tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71024770733091588262024-03-07T23:32:04.304-08:00ENAIDA CLUD BLOGAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.comBlogger30125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-35781383582733030822019-07-01T05:15:00.000-07:002019-07-01T05:15:00.281-07:00Those Who Can Do More, Teach<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Kembali Bertemu Lagi Di Blog Ini, Silakan Membaca</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="bandar ceme 99">bandar ceme 99</a></font></span></span></center>When I was in graduate school at Humboldt State University, I used to read a comic strip in the <span style="font-style:italic;">San Francisco Examiner</span> called <span style="font-style:italic;">Luann</span>. It takes place in a junior/senior high school, and one recurring storyline in the strip involves funny banter that takes place in the faculty room. In one strip, a bespectacled male history teacher named Mr. Fogarty is talking with a guidance counselor named Miss Phelps, and he says, “I wish I could quit teaching and go write a novel.†Miss Phelps replies, “Ah, yes, the ‘frustrated teacher syndrome.’ The art teacher wants to be a great painter, the science teacher wants to do research ….†Mr. Fogarty interrupts Miss Phelps and says, “What’s Mrs. Thorpe want to do?†Miss Phelps replies, “Thorpe? What’s she teach?†Mr. Fogarty responds, “Sex Education.â€<br /><br />In the Prologue to <span style="font-style:italic;">Teacher Man</span>, Frank McCourt’s third memoir, McCourt writes, “In the world of books I am a late bloomer, a johnny-come-lately, new kid on the block. My first book, <span style="font-style:italic;">Angela’s Ashes</span>, was published in 1996 when I was sixty-six, the second, <span style="font-style:italic;">‘Tis</span>, in 1999 when I was sixty-nine. At that age it was a wonder I could lift a pen at all. New friends of mine (recently acquired because of my ascension to the best-seller lists) had published books in their twenties. Striplings.<br /> So, what took you so long?<br /> I was teaching, that’s what took me so long. Not in college or university, where you have all the time in the world for writing and other diversions, but in four different New York City public high schools. … When you teach five high school classes a day, five days a week, you’re not inclined to go home to clear your head and fashion deathless prose. After a day of five classes your head is filled with the clamor of the classroom.â€<br /><br />Both the comic strip and Frank McCourt’s prologue address the aphorism we’re all familiar with: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. (Sometimes this is followed by, Those who can’t teach, administrate. I say this with all due respect for administrators—now that I am one). And certainly, while I am disinclined to give much credence to such a cliché, there is much truth to the old saying, though Frank McCourt’s observations put it into a more appropriate context. It’s not that teachers <span style="font-style:italic;">can’t</span>, so much as that they can’t find the time or the energy. After all, we were good students once, who not only loved to read but also loved to write, and had at least some skill at the task. That interest and those skills didn’t just evaporate the day we first sat on the other side of the desk. What happened is that we began taking home 100 essays every few weeks and killing ourselves trying to get them read and graded with at least a modicum of helpful narrative response.<br /><br />However, with all due respect to the recently deceased Frank McCourt, there are, in fact, many teachers who completely dispel this myth of the teacher who can’t, as well as who dispel the notion of the teacher who can’t find the time. There are those among us who toil with the hundreds of papers, who go home at night exhausted only to put in a couple more hours of grading, who go home weekends laden with bags of papers, projects, and quizzes to assess, who assign research papers to be due the Friday before a vacation so that we can spend our vacation grading, and yet who nonetheless still find the time for writing and scholarship.<br /><br />This Thursday evening at UConn is the Aetna Awards Night, when we will be honoring writers who won contests sponsored and funded by the Aetna Chair of Writing. These include graduate students, undergraduates, and high school students taking UConn English, but it also includes Writing Project teachers who have completed this year’s Summer Institute and who have won awards for their poetry and prose. This year, the CWP Teacher-Consultant Writing Contest had over eighty submissions from almost thirty different teachers from all grade levels, kindergarten through college. We are publishing twenty-seven different pieces from twenty-three different teachers. Three are elementary school teachers, two are middle school teachers, fourteen are high school teachers, one is a graduate student at UConn, two are community college professors, and one is an adjunct professor. Five are former or current Teachers of the Year in their schools or districts. Three have published books of poetry. One has published a work of nonfiction. Five are currently writing novels. One received the PEN Discovery Award for Young Adult Literature in 2007. One had her fiction published in <span style="font-style:italic;">Best New American Voices 2006</span>. One is a published playwright and poet. One is a Freedom Writer. One is a freelance journalist. One has published a half dozen scholarly articles within the last five years. And one received both a Fulbright Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Grant in the last five years.