Saturday, September 26, 2009
Friday, September 25, 2009
Rationale for Banned Books
NCTE provides a rationale for reading banned books... 100s of them for purchase!
http://www.ncte.org/action/anti-censorship/rationales
http://www.ncte.org/action/anti-censorship/rationales
Monday, September 21, 2009
60 second videos of the classics
USA Today reports that young freelance book reviewer for CSM, Jenny Sawyer, has posted the first 100 videos (60 seconds each), covering literature classics. Her website: 60secondrecap.com. http://www.60secondrecap.com
A better sparknotes? a better way to interest kids? the new format for book reports? Maybe just a fun diversion.
A better sparknotes? a better way to interest kids? the new format for book reports? Maybe just a fun diversion.
Paraphrasing: An Effective Comprehension Strategy
That's the title of a "The Reading Teacher" 63(1) article by Shareon B. Kletzien. Main points: research shows benefits of paraphrasing on comprehension. It encourages reader to make connections with prior knowledge to access what is already known about the topic and to use words that are poart of the reader's knowledge. It can be seen as a precursor to summarizing. It's "part of the moinitoring aspect of metacognition". Three short "case studies" are provided.
OECD data out
The new OECD report about investing in education (at the national level). Lots of interesting tidbits, including how much more a college graduate makes compared to high school... $367,000 over a lifetime for a male.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Did Shakespeare Want to Suppress His Sonnets?
Yes, he did, and the broadcast tells why. Morning Edition, National Public Radio, May 20, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Summer Reading
Short Tribune article about a true summer reading list here. The idea is that it's from Memorial Day to Labor Day. I love the part about doing summer reading for school "to get the full use of tuition"!
Should the law be "just" or "just legal"
Stanley Fish blog asks that question here as Obama is mulling his choice for a new Supreme Court justice.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Pocket Mod Poetry
I've been wanting to put some poetry on a pocket mod to keep in my pocket to memorize. Then my old friend Doc Wingler sent me this inspiring NYT Book Review essay on memorizing called "Got Poetry: The Case for Memorizing Poetry," by Jim Holt. He claims that he's got about 2000 lines of poetry so far.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Learning Argument Practices Through On-Line Role Play
by Richard Beach and Cadance Doerr-Stevens
in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
March 2009
The article knits together several ideas about engaging kids in writing and argumentative literacy. It borrows ideas from Harris (How to do things with texts), Flower (Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement), and Graff (They say/I say). The example, of an on-line collaborative argument/problem solving, addresses engagement, authenticity, role-playing, building argumentative skills. The article addresses teachers' role in helping kids negotiate the recent media movement to the "echo chamber" of particular value groups.
I'm going to try to use some of this in my fourth-quarter writing assignment for English 1.
in Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy
March 2009
The article knits together several ideas about engaging kids in writing and argumentative literacy. It borrows ideas from Harris (How to do things with texts), Flower (Community literacy and the rhetoric of public engagement), and Graff (They say/I say). The example, of an on-line collaborative argument/problem solving, addresses engagement, authenticity, role-playing, building argumentative skills. The article addresses teachers' role in helping kids negotiate the recent media movement to the "echo chamber" of particular value groups.
I'm going to try to use some of this in my fourth-quarter writing assignment for English 1.
Wednesday, March 4, 2009
New Literacies are Everywhere!
Including the March 2009 issue of Educational Leadership. I've read the lead article: "Orchestrating the Media Collage," in which author Jason Ohler says, "New media demand new literacies," and gives the following 8 guidelines for teachers:
1. Shift from text centrism to media collage
2. Value writing and reading now more than ever
3. Adopt ART as the next R
4. Blend traditional and emerging literacies
5. Harness report and story ("creative nonfiction" "blend research and storytelling")
6. Practice private and participatory social literacy
7. Develop literacy with digital tools and about digital tools
8. Pursue fluency (not just basic literacy)
If you're interested in "new literacies" -- visual literacy, media studies, film study -- come check the issue out.
