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.

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.

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.

So the WP site at UCLA has, for the past four years or so, run a study and focus group about addressing LGBTQ issues in the classroom. They’ve been doing a lot of work around the perks of being a wallflower, which they say is a great book for introducing these issues with high school students.

Discussion about Perks brings up a lot of issues that are similar to the ones we’ve been talking about with Huck Finn in the PLP group. Are we forcing people to deal with issues that they’d rather avoid, and if so, why are we doing it? Nicole from Denver teaches at the college level and is amazed at public school teachers who bring out these problems/controversies. If we bring up issues that personally affect us—ie, a gay teacher bringing up/fighting homophobia, or a teacher of color addressing racism—aren’t we running the risk of being perceived using our powerful positions as teachers to push an agenda on unsuspecting kids? I want to use The Chosen in ENG213, but won’t it just be perceived as me forcing my own interests as a Jewish teacher on my students?

I’ve yet to teach a class in which, when we read a book about an African-American character, the students don’t suddenly turn and look at one of the black kids in the class. We are, too often, expected to be able to speak for our group, whatever that might be, and it’s assumed that we always are. Being a minority of any kind forces that. But why?

Roundtable 1: Balancing the immediate needs of new teachers with an inquiry approach
There were two presenters, both of whom have a lot of experience running Writing Project sites that deal with all sorts of new teachers in high-turnover districts. Philadelphia and Boston have a lot of Teach for America participants, plus career-changers and teachers just out of school. This creates a lot of difficulties for maintaining continuity.

Dina Portnoy, Philadelphia WP, presented first. New teachers come from three places—young people straight out of the masters or pre-service programs, second career people, and Teach for America. The New Teacher Initiative used technology and building websites to promote teacher inquiry among the new teacher group. They used the KEEP Toolkit to simply collect and present data in an easy way. An inquiry into practice course—second year teachers who are working on certification/masters—pairs writings by teachers (many in NWP) paired with theoretical pieces that informed those writings. They used Blackboard, and wrote a lot about it. Also, teachers in the program have to develop their own inquiry questions. Issues are typical NCLB/urban schools issues. One new teacher was science department chair by October. TFA people tend to be put in these kinds of schools. Also, there is a need for immediate strategies for everything, especially classroom management, that all brand-new teachers (especially alternative certification teachers) have. Also, who’s going to stay and for how long will they stay? TFA is a 2-year commitment. 97% stay second year (higher than retentation rate for new teachers in traditional cert programs), 40% stay beyond second year.

Steve Gordon of the Boston WP presented next. When someone begins teaching, they want support and to belong to a community, but they are intellectuals who want to become teachers. How can we support that? How do you support a commitment to the craft? Starting problem—how do you recruit new teachers to join a new community that’s not officially required by the school district? Boston WP offered a retreat on Nantucket! Funding for inquiry classes is an issue—BWP is affiliated with UMass Boston. The cost to run the program can be prohibitive. You need your class to be a year long. BWP’s first inquiry class was only one semester, which wasn’t enough time. The second one (about publishing) was a full year. Publishing dignifies intellectual thinking. The numbers dropped as the year went on—you have to attend to recruiting new people while you’re creating a sustaining culture of people who are already on board. They talked to people two years after they participated to follow up.

I still think of myself as a new teacher—I’m in my fifth year, but I’ve been in two different districts. I’m still finding my way. Part of the reason for my participation in this workshop is selfish—I am an unabashed nerd and want to find out about the sorts of inquiry projects that other new teachers are working on. Another part, though, is more altruistic. I feel that since I am so new, both to the profession and to the Writing Project (just joined the CWP leadership council this year) that I can be a voice for newer teachers. So many WP people are highly experienced or retired and while I trust that they have our best interests in mind, I think it is important to have the voices of newer people represented. A question I have is whether the participants in the inquiry course were able to maintain/sustain their community after the course ended—did they get together in writing groups or something like that, or did they drift back into their own corners of the school district? I think that maintaining that continuity would be really important, especially since my impression is that it’s very hard to complete an inquiry project and get it to the point of publication in just one year. That ongoing support (not just by WP core members, but by inquiry class participants) seems vital.

