HOW TO GET AN A FROM HEALIGAN, 2013 edition

I am hitting the home stretch on research essays in my senior classes. It is a long haul for my seniors, writing that 4th research masterpiece in as many years. They drag their feet, hoping against hope that I will tell them what to do: and I do, really. We discuss the process, plan deadlines together and then even practice research (not googling) for a couple of days in the Tech Lab. But it always seems that it comes down to at least half of the class attempting to write a significant essay overnight. So this is my first attempt at voicing what leads up to an A paper.

So how do you get an "A" from me?


THE BASICS:
Pass it in on time.
Do the easy stuff right--MLA, cite your sources appropriately, include the pieces I request in
         your final submission, follow directions on the original assignment sheet.
Don't distract me with typos, mechanical errors, format inconsistencies.
Don't discuss any text you have not read. I can tell, and it dries up your style.

THE REAL DEAL:
Write TO me: so what did you really think about everything you have learned about your topic? Think about what you need to say before you write.
You have a job to do: stay on course. Readers like being told where to go.
Aim for full paragraphs with real topic sentences, illustrate with example, use your
         resources in a logical fashion. Mostly I want to hear what YOU think, not what your
         sources told you. You give me the picture. The research is just a caption.
Strategize your writing. Give me some variety in your paragraphing and sentence structure, try
         to interest me. Are you using appropriate diction for the assignment? Will I want to
         read what's next?
Don't worry about how many paragraphs it is. Worry about telling me the story of your topic.

ICING ON THE CAKE:
Pique my interest. Set me up in the intro. Vie for my attention.
Consider me, the reader. In a better world,  I would not be the only reader, but for now, regard your essay as words, not flying aimlessly into the ozone, but TO ME.
Make me want to read it. You know how many people are in your class, and how many essays I am reading, right?

I'm sorry that this is not a concrete list of the steps to writing nirvana. There is no such thing. It is not even close to my own best writing when I am inspired. Actually, I am already thinking that I could do this post better in a Facebook-style post. But...that will be the next draft!
Remember, you have never written a more informed, sophisticated piece of prose. You have been doing the school thing for 12 years: you are in charge.

WHO IS @1healigan?

I have been in a difficult place with Twitter this school year. My district, the Roman Catholic Diocese, decided last August that appropriate relationships with students did not include most social media platforms. If  I do not connect with students on Twitter (what I miss the most),  it is not the end of the world, because the strongest connections I build will always be the ones that happen in the classroom. But is there understanding that the alums I follow on Twitter, for example, also interact with my students, so that I still see tweets from my students all the time? If an alum retweets me, then her/his followers can also see my tweets. The intertwining of social identities is embedded into the platforms themselves.
I still blog with my students, and my seniors have built their own blogs, but Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook are out. Notice that only three social media sites are mentioned: this feels like a policy that was written with a different definition of social media than mine. I notice every day in every social platform I use, that I could model appropriate use for my students: they are open to try so many things, but do not always think through their behavior--same as in the rest of their lives. I believe that part of my job is to protect them, and have seen them learn to protect themselves and take control of their digital lives as they become more experienced on social media sites. But for now, I will be protecting them in the way that is needed by my district--it works too.So who was I on Twitter with my students? I tweeted...
*connections between pop culture and our classes
*the books I am reading
*quotes from the writers who inspire me
*the movies/anime I watch every week w/ Film Club & Anime Club
*@SpartanRemark stories:  spreading the good SMHS news
*memes with pertinence to literature motifs and themes
*new books and media they might like
*alerts on events and media that would interest teens
*shoutouts for great class experience or funny moments
So I built bridges, I strengthened bonds, I created (secret) backchannels to extend the learning from earlier in the day. Kids responded sometimes, I gained more followers--even kids at school I did not know. Very seldom did I see seriously inappropriate tweets, though their language is more relaxed than I would ever allow in school. Only once did I have to block someone, and he was inappropriate mainly to see what I would do, I believe. So I did what he needed me to do. Contract honored, even though I wish he had made a different choice.
So who will I be tweeting forward? Though many of my teacher Twitter friends tweet PD and great class experiences exclusively, I miss the opportunity to let my students see me as a model learner, reader, writer, person. I am still halfway through the school year, trying to re-constitute myself as @1healigan. When I view my twitter feed now, I look more like a reader, art appreciator, sometimes obsessive tumblr user, blogger and big fan of Spartan Remark. Not so bad, I guess. I feel the loss of those beautiful threads that linked me in a professional way to my young friends. Don't believe that @1healigan will let it sit forever, though.
https://twitter.com/1healigan

