Interversity.Org

Day four of intensive comprehension instruction--discouraged. . . . and discouraging, especially regarding the B day classes. Looking at the MAP results just briefly, the two B day classes are among the lowest of the students I teach. They do have a high frustration level.

So, here's the results of the reading I've done, most of it rereading. Both Tovani and Harvey and Goudvis advocate teaching students how to monitor their comprehension even before teaching reading strategies. Harvey and Goudvis use post-it notes and have students write their thinking on the notes and then share their thinking in pairs and then with the class. Tovani uses a four-quadrant "chart" for students to record their thinking during reading. Tovani teaches students to listen to their "inner voices" and to identify whether the voice is interacting and conversational or distracting and reciting.

Four weeks into the new school year. I'm tired already. I feel as though I'm fighting a losing battle against the "culture" of school, or at least the culture of my school. We want students to succeed, but what if the students don't want to succeed because it costs too much? You have to risk a great deal in order to succeed because you almost always have to fail first.

So, I'm thinking--What do I do to turn things around for those kids of mine who are not passing? How do I change the culture of the class to make "work" a positive thing instead of a weakness? How do I convince them that in order to pass, in order to succeed, you have to take risks, especially of failure? I don't know.

Another step in journey toward critical literacy in the classroom--a stumble.

Today, I taught an "inferring" lesson. I gave some statistics about spending on education: six times more money is spend on corrections than on higher education. Since 1980, the prison population has risen from 500,000 to over 2 million, with half of the prison populaton being African-American while African Americans account for 13% of the total US population. I asked students to tell me what it says (literal interpretations) and then to draw some inferences. They had trouble. Maybe I should have gone to Kylene Beers' "It Says-I Say" strategy to help students make connections between their background knowledge and the information in the text.

I have been rereading Alfred Tatum's book Teaching Reading to Adolescent Black Males. I think my reading and research about critical literacy is shaping the way I'm reading Tatum this time. I see my students so clearly in his descriptions of urban black males. What made so much sense to me this time was the idea of young black males taking on a "cool pose" as a way of establishing an identity.

I'm into his chapters on the theoretical strand of instructional planning--that is, thinking about what goes into the curriculum, not so much about how to teach it (that comes in later chapters). Tatum emphasizes how important it is to provide students with texts that connect to their lives in meaningful ways. Janet Allen says the same thing; in fact, that very point guided her selection of core texts and text sets for Framing Best Practice English 1 and English 2 curricula.

For my SCRI MG class, I decided to research critical literacy as a way to engage readers. I have a particularly apathetic bunch of readers. Nothing means anything to them; they complain often that they "can't get into the reading," whatever that means. I often wonder how much of "I can't get into" really means, "I didn't read the assignment beyond the first sentence.

My journey toward critical stances in the classroom began several years ago--I guess when my son John was in fifth grade (he's a junior now). I had a particularly "mean" class of seniors. They didn't mind hurting anyone's feelings for no reason whatsoever other than it gave them power over other people. They were "bullies," even the girls in that class. After the trip to Washington with the fifth graders and a trip to the Holocaust Memorial Museum, I realized how important it was to teach them something about the Holocaust in the hopes that they would become more sensitive to the way they themselves thought about "others" who were not part of their group.

I finished reading this book today.  I read it as a marathon just about--all Saturday evening and Sunday evening, and finishing it this morning.  So much of what Tatum says makes some sense to me.  There are not a lot of positive reading role models for AFrican-American students, and fewer for males.  Therefore, we have to find texts that speak to them in personal ways.  Tatum is all about achievement.  He does not believe in strategy and skill instruction to raise test scores (although that will undoubtedly be the outcome if we teach meaningful texts and the strategies to comprehend them); he is about achievement as a way to cope with the turmoil of growing up as a black male and as a way to change one's circumstances.  He believes in success, not failure.  His idea is that failure and lack of participation is not an option for anyone, but in particular for black males.

I spent this week at the Janet Allen It's Never Too Late literacy institute and the roll-out of the English 2 Curriculum that Janet is preparing for South Carolina.  At the same time, I started two books--on about teaching African-American males to read and the other a theory of writing assessment.  The Tatum book on literacy has got me thinking.I'm thinking about the idea of literacy as power.  There are all kinds of power, good and bad.  So many of my students are "gang wannabes."  They are adopting the colors, the language, the actions, and the attitudes.  Perhaps we are still too small to have the serious gang problems that larger cities are facing, but it's coming.  These gang wannabes are just as dangerous as real gang members.

I am not a good blogger. I haven't kept up with my journal on line, and not very well on paper, either. So much is going on. Our ninth and tenth graders started MAP testing this week--a computerized way of assessing reading, language, and math. This is a district mandate, rather than a state mandate, but honestly, it's one more "test." How much more do we have to "endure" in the name of accountability?

I'm not sure how the "common planning" is going. We don't have enough time to sit down and think through the units. And when one teacher is philosophically and pedagogically "opposed" to the other? Well, it gets interesting. I'm not sure how our lesson plans compare. I'm not sure her kids are getting what my kids are.

I have been disappointed. Last week, I was really excited. I have been using Cris Tovani's idea of having students write what's in their heads as they read on sticky notes. I thought the level of thinking was "getting there." Then I had students do the "episodic notes" graphic organizer from Jim Burke's Tools for Thought. Students had to pick one major event from each chapter of Night, illustrate it, and write why it was important. Most students simply summarized the scene without explaining the importance. Then yesterday, they worked in groups to discuss those sheets and identify two or three important events from each chapter. I was disappointed with the level of the discussion--it's still very surface level thinking. I was only slightly more pleased with today's class.

This school year has been a year of learning experiences--and I hope one of growth. I have made some real changes in the way I present lessons to students. The more I read, the more I believe that all students can read and comprehend what they read, but they need more and more support--support that I haven't always given well. I'm working on changing that. My daily routine includes some kind of language study--review of grammar or mechanics or usage, a read-aloud, SSR, and then "curriculum"-related work. It's not easy to keep with that routine, though, and since the new semester began, I have not. There are times when I give up one thing for another. But. . . .