Academic Responsibilities

Stanley Fish, in his NYTs blog, says that recent commentary about whether Barack Obama should include Larry Summers, lately fired as Harvard's president for controversial remarks about women scientists among other things, in his cabinet is wrong-headed. Most commentaries, he says, deal quickly with the question of WHY he was fired, claiming that it was because he was trying to shake things up.

Fish claims that a university professor should be one who is trying to wake people out of complacency, but not university presidents. That's the real issue about whether he should be in the cabinet: does he have people skills? Fish writes, "It is not a question of intelligence and competence -– everyone agrees that Summers is very smart and very accomplished as an economist; it is a question of tact, patience, poise, self-restraint, deference, courtesy and other interpersonal virtues." The more general point is that teachers have a whole different set of ethical and professional responsibilities than principals (or professors and university presidents). An academic is not an academic. Nor is it true that presidents just have MORE responsibilities -- they are qualitatively different.

Public Intellectuals from a new Zip Code

I've been thinking about why kids at school seem to be so blatantly bored with literature. As a department chair, I watch as teachers fret about the students who don't seem to care... and about students who pronounce their not caring more and more vocally. One response is to create bigger and bigger projects that go along with the reading. Another response is to spell out (usually in 12 point font on power point slides) what's most important about last night's novel reading. Yet another response is to blame the X (kids, TV, cell phones, parents, mercury in innoculations....) I don't think that any of these responses will get to the heart of the boredom.

Instead, I think that English departments need to change: our goal should be to help kids become better consumers of text. And by text I only barely mean "novels and short stories," I really mean documentaries and informational web sites and online newspapers and blogs, etc.

I love novels myself. And I think that reading, say, The Scarlet Letter, is a pleasantly rewarding intellectual and artistic puzzle that helps me think about big ideas like idenity and social norming. But I don't think that literature has any monopoly on helping kids become better readers, thinkers, or citizens. It's ONE WAY, and a way that is probably going out of style faster than you can say "D'oh!".

Today I ran across an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (not usually associated with flouting tradition!) which helps me make my claim in a sideways sort of way. The author, Daniel Drezner, in the article "Public Intellectual 2.0," found here, writes that public intellectuals have not died, but have migrated to the blogosphere. Drozner writes:

"To be sure, some important differences exist between the current generation of public intellectuals and the Partisan Review generation extolled by so many. In the current era, many more public intellectuals possess social-science rather than humanities backgrounds. In Richard Posner's infamous list of top public intellectuals, there are twice as many social scientists as humanities professors. In a recent ranking published by Foreign Policy magazine, economists and political scientists outnumber artists and novelists by a ratio of four to one. Economics has supplanted literary criticism as the "universal methodology" of most public intellectuals."

Drezner says, "That fact in particular might explain the strong belief in literary circles that the public intellectual is dead or dying." But for me, it also might explain why kids see, but English teachers don't, that our primary focus on literary criticism is outdated and, um, boring. English departments, even in high school, existed in their heyday after the New Critics (and New York Intellectuals) reign in the 50s and 60s.

Meanwhile, back in high school, teachers still hold novels up as holy relics. The answer, to many teachers, is to force kids to look more closely at the holy relics, and try to encourage kids to see how the old messages might still fit today. My response is that we should help kids see the holy is not just in relics!

What's the reading level of a text? That's a trick question!

Again, from Chris Tovani, 2008

Reading Levels Change

Based on three factors:

Background knowledge - The more background knowledge a reader has about the topic, text structure, and author, the more difficult text he can read

Interest and Motivation - If a reader has interest in the topic or is motivated to read, he will work harder to comprehend.

Purpose - When a reader knows why he is reading something and knows what he needs to get from a text, he can better sift and sort informaion to determine what is important

So, what does this mean for teachers? Shower readers with background knowledge, tap into interests, and create a purpose for every reading assignment.

Thinking Strategies Used by Proficient Readers

This is also from the Chris Tovani program. It's based on research synthesis of P. David Pearson and Janice A. Dole.

"A strategy is an intentional plan that is flexible and can be adapted to meet the demands of the situation.

Proficient Readers:

• Activate background knowledge and make connections between new and known information.
• Quesion the text in order to clarify ambiguity and deepen understanding.
• Draw inferences using background knowledge and clues from the text.
• Determine importance in order to distinguish details from main ideas.
• Monitor comprehension in order to make sure meaning is being constructed.
• Reread and employ fix-up strategies to repair confusion.
• Use sensory images to enhance comprehension and visualize the reading.
• Synthesize and extend thinking.

Interrogating Texts: 6 Reading Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard

Harvard College Library (the Lamont Library) has posted this handout about how to develop the habit of critial reading because, "Critical reading -- active engagement and interaction with texts -- is essential to your academic success at Harvard, and to your academic growth." Success in high schools that are trying to send kids to college, too!

What are the 6 reading habits?

