Education: May 2005 Archive Page

Often, when studying history, the details are lost in an attempt to fully understand the bigger picture. We do not look at what the individuals faced, the decisions they had to make. This project will not only examine the Holocaust as a whole event, but delve deeper into the history to see what choices people had to make as the Nazis stormed their homes, took them to ghettos, and forced them to dig their own graves.

It will be important to approach this subject with caution and seriousness. It was a horrible experience that we can never recreate or even relate to. As you create your story, pay close attention to the details. Read the stories of those who lived and were able to share with world what they experienced. This project will hopefully draw you into the time period and help you understand it more thoroughly. --[Holocaust Choose-Your-Own Adventure Assignment] (Stories of the Holocaust Wiki Project )

Part of a project that asked students to create a branching narrative (of the Choose Your Own Adventure model) describing the fate of a Jewish family during the Holocaust.

On the one hand, this is an excellent way to get students to imagine all the possibilities, rather than simply following the story of one particular family. I particularly like the concept of an Intersection Point, where it seems events take on a more communal focus.

On the other hand, it would take a strong teacher (and supportive administration) to manage something like this.

Seton Hill has a National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, and I'm currently involved in doing some editing and design work for them. I don't have any particular knowledge of the subject matter, but I can tell that emotions run high on topics such as simulations (in which students act out the roles of prisoners or guards) and the over-emphasis on rescues (when in fact few people were willing to risk themselves for their Jewish fellow citizens).

Via Weblogg-ed.

There was one kid who always sat in the front row--let's call him Fester--who recognized me right from the start of class because he'd read one of my short stories in a horror anthology. He was a horror fan. His story was also written from a passion, but I could tell that he truly set out to frighten me, and therefore impress me. And he did this by writing a story about me. --Mike Arnzen --Grossing Out Teacher: A Horror Writer in the Writing Classroom  (Broad Universe)

I love the name... "Fester". His last name is probably Boyle. Arnzen is inviting comments on Pedablogue.

As part of a web design unit, I once gave the class an assignment to create a web page that was so terrible it would make me weep. One student posted a photo of one of my children, with a link that connected to a porn site. I should have probably specified that I was looking for horrid design, rather than horrid content.

In another class, a female student submitted a two-page dramatic analysis making a fairly predictable and juvenile pun on the word "climax." She supplied ample erotic language to illustrate her point, but she mistook the ending of the play for the climax. Some students in the class were stunned when I suggested that her metaphor would be stronger if she recognized that most playwrights give the audience and the characters the chance to fall asleep holding each other after the climax, and that a relationship that ends with the climax is probably an economic transaction. I skewered her -- not for pushing the boundaries, but for the omissions that weakened her claims. (While literature is full of material that is both clever and shocking, in a college English class, you can only get so far simply by making a clever, shocking observation.)

While I don't teach creative writing classes, I do occasionally slip a short fiction assignment here or there. I might give this fall's American Lit classes the option to write a literary parody instead of a traditional close reading, for example. A few years ago, a student who was supposed to give an oral presentation on Huckleberry Finn instead read a made-up chapter that had Huck being seduced by Tom's Aunt Polly. I let him read for a little while, then politely asked him if he was going to do any critical analysis. He said no. I told him that he could sit down, and he did without a fuss. I didn't bother to ask him whether he had written that passage or just found it on the internet, and recorded an F for his presentation. I'd have let him redo the presentation if he'd have asked, but he dropped the course soon after.

A student recently submitted a whodunit in which the prime suspect was an English professor, who is the shell of a great man at the beginning of the story. As part of a workshop in which I demonstrated the value of conflict in fiction, I rewrote a few lines of dialogue and suggested a backstory that would have permitted us to watch the professor breaking down, rather than only showing us the end result. I think students who are just discovering their identities as adults and scholars, and who are used to the clear boundaries that were in place between them and their high school teachers, may feel that seeing their teachers as less than perfect can be liberating and humanizing. This pushing of the boundaries is a part of adolescence, and when students have room to do it thoughtfully and reflectively, it can be a great developmental technique.

From time to time I do appear as a character in a different kind of student writing -- academic blogs. Or, almost as often, the personal blogs in which my students pour out the emotions they don't want to put into their academic blogs. Typically the references are neutral, sometimes they are affectionately mocking. While students do from time to time complain about the workload I assign, only one student has posted an all-out rant.

While I do post links to student blog entries, it's a different matter completely for me to post anecdotes about things that happened offline. I would never post a student's grade, or post a bulleted list of all the things a student did wrong. It's part of my profession to know where those boundaries are, and I've had plenty of mentoring and practice to learn about them.

Researchers and educators blame the gap between books and boys on everything from a built-in fidgetiness to low expectations to a lifelong association of reading with their mothers, teachers, librarians -- all female role models.

