Moved . . .

I would like to say thank you to all of you who have written comments and emails to me over the past few months.  I am glad that this blog could be a helpful resource for so many educators.  I know the stress and time constraints that many of you feel, and you have my utmost respect and admiration.  In the past few months I have finished my first book, an as yet untitled two hundred page closet drama and have started a second more young adult oriented project.  I have also moved from public education to private tutoring.  I appreciate all the support that I have received through this site, but am afraid that I will no longer be able to continue it.  I have, however, started a new blog containing mostly book reviews of young adult literature and writing, in general.

So, for those of you who are interested in YA lit or would like to be introduced to a few new Young Adult titles, I am now located at:

Hidden Shelf: Books for the Clever, Young and Old

The End

My long and illustrious career as an educator has finally come to an end.  After one whole week on my own I have decided that this profession is just not for me.  Grad school here I come.

Good luck to the rest of you.  You have my utmost respect and admiration.  May this school year bring you much happiness and joy.

Student Intereset Survey + Goal Setting Lesson Plan

So, Monday (tomorrow) marks the first day of the 2007-2008 school year in most counties that I’ve heard of in Georgia.  Monday is also the official start of my first year as a teacher.  I’ve been told horror stories, but I’ve also been given lots of reassurances.  I’m hopeful that if I remain consistent and fair in my discipline plan, I will be able to gain student’s respect.  I’m already looking forward to the days when I have students that will spread the word and allow me to have a reputation that precedes their coming into my class.

I’ve been trying to do a lot of preparation, but it has been difficult.  So far, I can confidently say that I am as prepared as I can be for the first day of school.  I have my syllabi all printed out and I have my Student Information Sheet and Interest Survey ready to go.  My number one goal is to establish myself as a strict authority figure, immediately.  My number two goal is to get to know my students as well as I can, on an individual level, as early as possible.  I created this fairly open-ended interest survey in order to do that.

In addition to going over the syllabus/code of conduct/expectations and all that good stuff, on the first day.  I have my digital camera ready to take pictures of each and every student (although, I will be taking them in groups of 3-4).  I want to be able to have pictures to fill up the bulletin boards.  I figure that it will help me remember their names and make them feel more comfortable in my classroom.  I hope to create a really close-knit community in my classroom, so I’ve been brainstorming ways of doing that.  I think the best way that I have come up with is trying to make students feel, as much as possible, that this classroom is theirs, just as much as it is mine, and to ask for their opinions as much as possible.

On Day 2 I plan on using a Goal Setting Lesson that will enable students to better understand how I formulate goals for their class and help them set goals for themselves, both short and long term.  A lot of the students that I will be teaching are considered at-risk.  Meaning, I suppose, that they are at-risk of not graduating from high school and continuing in the cycle of generational poverty, which is a big problem in this city.  Many of them have no models for goal setting and many of their parents don’t talk about what what they will do five years from now.  So, I am going to try to make this a big part of my classroom and find ways for students to continue to monitor their progress and set new goals.

In Carol Ann Tomlinson’s How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed-Ability Classrooms, she offers an activity that is perfect for extending the ideas taught in the Goal Setting Lesson.  One of her ideas for differentiating is allowing students a day within a unit to set their own goals and come up with a plan, or set of activities, that they are going to engage in to meet their goals for the day.  She calls it Design-A-Day, and many members from my college cohort have had many good things to say about it. 

I’m trying not to bring textbooks in until the second or third week of the school year, so what I start students out with is a diagnostic test so that I know where they stand in terms of ability in all the criteria that they will be tested on.  On that same day, I plan on guiding them again through Georgia’s college preparation website GeorgiaCollege411 and the CollegeBoard website.  We’ll probably have discussions about learning interests, scholarships, tuition, college majors, and post-college opportunities, as well as a short Q&A session about what to expect in and from college life.

On Thursday and Friday I’m going to do a mini-unit based on names.  We will read a vignette from House on Mango Street called “My Name,” in which the main character, Esperanza, gives a very lyrical explanation and description of her name.  Students will discuss the vignette and names and general.  They will end the week by writing their own short vignettes about their name.

Now down to “real” planning . . . . 