<br /><br />Looking over this impressive cast of teachers, I am made to think of a coffee mug given to me when I got my first job teaching high school English. It said, Those Who Can, Do. Those Who Can Do More, Teach. That mug was lost years ago, but I’m thinking I should go online to see if I can order some to give out to my CWP colleagues. I’m gonna need a bunch.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />I just began reading <span style="font-style:italic;">Charlie and the Chocolate Factory</span> to my son, our fourth Roald Dahl book. He loves it, as did I. I bumped into my friend Jon the other day, and he and I were trying to recall when we first read that book. For me, it was during the Blizzard of 1978, which occurred in early February. I would be nine that April. We lost power, and I spent two days reading the book by candlelight in my parents’ living room. A nice memory to have.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-22990019567550562142019-06-24T05:15:00.000-07:002019-06-24T05:15:00.306-07:00A Wonderfully Unproductive Day<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="play bandarq">play bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>On Halloween we had friends come over for dinner before trick-or-treating. Kim and Tom have three little girls around the same age as our kids. We had a nice night that ended with the five kids sitting on the floor of our living room in their disarrayed costumes, eating their candy, and watching <span style="font-style:italic;">It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown</span>. I should point out that my six-year-old son shares with his mother a certain Scandinavian, existentialist perspective on life. They like rainy days and <span style="font-style:italic;">Mumintroll</span> books; they loved the new <span style="font-style:italic;">Where the Wild Things Are</span> movie with all its emphasis on the search for a shield to keep away life’s sadness and loneliness. So, as you can imagine, Cormac loves Charlie Brown and feels sincere heartache over every slight that Charlie Brown endures. Cormac also has a strong sense of justice, and expresses strong opinions about what to do to mean people, such as tie them up or lock them in a closet. Watching <span style="font-style:italic;">It’s The Great Pumpkin</span>, Cormac continuously expressed his anger at the mistreatment Charlie Brown receives, and at one point said, “Why is everyone so mean to Charlie Brown? Do you know what I would do if I were Charlie Brown? I’d take all those rocks everyone kept giving me and I’d hit people on the head with them when they were mean to me.†All the adults looked at one another, and then my wife said, “You know, for thirty-nine years I have been watching this film, and it has never occurred to me that Charlie Brown is armed with an arsenal of weapons provided by the very people who persecute him. That’s quite an insight, Cormac.â€<br /><br />Today I had an odd day of poorly timed appointments. I had a late morning doctor’s appointment in Norwich, a make-up following a cancelation on a day my daughter stayed home sick. Then I had to be in Hartford in the middle of the afternoon. I kept finding myself with odd chunks of time between things, spaces of twenty or thirty minutes, too little time to be productive and get anything done, but too much time to fritter away. It was also one of those cool, grey November days that Cormac and my wife love, and I found myself indulging in some of their Nordic pensiveness. <br /><br />After I got back from the doctor’s office, I had some lunch and threw on some more professional attire for my afternoon meeting, but as I got ready to get into my car I realized that I was leaving way too early. My first instinct was to hurry inside and try to work on something, but instead I walked across my backyard to the stone wall that separates our yard from a large meadow owned by my neighbor. In her field is the remnant of an orchard, a handful of apple trees and one or two peach trees. No one has tended them in years, but they still bear small fruit that’s good for pies or apple sauce. Most of the trees had lost their leaves and stood like solitary sentinels against a wall of larger, darker trees beyond. But one small apple tree still retained its leaves. They were mostly deep red, then orange, then yellow, and still some green at the bottom nearest me, and against the grey-brown distant woods and the yellow grass, the colors of this one tree struck me as beautiful. I sat down on one of the large rocks along the wall and just watched the tree. Autumn birds flitted and sang everywhere as they gathered seeds and chased one another across the steely sky. I sat there for ten, maybe fifteen minutes at most, and just let my thoughts drift rather than obsess about the work to be done today and tomorrow and next week.<br /><br />At the top of the hour I returned to my car and left for Hartford. The traffic was light, and I arrived there early, with some twenty minutes before my scheduled meeting. So I walked away from the building and out of the parking lot. I walked along Farmington Avenue and admired the architectural detail of the old buildings still standing, and tried to imagine what the neighborhood looked like when it was still residential and the Park River still flowed above ground through the West End. I wandered into a neighborhood I have driven by a thousand times and that I lived near for close to a year right after I moved back to Connecticut from California upon completing graduate school. And I noticed that many of the buildings were marked with National Register of Historic Places faceplates, though I have no idea why these buildings have such significance.