But now more are suggesting that the problem may not lie entirely within the boys themselves. Some educators believe that the way schools teach reading tends to favor girls, both in terms of teaching style and reading materials chosen. It's a concern that has pushed teachers to work harder to both find materials that boys like to read, and to find more "boy-friendly" ways to present that material.

"Boys have a more tactile, 'hands-on' learning style," and they favor subject matter which reflects that, says Linda Milliken, reading specialist at Chester County Intermediate Unit near Philadelphia. "They like lots of nature topics -- bugs, dinosaurs, how things work," she explains. "They like to identify with a character who has his life in control."

What they may not like is the problem-focused reading popular with many teachers today -- stories about divorce, abuse, single-parenthood, addiction, and such.

Girl readers are generally drawn to narratives that focus on relationships between people, while boys tend to prefer adventure, science fiction, war stories, history, and, of course, sports. --Mary Beth McCauley --How to Get Boys to Sit Down with a Book (ABC News)

My son (age seven) recently selected a series of books on the elements (Oxygen, Carbon, Nitrogen... we even tracked down Magnesium) for me to read to him at bedtime. We're working our way through another series of books on Energy of the Future (we finished Biofuel of the Future the other day, and we're on Solar Power of the Future now.

The men in my American Lit course generally liked The Great Gatsby and James McBride's Miracle at St. Anna, though one student who has called herself a literary snob spoke out against both works. But some of the female students who didn't get into the heavier literary works also liked McBride, so clearly gender is only one factor in a complex equation.

As for gender differences in literary styles, see this great spoof of a tandem writing assignment, an e-mail that has been passed around for years.

Random things that I will not miss about high school:

- listening to my classmates whine
- my business law teacher parroting back everything I say in the form of a question
- never getting any input on anything I turn in
- disgusting bathrooms
- listening to my male teachers flaunt their "big, tough guy" persona
- not having enough writing or literature classes
- hearing my teachers talk more about their social life than the subject they teach
- wasting six hours and accomplishing nothing
- tedium
- watching my peers create loud, violent disturbances in class after class, and having teacher after teacher stand back and say helplessly "I don't know what to do with them."
- getting up at 6:21a.m.
- never getting any advice on my assignments and therefore, never becoming a better writer
- watching the teachers try even harder than students to invent excuses for us to not do any work
- counting the seconds and the minutes and the hours until I could go home and have my time truly be mine again

I am ready for college. I am ready to learn how to think and feel for myself again. --Kayla Sawyer --I am dead inside, and I have the educational system to thank (Shameless Digressions)

Kayla wrote this the evening that she finished her last day of classes as a high school student. She's on her way to Seton Hill University in the fall.

She contacted me the other day, saying that she heard SHU journalism majors used blogs, and she wanted to get sarted.

If you have a moment, I hope you'll visit her blog and let her know what you think about her writing. I know I'm looking forward to having her in class.

The challenge is to create students who are lifelong learners rather than successful test takers. One of the phrases that Alan consistently uses in his presentations is "fearless learners," that we have to give our students the tools and the skills to find relevant information and use it well on their own. That we need to teach them to literally revel in the learning process and the collaborative, social construction of knowledge that it creates. That the teacher to student vertical model doesn't cut it any longer. I sincerely believe that is what the Read/Write Web can do, that it can provide the means for our students to create their own learning opportunities, that it can teach them how to negotiate meaning, how to find truth, and how to become a lifelong learner. I believe this because it's my own experience, and because I see more and more of it every day in this community of learners.

But here is the struggle, of course. Schools are not fearless. --Will Richardson --Fearless Learners, Fearful Schools (Weblogg-ed)

But while the goal of rewarding good teachers is laudable, the awards can sap the morale and productivity of faculty members who try too hard to receive them. For young professors in particular, paying too much attention to teaching awards is dangerous. [...] A professor whose goal is to win a teaching award can be tempted to focus on using varied and creative teaching styles, rather than on student learning and its assessment. The abundance of recent literature on teaching styles, with its endless debate about the effectiveness of different strategies, exacerbates the problem. Adopting different teaching strategies is terribly time-consuming. Junior faculty members must decide if it is worth it. --David G. Evans --How Not to Reward Outstanding Teachers (Chronicle)

It is very tempting to teach everything the same way I taught it last time, shooting for polish and refinement rather than radical re-vision.

This year in my American Lit class, in response to the unusually high stress signals the students were giving off, I turned what had been on the syllabus as the final date for the term paper into the due date for a rough draft. I pulled an all-nighter marking those drafts and turned them back to students within a few days. In a class of about 25, only four students took advantage of the opportunity to revise.

It takes about a half hour for me to read and comment on a term paper, if I assume the paper is a draft and that the student will use my comments to revise. If, on the other hand, I am simply assigning a grade, I can easily sort the papers holistically -- Susie's paper is better than Billy's, which is not quite as good as Frankie's -- and then go back and assign grades based on whether each paper meets the assignment criteria.