I don’t know about all of you teachers out there, but I’m ALREADY exhausted . . .

So I didn’t look hard enough … Lesson Plans for British Literature

I couldn’t leave out the Brit Lit people.  Like I said in the previous post, these lesson plans are based on a set of standards called the Quality Core Curriculum (QCC), which the state of Georgia has already abandoned in the subject area of English Language Arts.  I, however, think that there are still some valuable resources in these pages.  So, if you are teaching British Literature and are looking for some ideas, I would AT LEAST browse here.

For those of you teaching American Literature . . . a gift (I hope)

For my current or future American Literature teachers out there, this link might help you out a little bit.  The state of Georgia has recently finished realigning it’s standards.  (In place of a set of standards that were called QCCs, we now have the GPS, which I find incredibly useful because of how unambiguous and explicit they are in, finally, explaining what it is teachers should be teaching their students in each grade and subject area.  I don’t like too many restrictions when it comes to planning, but it really gives enough guidance to be comforting and leaves enough room for freedom and creativity.  For these reasons, the GPS are quite welcome, as far as I’m concerned.)

Despite the fact that the old standards have been done away with and that these lessons plans have been “deactivated,” there are many, many good ideas within these pages and within these links (to other web sites as well as to lesson plan worksheets).  In the American Literature pages, there are thirteen units with detailed lesson plans, links, worksheets, and ideas for differentiation.  I highly recommend checking it out. 

That means lesson plans for people who teach these novels:

The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and House on Mango Street. 

There are also lesson plans for people who would like resources for:

Native American Literature unit, Colonial American Literature unit, Age of Reason / Rationalism unit, Romanticism unit, American Poetry unit, Realism unit and Modern American Literature unit.

I like a lot of the lesson plans because they try to create plans that require students to use inductive and deductive reasoning skills.  Hopefully you’ll be able to find at least something that you like enough to modify and use for yourself.

I’ve been trying to see if I can find similar pages for World or British Literature.  I’ve yet to find those. 

Of course, GeorgiaStandards.org also provides lesson ideas on that newer site.  Happy Planning!  I’m off to continue rediscovering all the subtle beauties and depths of The Scarlet Letter that eluded me all those years ago, when I first read it in sophomore English.

English GACE Test

So, I cannot help but notice that the majority of my visitors come here frantically searching for something related to the GACE (Georgia Assessment for the Certification of Educators) test.  While my experience of the test was that it was not very difficult at all, I did go into it having just completed an English degree and completing an English Education degree.  While I am in no way qualified to talk about other sections of the GACE, I have created, for a friend, a mini-study guide of topics that it may behoove you to be familiar with if you are taking the English portions of this test.

I do want to note that I have no way of knowing what questions will appear in the upcoming GACE tests and what topics will be most prevalent.  The best guides available are still the ones that appear in the preparation materials section of the GACE website.  Familiarizing yourself with the GPS (Georgia Performance Standards) might be another good way for  you to become familiar with the types of skills and material expected to be taught in your content area.  These new standards for English Language Arts, for example, includes a new section dedicated to listening, speaking and viewing.  To go along with that set of standards, the GACE test that I took seemed to include many questions on media literacy viewing strategies, methods of persuasion and logical fallacies.  It is also my experience that you will not be asked questions that pertain to educational psychology or educational theory (except, perhaps, the extremely well-known terms and names, like Vygotsky and contructivism).

With that being said, I encourage you to check out my English GACE Review.  Good luck to all of the future teachers of Georgia who will be taking the GACE over the next few months. 

My very first classroom, classroom management, and Scarlet Letter Lit Circles

So, I have officially completed my county’s new teacher orientation.  Some of it was thoroughly mindnumbing, but there were positive aspects to it, as well.  I made friends with the other new English teacher in my high school, a first year (and, therefore, terrified) TAPP teacher who will be teaching tenth grade at another high school in the county, and an elementary school teacher who will be teaching fourth grade.  I, also, had the opportunity to become friends with a young man (as young as me!), who just graduated from college (and, is a TAPP teacher, as well).  It turns out that we are also hall neighbors, with him right across from me.

