Freedom of the Press

We rode our bikes to the Newseum yesterday. This was the first time that I had been inside their new building, and it was very cool-- six levels of exhibits dedicated to journalism and the first amendment, with lots of really fascinating stuff.

Years ago, when the Freedom Forum opened the first version of their museum across the river from where they are so prominently located now, the principal of my school called me to his office. It was my second or third year teaching, and he had an opportunity for me. Seems there was this new thing called the Internet, and the ABC/Disney people were trying to set up a website with news content for kids, by kids. Their idea was to find kids to cover local newsworthy events and then to have them write them up and submit them to be published on their online news page.

We were one of the first schools in the area with a webpage of our own, and they contacted us to see if we had any students willing to cover the dedication of the Newseum. The international exposure that they were offering to our young writers was unprecedented at the time, and it was with genuine excitement that three students and I picked up our press credentials on the morning of the ceremony. Vice President Gore was the keynote speaker, and we were in the third row for his speech, although, as news of the day, it was being projected on all the huge video screens throughout the museum, too. Afterward, we were invited to a reception and then escorted on a tour of the whole place. The Möbius nature of being the press that covered the opening of a museum dedicated to the press was completely lost on the kids I was with-- but who could blame them? They were on deadline.

Incontinuity

A few weeks ago, I posted about the professional learning community I was tapped to facilitate for the coming school year. It is supposed to be a continuity group for teachers who have taken either the Writing Project Summer Institute, or the 3 credit hour course offered during the year. I was heartened by the fact that our county ELA department recognized how valuable exposure to the NWP can be AND how important it is to support teachers afterward. As part of the planning for our first meeting in September, I sent links to a couple of articles that I thought would be really good places to start our conversation about how to keep that writing project magic alive. One was called Teaching After the Summer Institute by Nick Maneno. It is by no means a radical manifesto, and I encourage you to follow the link and read it for yourselves, but I'll cite a brief excerpt here:

Teachers who have had experiences like the summer institute often find themselves explaining the benefits of student-constructed knowledge over teacher-directed practice, word study over traditional spelling lists, cooperative work over isolated practice.

But when I talk about writing practices with my teaching team, administration, and most teachers, they are often not able to transcend rubrics, writing prompts, and the mechanics of writing.

Today, five weeks after I sent the link to our central department, I got this response to my proposal that we use this article in our initial meeting:

I understand the teacher's frustration in "Teaching after the Summer Institute," (and I think this is evident in our office's support of the NVWP course and summer institute) but I don't think the article says enough about how there has to be a balance between form and creativity. It would definitely make a good conversation piece, but we don't want teachers to think we're saying it's ok to toss rubrics, domains, etc., out the window.

Don't Forget to Floss

We were invited to a birthday party for one of our neighbor's three-year-old daughter today. The party was at the home of a friend of theirs from church, "Grandma Lois," and the guests seemed to be a mixture of friends, neighbors, church friends, and preschool friends. It was an amiable group who gathered in the backyard, but as in most cases, the sub-groups sort of stuck to themselves. At one point, the birthday girl, in an impressive show of social skills, made her way through the guests with her mom.

The five of us 30- or 40-something women who made up the neighbor group found our attention drawn to a conversation with a couple of people from the church group. It seems that the assistant pastor was telling the Sunday school kids that every time they brushed their teeth they should say a little prayer-- why not kill two birds with one stone? Clean teeth, clean soul, right? The neighbor to my left raised her hand to her mouth, exhaled sharply, sniffed, and grimaced. "Damn!" she muttered. "It's the devil again." She met my eye and shook her head. "That's what he does, you know. He sneaks up on you like tartar."

Staycation

I sat on my stoop this evening grilling a couple of steaks for our dinner. How quiet it was for a Saturday night. None of the neighbors were around; no cars drove by. My unit is at the far end of the complex, and there is a small copse of woods just across the parking lot. Sometimes it offers the illusion of a much less populated residence. I looked up through the crab apple boughs that shade my front porch at the much taller trees in the woods and then beyond them to the sky. A chickadee buzzed twice in the branches over my head and then flew away fast, like he was late for dinner.