x

MY LATEST READ: RAILSEA by China Mieville

What a ride! Mieville's style could be called obtuse, but I delight in his clever revision of syntax and colloquialisms: the pastiche of common usage and shorthand slang is intoxicating.  The story will be familiar to many: Moby Dick, albeit in a dystopian future where the world has moved on from what the reader understands to..... Well, that is not answered until the conclusion. Sham ap Sorap is an engaging Ishmael on the rail-road sea, but with his own style and the same naiveté that made me wince in MD.
             The world Mieville creates is not easy to understand, the reader just has to go along for the ride--this particular fact might make the book a hard sell for my guys, but oh so worth it for the right kid. An example? Sham, our Ishmael, when kidnapped by rail pirates, dreams of a future for himself that eliminates the deprivations of imprisonment--the dreamy future he imagines for himself contains the entire plot of Robinson Crusoe! So read this book, love or hate it, but no chance of forgetting it.

View all my reviews

SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE: 20th c grading in the 21st c.

I will never finish grading, because reading their writing is inspirational, in the most practical sense of the word. Right now, I am lost in King Lear "tests."  And the fundamental tension between my delight in my kids practicing their craft and then my angst as I assign a letter grade to their work is giving me agita, once again.  I can tell you exactly the difference between an A and a B on their final essays, but every time I assign a grade, I feel as if the learning that happens when they write evaporates AT THE MOMENT they see the letter--no matter which letter it is. If it is an A, they think they did everything "right."  If they see a B, then they are disappointed. If it is a C, then they are angry or hopeless. None of  these reactions are what I want our conversation to be about. Curses!
We read King Lear because it plays with ideas and situations which are great to investigate with 16-year-olds. We read it together because Shakespeare's address of common situations and the human error implicit in emotionally intense relationships is a tough road to navigate alone--no matter your age. See their blog posts as evidence. We ended up rewriting them in class to more truthfully address the complicated feelings involved with being a young adult and a child at the same time--which is what our culture demands of my young friends. I wish you could see what happened the second time around--for practical reasons, they are not posted publicly, but it was wonderful.
So back to my essay tests--some of them reached all the way from family drama to national drama to human drama, and I am thrilled. But I still feel frustrated that those who did not get there may not have done so because they are 16, not because they are not reflective or critical thinkers. If I "award" them high grades, considering their maturity level, then how do I "reward" those who already see past personal experience to symbolic intent? My conclusion is that GRADES DO NOT WORK. But that does not solve my immediate problem: I will assign grades now, and work on a real world solution for the future. I am not teaching in an environment that even has a vocabulary (yet) for this issue--who is? But I think that I must broach the subject, regularly. Maybe with my department, maybe with open minded administrators. If I am to prepare my young friends for their lives, something's gotta give.

Teaching is art, learning is personal

One week is not enough for me to absorb everything that I heard and learned at NCTE. But I have not been able to forget the inspiration I felt listening to Sir Ken Robinson validate me, an English teacher from Delaware whom he had never met, in Friday morning's keynote. I have always known that teaching is a vocation, not a job. But I had not met too many other people who verbalized this, or even felt it. Teaching is the ultimate geek life, in my experience, and I was lucky enough (?) to have been a geek longer than the word has been in use. Finally, the payoff comes from a grandfatherly British "creativity expert" who put words to the hopes and dreams I lay out in front of my classes every day: that our shared imagination is the key to the future, that what we know and feel for each other is what will drive the inevitable growth of our culture, and that school must be a personal journey for every single one of the young faces I look forward to seeing each morning. That I, their teacher, can mold this personal journey, because I practice my art with them every day. It is not mechanical, it is organic: We are farmers, not engineers. Bravo and thank you, Sir Ken.

   So what am I to do with all this respect and validation? Well, I will trust my instincts with more confidence than I have allowed myself before. Seniors who choose World Literature with me are taking a step to understanding themselves as citizens of an 80 billion strong community, and that can only be a good thing. So beware my commitment to forging a path to that self-awareness in my kids. I will continue to model  reading  as yoga for our hearts and spirits. And the choice I provide--in reading, writing, performing--is what makes it unique to each of them, so that they know to demand a personal journey to self in college. 

   And I will celebrate the flow of each day, give up worrying if I am an A or a B teacher, just as I want my young friends to sense the rockstar quality of being a learner, a student of the world, not just an A student or a B student. Can't wait to see them all tomorrow.
**For more NCTE12 goodness, check out Franki Sibberson's NCTE blog roundup at http://readingyear.blogspot.com/2012/11/ncte12-roundup.html

TEACHER FINDS HOME AT NCTE 2012

The night before I did my first NCTE preso at my first NCTE conference, I had my old guerrilla* teacher dream again. The one where I was crawling on my belly through debris-strewn streets with my Uzi in my hands, the dream I used to have when I first started teaching and felt like I was in a war zone every day.  The most vivid part of the dream was me--I was wearing camo, the only part of the dream in color.  That's why it was not a nightmare, there was this star quality about me, like I was living life in color...and eventually, the dream stopped as I grew more experienced and started to love the performance art that is teaching. 