All in all, it wasn’t as bad as I had expected.  I took advantage of the free stuff, I appreciated the free lunch and, most of all, I took away some really good ideas for classroom management.  Thinking about the year to come, I had been struggling a little bit with deciding what types of incentives and consequences I would give my high school students.  High school students are often not as mature as they would have you believe, but you certainly don’t want to run the risk of making them feel as though you are infantilizing them.  Woe to the teacher whose students laugh at him or her over their misled notion that stickers are still effective motivators.

While the speaker at the last session of our orientation offered a lot of great ideas about how to manage one’s classroom, I felt that a lot of the strategies offered by our speaker, and based on the discipline strategies of Dr. Terry Alderman, were aimed mostly at younger students, particularly at the elementary level.

For high school, I did take away a couple things that I wanted to implement, however.  One of the things that I really feel silly about doing in front of the classroom is holding up my arm in some gesture as I wait for them to quiet down and give me their attention.  I don’t know why this makes me feel particularly stupid, but it always does, regardless of whether or not it works (but, believe me I have felt much stupider the times that it hasn’t worked).  One strategy that I took from our speaker, Ms. Savage, was to have a certain number of colored bracelets around one wrist, and switching them to the other wrist if I am holding out my hand and they continue to ignore that gesture for getting quiet and giving me their attention.

I really thought that it would be a good idea.  You could even pull this off with hair ties or rubber bands, although I would imagined that those plastic colored bracelets that have been all the rage and/or colored hair ties would be much more visible.  The important thing in all of the strategies that the speaker shared, regardless of grade level, was that students have a visual cue to motivate them and let them know where they stand on the behavior spectrum of “good” to “not doing so hot.”  I want to use them to determine how much time students will be given at the end of the class as free time to sit in their desks and read, talk, or work on their homework.  If I have five or more bracelets on the “good” wrist by the end of the day, they get their entire five minutes.  If I have less than five, they get the number of minutes left on the “good” wrist.  Bracelets will move from the “good” to “bad” wrist in my class when I have to wait more than ten seconds for the class to quiet down or when a student blurts something out while another student, or I am talking.  One student can only lose one bracelet for their class in a day.  If that same student breaks any of the guidelines again that day, they will be given a warning, and then teacher detention.

My teacher detention usually builds by increments of 15 minutes.  I start with 15 minutes and if a student commits another offense, another 15 minutes will be added on to their time.  Students have a week, or five days, to come and serve my detention before I will write an office referral.  Of course, all major offenses will be dealt with by an immediate office referral. 

Students for whom it is difficult to refrain from talking or any other minor, but persistent, behavior, will be dealt with in teacher-student conferences.  Once a student receives three teacher detentions, they will sit down with the teacher and fill out a behavior contract that outlines their understanding of the problems that they seem to be having with the classroom guidelines, the strategies that the teacher and student will use to try to fix the interruptions, as well as, motivators and consequences for sticking to or breaking the contract.

I think that this is a wonderful idea because it allows me to talk one-on-one with students about what is troubling them, lets them know that I am on their side, and that tells them that I am willing to problem solve with them about how to solve these problems.

As another incentive, I am going to employ what Ms. Savage called Mystery Motivator.  Whenever I catch a student being prepared or staying on task at certain random times, I will give them a slip from my paper cube.  They will write their name on this piece of paper and slip it into the jar marked for their period.  I will let the jar accumulate for two weeks, and then I will pick a random name.  The student whose name I pick will be given a secret prize kept inside the mystery box or mystery envelope.

This is basically the classroom management plan that I have put together for my class this year.  I feel that it’s both fair and respectful to students.  I just hope that it ends up being a successful plan, because I know how difficult classroom management is for so many first year teachers.

In other news: I received my one hundred dollars from the governor.  “Sonny Money” as some teacher apparently refer to it.  I don’t know what I am going to spend it on, yet, but there is certainly a lot that I could spend money on.  I am still going to ask my department head if it would be possible to purchase a certain set of books for me to teach literature circles with the Scarlet Letter unit in order to get students more engaged in this difficult text.  I believe that while the text can be exceedingly difficult in its language and syntax, that students will be able to better understand and access the themes, if they have to read thematically-related books about which they can more easily relate.