Previewing
Annotating
Outline, summarize, analyze
Look for repetitions and patterns
Contextualize
Compare and Contrast

Each heading is followed by a succint description and several bullet points of examples.

When I annotate, what do I write?

This comes from a "Day of Reading" Seminar with Chris Tovani.

What I annoate, what do I write?

Sometimes I:

Record a REACTION

Ask a QUESTION

Give an OPINION

Make a CONNECTION

Respond to how I would RELATE if I were in that situation.

What is "Theme"... it's like a theme park!

I copied this from the teaching blog "View from 125"

Theme Park Analogy
In my third block class today one of my students, Dennis Vincent Long (he requested I publicize his name this exact way), came up with a good idea to help me explain the term theme to my students. I was going through my cards, asking them what a theme is and he popped out with, “Theme parks.”I was initially inclined to blow this off and keep going. After a few seconds of thought, however, I realized that he was on to a good idea. Think of the original Disney World, the park that is now called the Magic Kingdom. In that park there are four themed areas: Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, Frontierland, and Adventureland. There is also Main Street, USA, Liberty Square, and Mickey's Toontown Fair. Each one of these areas has one big, unifying idea behind it. In Fantasyland all the rides, shops, restaurants, etc. are related to the various pure fantasies that Disney puts out. [Digression—Is the It’s a Small World ride in Fantasyland because world peace and harmony is nothing but a dream?] In Tomorrowland everything relates to science fiction and/or the world of tomorrow. In Frontierland everything is related to the rugged frontiers of America’s past. Adventureland is themed to the different adventure shows Disney has created over the years.As each one of those areas has everything relate to each other, so a theme in a book or a story would be the big, unifying idea that holds that work together. All the other aspects of the book need to relate to that theme. So, thanks, Dennis! If not for your thought today, I probably would not have come up with that analogy. It makes the idea of theme clearer to me, anyway.

National Book Festival Author Webcasts

I copied this from eNotes school blog "The English Teacher Blog"

LOC: National Book FestivalNovember 10th, 2008 by carla
The Library of Congress publishes online a wide variety of materials teachers can use. This includes the webcasts of National Book Festival presentations by authors and illustrators. Are your students doing an author study? See if there’s a clip here they can use. Are you getting ready to read? Let the author say a few words to your students first.
The presentations are organized by the pavilion at which they occurred.
Samples from 2008:
Tiki Barber
Jan Brett
Joseph Bruchac
Judith Viorst
Paul Theroux
From 2007
Jodi Picault
Maria Celeste Arrarás
From 2006
Khaled Hosseini
Louis Sachar
Explore the complete list, dating back to 2001.

Twelve Years of Apples

In "Learning in Depth," Kieran Egan muses about a school curriculum that is based on depth rather than breadth.

Kids should be given a topic during first grade -- apples is his first example-- and learn about it for the next 12 years. She would first make lists of apples and taste different apples, and her portfolio would grow. She would "become active in compaigns to preserve rare apple varieties;" later, she "knows the locations of the major orchards of the world as well as their owners, costs of production, profits, and transportation problems." Other kids would learn about birds, the circus, railways, the solar system, "and so on."

Egan asks us to "Imagine what school would be like if we implemented such a project on a large scale." My imagination tells me that the kids that are curious, inquisitive, independent will do well; the kids who are especially conscious about grades will wonder about how many artifacts need to go into the portfolio for an A; and most kids who are apathetic now will not suddenly have an epiphany of interest given the topic of "the circus."

I agree that teachers and schools should make a move to value depth over breadth, especially in the context of testing requirements that winnow the curriculum. And I really admire the notion that you are encouraging the kind of deep research that encourages students to make connections between static objects and the world. But Egan's hopes are not just unrealistic, but silly. What happens if I really don't care much about circuses, but love insects, the topic of my friend Manny, who like licorice? Does the 10th grade English teacher help each of her 150 students go futher in depth with each of the 150 topics?

The kind of 12-year committment Egan describes is more like an avocation. Kids will learn deeply about things, will spend countless hours on specific topics... but rarely on randomly chosen topics. In my experience, those avocations, even in high school, tend to be things like "vampires," and "wizards," rather than "apples." That's not to say, of course, that someone might put together a great portfolio on "vampires," but the number of kids who could follow through on vampires from age 6 to age 18 would be, I venture to guess, small.

There are better ways to value depth over breadth. A teacher could ask a student to read three books in a year about a single topic, or by a single author. A teacher could create a writing class around the topic of a single topic, "air," "water," even "apples," and ask kids to investigate facets of the issue. A school department could have a "theme" for a year. In my school, for instance, the social studies department is focusing on "genocide" next year.

Egan says that such programs have already begun. In Japan, for instance, "students make fortune cookies, slip a piece of paper with a topic inside, then randomly choose a cookie -- and their topic." It wouldn't be long before some young wit writes "boobs" on the slip. At least there might be more interest in that than "circus."