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Spotify: My New Obsession

Posted on July 19, 2011 by Jackie
Image representing Spotify as depicted in Crun...

Image via CrunchBase

So I know there’s been a lot of hype about Google Plus, but if you can score an invitation, I think Spotify is much more exciting.

I’ve been a longtime Pandora user, and I have loved being able to create stations based on my favorite artists, and also have those stations introduce me to similar artists. However, Spotify has several advantages: a library of 15 million tracks, but also the ability to make, share and subscribe to playlists. For example, I made a playlist of my girls’ favorite dance tracks this morning, but I also subscribed to four playlists Britney Spears made (80s music, workout mix, her kids’ favorites, and a “me time” mix), as well as linked up with my Facebook friends who are on Spotify already and also subscribed to a playlist of Mercury Prize nominees as well as a 146-track “America” themed playlist, both made by Spotify staffers. I can see myself using this a LOT, both at home and at school while I’m working and grading. Once more of my friends are there, I’m looking forward to checking out their playlists, as well as making collaborative playlists.

Also, as a teacher, this may put an end to frantically scrambling on YouTube to find the right version of a song I’ve just decided I want to play for my students, and also with Spotify, I don’t have to feel guilty about copyright issues. If enough of my students end up there, we could make book-themed playlists, or playlists for a certain time period, or ones a certain character would like today–imagine a Holden Caulfield playlist, for example, that all students could access, or a playlist one character would make for another. I’ve done these kinds of assignments before, but this way, all the students could hear the results, or could easily work together. I think Spotify will end up having some really neat teaching applications.

I don’t have any invitations to share, but if you end up using, I’d love to hear more, or maybe share some playlists!

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Review: I Read It, But I Don’t Get It

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Jackie
Cover of "I Read It, but I Don't Get It: ...

Cover via Amazon

Decision made: I ended up going with I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent ReadersBERJAYA first because it had some direct application for a project I’m working on with a colleague this summer. We’re developing a proposal for a summer program that would target struggling readers/writers in the first two grades of high school and give them a concentrated summer instructional experience to try and build whatever skills seem to need the most development. I think I’ll be going with Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and ThemeBERJAYA next, so look for the review in the near future.

Anyone who has taught high school English, no matter where you are in the country or what demographic you’re teaching, has probably heard a student say, “I read it, but I don’t get it.” What part was trickiest? What was most confusing? Why do you think you didn’t get it? These are tough questions for most struggling students to answer, but without them, it can be near possible to help a student strengthen their reading skills. Cris Tovani tackles this task head-on in this book with a mix of anecdotes, strategies and assignments that she has tested for years in her own classroom, as well as in her work with training teachers.

If you’ve read about different adolescent literacy strategies, you may already be using some of the tools Tovani recommends here; I was pleased to see anticipation guides and double-entry journals, both of which I’ve used very successfully before. However, I also found some really potent examples of framing language and classroom activities that I think will become key elements of my reading discussions in class. I’ve long pondered how best to scaffold my students’ reading in our Bible as Literature unit, and I’ve got some fresh new ideas based on this book. Another crucial point was that while struggling readers will benefit most from these techniques, we’ve all seen even stronger students hit the wall when they come to a particularly challenging text, and these strategies can work for them as well when built into whole-class work. The language Tovani uses to identify for her students what “good readers do” and how to model those strategies will be invaluable to me, and will definitely help frame how I address these stumbling blocks in class.

Another big take-away for me was that students want us to go over the reading in detail in class, not always because they haven’t read (though that can also be the case), but because they don’t have confidence in their own abilities to construct meaning from the text. The more we do that work for them, the more they give up on being able to do it for themselves. In other words, this is another argument in the ongoing sage on the stage vs. guide on the side debate (that is often more polarized than it needs to be), but an argument that shows concrete ways to be that effective guide-on-stage. For me, as a fan of Paulo Freire, and especially his theories opposing the banking model of education, this supports my own philosophy of education as well. That said, when a student asks me about a part in the text she didn’t understand, my first impulse is to explain it to her, which is probably a byproduct of being a big book nerd in the first place, as many English teachers are. Now, with Tovani’s voice guiding me, I hope I’ll be able to resist that impulse more often.