Roundtable 2: Modifying sites’ work to meet the needs of new teachers
Vickie Brockman, Winthrop Writing Project (SC)—teachers with less than 3 years experience aren’t invited to summer invitationals, but they have monthly dinner meetings (Thursdays, white tablecloths) that deal with issues DRIVEN BY WHAT THEY WANT TO TALK ABOUT. There’s a summer program for new teachers—after 2 summers of that, they are invited to summer institute. But how do they stay involved in the monthly meetings? They have conversation partners, whose job it is to keep conversation focused at new teacher dinner meetings using a protocol. The key seems to be to talk to people who are one step removed (3-5 years experience) rather than someone with 30 years of experience. Little pieces of work at a time for new teachers. Everyone gets some ownership, and leadership people are grown from the start. A book study group didn’t work. LISTEN TO THEM AND CHANGE FOR WHAT THEY NEED. Southern Nevada— is the 5th biggest district in the country, basically Vegas + surrounding areas. 8,000 new teachers in last five years. What is a new teacher? There are lots of alternatively certified teachers. A traditional mentoring system didn’t work for SNWP any better than it did for the Las Vegas school district, which no longer has a new teacher induction program. Inquiry is the most overlooked portion of new teacher training—they think they want people to show them how to take attendance, but really need reflection/research. It’s important to have new and veteran teachers work together to have these conversations. NWP has expanded work geographically while getting deeper. How do you keep TCs on the same page? How do you keep them involved in the WP? How do you feed new teachers into the WP? Lasts five days. Work through use of protocols, how are they used, designed, etc.
Writing is KEY to protocols—doesn’t matter what the protocol is about. You can have smaller groups at different schools, led by trained TCs. This is how the CWP can get involved with reaching both new and veteran teachers.

New teachers in CT are pulled in many directions, as I’m sure they are everywhere. In our 2nd year, we complete the BEST portfolio, which is a four-pronged reflective monstrosity that takes basically from October-May to complete. That’s the main focus of the 2nd year, and districts in CT find themselves trying to support their new teachers in this pursuit while also demanding that they prepare their students for the now-mandatory-for-graduation standardized testing system that’s in place in the state. Last year was my 2nd year in CT, so I did my BEST portfolio, but I also had participated in the CWP summer institute the summer immediately before. I think my experience there was what got me through the Teaching of Writing portion. I wonder if there’s a way for WP sites to help new teachers through these certification program requirements.

New teachers are people to be worked with, not worked on.
WP sites are a home for all teachers, not just experienced teachers.
There’s a dichotomy between inquiry and actual practice—it’s not just another new thing they need to do, but it should be a part of their practice. The answers are there. It’s a practical way to conduct business every day.

“They’re having trouble printing our release so we can tell the fuel guy how much fuel we need.” About 10 pm, sitting in a very tiny plane on the tarmac at JFK. We’ve just walked through a fabric tunnel illuminated with festive white Christmas lights. Every so often, there was a gap in the fabric and we could see pavement covered with tiny trucks. Cones blocked one escape path; a trash can the other. Clearly, this area is secure. would be proud. Good perimeter.

The captain has assured us, in a very warm twangy voice (the sort that you wish all airline captains would use) that he’ll get us to Nashville as fast as possible. This is reassuring. The flight attendant is a nice but harried-looking woman who isn’t terribly thrilled that rows 9-12 find the whole situation just on the right side of hilariously absurd. Missy, Sue, and I are in row 9. The laughter grows a little as we take a lap of the various runways and taxiways. At one point we get on the BQE and are briefly in LaGuardia. This is awesome.

In Delta’s most wond’rous waiting area, Sue, Missy and I talked to a lady waiting to get back to DC after three months in Europe and North Africa. She had the fanciest boots I’d ever seen. Her friend, whom she had met on her flight from Germany to JFK from, looked like I feel right now. He’d been returning to Pittsburgh from Pakistan all week. Apparently his “hip-hopping” itinerary got him on some sort of watch list, too. Then there was the consultant from Albany. He was the happiest person in the whole lounge, probably because he’d just come back from three weeks in Kyrgyzstan, which he got to following a two-day delay in Istanbul. “A nomadic culture,” he said of where he’d been. “I served in the Peace Corps back when the world was new.”

We taxied from JFK to LaGuardia and back, taking off about four hours late. Got in to Nashville and to our hotel at 2am. Sleep. Yes.