The Young Adult novels that I have chosen as perfect literature circle selections to read in conjunction with The Scarlet Letter are as follows:

Monster – Walter Dean Myers

About a boy who is on trial for his participation in a robbery turned murder. This book begs a lot of questions regarding the degrees of innocence, the responsibility ability of one person to judge and decide the fate of another person, as well as, the degree to which an experience like this changes the way people look at you and you look at yourself.

Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson

Amazon.com Review:
Since the beginning of the school year, high school freshman Melinda has found that it’s been getting harder and harder for her to speak out loud.  What could have caused Melinda to suddenly fall mute? Could it be due to the fact that no one at school is speaking to her because she called the cops and got everyone busted at the seniors’ big end-of-summer party? Or maybe it’s because her parents’ only form of communication is Post-It notes written on their way out the door to their nine-to-whenever jobs. While Melinda is bothered by these things, deep down she knows the real reason why she’s been struck mute…

Contains some sexual themes, as the reader finds out that Melinda was the victim of a rape.

Baby Be-Bop – Francesca Lia Block

From School Library Journal:
Grade 10 Up? A prequel to the popular books about Weetzie Bat and her circle of quirky friends and relatives. This novel is about her best pal, Dirk, in his pre-Weetzie days. He’s in high school (in L.A., of course), living with Grandma Fifi and struggling with how to come out to his best friend and soulmate. When a gang of gay bashers beats him up, he drags himself home and passes out. While he’s unconscious, long-dead relatives he’s never known come to him in what seem to be dreams.  His visions assure him that “There was love waiting; love would come.” Block writes distinctively and convincingly, interweaving the hallucination scenes smoothly. She makes the power of stories felt?and here, more purposefully than ever before, she weaves a safety net of words for readers longing to feel at home with themselves.

(Brief drug references, some sexual content, sensitive subjects dealing with sexual orientation.)

The First Part Last – Angela Johnson

From School Library Journal
Grade 8 Up-Brief, poetic, and absolutely riveting, this gem of a novel tells the story of a young father struggling to raise an infant. Bobby, 16, is a sensitive and intelligent narrator. His parents are supportive but refuse to take over the child-care duties, so he struggles to balance parenting, school, and friends who don’t comprehend his new role. Alternate chapters go back to the story of Bobby’s relationship with his girlfriend Nia and how parents and friends reacted to the news of her pregnancy. 

(some potentially sensitive subject matter about teen parenthood)

Native Son - Richard Wright

From Library Journal
After 58 years in print, Wright’s Native Son has acquired classic status. It has not, however, lost its power to shock or provoke controversy. Bigger Thomas is a young black man in 1940s Chicago who accidentally kills the daughter of his wealthy white employer. Though his fate is certain, he finds that his crimes have given meaning and energy to his previously aimless life, and he goes to his execution unrepentant. Out of this tale the author develops a profoundly disturbing image of racism and its results that puts Bigger’s experience in horrifying perspective.

(Parents should be aware of violent language and situations contained in this book.)

Return from Summer Hiatus + Review: Octavian Nothing

So, it has been quite a while since I have been able to update this blog.  I have graduated, moved into my new loft, and taken the entire summer to have as much fun as possible before this upcoming school year.  I just found out that I will be teaching two classes of American Lit and one class of World Lit.  I’m very excited, but, also a little bit nervous.  I suppose that is only normal for a first-year teacher, though.

I have spent some time this summer reading some YA Lit.  So, here is one YA Lit book review for now.  I’ll be planning for my classes in the next couple weeks, but hopefully I will have the opportunity to update again.

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party – M.T. Anderson

M.T. Anderson is by no means a stranger to the world of YA Lit, having written several highly acclaimed young adult novels that have already found their way onto the library shelves and course syllabi of many high schools across the nation.  I noticed that his novel Burger Wuss  made it onto the summer reading list for my high school this year; and, perhaps, his better known novel, Feed, was a National Book Award Finalist a couple years back. 