All in all, I’d add this title to the list of essentials for any English teacher’s bookcase, and even go further by saying that if you’re in a reading-intensive subject, you and your students could greatly benefit from this book as well.

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Choices, Choices

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Jackie

Every summer I like to pick a book about teaching and use it to improve myself professionally or meet a certain goal of mine.

Okay, what has actually happened before is that I pick several books in a summer and only end up carefully reading one of them, while the others languish. So this year, I’m trying to really choose just one, but my list includes a wide range, from conceptual big-picture books to concrete strategy-based texts, and I’m having trouble picking. Want to help me choose? Here are what I’ve narrowed down to so far:

I Read It, but I Don’t Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent ReadersBERJAYA

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every ChildBERJAYA

Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and ThemeBERJAYA

25 Quick Formative Assessments for a Differentiated Classroom: Easy, Low-Prep Assessments That Help You Pinpoint Students’ Needs and Reach All LearnersBERJAYA

The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven KidsBERJAYA

The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every ChildBERJAYA

Cast your votes in the comments!

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Teach Like A Champion, Revisited

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Jackie
Cover of "Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techn...

Cover via Amazon

Last summer, I read Teach Like A Champion, and wrote that entry about how much I expected it to influence my teaching. Towards the end of this school year, I found myself reflecting on this book again, and how it had affected my teaching.

Overall, what I found was that the phrasing of these techniques in short memorable phrases helped me remember them often during the school day and therefore employ them more consistently; what I found in reading the book was that I had employed many of these, but did not honestly employ them daily in my classroom.

The strategies I returned to again and again this year were: Lemov’s phrase for the ideal teacher’s demeanor, “Warm But Strict”; Cold Calling (calling on students even if they hadn’t raised their hands), Right Is Right (only stopping when a student has given the right answer) and 100% (striving for 100% engagement in the room). In my original entry, I talked about the need to protect each classroom minute, and by the end of the year, I was very comfortable saying, “We’ve only got five minutes left and I need every one of them” when I felt my students’ attention wandering.

Looking back on my original entry and some of the ones I linked there, I realize that I have still not solved the bathroom visit issue, so I need to think again about whether I want to use a hand signal or some other visual cue, rather than a raised hand. I also see that I intended to revisit the book during the year: better late then never? Perhaps this is another goal of mine that can be served in the teaching journal goal I’ve set for myself. Also, now that I feel I’ve mastered those strategies, I’d like to revisit the book and see if I want to add any others. I remember Miss Teacha saying in her post that out of the 49 strategies, she already used 14, and would recommend that new teachers aim for mastering at least 15. While I’m not a new teacher, I think it would be interesting to count up how many I feel are already in my toolbox and then think about what I’d like to add.

While I’m reflecting like this purely for my own interest, I think the fact that the book has lingered so long with me reinforces my original statement: it’s a must-buy for any and every new teacher, or indeed, any teacher who wants to feel more confident with questions of classroom management (which is probably all of us, from time to time).

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Professional Development: Why Do It

Posted on July 5, 2011 by Jackie

It seems to be a given that professional development is a must for the continuing growth and progress of teachers: witness the plethora of resources and attention devoted to it on the federal and state level. Knowledge in our fields is constantly growing and changing, and ideas on how to effectively teach are ever-changing, so if we want teachers stay abreast of these swings of the pendulum and be able to incorporate them into our work, we must have access to dedicated time during the year for professional development.

At my independent school, I’ve had access to some wonderful professional development sessions through AIMS, which comprises over 120 schools in the MD/DC area. One that stands out for me in particular is the annual Making Schools Safe workshop, which has greatly informed my work in sponsoring our school’s Gay-Straight Alliance, but also has helped me think carefully about making my classroom and school a safe place for all students. I also had the thrill of presenting at the AIMS annual conference one year, which I hope will only be the first time I get to share my efforts with other teachers, and have heard some inspiring AIMS sessions in the past as well.

