Occasionally, if I assess that interest or incentive is worthwhile, I will post a writing opportunity for students.  Here is one that might be worth the time and effort:

drive2life Contest

 

Thanks to Mount Desert Island High School for this most excellent parody. No offense to Meghan Traynor, after all it is her music, but I prefer THIS version…’cuz I’m all about those books.

 

 

November, the month that flies, brings Thanksgiving, the national holiday that honors our gratitude, our survival in an alien environment that became home.  How did that happen?  Certainly the spirit of adventure and resilience mattered, but the new challenges demanded a willingness to learn, to break with patterns that no longer fostered necessary adaptation.  Not unlike those earliest pilgrims, when we leave the classroom to attend the National Teachers of English Convention and The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents, we are motivated to learn and grow, returning to the classroom, and your children, with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication to thrive as the best professionals we can possibly be.

This year’s event, held in National Harbor, Maryland, exceeded our hopes.  From Friday at 8 a.m., to Tuesday at 2 p.m., we feasted on an array of ideas, offered by the top professionals in our field, and heard from the authors who galvanize our efforts to put great books in the hands of our students.  It was truly an event for which we give thanks, to an Administration and Board of Education that supports such professional development, and to you who entrust your children to us throughout the school year.

This year we attended several sessions that focused on the shifts your children will be experiencing in curricula and testing.  Among them is the critical ability to be able to read texts of all types, and put them in conversation with one another. In a particularly affecting session, the presenters discussed the myriad formats available for authors to present their arguments, providing examples from his eighth grade class that had participated in a C-Span-sponsored contest.  The multimedia feature http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As%2C%7B%221%22%3A%22RI%3A9%22%7D#/?part=tunnel-creek, “Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek,” provides an exquisite example of the options available to developing writers in the 21st century, and serves as inspiration for those of us who are teaching them.

In another very different, altogether inspiring session, presenters demonstrated how they have used video recording as part of the daily Readers’ Workshop to foster book analysis.  Students record themselves speaking about the books they have finished, each creating a digital file as a history of their reading development.  As the presenters attest, this “Selfie Center” has promoted a deeper look at independent text selections on the part of the students as well as an awareness of effective speaking and production skills.  We know that we can adapt and implement this strategy in our classrooms.

These two sessions represent but a tiny portion of what was offered; each of the three convention days was jam-packed with food for thought, full-fledged meals of ideas, ours for the taking, and digesting.  The ALAN Assembly serves as the perfect dessert: a buffet (see photo above) of soon-to-be-released, or recently-released Young Adult titles accompanied by authors’ talks that run the gamut from informational to humorous–but always thought-provoking.  This year’s conference featured authors who shared their stories of triumph and loss, heartbreak and hilarity, in a range of genres.  A particular highlight was the parent-child collaboration panel where author Neal Shusterman, a favorite among our students for his dystopian series Unwind, and his son shared their experience in collaborating to create a novel about the son’s mental illness,                                      .

Although it may not be universally true that professional development extends one’s boundaries, engenders discovery, and validates the time away from the job, this opportunity certainly did.  We are grateful!

 

The best thing about teaching?  Of course it is the students, and the attendant unpredictability of each year–of each day, if we’re truly honest.  I understand all the talk about efficiency, but truly teachers are working with personalities, and that means learning to be flexible, finding moments of serendipity in the unraveling of a well-crafted plan.  That’s the best thing.

At its heart, the act of teaching is the consummate act of learning.  In what other profession is it so clearly built into every day?  Another great thing about teaching is that, to do it well, one must constantly be changing and growing and learning.  The second-best-thing!

(photo by Christian Montone @blogspot)

An advertising tagline that has become almost invisible because of its ubiquity is, “New and Improved.”  Teaching requires that we carefully attend to the phrase, however.  In our role as consumers, it is difficult to know what that means with a product we already think is good.  What can possibly be done to make it better?  If we’re lucky, the improvement, the tweaking of something that was already good, enhances its worth, and we wonder at the process.  If we don’t notice any difference, we question the claim.

This is my 35th year in the classroom, and I want to make this one new and improved, so people say, “her class was good before, but now it’s even better.”  It’s a challenge to embrace the new for improvement’s sake, but keep the tried-and-true because it has served its purpose admirably.  Striking this balance is an imperative because we’re not talking about laundry soap here; we’re talking about learning and the lives of young people.  The decision to perform differently when one has already attained a level of success must  be approached judiciously.  I know I need to work on reading conferences with your children, so with an eye toward that performance goal, for THEM, I shift toward the new.

After reading two professional books with change in mind, Book Love and Readers Front and Center, I anticipate more productive reading conversations with your children, deeper engagement with the texts they choose and the thoughts they share.  True improvement.  In terms of tracking these conversations and maintaining a history that we can reflect upon, I will be using a web-based tool, Evernote, to capture the gist of our interactions in a format that I can easily share with you–the new for me though I follow in the stead of fellow professionals for whom this is already tried-and-true.

I will work to have my “consumers” wonder at the process, not question the claim, as we venture forth this year.  Let me know how I’m doing.

While it is necessary to get the room ready for the new year, I’ve become much less focused on the trappings and far more interested in the real estate:  STUDENTS.  Today I ironed out some glitches with the new app that I hope will benefit any of the eighth graders who possess a smart phone, Apple or Android.  Julienne and her colleagues at ClassOwl worked tirelessly to have all systems “go” for tomorrow.

When I first connected with them, I appreciated their vision, realizing that the best tech tools do one thing REALLY WELL!  It is a lesson in focus that would benefit many of us to remember. (I speak for myself here.)  Julienne described how, in her time at Stanford, she realized that the phone was truly underutilized as an organizational tool for juggling assignments.  Out of this lack sprang the Class Owl app.

The addition of integration with files and Google Drive holds true promise for our year together.  I hope you and your children who possess smart phones will avail yourself of the class code to join.  I will be discussing it during our first day together–tomorrow.  For those students without the phone, the ClassOwl site is available online.  I will also post homework on my webpage in the Calendar (see navigation).  It’s time to GET REAL!

The CLASS CODE IS:  86QC5V