His new novel, Octavian Nothing, follows the childhood of a young boy in the American colonies on the eve of the Revolutionary War.  We know that Octavian is the son of a princess and prince from a country across the ocean.  We know that Octavian is the brilliant protegee of the “enlightened scholars” who populate the Novanglican College of Lucidity, behind whose walls Octavian lives his studious, but sheltered, life.  What we are left to answer for ourselves is the question of who Octavian is.  Why is he so important, and for what purposes is he being taught and sheltered by the Novanglican Church of Lucidity?

Written in elegantly heightened and beautiful prose, from the point of view of our protagonist, Octavian, M.T. Anderson allows readers to witness the birth of a nation from a point of view that continues to be largely ignored in historical accounts and fictional narratives, alike.  Anderson asks us to examine the hypocrisy that exists between the ideals on which countries are founded and the reality of those ideals in practice.  Through his focus on the horrifying experience of one individual through a time that is generally looked upon idealistically and nostalgically, we are confronted with the question of what it means to be a citizen of or a traitor to a nation. 

I cannot praise this book enough.  I think that it should be required reading for all high school American Literature students.  While the language may prove a little difficult, it would be more than worth it to try to teach a book that deals with such compelling, important and contemporarily relevant themes.  This is, by far, the best YA book that I have read, and I can’t wait for the second volume to come out.

Hopefully there will be more posts to come, now that I am back in the habit of thinking about school.

Good luck to everyone anticipating and planning for the beginning of another school year.

YA Lit Book Review: The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

If you are interested in some background about how I came across this book, read background.  If you are only interested in the review, I have so kindly split this entry up into two sections.  Simply skip down to the review section.   

Background: 

Since I have more time than I know what to do with right now, I’m trying to read as much YA Lit as possible.  I figure the more YA Lit that I am able to read now, the better I will be able to serve my students next year and in the years to come.  I started to fall into the trap, lately, of believing that all YA Lit was boring fluff.  (I had been reading Scott Westerfield’s Uglies [Book 1 of the Uglies Trilogy] and Peter Dickinson’s Eva.  Both are good books and I would recommend reading the reviews on Amazon.com sound at all interesting to you.  I found the topics interesting (Uglies dealt with a futuristic society in which everyone, at the age of 16, undergoes surgery to become superstar gorgeous.  Eva concerns a teenage girl, Eva, who wakes up after months in a coma to find that she no longer inhabits the body of a human, but that of a female chimpanzee) and believed that they had potential to be great YA Lit books.  So, it was not the fluff part that got to me.  It was that I found these books incredibly tedious to read.  They were, in some areas, utterly boring.  The timing and flow of events in each of these books was completely off, dragging the action out far longer than it should have been.

I am happy to say that Nancy Farmer’s The House of the Scorpion changed my mind about YA Lit once again.  My interest in incorporating literature circles in my future classes is at an all-time high, so I’m trying to group books into thematic units.  I came upon The House of the Scorpion because I’m currently interested in accumulating a list of books that would fit well into a utopia/dystopia unit.  This is the same reason that I was drawn to the Westerfield and Dickinson novels that I mention above.  Farmer’s book, however, is the first one I’ve come across that I would not hesitate to include as a choice for utopia/dystopia literature circles.

The Review:

Mattéo Alacrán lives in Opium, a country that borders the United States to the south and Aztlán, formerly Mexico, to the north.  Mattéo is the highly protected clone of the powerful, one hundred and forty year old drug lord and ruler of Opium, El Patrón.  As a little boy, Mattéo loves El Patrón, even as everyone in Opium, including El Patrón’s family, cowers in fear of the old man.  The House of the Scorpion follows Matt on his journey to discover who he is and why he was created, as well as the terrifying methods that El Patrón uses to keep all the inhabitants of Opium under his tyrranical control.

Nancy Farmer (also, author of The Ear, The Eye and The Arm) exhibits, in this novel, a perfection of timing.  The House of the Scorpion is the perfect balance between beautifully detailed descriptions of character and setting and action.  Building suspense with each turn of the page, Farmer keeps this almost 400 page novel moving smoothly, without imposing artificial excitements or leaving loose ends.  Perhaps, more importantly from a teacher’s point of view, Farmer’s novel touches on a variety of weighty and provocative themes, including what it means to be human, the responsibilities of a society to the people who create it, the influence of nature vs. nurture on the personality of a human being, the ability of greed to corrupt and the opportunity to make good or bad decisions.  Matt’s movement from the world of Opium to that of Aztlán may also provide a great opportunity for comparing and contrasting the social structures of each society and each societies treatment of its citizens. 

