Happy Accident

I find that Saturday mornings are a good time to get lost on the internet. With a little of that extra weekend time, I'll follow this link or that like so many bread crumbs and I usually end up in some pretty interesting places. This morning was a good example. I actually started out on facebook marveling at the juxtaposition of my libertarian tea party friend's status with those of my much more liberal-leaning buddies and wondering how I became the fulcrum that balances such opposing views when I noticed that one of these characters had liked something called Coiled Comics.

Did I click on the button to get out of the sticky middle or was there genuine interest there? It was a little of both, to be honest. Over the last few years, I have been working to introduce more opportunities to create graphic pieces in my class and so I do have an interest in comics. Plus, kids love reading them-- In my experience, both the Bone and Diary of a Wimpy Kid series can be classified as genuine gateways to more text-based selections for many kids.

Anyway, I was not disappointed this morning. Coiled is a weekly serialized web-based comic that has a sixth grade boy as its protagonist. It looked like something my students would like as readers, but also something that I could use as a model text for them as writers. I was only concerned that, since it isn't finished, the series might take a turn for the inappropriate either in terms of violence, language, or even sex.

With that in mind I promptly e-mailed the co-authors. It was only a few hours later that I received Peter Gruenbaum's reply: My personal philosophy is that people should be able to tell good, exciting stories without the level of violence that are found in many young adult novels. The prologue is as violent as it will get, and the story will have no sexuality or swear words in it -- they just aren't relevant to the plot. He also invited me to stay in touch as to how the kids like it.

How cool is that?

Learning Curve

This year on our team we have some students with disabilities with which I do not have much experience. We have triplets who are all blind and a girl with cerebral palsy who is confined to a wheelchair. Working with these kids offers a new lesson in perspective almost every day; I never realized how much I take my sight and mobility for granted until we started figuring out how to include these students in all of our lessons and activities. As challenging as it is for us, I am continually impressed by the independence and tenacity of these four children. They are amazing.

In support of the triplets we have a vision-impairment specialist assigned to our school who is blind himself. I have never had the opportunity to spend much time with a blind person, and I'm afraid it shows. The other day at lunch he asked me where the trash can was. "It's over there," I told him.

"Um, that's not very helpful," he said, and we laughed at my mistake.

"Well," I replied, "I pointed, too!"

Like Any Other Day

Today I received the following email from a particularly conscientious student:

I am absent from school today because I'm sick. I will be back in school tomorrow. I was wondering if we did anything important today in English since I missed a class. Please let me know.

To which I replied:

Of course we did something important in English today, but it was nothing you can't make up when you get back. I hope you feel better. See you tomorrow!

Warm and Cool

One great thing about our school is that, in support of writing across the curriculum, we use one of our professional development early-release days for the entire teaching staff to holistically score expository writing samples from every student. Everyone is familiarized with the state rubric and team teachers meet to read and evaluate their students' writing.

Perhaps, as an English teacher, I'm biased in my perspective on this; no doubt some of my colleagues in other content areas might express another opinion. I have the sense that many non-English teachers feel that writing has a very limited place in their classes, despite lots of research confirming writing across the curriculum as best practice for instruction in both writing and content. (Bottom line: Like people who can read well, people who can write well are generally more successful in all academic areas than their peers who cannot.) Even so, every year we experience some push back and even resentment when it comes time to read and score those essays.

This year the English department was presented with a request from our colleagues. Since they are asked to not only rate each writing piece from 1-4 in composition, written expression, and correctness, but also to provide the student authors with a comment both praising them and offering a suggestion for improvement, our fellow educators wanted a comment bank from which to draw their remarks for the kids.

Hm...

Oh, wait! I have one:

Nice initiative in trying to make this as easy and thoughtless as possible! Next time, try actually engaging with the task at hand to give our kids some authentic feedback.

What a Difference a Year Makes

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the amazing new group of students we had. Flash forward-- for the first time in my career, there has been no personnel change at the sixth grade level since then, but this beautiful fall day found several of us veterans reminiscing about last September.

Don't get me wrong-- the kids this year are sweet and age-appropriate, they just aren't the kids from last year. Tuesday is the day when we meet with the counselor to discuss student concerns, and she left with a list of at least 20 kids who aren't doing their homework, aren't coming prepared, don't follow directions, can't open their lockers, can't make it on time, can't make it all. Oh, they love middle school, all right-- they say so all the time-- but middle school is sort of a challenge for them right now. Sigh.

At the end of the meeting, one teacher who has been on the team for seven years, but has thirty-plus years of teaching experience made an announcement. "Well," she said, "this makes me feel much better." We looked at her, momentarily perplexed. She shrugged. "I thought it was me," she laughed. "I was sure I had lost my sixth grade mojo."

Pinwheels for Peace

The awesome art teacher at our school introduced a cool activity last year: Pinwheels for Peace is an art installation project conceived of by two art teachers in Florida in 2005. Every year millions of windmills are created and displayed on September 21, in observance of the United Nations World Peace Day.

This year, our new Tolerance Club took the lead on the project, helping to organize materials and set up the display of over 350 pinwheels in front of our school for World Peace Day tomorrow. Tonight as I left the building, hundreds of colorful handmade pinwheels twirled in the soft breeze. Our school is a mixed-use facility, and I saw dozens of people there picking up their children, attending night classes, riding bikes, walking dogs, and jogging past. Few could fail to smile at the pinwheels spinning in the setting sun, especially after reading the banner...

Visualize Whirled Peace

Bunny Ears

Our school system subscribes to a password-protected academic internet service. Each teacher has a "course" with tools like a discussion board, blog, wiki, online assignments, etc. that students can access from anywhere they have an internet connection. One part of my English class involves giving my students the chance to write informally for an audience of their peers on our course's discussion board. I put up topics of interest like sports, music, pets, and video games and invite the kids to post at will. There are other more structured writing assignments, too, and we start the year with introductions. Each student has to write a couple of paragraphs introducing him or herself to the rest of the group. As a follow-up, they are asked to read and reply to at least five other kids.

Anyway, we were in the computer lab on Friday to kick off this activity, and so I've spent a good chunk of my weekend reading sixth grade writing, some of it rather silly indeed. Not that I mind-- I find what they have to say to each other pretty interesting, and this assignment can really provide a lot of insight into their personalities, interests, concerns, and of course, writing skills. Sometimes what they write is hard to understand, which is a good lesson for them, because quite often, whomever it's addressed to will reply in confusion, giving that writer incentive to revise the message.

Today, I read a post that temporarily stumped me. It was in reply to a girl who had written that she was excited about all the field trips we might take in sixth grade. To that another student responded, REALLY, REALLY, Kim Positive can't wait for the exciting (with bunny ears) field trips? WOW! I understood the teasing sarcasm-- it was the bunny ears that got me. I read it again and was just about to click away with a shrug and a note to self to ask him about it tomorrow when I realized what they were... He meant air quotes! I was fascinated by the implication: he didn't realize that the bunny ear gesture actually stands for punctuation marks, much less that he could have written them directly into his reply.

Now, that is going to make a good mini-lesson.