I try to keep a running “wishlist” for different aspects of my professional career, and my PD dreams include attending NCTE’s annual convention as well as someday presenting there, and publishing lesson plans on sites like ReadWriteThink and the NEH’s EDSITEment (remember, it’s my dream list!). I strive towards presenting and publishing for several reasons; I have gained so much from the contributions of other teachers, that I want to be able to return the favor for the greater community of teachers as well. However, I think that striving towards this also helps me work towards being more creative and rigorous in my teaching as well, so that I have something new and valuable to bring to the conversation, and keeps me invigorated in a profession that can be notoriously draining.

I’ve heard/read teachers before who say they take the whole summer “off” from going into school or going to workshops, but while I do log many pooltime hours, the summer is when I have the mental space and energy to do some of the big-picture thinking about my teaching practice, the kind of meta-thinking I just don’t always get to during the school year.  Professional development has been a big part of that, inspiring more of that big-picture perspective and giving me the tools to put ideas into action.

In fact, I just returned from an amazing PD week-long session that I’ll blog more about soon. It’s inspiring just to be around the kind of teachers who flock to PD sessions, who are dedicated and creative and thought-provoking, who are able to tell me about a story I’ve never read or give me a perspective on a text that never occurred to me. I took so many notes and pictures during the week, and even on the plane ride home, I was jotting down ideas and connections to better plan the upcoming year. Who knows how much I will actually realize for the fall, but I know what I’ve learned will continue to provide inspiration for years to come.

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Keeping a Teaching Journal

Posted on June 20, 2011 by Jackie

On Twitter recently, a link to an article on keeping a teaching journal popped up, and I was instantly intrigued.

Keeping a work journal has been on my mind since I read about it while writing about my new gratitude journal habit, but I didn’t realize there was such a wealth of resources and articles on how specifically to reflect in a teaching journal. I’ve written before about how important it is to reflect on teaching, and my blogging has always been reflective, but I never want to risk my job or betray the privacy of any of my students or colleagues. Also, I like the idea of reflecting immediately after each class, even if it’s only a brief jotting down of quick impressions. When I was adjuncting and frequently teaching new classes, I used to write all my lesson plans in a notebook, and then reflect right after that class by writing a paragraph or so after I’d taught that plan. It was incredibly valuable in my growth as a new teacher, but somewhere along the way, I lost the habit.

I think I’ll try The Teacher’s Daybook, 2011-2012 Edition: Time to Teach, Time to Learn, Time to LiveBERJAYA, because I admire Jim Burke so much and I know the earlier edition has been so popular.  I still like the idea of keeping a work journal, but that would be something I did at home, to make sure I could feel free to write in it without censoring myself.

As much as I enjoy blogging under my own name and feel it has moved me in useful directions, there’s something to be said for writing without censoring myself, not thinking of a finished product like a poem or essay, not worrying about proofreading or whether I’m expressing myself clearly, but just writing to figure things out and get the thoughts and feelings down on paper and out of my own head.  I kept diaries for much of my childhood and adolescence, lost the habit in college and graduate school, then started blogging after my girls were born.  But writing freely, the way I used to, scribbling furiously until my hand was sore?  It’s been years, and sometimes, I miss it.  I think it would help me process more about my job, and maybe more about my life along the way.

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End of Year Gifts

Posted on June 15, 2011 by Jackie
Assortment of gift cards

Image via Wikipedia

I got the best end-of-the-year teacher gift recently.

No, it wasn’t a gift card, or a box of chocolates, a pretty scarf or expensive perfume, though I have gotten all of those things before. It came in an envelope, didn’t cost a thing, and will be a gift I treasure forever.

The parent of one of my graduating students, a girl I never taught but worked with extensively in other capacities, wrote me a letter, in lovely penmanship on a thick ivory card, thanking me for the relationship I had built with her daughter and telling me how much it had meant to both of them. It brought me to tears, truthfully, and it was such a wonderful surprise to find in my mailbox.  Yes, high school teachers like to be thanked too.