1. Shift from text centrism to media collage
2. Value writing and reading now more than ever
3. Adopt ART as the next R
4. Blend traditional and emerging literacies
5. Harness report and story ("creative nonfiction" "blend research and storytelling")
6. Practice private and participatory social literacy
7. Develop literacy with digital tools and about digital tools
8. Pursue fluency (not just basic literacy)
If you're interested in "new literacies" -- visual literacy, media studies, film study -- come check the issue out.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Then and now
Here’s an interesting then and now for you! (and it’s two pieces of visual literacy):
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/02/jonathan-kay-on-the-lesson-from-israel-apartheid-week-anti-semitism-is-now-a-creature-of-the-left.aspx
Here’s the argument: anti-semitic pictures have replaced the image of the hook-nosed Jew with the Israeli tank/gunship shooting down innocent kids. Anti-semites used to be part of the far right, now they’re aligned with the far left. Provocative and interesting.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/03/02/jonathan-kay-on-the-lesson-from-israel-apartheid-week-anti-semitism-is-now-a-creature-of-the-left.aspx
Here’s the argument: anti-semitic pictures have replaced the image of the hook-nosed Jew with the Israeli tank/gunship shooting down innocent kids. Anti-semites used to be part of the far right, now they’re aligned with the far left. Provocative and interesting.
Academic Vocabulary BIG LIST
Coxhead (2000) compiled the Academic Word List containing the 570 most common academic words.
Here are the top 570 Academic Vocabulary terms: http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm
Here are the top 570 Academic Vocabulary terms: http://www.uefap.com/vocab/select/awl.htm
Monday, March 2, 2009
Why Bother Theorizing Adolescent's Online Literacies for Classroom Practice and Research?
Why Bother? by Donna E. Alvermann in the Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy. Sept. 2008
see PBS Documentary - "Growing Up Online" aired Jan 22, 2008.
"the increased availablity of hypermediated digital texts is having profound effects on how young people process information" (see Dresang, 2005
a move from "collection" to "connection" (Luke, p 400, 2003)
"Akin to Freire's banking concept of education, collection code curriculum implies that teachers depost knowledge 'bits' into students who, in turn, accumulate, indeed collect, largely disconnected discipline-baed facts and figures through skill-and-drill pedagogy. By contrast [in connection code courriculum], digitalized knowledge and networked environments, critical understandings of teh relations among ideas, their sources and histories, intertextual referents and consequences, are as important if not more so than mastery, reproduction, and recomination of discrete facts or units of information"
Bean and his daughters offered this observation: conventional text-bound teaching in the content areas belies how contemporary youths locate and use information that has relevance for them. (Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999)
The work of literacy instruction is as much about listening and learning as it is about telling and teaching. Kirkland (22).
Bean. 1999. Intergenerational conversations and two adolescents' multiple literacies: implications for redefining content area literacy. JAAL, 42(6), 438-448.
Kirkland, (in press)
Luke, C. (2003) Pedagogy, connectivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinarity. RRQ, 38(3), 397-403.
see PBS Documentary - "Growing Up Online" aired Jan 22, 2008.
"the increased availablity of hypermediated digital texts is having profound effects on how young people process information" (see Dresang, 2005
a move from "collection" to "connection" (Luke, p 400, 2003)
"Akin to Freire's banking concept of education, collection code curriculum implies that teachers depost knowledge 'bits' into students who, in turn, accumulate, indeed collect, largely disconnected discipline-baed facts and figures through skill-and-drill pedagogy. By contrast [in connection code courriculum], digitalized knowledge and networked environments, critical understandings of teh relations among ideas, their sources and histories, intertextual referents and consequences, are as important if not more so than mastery, reproduction, and recomination of discrete facts or units of information"
Bean and his daughters offered this observation: conventional text-bound teaching in the content areas belies how contemporary youths locate and use information that has relevance for them. (Bean, Bean, & Bean, 1999)
The work of literacy instruction is as much about listening and learning as it is about telling and teaching. Kirkland (22).
Bean. 1999. Intergenerational conversations and two adolescents' multiple literacies: implications for redefining content area literacy. JAAL, 42(6), 438-448.
Kirkland, (in press)
Luke, C. (2003) Pedagogy, connectivity, multimodality, and interdisciplinarity. RRQ, 38(3), 397-403.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Hoerr "How Book Groups Bring Change"
In Feb 2009 Educational Leadership
titles for faculty book groups
Alexie - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
Gurian -- Boys and Girls Learn Differently
Gardner -- Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligence
Barth - Improving Schools from Within
Levine, Mel - A Mind at a Time (differentiation)
Charney - Teaching Children to Care
Tatum, Beverly Daniel -- Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
titles for faculty book groups
Alexie - The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian
Gurian -- Boys and Girls Learn Differently
Gardner -- Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligence
Barth - Improving Schools from Within
Levine, Mel - A Mind at a Time (differentiation)
Charney - Teaching Children to Care
Tatum, Beverly Daniel -- Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
DuFour, Marzano "High Leverage Strategies for Principal Leadership"
found in the Feb 2009 Educational Leadership
p. 65 look at article for Marzano's "Generic Scale for Developing Common Assessments" (4.0 scale)
support collaborative teams by..
