No Killer Instinct

I guess it's time to file the follow up report on our basketball season. Back in October, I chronicled the saga of tryouts and cutting the team in a six-part series. I wrote about our decision to leave the girl who is arguably the best player in the school off the team because she had a bad attitude and seemed unable to follow directions. I said the team was nice, and that was fine with me.

Well... we are 0 and 7. We had our last practice today, and the final game of the season is tomorrow. We are not expected to win. We lost our closest game by three, but just the other day, we were humiliated at home, 53-8. At one point in that game the score was 33-0.

Has it been a demoralizing season for the players? It's hard to say. They seem upbeat in practice, and they work hard and execute what we are teaching them. They have personally improved, but they are not a competitive team. The other teams are bigger and stronger and more talented, and in the games, our girls are timid and flat.

It's never easy to have a losing season, but this will be the first time in my years of coaching that we have been winless. Nicest team ever, worst record ever. Could there be a connection?

Maybe It's the Moon

Despite the fact that my PLC folks didn't seem to have a lot of appreciation for edublogs, I do. I'm not ashamed to admit that I find them helpful and even inspirational at times. For example, two of the bloggers I read regularly seem to be struggling with some of the same things that I am right now, and they have both defined the issues and expressed their concerns much better than I have. I invite you to take a look.

Pressing On by Ruth at Two Writing Teachers

Stop Questioning? by Dina on Reading Free

(The second one is a really cool blog. Allow me to cite their "About Us" entry: He’s in his twenty-seventh year of teaching language arts; she’s in her third. He teaches 6th grade in a self-contained classroom in the Alaska interior; she teaches 7th grade in a rotating class middle school in an urban hub of upstate New York. What brings them together: the simultaneous launching of the workshop approach to reading and writing in their classrooms, pioneered by Nancie Atwell.

Doug Noon and Dina Strasser both blog about their teaching experiences and met through the wild and crazy interlinking of the edublogosphere. Now, they join forces to explore one of the most promising and status-quo-busting approaches to literacy available today. )

Now THAT's what I'm talking about.

Oy, My Brain

So, after I posted last night, I was brushing my teeth, thinking about what I wrote, and it occurred to me that part of the problem comes when I assign a grade to an exercise. Exercise is practice, and shouldn't we grade student work that is supposed to show mastery? Granted, the Letters About Literature assignment might have led up to mastery of certain things (thankfully, for many students, it did), but if a writer is not engaged in the topic, is it fair to expect mastery? What message does that send to a struggling writer, other than, here's another assignment you didn't like and didn't do well on, either. Research shows that it is best to teach students writing skills in a meaningful context, like when they're working on something they want to write. Given that no assignment is ever going to appeal to everyone, what's an English teacher to do? When it comes down to it, I don't care if my students can write a good Letter About Literature, I want them to be able to write a good anything.

I'll keep thinking about it.

Letters About Literature

My students have participated in this contest every year for the last three. The premise is interesting: kids are supposed to write a letter to an author explaining how a particular book changed them or their view of the world. Although this task might seem deceptively simple, the sponsors of the contest, the Library of Congress and Target, take pains in their instructional materials to emphasize that students must "correspond don't compliment" and "synthesize don't summarize." These higher order thinking skills can be tough for my sixth graders, but they are by no means impossible, so the assignment turns out to be a just-right challenge-- one that can be done well with enough preparation, work, and support.

The problem lies in the fact that these letters are supposed to be authentic and heartfelt, written by the students in acknowledgment of a significant impact the author's work has had on them. Quite honestly, not every eleven year old has experienced such a profound connection with a book. What then, English teacher? Do you disparage these children as shallow and chalk it up to weak parenting, too much TV, and video games? Do you release them from even trying because they're just not feelin' it?

It's been a tough call for me, but this year I asked all my students to approach the assignment as a writing exercise-- they had to go through the steps to produce a letter, but no one was required to send it unless they wanted to. As I've written before, this year my students are awfully compliant, and so most of them humored their wacky teacher and unquestioningly went through the process: reading models, completing mini-lessons, and then composing, revising, and editing draft after draft of their letters, until today, the day before the deadline, nearly half of them decided to enter the contest. And most of the letters were pretty good, too.

So, I have a stack of letters to grade this weekend, and when I do, I'm going to take a good look at the ones that are not successful to try and figure out how and why the "writing exercise" failed for those writers, because this kind of whole class assignment is exactly the kind of thing that I think undermines my workshop, often at the expense of struggling writers.

Giving Gifts

Obviously my students don't draw names for a holiday gift exchange, but last year we did gifts of writing using the Secret Santa concept. It was voluntary for students to participate, and everybody who wanted to do it filled out questionnaires with information about themselves. Then we folded those up and drew out of a bag to see who would be the recipient of our gift of writing. The parameters were broad-- it could be a piece of any genre and it could be written about the person or for the person. I thought it would be fun for the kids if I drew a name in each class, too.

It ended up being a nice activity, one that allowed the students to apply many of the writing lessons we'd learned. Most kids wrote a free verse poem about the person whose name they'd drawn, and I did, too, but some wrote letters to them and others composed pieces for them-- poems or short stories or cartoons that they hoped the person receiving the gift would enjoy. At the end, when the writing was done, we created companion wordles to give along with our gift.

I still have my five gifts of writing, and it was successful enough that I'm getting ready to do it again next week. I've struggled a little bit with the timing, though. We could do this activity any time, and it might be a good end of the year ritual, but this is a season of giving in the culture in which we all live, and I think it's okay to participate in that, too.

I think so, but I'm not sure.

Season's Greetings

When I was a little girl, every year in school we drew names for Pollyanna gifts. There was always a price limit like one or two dollars, and kids would bring the wrapped presents in and put them under the classroom tree. We opened them during the Christmas party, and I always remember being disappointed because I never, ever got a Lifesaver book. It wasn't even that I liked Lifesavers that much (with the exception of butter rum... now those were really good), but the book was so cool, and it was something my parents would never buy for me.

Remarkably, all of this took place in a public school, way before the phrase "politically correct" was ever dreamt of. Nowadays, in the diverse school I work in, some of us don't even think the secretaries in the office should construct their annual "holiday" display, even if it only consists of empty boxes wrapped in winter-themed paper surrounded by colored lights. We know what they're trying to say. And this afternoon, as I listened to the winter concert, I wondered how Santa and Silent Night could possibly be appropriate, even at this Most Wonderful Time of the Year.

For 'Cause

It's super-duper hard to hold on to a student-centered focus. That's why I moved away from the workshop back then. It takes a tough combination of confidence and humility-- it's hard to have the humility to step out of the way and let the students learn, and so any teacher who does that is constantly second-guessing herself, trying to find a balance between direct instruction and student practice. From the outside, such an approach doesn't always seem "rigorous" enough, and since many people equate rigor with value, it takes confidence to stand behind this philosophy.

For all those reasons, it can be kind of lonely, too.