When my daughter Sophie was in first grade, she had a really great teacher, who had just graduated and was in that dreaded first year of teaching. You could see, however, that she had all the hallmarks of success, and so one evening, I wrote her a note over email with some words of encouragement, teacher to teacher, but also as a grateful parent. This spring, two years later, I ran into her in Starbucks with her own mother, and she told her mother what a nice email I had written her, and how much it had meant to her.

The lesson? Every teacher appreciate cash, or a gift card to a restaurant or even a grocery or department store. But the gifts that really touch us, that give us strength, that inspire us? Tell us what we’ve meant to you and your family, and thank us for any way in which we’ve helped educate your children. It will mean the world to any teacher worthy of the name and profession.

And if you want, you can slip a gift card into the envelope too.

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Evaluations

Posted on June 13, 2011 by Jackie

Like Miss Teacha, I’ve been spending some time with my end-of-year evaluations recently, and as always, it’s been intriguing and edifying.

I don’t have an official form I need to use, no combination of Scantron and narrative answers, and these evals are not as integral to my job security as they can be for adjunct or even tenure-track faculty. But I find them still to provide a wealth of information about everything from texts to assignments to my teaching style, and I’m surprised by some of the results every year. I never look at them before I’ve turned in grades, a lesson mandated when I was teaching college-level courses since that was standard policy, and one I’ve adopted now that I administer my own surveys. Happily, I turned in my grades a week ago and have finished up all my official commitments, so I spent some time collecting data from my stack of surveys, and then reflecting on the results.

This was the first time I’d used this particular survey (document linked here), and I’m really pleased with the results. There was an interesting thread on the English Companion Ning recently if you’re looking for other ideas as well. I prefer open-ended ones, and for now, I think I prefer paper over an online tool.

Here are some of the results that struck me the most:

    • Only one “boring” comment, which I’ve come to expect every year, and a ratio I’m happy with considering I have 48 student surveys in front of me (and, to be honest, since it was balanced by a few very effusive comments).
    • I was pleased to see that the three most effective or helpful aspects of the class were class discussion, seeing me for academic help, and reviewing the day’s reading, as these are areas in which I feel I am strong, and which I do feel have great potential to benefit the student.
    • When asked to choose three words to describe the class, the overwhelming winners were “fun” and “challenging,” which is the perfect combination, in my mind, and one that can be incredibly tricky to balance.
    • When asked to describe me as a teacher, the most popular choices were “nice,” “understanding,” “funny,” and the most frequent, “helpful.”  Again, these are the adjectives I’m striving to project, so it’s great to see that my teaching persona is in line with my hopes and expectations.
    • My students are much more afraid of in-class essays than I realized, so I need to think about how to better prepare them next year.
    • More than one student praised my focus on teaching them to annotate and attributed their stronger reading skills to better understanding how to do so, which was a heavy focus of mine during the year.
    • I tried two new poetry-related ideas this spring, my Edgar Allen Poe project and my Poetry Tournament, both of which were mentioned and praised in these surveys.  While I’ll be tweaking both for next year, this makes me even more glad I attempted them this year.
    • I suspected during the year that the way I taught grammar was not as effective and engaging as I’d like it to be, and this suspicion was reflected in these surveys as well, giving me even more motivation to revamp my approach for next year
    • They also reflected back to me that my feedback on smaller assignments might not be enough, which is also food for thought for next year.

Some of their more narrative responses also surprised me and touched my heart.  When asked to describe the course, here are some of their answers: “your grading pushed me to be better,” “we were all included,” you helped everyone in the class feel needed,” “you grade too hard for what you teach,” “you always asked how we are if we seem to be sad.”  Does the student mean that English shouldn’t be graded hard?  How did I make that student feel needed, and what exactly does that mean?  I saw that some students appreciated how I let them listen to music while working independently, and that others felt I didn’t do enough to motivate students who hate English.  I saw that even though they complained about some assignments, they saw the value in them.  And of course, I saw that they really like watching film clips!