But I still sometimes felt like I was a lone soldier. When I added SSR, or grabbed onto a kid that someone else said was not worth it, or let the kids be in charge as we chose what to read together, or ran into the department office gushing about a book I read, I sometimes felt like I was an outlier.  Well, NCTE changed all that last weekend.

I did have the dream again, mostly because I was nervous, but it gave me my focus for the speech. And I sat on a dais with three other inspiring teachers, not alone, as we talked about our passion for our students and where this led us. At the secondary section luncheon where everyone at my table geeked out about why we loved Sherman Alexie's books, we also told each other about the best sessions we had attended. No shame. The readers group led by Michael Moore and Carol Jago was just that--a place where I got to hear about the best book everyone else had just read.   I met so many twitter friends in person, made “live” friends, and felt all my ideas just flowing. I felt at home, I was with family. I am sorry I waited so long to get to NCTE, but I am never going to miss it again. No more urban guerrilla teacher dreams. Everything and everyone was in color at NCTE. And I have not even written about meeting Sir Ken Robinson yet…

* there is unfortunately no photo of a teacher in camo to accompany this post, because I was not prepared for the images that popped up when I tried to find a picture. Gulp.

WEDNESDAY, I AM THE LEARNER

Today I lived my own credo: a teacher needs to be a good learner. Thanks to my sophomores for being so patient as Healigan learned her lesson in the Tech Center. It was our regular blogging day yesterday, but there were problems as we discovered that no one could reach the link in the blog post that led to our current events topic of the week. It took almost the whole period for two adults to troubleshoot with the help of my kids: no one had paid attention to which browser they were using, and many were using Firefox. Our Mac desktops were rebelling. Ten minutes of FREE RICE at the end of the day is not the worst thing in the world, the kids delightedly assured me.   So we went back to Tech today, and still encountered problems even after everyone double checked that they were using Safari.  Folks still couldn't easily open new tabs to pass easily between the source text and their writing site, no one had their sites bookmarked in the toolbar, and so on. We eventually got the job done, but the real lesson was mine: since our school does not do formal computer training for every freshman student, then I should be doing it with them--especially in this class, where every student exhibits learning differences and some have physical issues to be managed on top of the learning issues. One student needs to use a laptop very day, but she usually brings a Dell from home, so that was no advantage with the lab's Macs (and she wanted to do what everyone else was doing).Here's what we will review next blogging day:
1. choosing the right browser for your device/computer.
2. changing preferences so they can open new tabs the Mac way. I get crazy when I see someone accessing a drop down Windows type menu, clicking open a new window, then going back to the google bar to type in the search window on a Mac. When they complain that Macs take too long, I gently review the minor differences between the two devices, and assure them that using both PCs and Macs (and whatever else comes down the line) is going to be a fact of their lives. Learn now while I am here with you!
3. knowing the difference between bookmarks vs favorites: making the decision which kind of book mark you want is critical to the convenience on a Mac. Do you want a site on the toolbar, in Top Sites, or somewhere else on the bookmarks menu? Take care of it once. Everyone laughed when I showed them how to get rid of Top Sites in the toolbar--they're not my top sites either, guys. Get rid of them!
4. BIGGEST thing I learned today? my kids did not know the difference between the google ADDRESS bar and google SEARCH bar at the top of their screens. Why should they? Teens are often lucky getting to sites they want by typing a search term in the address bar, because they go to sites that are named with the url--youtube, facebook, twitter, etc.  But when actually researching a topic, they become irritated with the results they don't get that way. Some kids figure it out, but many do not--they are still at the beginning of their googling careers, so the skills are just developing.
There are so many more  settings, etc. that I need to consider. What has stopped your classes in their tracks?
And of course, now I have to think this through with the school iPads.

UPDATE: This year's heroes announced!

UPDATE : The 2012 heroic classes have been named: the Honors Brit Lit sections went with Dumbledore's Army and 007, which I will be tempted to cast as adversaries when we hit the 20th century, I predict. My first ever sophomore American Lit class chose the Avengers after this summer's blockbuster movie. I foresee strong curricular links in their future this year. And the senior World Literature class? Well...

