And there it Is

We have a nice strawberry bed in our garden. When I first put the plants in two years ago, all the literature I read suggested not picking the fruit until the second year in order to help strengthen the plants and their subsequent crops.

I thought that was the dumbest idea ever, and I would have picked every single berry from those vines last year except that they all rotted on the ground side before they completely ripened. Having been forced into following the directions, my next dilemma was how to keep my berries from doing that every year.

The answer? Why, it's in the name. Straw. You're supposed to mulch the plants with straw, or even better, pine straw, and then the STRAWberries can ripen on a soft little bed. I did that today, and I have high hopes for lots of berries in June.

Be Still My Vintage Heart

I heard yesterday that starting next week and continuing into the next season, Patty Duke and Meredith Baxter are going to play a long-committed lesbian couple on Glee.

Let me animate my reaction to this news about a couple of my childhood icons:

spit take
slide whistle
jaw drops to the floor
boing boing sound
eyes pop out
goofy grin

If Only

I think I've mentioned how the writing club kids like to give each other prompts when we meet. I'm sure part of the appeal is being allowed to write on the white board, and most of the time the assignments are so silly that it is kind of challenging to get anything on paper in the 5-10 minutes we allow. (But... I guess our students might say the same thing for many of the tasks we set for them.)

Really, though-- Write about pandas and turtle cup cakes? The Bermuda triangle, without pickles? Using the words, "before", "daffodil", "cocoa puffs", "converse" and "soccer"? You see what I mean, but let me tell you, those kids put out some crazy good writing on that kind of dare.

Yesterday, though, someone posted the following challenge: Write three paragraphs arguing against standardized tests, and it wasn't either one of us teachers.

Trying to remain neutral, I asked the assembled students what their objections to these tests were. "I'll scribe," I volunteered. "You talk."

"They're not fun!" someone started, rather predictably.

"It's boring," another student added.

We adults shrugged sympathetically. "What else?" I asked.

"Well," one kid started earnestly, "all that review cuts away from learning new things."

"And they create a lot of stress!" the girl to his right chimed in.

"Stress? Why? None of you guys are going to fail," I said, because it was true.

"All those signs everywhere about how many days until the test can really freak you out," she told me. "And what about the announcements?" she continued.

"SOL Boot Camp! SOL Boot Camp" they all started to chant.

"What is that even about?" she asked.

"One of our teachers told us that how we do can affect the economy," a boy said. "Test scores impact property values."

"One of your teachers told you that?" I repeated, a little incredulously.

"He was just being honest," the student answered, "but the tests aren't a fair way to evaluate you guys either. I mean you can't control how every single student is going to do on them, right?"

More shrugs from the teachers.

"Okay. Do we have enough?" asked the student who had posed the prompt. "Let's write a letter to the school board and get rid of these tests!"

We Run

I had my poet friend in for his 5th annual visit with my classes today. The activity he led us through was a fitting end to the National Poetry month challenge we just finished on Tuesday. He had the kids up and moving around, finding and re-finding their "tribes," and then did a fun writing exercise based on Tim Seible's poem Renegade. The poem repeats the words we run, we run like... and is a very accessible model for writers to experiment with. The lesson was good enough to repeat with writing club this afternoon.

Here is a collaborative poem composed of some of the images we came up with through out the day:

we run
we run like the moon escaping the sun
like a bloody nose
like deserts to water
we run like a murderer escaping the police
like dust into the vacuum
we run like this poem goes on
like echoes in a cave
like a home-run ball over the wall
we run like yesterday is tomorrow
like the words you didn't mean to say
like rain on water
we run
we run like cleats on the turf
like cockroaches in the kitchen light
like a cat chasing a laser pointer
we run
we run like we are both chasing and escaping something
we run like the caboose after the train
we run like ghost crabs in the moonlight
we run
we run like we are late for the bus
run like it's the last day of school
we hear the bell and we run

Been There

We're expecting some sort of cicada activity around here this spring. The details are a little murky, because our big, big, big seventeen year brood, Brood X, was here in 2004, and so they won't be back until 2021. This year's brood is Brood II, also a 17-year brood, but usually not as populous as X in these parts.

Personally, I am unconcerned about the potential plague. I know from experience that these bugs don't bother me, but the same cannot be said for my students. In 2004, they were three, and any locust recall they might have is blurry at best.

All they know is that some time in the next few weeks, those critters are crawling out, and just the chance of any significant number of two inch flying green bugs (with red eyes!!!) is freaking them out.

Measurable Objectives?

Part of being a school which implements the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Programme is identifying a student each month who exemplifies one of the learner profile traits that the IB MYP has prescribed.

Full Disclosure: I am not a fan of the IB MYP, and I believe that character education is best conducted at home or in context, and I also agree with Alfie Kohn that awards are more effective in reinforcing the authority of those who grant them than for praising those we intend to commend or encouraging their peers to be more successful. BUT, A few years ago, in an attempt to make these monthly recognitions more meaningful for the students, our team implemented a peer nomination form. The teachers still made the final designation, but it was based on what the kids wrote.

Has the process improved since then? It's hard to say. Many 11-year-olds are still inclined to nominate their friends, if not the person sitting next to them at the moment they are offered the opportunity. They are kids, after all, and they don't fully understand their role in the process, but teaching them that is part of what we do.

Often, we adults are tempted to dismiss their nominations for those very reasons, and in the interest of time and efficiency, we want to designate a student ourselves. Then, too, we feel compelled to take into consideration the demographics of just who is winning these awards. Are there too many girls? Too few minority kids?

In the end, it seems like the objective, if there ever was one, is lost. A name is read on the announcements, a certificate is granted, a photo is posted on the school web site, and then we all move on to the hundreds of other things that occupy our days.

Girl Rising

We went to a special screening of the documentary Girl Rising this evening. Organized by a parent at our school, the theater was packed, mostly with women and girls. The movie itself, the stories of nine girls from developing countries and the impact that education has and might have on their lives, was interesting, a compelling mix of sobering and uplifting. The production was creative, too, partnering each girl with a renowned female writer from her region and a celebrity narrator, but it was the girls who stole the show.

For the last twenty years I have worked in one of the most diverse schools in our nation; in any given year we have students from well over 25 countries, and the faces of the girls in the movie, from Peru, Haiti, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Egypt, Nepal, India, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan echoed the faces of so many of the students I have taught. Even their names were the same in some cases: Mariama, Amina, Azmera, Suma, and Yasmine.

This movie reminded me that as many problems as we think we have in American education today, what we offer our students, while perhaps never good enough, is still quite extraordinary.