I’ve got a few workshops coming up, so it will probably be July before I can really dig in and start making substantive changes to my lessons and assessments.  But my students have given me some wonderful starting points and some invaluable guidance, and once again, I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have happened into this stage of my career, where I’m exactly where I want to be.

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Graduation

Posted on June 7, 2011 by Jackie
40 red roses

Image by Morgaine via Flickr

Girls in white dresses carrying red roses: must be graduation time again at my school! Every year I get a littler tearier, I think, not just because it’s wonderful to see these amazing girls move out into the greater world, but because each year, it seems a little closer to when it will be my own girls, walking across some stage, preparing to spread their wings while I stay behind and cheer them on.

Congratulations to all the graduates!

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Pioneer Woman and Me

Posted on May 27, 2011 by Jackie
Cover of "The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipe...

Cover via Amazon

Thanks to a dear subscription-having friend, I finally got to read the entirety of the recent New Yorker piece on The Pioneer Woman, otherwise known as Ree Drummond, otherwise known as one of my favorite, must-read, daily-check websites.

Like many of her readers, I suspect that Ree and I don’t have much in common: I have half as many kids as she does and far fewer animals living on my much smaller (and very urban) property. My husband is not a cattle rancher, I don’t homeschool, and I suspect we have different beliefs on faith, politics and many other subjects. I am also not a savvy businesswoman, and I don’t make money from blogging, much less the “solid million dollars” quoted in the article.

But we are both mothers, and bloggers, part of the 14% of women online in the US who are bloggers. While I do have access to a far wider variety of spices and ingredients than Drummond can probably find in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, I am very fond of the kind of cooking she does, and I am extremely fond of the photo-heavy way in which she posts her recipes. I love her accessible, funny, quirky way of writing, and her images are a wonderful visual treat. I appreciate that this woman, with a very full and rich life of her own, still felt the need to reach out, to express herself to online readers, to have a corner of her life where her voice was heard, independent of being a well-known figure in her own world. I don’t think she started her blog to get rich, and if you read her early entries or have read her from the early days on, I think you would agree.

So why do I rely so much on my daily serving of the Pioneer Woman? I love her recipes: her French Breakfast Puffs and sherried tomato soup have become traditional parts of our family Christmas brunch, and her crash hot potatoes and twice-baked potatoes are some of my favorite side dishes. I own a copy of her The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Recipes from an Accidental Country GirlBERJAYA and plan to cook my way through it eventually and will definitely buy her second one, coming out sometime soon, I think. I also use Tasty Kitchen frequently and have gotten some of my favorite reliable recipes from there, like this one for cheddar meatloaves.

I also love the (admittedly packaged version) stories of her life that she shares with her readers, which despite stereotypes, are not always completely sunny. Sure, she posts tons of pictures of her photogenic and adorable family, but she’s talked frankly about her parents’ divorce as well as her developmentally disabled brother and his drinking problem. I don’t own The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels–A Love StoryBERJAYA yet, but am planning on it when it comes out in paperback, even though I’ve read all the website posts already, and I will definitely see the movie when it comes out. As a blogger myself, I appreciate that she doesn’t share every single detail of her life, and that she manages to feel like a woman you would know and like without baring her entire soul and while still preserving her husband and children’s privacy as much as she can. It’s a fine and tricky line to walk, and she does it well.

Do I envy her success? Not really. Sure, I would love to have a million dollars (who wouldn’t?), but not if it meant trading my life for hers (though I would certainly love to take a weekend on her ranch once in awhile). I am not a business woman, nor do I aspire to be a professional blogger; my life as a teacher and writer is perfectly suited for me, and I don’t think I would last long on a cattle ranch. What I do envy is her seeming grace, her ability to embrace the chaos, and the way she never appears flustered. Even though I know that is only the surface she presents to the world, it’s a surface I’d like to resemble more closely.

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