I highly recommend this book, and will probably try to incorporate it into literature circles in my own classroom.  I would recommend this book for high school students, grades 9-11.

Rubrics, oh my!

Last week I made a presentation about rubrics. It basically consists of some tips to keep in mind when creating rubrics, as well as some links that might be useful for considering the criteria that you are looking for when grading various types of performance assessments. So, without further ado . . . my rubric one-pager:

Creating Rubrics

1. Determine the assessment criteria (score categories) that need to be demonstrated by student work. (This should, of course, be informed by your unit / lesson goals.)
2. Decide whether an analytical or holistic scoring rubric would best assess student work.
3. Define high and low-level achievement for the assessment criteria (score categories) you have chosen. Include as much detail and as many levels of achievement as is appropriate/necessary for your specific needs.

Additional Tips:
-Try to describe levels of achievement for each score category “using descriptions of the work rather than judgments about the work.” For example, avoid words and phrases like “good” or “fails to.” Be as positive as you can in describing work levels that do not achieve excellence.
-Try to remain consistent in how you format your rubrics throughout the year. The more comfortable students feel with your format, the more likely they will know how to navigate, interpret and consult the rubrics you have so painstakingly created to help them.
-Try keeping rubrics to one page – your descriptions of score categories and levels of achievement should be kept as short and simple as possible.
-Related to the previous tip, try to avoid using difficult language that will only confuse students about what your expectations are and what their goals should be.

http://www.ericdigests.org/2001-2/rubrics.html

Online Resources

There are many Internet resources available to teachers for using and creating rubrics. Remember, though, that no generic or pre-designed rubric will be able to assess the standards that you are setting for your students better than one that you create yourself. Here are some of the best resources online:

Rubistar – A website where you can view rubrics used by other teachers as well as create and save your own.

TeAch-nology – Print pre-designed rubrics that assess everything from notebook organization to classroom participation or generate your own customized rubric.

Rubric Builder – An educator-created site that allows teachers to build their own rubrics and browse through almost 50,000 other rubrics created by other teachers. Currently in its Beta stage, you may encounter some glitches in trying to work with this site.

Tips for Increasing Student Involvement & Responsibility with Rubrics
1. Instead of asking students if they have any questions about the rubric right after introducing it, tell them that part of their homework is to review the rubric and come in with questions the next day. You could also offer some sort of incentive for doing this.

2. Related to tip #1, make it a homework assignment for students to analyze the rubric and create, for themselves, a checklist of the requirements for the assignment. In class the next day, have students get into groups to make sure that everyone’s checklist looks accurate and matches all requirements of the rubric before allowing questions.

3. Right before students turn in their assignments, have them refer back to their rubrics and write reflections on how they think they fulfilled each of the assessment criteria, what was a strong spot, a weak spot, etc.

4. Involve students in determining what appropriate criteria for assessment and evidence of achieving standards might be. Also, involve students in determining how important these criteria are and how heavily each should be weighted.

Ross-Fisher, Roberta L. “Developing Effective Success Rubrics.” Kappa Delta Pi Record 41.3 (2005): 131-5. Academic Search Premier EBSCOhost. GALILEO. University of Georgia Libraries. 01 Apr. 2007 .

An activity that we didn’t get to do because of time restraints was something that I think would go really well in a high school classroom. My presentation group had the idea of getting the class, in small groups, involved in creating a rubric to assess a perfect date. The students would have to come up with essential categories to consider and then descriptors of high, medium and low achievement in each of the categories. I’m not sure exactly how I would structure that in a high school classroom, and I’m sure it would depend on the grade level that I was teaching, but I feel that an activity like that would be a fun way to get students interacting with rubrics and understanding the way they work and the way you, as a teacher, create them.

As we have all finished our student teaching and are pretty much coasting toward graduation, our cohort has divided up into small groups that are giving short GCTE-like presentations about a variety of issues important in the classroom. Look for these ideas in posts to come!

Hope everyone had a great Easter!