A handful of others did benefit from the extension, in that they didn't bother to turn in the rough draft, and only turned in the final draft -- but that means I had to mark their papers closer to the end-of-term crunch. And some students didn't need to revise because they were happy with the As or Bs their draft earned them. But a significant chunk -- including most of the ones whose papers took the most time for me to evaluate -- decided they would rather live with their C or D.

Was the benefit to those four students worth the extra effort I put into the assignment? One one level, yes. On another level, I'm not so sure. I knew I couldn't force the students to take advantage of the opportunity, but I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by simply writing a letter grade on the draft, and then simply let those students who were unhappy with their grade make an appointment with me to discuss it.

I have recently decided that not being in a class that requires blogging is a bad thing. Because i am not required to do blogging, i don't do it. This isn't because i don't want to, it is because i don't have time to. If it were required, i would make time to do it, seeing as how blogging would be a part of my homework. I fear that in mentioning this, i am going to be bombed with blog-required classes, but, i almost look forward to it *shudder* So, next semester blogs, come on, bring it on. I will be attempting to blog over the summer, although i don't know how often this will be... --Lori Rupert --I bid thee farewell (Kaleidoscope)

One of my students posted this pretty much on her way out the door for the summer.

We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of short-lived answers to narrow questions, it requires us to rethink our roles as teachers and to redefine our curricula. Remember, we don't own the content any longer. Our students teach us the tools. They are already connecting and collaborating. To hold on to the vertical classroom is to risk irrelevance...soon. --Will Richardson --Horizontal Classrooms (Weblogg-ed)

Okay, okay, I'm rethinking, I'm rethinking!

Put bluntly, failure attracts more money than success. Politically, failure becomes a reason to demand more money, smaller classes, and more trendy courses and programs, ranging from "black English" to bilingualism and "self-esteem." Politicians who want to look compassionate and concerned know that voting money for such projects accomplishes that purpose for them and voting against such programs risks charges of mean-spiritedness, if not implications of racism. --Thomas Sowell --The Education of Minority Children (TSowell.com)

That's from very near the end of this essay, which contains some other very challenging statements.

The appeal of the blogs? Humor seems to be the biggest attraction. Ironic detachment from the news, an ability to deflate egos and refreshing, undisguised opinion are also valued. All are antithetical to most news organizations.

American newspapers traditionally and scrupulously segregate fact-based reporting from opinion by designating pages for each. Radio and television try to ensure that opinion remains secondary to reporting. Conclusions should be drawn warily. Bloggers tend not to care if they, and their readers conflate opinion and fact. It's part of the appeal of the blogosphere.

As news organizations fight to regain their battered credibility and vanishing audiences, the blogs and the number of people who read them continue to grow. The blogs entertain, they provoke, and they are not constrained by journalistic standards of truth telling.

This is a challenge and a danger for journalism. --Jeffrey A. Dvorkin --When Those Pesky Blogs Undermine NPR News (NPR)

The issues extend beyond the world of journalism.

Dvorkin notes that "younger people find the Internet a more useful place, and a more nimble way to get their news," but when he says " blogosphere has proven once again to be an amoral place with few rules," he misses the point. The internet is full of moral people, too. But because the mass broadcast media offers its audience only one meaningful way of personalizing its content (the on/off button), Dvorkin is thinking in monolithic terms.

He is right to note that there are instances where the public's right to know does not supersede issues of national security, but the specific case he mentioned -- the U.S. government issuing a redacted report that could be easily, trivially manipulated to reveal the redacted text -- is itself a newsworthy story. Journalists are trained to understand that just because they discovered a name (or a fact) does not give them the moral justification to publish that name (or fact) in every circumstance. That's because journalists are trained to think of the impact their work has on the general public. Bloggers, who may be writing for an imagined audience that consists only of peers, may simply not understand what it means to post a personal comment on their weblog.

A former student of mine from the University of Wisconsin, who started blogging for a class project and kept it up after she graduated the class and entered law school, kept detailing her escapades with alcohol and misadventures with boyfriends. I was often horrified to read of her exploits, but 1) they were funny and 2) they helped remind me that the "good students don't drink too much, only bad students do" binary opposition I carried in my head was false. At any rate, when I last checked this student's blog, she had removed all the entries and replaced them with a statement suggesting it was time for her to move on. I guess she doesn't want future potential clients to Google her and read of her exploits.

This student wasn't a journalist, but she named the names of her friends, not just herself. Presumably her friends have blogs that might mention her name.

Since more and more students are arriving at college already having blogged socially, it seems to me that part of freshman orientation should include a "be careful what you write" warning, along with "don't walk home alone" and "don't procrastinate."

Parenting technique is highly overrated. When it comes to early test scores, it's not so much what you do as a parent, it's who you are.

It is obvious that children of successful, well-educated parents have a built-in advantage over the children of struggling, poorly educated parents. Call it a privilege gap. --Dubner and Levitt --Do Parents Matter? (USA Today (will expire))