When the hurly-burly’s done

So there haven’t been too many new posts here recently, but I’m not going to apologize. I try to keep my writing on this site relevant and readable, and I haven’t had much to address of late been able to formulate anything meaningful of late. There’s a lot on my mind–I started, and discarded, a post called “Our Failing Affluent Suburban Schools,” if that’s any indication–but I’m trying not to get all shrill and annoying here. So.

Yesterday I retreated to Manhattan with some old friends to get lunch and watch Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I’m a sucker for rock hagiographies–I was the biggest Behind the Music fan in my circle of friends–but for once, this is about a deserving subject. Joe Strummer is a fascinating person to know about. His posh background never prevented him from empathizing with people of other races or social classes (the film points to the Clash’s cover of  “Police and Thieves” “Police and Thieves” as the moment when punk opened its arms to black people).  And toward the end of his life, after some post-Clash depression that rendered him almost completely nonproductive, he formed a new band, the Mescaleros, that explored folk music from all over the world in service of Strummer’s always political, always optimistic lyrics.

Not everyone is going to change the world, or even give the world a couple of great songs, like Joe Strummer did.  But there are plenty of people trying, and to me that’s really important.  In the teaching profession, we tend to get stuck in our own rooms, hemmed in by state-mandated testing, intrusive administrators who just don’t get it, dumb committees we didn’t ask to be on, parents who are lied to by their children, children who are lied to by the television, colleagues who should’ve retired fifteen years ago, and all sorts of negativity.  But there needs to be room for creativity, for idealism, for all that sort of thing.  I’ve been down about my job recently, for rather personal reasons, but I keep thinking that someone in my classroom, if not a future Joe Strummer him- or herself, will at least get what he and his colleagues tell us.

Speaking of Strummer’s colleagues, do you know Billy Bragg?  I’ve become a huge fan of his in the past couple of years.  He and Strummer were friends.  And even if they weren’t, they were.  Know what I mean?

Heading into the last day of the first quarter, it’s not a bad idea to take a few minutes, relax, and enjoy a masterpiece: Wes Montgomery performing Thelonious Monk’s “‘Round Midnight.”

Bonus track: The Brad Mehldau Trio doing Radiohead’s “Exit Music (For a Film).”

Clarence’s started thinking about how to set up his classroom processes, tech-wise, for the school year that’s about to begin. It’s cold and rainy outside (in Scotland, this is what passes for “pretty nice weather,” but here in CT, it’s not going to cut it), I’ve got a pot of coffee going, and I’m in the right mood to work on this sort of thing. I’ll start off by responding to some of Clarence’s ideas, but I can’t guarantee that I’ll stay on topic. Hopefully that’ll be okay.

His first entry in the “Nuts and Bolts” series is about wikis. Back before I knew what a wiki was, I applied for a grant (which got rejected) for some tech items that would let my students create their own US History textbook, as the one we had at my old school was garbage. Since I was teaching both US History and English at the time, to the same students, I thought writing a new textbook that subsequent classes could add to would be a fabulous way for my kids to demonstrate both their history content knowledge and their writing skills. The way I’d envisioned it, committees of students would write and edit the narrative sections, create sidebars, curate primary sources, create maps and charts, and post the whole thing online. It seemed like such a good idea at the time, and still does.

I want to use wikis more this year. Evan had our ENG/AMH213 students using wikis all the time by the end of last year. Their sophomore research papers, for example, were wikified. Though there was the usual grumbling at the start (”Another online thing? You’re KILLING us.”), the students seemed to have taken to it.

Now I’m wondering if it might be worthwhile/interesting/feasible to set up a 212 wiki, sort of a collective notebook for everything students might need to succeed in the class. Research done to understand allusions in texts, vocab lists, interesting links, etc., all could be posted to a central wiki to which each student would have access. Clarence has an interesting system for giving credit to students for working on wikis (they need 20 points a week, from what I can tell, and earn 2 points for small edits/contributions and 5 points for doing something that strongly contributes to the class’s knowledgebase). I am definitely thinking along those lines right now–there’s got to be an incentive for contributing to a wiki, but dictating what needs to be done goes against the spirit of the whole enterprise.

The second Nuts and Bolts post is about RSS. I’m with Clarence on this: it’s probably the most powerful tool we have available, and yet we as teachers aren’t using it. Clarence has his students subscribe to a selection of blogs using RSS and uses that to generate classroom conversations about information and how it’s gathered, presented, and used. To me, this is very important–we should, as teachers, be helping our students to make sense of the huge amounts of information that come at them every day. RSS is an easy way to take on at least some of this challenge.

The fact is that RSS is different for kids. They are used to being spoon fed information from often outdated textbooks which they hate reading. But when it comes right down to it, textbooks are easy. They simply have to open them to a certain page when they are told and work with whatever they find. RSS requires them to be active and involved with the collection and evaluation of the information they work with. They need to find trusted nodes and work with their “information pipe.”

This morning, I caught an episode of Where We Live, which is broadcast on Connecticut’s main NPR affiliate. It’s usually a show about local politics and issues, and it’s definitely got limited appeal if you’re not in CT. But this morning’s show was very interesting. It was about how Facebook, MySpace, and other social networks are changing the nature of friendships and social order in high schools.

A phrase stuck out, and I’ve been thinking about it all day. One of the guests described high school as an “information-rich environment.” This is nothing new–high school hallways years ago were filled with conversation, and classrooms with notes passed back and forth. But now that students are using social networks outside of school, the guest went on to say, there are new sources and kinds of information to which our students are privy.