66 Collaborating on common assessments. Several questions to guide this work: How wil your team monitor the learning of each student on a timely basis? Do your common assessments reflect the characteristics of quality assessment that we have identified? How are we using the results from assessments to support stduents who are experiencing difficulty? What criteria are the members of your team using to assess the quality of students' work? What evidence do you have that members of your team apply the criteria consistently?
"a team that asserts it is committed to helping students learn to write 'a good persuasive essay' must be prepared to define the elements of a good persuasive essay; distinguish among essays that are good as opposed to great, fair, and poor; and practice applying the agree-on indicators of quality until they can provide students with consistent and precise feedback (that is, team members establish inter-rater reliability.)
role of principal - "monitors the ongoing work of teams by asking them to submit the products that flow form their collective inquiry and collaborative dialogue -- products such as the guaranteed and viable curriculum, pacing guides, common assessments, analysis of results, and so on. The principal also meets with each team quarterly to review its work. Together they examine the content, pacing, assessments, and, most important, the evidence of student learning from the assessments."
p. 65 look at article for Marzano's "Generic Scale for Developing Common Assessments" (4.0 scale)
support collaborative teams by..
- time for collaboration embedded into the routine workweek
- resources to examine curriculum, such as state standards, curriculum guides, analysis of student performance on past assessments; examples of rubrics that specify the criteria to be used in judging the quality of work
- vertical articulation with teachers in the next higher grade level to ID knowledge and skills those teachers have specifed as essential for students entering the course
66 Collaborating on common assessments. Several questions to guide this work: How wil your team monitor the learning of each student on a timely basis? Do your common assessments reflect the characteristics of quality assessment that we have identified? How are we using the results from assessments to support stduents who are experiencing difficulty? What criteria are the members of your team using to assess the quality of students' work? What evidence do you have that members of your team apply the criteria consistently?
"a team that asserts it is committed to helping students learn to write 'a good persuasive essay' must be prepared to define the elements of a good persuasive essay; distinguish among essays that are good as opposed to great, fair, and poor; and practice applying the agree-on indicators of quality until they can provide students with consistent and precise feedback (that is, team members establish inter-rater reliability.)
role of principal - "monitors the ongoing work of teams by asking them to submit the products that flow form their collective inquiry and collaborative dialogue -- products such as the guaranteed and viable curriculum, pacing guides, common assessments, analysis of results, and so on. The principal also meets with each team quarterly to review its work. Together they examine the content, pacing, assessments, and, most important, the evidence of student learning from the assessments."
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
How We Were Ruined & What We Can Do
How We Were Ruined & What We Can Do
By Jeff Madrick
(article in the NY Review of Books)
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
by Charles R. Morris
PublicAffairs, 194 pp., $22.95
Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis
by Mark Zandi
FT Press, 270 pp., $24.99
The Reckoning
a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson et al.
The New York Times, September 28–December 28, 2008
This long review article gives me the clearest picture I've had yet of the cause of the financial meltdown. The essential part, according to Madrick, is the rise of CDOs. Investment banks and even commercial banks were packaging not only residential mortgages but also equipment loans, commercial mortgages, credit card debt, and even student loans—known in general as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Madrick notes that, "Morris writes that 80 percent of all lending by 2006 occurred in unregulated sectors of the economy, compared to only 25 percent in the mid-1980s." The CDOs produced high profits and high risk, and were unregulated. Banks were purchasing them with huge loans from Cayman Island banks, sometimes 30 - 40x their own capital. When the CDOs went bad, the big banks didn't have the capital to cover them.
By Jeff Madrick
(article in the NY Review of Books)
The Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
by Charles R. Morris
PublicAffairs, 194 pp., $22.95
Financial Shock: A 360° Look at the Subprime Mortgage Implosion, and How to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis
by Mark Zandi
FT Press, 270 pp., $24.99
The Reckoning
a series of articles by Gretchen Morgenson et al.
