To Have and to Hold

Over the course of my career, I have been fortunate to be in the vanguard of educational technology. 20 years ago, I had a computer and printer actually in my classroom, when most of the others were in labs. I wrote a grant for a phone line and modem so that my students could have email pen pals back in 1996, and the same year I asked the principal for an LCD projector so that we might watch movies and view other electronic presentations in our awesome theater. Not too long after that, I had one of the first SmartBoards in our school, and I also introduced the document camera to the building (by offering to pilot it, of course!) There is a strong web-based component to my English class, and it's been years since final drafts of anything were hand-written.

I share this history not to boast, but rather to establish that I appreciate technology, and although I am not a digital native, I like to think I earned my citizenship a long time ago. Even so, the recent push to automate everything and go as paperless as possible does not sit well with me. Does something really exist if you can't see it without a charged battery? I think not. I'm a little too analog for a totally virtual world.

That's why the latest writing assignment my students are doing, collaborative stories written in letter form, will ultimately be published in tiny chap books, one for each author, and a couple for the classroom library.

I've showed the students how to assemble them as they've finished their pieces, and the reaction has been remarkable. "You mean we can have it?" one girl asked me today, incredulously. And when I nodded, she hugged it to her chest. "That's so cool!"

Group Hug

It happens every year...

Like turns to love, and the students in my class go from somebody else's children to *my* kids.

I think you can see why:

Fleeting Obsession

In the wake of the most recent snowfall, our dog has decided that she only likes to pee on snow. Anytime she has to go, she seeks out a patch of filthy slush and perches precariously on its icy surface to relieve herself. It's very amusing, this new neuroticism, and at eleven and half, she's earned a few eccentricities, especially those that can't last.

Open Doors

I searched my email for the keyword "door" this afternoon. I know. It seems odd, but we're having a door poster contest at school, and I wanted to review the "rules" to make sure the creation of my homeroom students was regulation, since they chose to focus on one book each with a quilt motif, instead of one for the group. As pleased as the kids were with their labor, I'd heard a little pushback from a couple of adults.

My query returned 31 results from September 2011 until yesterday, ranging in topics from albinism to wrestling to adolescent development, the main entrance to our school, and the contest in question. There were also a couple of messages from poets.org. Whenever I subscribe to their poem-a-day, there are always so many that are too good to delete, and eventually I have to unsubscribe so my mailbox won't overflow.

One of those poems I treasured was To the Thawing Wind by Robert Frost, but I had no recollection of it and so clicked on it today to refresh my memory. It started like this:

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;

Astonished, I looked up from my monitor and out the window at the rain melting the snow. How could a poem published 100 years ago be so fresh and relevant?

How could it not?

In the end, I needn't have bothered with the mail search at all– the colleague running this friendly competition complimented our poster this afternoon and shrugged off my question about qualifications with, "Yeah... They're pretty loose."– but I was glad I did.

Catchy

"Can we write a song to go along with our quiz?" a student asked me this morning.

I raised my eyebrows in confusion. Was this some kind of DST hallucination?

"You know, like a jingle," he explained.

The class was working on activity where they have a set of question starters organized in Bloom's taxonomy, from lower to higher order thinking skill. Their task is to compose a five question quiz based on the memoir we are reading. Each question must be from a different category and they also have to provide an answer key. Then they give the quiz to another student (and take one that someone else has composed), grade the quiz that they created using the key, and have a conference with the other student about the results. 

It's a waaaay better assessment than most any I might create, mostly because they are very engaged in the activity, which brings us back to the student this morning.

"Sure," I told him, and when he handed his draft in for me to check, this was scrawled across the top of the page:

Yeah, yeah, take the quiz baby, yeah!

Redistribution of Time

There's one day a year when I barely need think about what my topic will be when I sit down to compose my thoughts to write, and that day is this– the dreaded dawn of despicable daylight savings time. The challenge has become how to freshly frame my rant.

Fortunately, an Internet meme making the rounds today perfectly expresses my opinion of this outlandish construct:

Only a fool would think that cutting a foot off the top of a blanket and sewing it to the bottom would make the blanket longer.

Well said, World Wide Web, well said.

Minor Detail

Heidi's old friend Tom is in town this weekend. The two of them went to grade school in Buffalo together, and then in one of those small-world twists, he and my brother-in-law worked together for a time in NYC. Back then, whenever we drove up to the city to see Courtney, my sister, Heidi would give Tom  a call, and the five of us would meet up for an afternoon or evening. The food was always good and the conversation fast and funny, and we passed many fun hours together that way. 

That's why my brother-in-law was a little surprised when he and Tom were talking about Thanksgiving. "Courtney's mom will be there, and her brother and his family, and Tracey and Heidi," he told Tom.

"Why are Tracey and Heidi spending the holiday with Courtney's family?" Tom asked.

"You know Courtney and Tracey are sisters, right?"

Turns out, that was a surprise to Tom, one that we still tease him about all these years later. "Well," he laughed tonight when it came up for the umpteenth time, "that did clear things up for me!