Is this a good thing? I don’t know. I use Facebook (students–don’t try to add me, because I’ll ignore you, and it’s amazing how potentially incriminating/embarrassing a lot of your photos are) to keep in touch with a large group of friends. I just got back from a summer program in Scotland with a lot of undergrads, and I was amazed at how natural it was for them to assume that everyone’d use Facebook for everything from sharing photos to making lunch plans. It’s part of their world, and definitely part of my students’ worlds.

But information comes from a lot more sources, and these are sources that we need to help our students to use. They’ll do Facebook stuff with no problem and no prompting, but will they read academic blogs? Will they set up RSS searches for research topics? Will they download podcasts of lectures and speeches? And, most importantly, will they know how to organize the information they find, and cull out the useless/spurious stuff?

Nuts and Bolts III is about blogging. It seems like it’s been a long time, but I only started blogging, and having my students blog, last year. This site, for example, went live in July. Since then, I’ve become, it seems, one of the go-to people for my colleagues who want to get into classroom blogging. It’s flattering that people think I know what I’m doing, but I get the most joy out of just telling people, quite honestly, that they can figure it all out on their own. That’s the beauty of the technology–it’s by far the easiest to use of anything I’ve found.

I’ve given a lot of thought to how I want to continue to use blogs in the classroom. This past year, I used what Clarence calls the “mother and child” model–one central blog (mine) with links to each student’s individual blog. I read their blogs using my handy-dandy RSS reader, which enabled me to stay on top of their assignments and make sure that what they wrote was appropriate. I had to step in a couple of times and take down posts that violated the rules laid out in the beginning of the year, but I was able to do that in about five minutes from the privacy of my home. It was great.

My next step is to figure out how to award honest credit for blogging. I’ve thought of a couple of models. One way might be to require a certain number of blog posts per week, cycle, month, semester, whatever, and do it based on quantity. Part of me really likes this idea–if a student does all 10 (or whatever) blog posts for the unit, she gets full credit. If she slacks and does 6 of ten, she gets 60% credit.

But there’s also got to be some way of measuring quality, not just quantity. The blogs my students keep aren’t meant to be read in a vacuum–if I’m the only person reading them, they might as well be those old-school journals I collect from time to time. A blog is meant to be interactive, to generate conversation and debate from the community as a whole. And commenting on other people’s blogs (whether fellow students or total strangers) needs to be factored in as well, because that’s important. I wonder if there’s a way to create some sort of metric for online academic conversation, in which students present to me a combination of a) their own blog posts that demonstrate good, incisive writing; b) their own blog posts that generated a lot of discussion; and c) their contributions to discussions on other blogs. That combination, I think, would be a much more accurate way of measuring how well students read and write on the internet, and how well they are able to communicate their ideas and opinions in a public forum.

That’s a lot to think about, and something I’ll return to at a later date. Right now, though, I’m sick of sitting in front of this screen. There’ll be more posts as this week goes on and I continue to record my thoughts about what needs to get done.

Peace.

Mexico was great.

Photos here.

So the Odyssey Movie Project is over, as is the school year. That’s not entirely true. We’ve entered our four-day exam period, but I don’t count that as part of the year. I still can’t figure out what kind of educational value final exams have–it’s not like the feedback on them, such as it is, is going to be used for much, as the course is over. That might be something for another post.

Right now, I want to celebrate.

Back in early May, 81 students learned that they’d be responsible for creating an original film based on The Odyssey. They were given skeletal instructions and turned loose to get the thing made in about a month and a half. They decided on a basic plot line and spent a couple of weeks writing a script (big shout to Star and Brad at Plotbot for their help) and storyboarding the whole thing.

Then all hell broke loose. There were casting, musical, location, wardrobe, and directorial decisions to be made. There were egos to soothe, shy people to draw out, budgetary concerns to overcome, and camera equipment to reserve. Students asked parents for permission to have an entire English class over to shoot at their houses. Ed’s class dumped my two classes, complete with an honest-to-goodness “It’s not you, it’s us” speech.

Editing hiccups happened. Fights occurred. There were a lot of suspicious looks from teachers in my corner of the building when they walked by. Snacks were eaten.

For a while, I didn’t think either of my classes would finish their appointed movie sections. It wasn’t until I saw all three movies this morning that I believed.

Let me assure you: there is nothing more thrilling than when your doubts are allayed. When the last strains of “Don’t Stop Believing” echoed in the auditorium at the end of the last movie, I finally realized what had happened: They did it.

81 sophomores.

3 fencing foils.

3 dance parties.

Innumerable (hopefully non-adult) shots.

1 dog.

Even the Download Beeping Song sounded good.

Was it a perfect project? Absolutely not. The feedback we’ve gotten has called for more structure, more definite due dates, more guidance. Totally fair. We sort of made this project up as we went along, no doubt. If I were to do this again with another class, say, maybe next year’s sophomores, I’d include strict dates for certain benchmarks to be met (first draft of script, final script, storyboard, shoot schedule, minutes of raw footage, etc). I’d also be much better at ensuring that students were reflecting every day on what had been accomplished, maybe through their blogs. I don’t know.

For now, though, I’m happy that it’s all done. The rest of the end-of-year wind-down seems anticlimactic.

Thanks, everyone. It’s been real.

Download Don’t Stop Believing.