The New York Times, September 28–December 28, 2008
This long review article gives me the clearest picture I've had yet of the cause of the financial meltdown. The essential part, according to Madrick, is the rise of CDOs. Investment banks and even commercial banks were packaging not only residential mortgages but also equipment loans, commercial mortgages, credit card debt, and even student loans—known in general as collateralized debt obligations (CDOs). Madrick notes that, "Morris writes that 80 percent of all lending by 2006 occurred in unregulated sectors of the economy, compared to only 25 percent in the mid-1980s." The CDOs produced high profits and high risk, and were unregulated. Banks were purchasing them with huge loans from Cayman Island banks, sometimes 30 - 40x their own capital. When the CDOs went bad, the big banks didn't have the capital to cover them.
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Barack Obama Stands Up for Libraries
Obama's kenote speech at the Opening General Session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago, June 23-29, 2005. Read whole speech here.
50 "Reading is the Gateway Skill that makes all other learning possible"
50 "Whether it's software design or computer engineering or financial analysis, corporations can locate these jobs anywhere in the world, anywhere that there's an internet connection. As countries like China and India continue to modernize their economies and educate their children longer and better, the competition American workers face will grow more intense, the necessary skills more demanding. These new jobs are not simply about working hard, they're about what you know and how fast you can learn what you don't know. They require innovative thinking, detailed comprehension, and superior communication."
51 "It's not enough just to recognize the words on the page anymore. The kind of literacy necessary for the 21st century requires detailed understanding and complex comprehension. And, yet, every year we pass more children through schools or watch as more drop out. These are kids who will pore through the help-wanted section and cross off job after job that requires skills they don't have.... We have to change our whole mindset as a nation. We're living in the 21st century knowlege economy; but our schools, our homes, and our culture are still based around 20th century and some cases 19th-century expectations."
52 "What if instead of a toy in every Happy Meal there was a book?"
50 "Reading is the Gateway Skill that makes all other learning possible"
50 "Whether it's software design or computer engineering or financial analysis, corporations can locate these jobs anywhere in the world, anywhere that there's an internet connection. As countries like China and India continue to modernize their economies and educate their children longer and better, the competition American workers face will grow more intense, the necessary skills more demanding. These new jobs are not simply about working hard, they're about what you know and how fast you can learn what you don't know. They require innovative thinking, detailed comprehension, and superior communication."
51 "It's not enough just to recognize the words on the page anymore. The kind of literacy necessary for the 21st century requires detailed understanding and complex comprehension. And, yet, every year we pass more children through schools or watch as more drop out. These are kids who will pore through the help-wanted section and cross off job after job that requires skills they don't have.... We have to change our whole mindset as a nation. We're living in the 21st century knowlege economy; but our schools, our homes, and our culture are still based around 20th century and some cases 19th-century expectations."
52 "What if instead of a toy in every Happy Meal there was a book?"
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Music Quickens Time by Daniel Barenboim
"How do we live with discipline and passion? How do we make the connection between our brains and our hearts?" Barenboim asks towards the beginning of this collection of essays, interviews, and appreciations. Barenboim argues throughout the book, against the commonsense idea that gaining life experience can make you a better musician, that music has much to teach us about life. For example, we learn about relationship of parts to the whole, about how music integrates many voices in producing a whole, and how music can contain the tragic and the comic always. Barenboim distinguishes between "strategic" and "tactical" thinking about music... the strategic has teh end in mind, is relating the current moment of music to the whole; the tactical is about performing the moment. This, too, is about negotiating through life's contract. He defines thinking as a marriage between intellect, emotion, and intuition. (Intuition is what you get, I think he means, after studying something for a long time... it's like improvization.) Barenboim claims that we (and musicians in general) have become overly specialized. Conductors know only their own repertoire... the know Schubert's symphonies, but not his piano sonatas intimately. The book is an appreciation, too of several musicians, including Boulez. Barenboim cites Arnold Schoeberg, "The middle way is the only way that does not lead to Rome," in calling for "courage" in performance. "Each performer must find within himself the will required for this process, perhaps apdopting the line of most resistance outside the world of sound as well." Finally, I really like how this is phrased: "The unwillingness to ask these questions is symptomatic of thoughtless faithfulness to the letter and an inevitable unfaithfulness to the spirit."
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