussion, individual writing, research, blogging–these are all tools that I hope to give my students as they practice interacting with texts, both in school and in their personal worlds.

That’s why the Writing Project model is crucial–it gives teachers the tools they need to help their students get to the kind of reading that Smith believes is so important. It empowers teachers to become writers and to help their students become writers, and it makes the class much less teacher-centric. I see blogging as the logical extension of that, and when we start moving towards wikis (and yes, we’ll start moving that way in the not-so-distant future) it’ll be even more so.

In some ways, the NCTE sessions I attended were disappointing. Maybe I got spoiled at the NWP event, and maybe I was just tired after a night seeing Nashville, but I didn’t have the patience to sit and be talked to. It was great hearing “celebrity” presenters like Don Graves and Tom Romano, both of whom I respect immensely as writers and teachers, but I wanted more interactivity. At the last NWP Tech Liaison session I attended, Troy Hicks and Bud Hunt started (and we all contributed to) a Wiki about our discussion. That interactivity was so refreshing and, more than the specific information that was transmitted, inspirational as a way that classrooms can, and maybe should, work.

My struggle now will be to try and articulate, then remedy, the reasons why I won’t totally let go and let my classroom be a place where we all, including (especially?) me, create our learning experience together. I need to figure out what I’m afraid of, or if I’m really even afraid. This is going to be fun, I think, and frustrating. I’m ready to hit the wall and I’m ready to figure out workarounds that might lead to dead ends. Off we go.

What it looks like to stand behind a cowboy and watch a band perform

Originally uploaded by jwasserman.
Pretty much self-explanatory. This was a new experience for me.

Bud Hunt (CSU Writing Project) and Troy Hicks (Red Cedar Writing Project) are leading a workshop right now and are working on a wiki with the notes…this is the way of the future. Buckle up.

This hotel is bigger than anything I’ve ever been inside

Originally uploaded by jwasserman.
There was a networking event/social, which was kind of fun for a little while. They had food and live music. Of course, the live music was of the country variety, which was great. Last time I was in Nashville I was 17 and didn’t want to hear thing one about country music, except for Hank Snow singing “Honeymoon on a Rocket Ship,” which I thought was great, and Alabama’s “Mountain Music,” which I remembered listening to at some cast party. When I was 17 I was a year away from discovering Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Willie Nelson, and Steve Earle. I can’t wait to get out tomorrow night and hear something a little more countryish than a bunch of English teachers throwing down for their peers.
We got a cab and went over to the Gaylord Opryland Hotel, which was enormous and extravagant and intimidating. They have an indoor jungle there, complete with a boat ride. Let me say that again. You can pay $9 to get on a boat and ride slowly around the courtyard/lobby/shopping district of this hotel. I think I would’ve felt horrible if we’d sprung for that. Most of the cabbies we’ve encountered in Nashville have been Somalis. The guy who drove us to the Opryland Hotel moved to the US three years ago. He was in Minneapolis but came down to Nashville, where he lives with his wife, drives a cab, goes to college, and saves up to get his four children out of Kenya and over to Tennessee. That is his dream. The guy who drove us back left Somalia over ten years ago, came here with pretty much nothing, and within a year of his arrival bought a three-bedroom house outside Nashville for about $70k. He thinks the place is worth around $200k now.
There’s a civil war in Somalia that’s been going on for years and seems to be getting worse now. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be in someplace safe like Nashville, going to school during the day and driving a cab at night, all the while working toward getting your loved ones out of an impoverished war zone. Those cab rides really put a lot of things in perspective for me. It was very similar to my first year teaching, when I got a new student who was a
Kosovar refugee. He’d seen so much, like his schoolmate’s entire family killed when their house was blown up. The other kids in the class thought that he was quiet because he didn’t speak English. The truth was that he spoke nearly perfect English. He was silent for another reason.