A word about seniors first. They have the most evolved view of themselves as teens go, but they also enjoy a last chance to imagine themselves as wild, untamed and untameable. So they chose Bane's Disciples after one of the Dark Knight's most terrifying (in my opinion) foes. Not sure what I can do with that--but wasn't that their point? And it is not all that bad to be Batman: I am not sure they realized that since they are the villains of the class, that means I get to be the hero. 

  From 16 September 2010: Every year, each of my classes chooses a "team name" to represent themselves in Healigan's world. Most teachers name their classes by color, but I hate to give up a teachable moment. I only require that the name avoid insulting anyone, represent some heroic traits, and promote class bonding. It is an agonizing process for me, since we begin the year with very different concepts of what makes a hero. Some years they live with a name that fits them less and less as they learn more about heroes, good and evil, and archetypes. The year of the Jokers was tough: we discussed everything in terms of anti-heroes and villains. They were a oppositional group, and had chosen the right name. But it was not much fun. So today I was so pleased to see one group arrive and three members immediately bring up the name they had chosen last week, the GoodFellas. They wanted to know more about GoodFellas, so I showed them the movie trailer. Much consternation ensued, after many realized they had given their vote away on the word of other classmates. What a great lesson about the political process! So I agreed to reconsider if they discussed amongst themselves and decided they would like a run off election Monday. I'm hoping for Watchmen (one of the better choices). No hope for Beowulf.

ASSESSING READING WITH WRITING

   I am in my second day of reading Beowulf "tests" consisting of two short (20-minute) essays on topics I  provided. This year I focused our review to include some discussion of how to choose the right prompt for their personal strengths and weaknesses. I always offer choices with the prompts, but in previous years, the students had not seen the choice as part of the assessment. They had not realized that they hold some power in the choices they make: the choice is critical for me in assessing their learning. It was obviously the first time many of them  had thought about writing in this way--most of them still admit writing is just hard work, and therefore they do not like to do it. The idea that they were good at some parts of it seemed to be something that they had not considered since grade school. Nice to be the bearer of good news once in a while!
   I know that some of my colleagues cannot schedule this much time for grading a test, and I admit that if my own children were still young, I am not sure how I would do this either. But as a writing teacher, this time is priceless. I learn my students, and their voices are so clear and strong, that I am humbled by the chance they give me to know them. And assessing learning with writing is an art, and every chance I have to practice that art is thrilling.  I love that some of them veer off into the wild blue yonder of their own reactions--they still teach me about Beowulf every year. And those who stick with class discussion and their notes to focus their observations seem to consider stylistic choices more consciously as they grow accustomed to my way of working with them. And once in a while, I recognize the other Beowulf lovers in the class just by the way their words shimmer on the page.
   The only downside for me is knowing that the formal essays are coming, and it is so hard to convince kids that the strictures placed on them are insignificant, that they still have a chance to strut their stuff for me.  I work on that every year. Not sure of the solution (more writing? less sleep?)

*image attribution: http://www.onbeing.org/sites/onbeing.org/files/styles/large/public/6002204726_85b34c8c01.jpg

SOCIAL MEDIA, SOCIAL TEACHING: in crisis comes opportunity?

   A Taiwanese friend often reminds me of the Chinese proverb "in crisis comes opportunity," and this year I am making it part of my truth. My school is implementing new social media policies to support the mission of our diocese, so my job on this Labor Day is to figure out what I am going to do with tumblr, Twitter, Blogger, Wikispaces, Instagram, Pinterest, and flickr. Facebook, Google+, YouTube are already decided for me. Posting this twitpic from last February seemed like a good idea as I try to reconcile the benefits that I reap with students from embedding social media in my instruction with the very real problems in "social" teaching that all teachers must acknowledge. My school administration has always supported and trusted me, so I am continuing with Blogger and Wikispaces, but I am not sure if my great idea for "this I believe" boards on Pinterest will fit  the new rules. It is also difficult to visualize our nascent online news "paper" without Twitter, and it is up to me to work through the details so that my administrators can guide my plans.
   And Twitter...it is impossible to explain the impact Twitter can have on the big picture with a group of students--I do not use Twitter directly at present, but I sure do use it as a backchannel outside of class. All of you who use it know the ancillary benefits that can come from every single view of your last 4 star rating on a book on Goodreads that student followers see.
   So far, I think that I should err on the side of caution, which means Twitter will be a no-go for this year. Since I used it informally, I will be the only one who feels the instructional loss. I will miss the direct contact with students, but the most difficult part will be explaining that I must block them--they will want to smell censorship, so I will have to reassure them. And does my administration know that blocking them will not necessarily  remove them from all interaction with me on Twitter? I am not sure.
   How do you manage the gap between what you know works and your responsibility to protect your students?