I'm a little out of sorts the last couple of days, because my annual summer trip to Maine ain't gonna happen. There are a number of reasons, but they're not really important. As I sat there tonight, I was focused on my dissatisfaction. I considered and rejected the logistics of an improbable October trip Down East to see it in its fall glory. I sighed and imagined myself on the back porch of the house we usually rent, looking out over the Eastern Narrows to Sargent Mountain in the distance. A breeze stirred in the trees and brought me back to this place, my home. I flipped the steaks and took a sip of wine. I adjusted my position on the top step, and realized my bum was a little sore from the eighteen mile bike ride we took this afternoon. August continues to astound us with its lovely weather; today was 83 with very low humidity. The evening, too, was perfectly pleasant... Truly? It wanted for nothing but my appreciation, and so I vowed to oblige.

Slow News Day

For the second time this summer, I had a showdown with a toaster, and this time, the toaster beat me. My problem has to do with thin slices of toast slipping down under the slot, but not far enough to come out with the crumb tray. What is one supposed to do in such a situation? Toaster tongs are ineffective in removing the errant slice, as is a fork or a knife. Trying to pull it back up is like hitting reverse once you're in the rental car return lot-- damage will occur, and you'll never make it out anyway.

The first time, I ended up literally shredding the piece of toast with a steak knife until the pieces were finally small enough to shake out the top or to slide out the bottom. They and several years worth of crumbs from the toaster at the beach rental house scattered all over the kitchen one morning during our vacation. That was a treat to clean up. This morning, it was my own toaster that turned on me: a little piece of toasted rosemary bread twisted just wrong when it popped up and then slid irretrievably into the nether regions of the toaster, where it remains despite my best efforts, a victim of poor design. I demand a rematch.

How 'bout it toaster? Best two out of three?

No Adult Left Behind

I had a meeting at school today. Two and a half weeks out from our report day, this was just me, the other sixth grade team leader, and our director of guidance. At 11 AM, there were probably 4 other people working full time in all the building, and that summer ghost town vibe was still going strong. We decided to sit at a table in the library, and it took a few minutes to actually locate a few chairs to pull up to one of the tables. With only half of the lights turned on and a dozen or more overhead projectors staring at us from in between the stacks like so many cyclops, it still felt good to look decisively forward to next year. Kids names, test scores, and placements felt real and immediate. Information about the master schedule, pre-service week and colleagues? All very relevant.

Our conversation wandered a bit, as summer talks have the luxury of doing, and we touched a little on the challenges of building a cohesive staff with a common vision from 85 disparate individuals and the subsequent impact such attempts have on overall morale. It has long been my opinion that, as educators, we must expect no more and no less of the adults we try to reach than we do of our own students. It is hypocrisy to criticize teachers for giving up on hard-to-engage students, when we dismiss them as burnouts in the next breath. "High expectations for all" is a credo that might best be extended to colleagues as well as kids, and don't even get me started on parents.

Crisis Identified

I finally finished my piece of the adolescent development project. Yay. After all is said and done, I'm more pleased than displeased with my work, but that could just be a loss of perspective. One unexpected outcome of this project is that it is forcing our central office to at least consider sexual minority students. As I compiled my research on identity formation, it was my job to look at the impact that ethnicity, race and gender had on identity, but sexuality was an issue as well.

I sensed a little surprise and a little pushback when I got the first feedback on the draft of my powerpoint. In the last three years, our school system has committed to "courageous conversations" about "cultural competency," primarily in order to address the achievement gap. Sexual minorty is usually a neglected component of these conversations.

I teach in a middle school, and many people feel that kids who are only 11-14 years old are too young to be concerned about, much less engaged in any conversations about, sexuality. But the truth is, at that age, most kids who are gay, know it, and refusing to talk about it only reinforces their feeling of isolation. Unlike other minorities, gay kids don't usually come from gay families, and often they are afraid that not only will their families not understand and/or support them, but may even reject them because they're gay. Their peers use "gay" as a derogatory term, and in a time when fitting in is vital, their feelings about being gay are nothing they want to share with their friends. In many cases, gay middle school kids have no support at all during this crucial developmental period.

I think our school system should acknowledge that and do something about it.