<br /><br />As I spent such a significant amount of my day being wonderfully unproductive, I found myself thinking about the meeting I was at last week for the new Humanities school that will be in Bulkeley High, and how I had written on my draft of the mission statement something to the effect that the Humanities teach us how to be human. But in fact for all my time immersed in language and literature, I get so caught up in all the administrative tasks of my job that I find or make little (or at least insufficient) time for such meaningfulness—like contemplating a beautiful tree, listening to birds singing, or admiring the architectural beauty of an historic neighborhood.<br /><br />After I was done with my meeting, rather than rush back to my office, I took myself for a cup of coffee at Tisane, up near Prospect Street, and to my pleasant surprise bumped into a friend and colleague who had been at a poetry reading at Saint Joseph College. I was glad to have a reason to sit and talk over coffee rather than just rush off and gulp it down as I drove. I went and got my daughter after that, a little before my time, and thankful for this odd day.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-86256396083721120032019-06-17T05:15:00.000-07:002019-06-17T05:15:04.570-07:00Veterans Day And War Literature<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Senantiasa Menyambut Kedatang Anda Untuk Membaca</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarqq">bandarqq</a></font></span></span></center>As Veterans Day approached, I found myself thinking about the many books we read in my American Literature course that deal with war and its consequences. Though <span style="font-style:italic;">Huck Finn</span> does not deal directly with war, it’s difficult to study the work of Mark Twain and not discuss the Civil War or Twain’s anti-war and anti-imperialist writings. William Faulkner notoriously lied about his World War I service record but later became a goodwill ambassador for the State Department and won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes in 1955 for <span style="font-style:italic;">A Fable</span>, which chronicles a soldier’s unsuccessful attempt to end fighting in World War I. Hemingway is perhaps the only American author to win the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prizes as well as a Silver Medal and a Bronze Star. His early works, especially <span style="font-style:italic;">The Sun Also Rises</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">A Farewell to Arms</span>, chronicle the horrors of war and its aftermath. Even works like <span style="font-style:italic;">A Streetcar Named Desire</span> or <span style="font-style:italic;">On the Road</span> can be read through the lens of war. Stanley Kowalski, if you remember, served in Italy during World War II. One of my students wrote a paper that analyzed Stanley’s behavior as the result of hypermasculine stress berat response, a transference of aggressive behavior that is necessary in combat to domestic situations that don’t require force. Jack Kerouac, himself a veteran of sorts, makes <span style="font-style:italic;">On the Road</span> a post-war work when he writes toward the end of the novel that as the indigenous Mexican Indians come to the side of the Pan-American highway to “hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, … they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it. They didn’t know that a bomb had come that could crack all our bridges and roads and reduce them to jumbles, and we would be as poor as they someday, and stretching out our hands in the same, same way.â€<br /><br />My maternal grandfather served in the Navy between the world wars, my father’s oldest brother Bobby served in Korea, and my father and his second oldest brother Gordy both served in Vietnam. When I was a boy, I was so in awe of the fact that my father had served in a war that I made him breakfast in bed every year, not on Fathers Day, but on Veterans Day. But for me this time of year is fraught with emotions. The seventh anniversary of Bobby’s death was the other day. He would have been 74. On December 26, my uncle Gordy would be 69, but he died a year and a half ago. And on December 18, it will be four years since I last saw my father. Bobby, Gordy, and my father were three of ten children, they were the only ones who served in wars, and they all suffered from alcoholism. War did not cause their alcoholism, my father’s disappearance, or the premature deaths of my uncles, but when I read about the prevalence among our veterans of alcoholism, domestic violence, and PTSD, I can’t help but see a correlation.<br /><br />So, on Veterans Day, I find myself mourning the loss of my uncles and the virtual loss of my father. And I find myself frustrated with what I fear is happening to Veterans Day. Maybe this began in 1954 when the day was changed from Armistice Day to Veterans Day, from a focus on the day war ended to a more generalized focus on service. But it seems to me that the day has become less sacred. Just as Christmas has become about making enough retail sales to end the year in the black, and Labor Day is about back to school sales, and Presidents Day is all about car sales to get rid of all that back stock dealers will otherwise have to pay taxes on, Veterans Day has become a commercial celebration. A quick Google search of “veterans day sales 2009†produces 18,000,000 hits, the first of which is for a site called CouponConnector.com/veterans-day. Certainly veterans and their families aren’t at fault for this state of affairs, and it would be easy just to blame businesses and marketers, but the military shares blame in this, too. In an kurun when military policies prohibit journalists from distributing photos of combat, death, or even coffins, military recruiters flood television and magazines with ads that portray war as a video game or an extreme sport. All I can think when I see these ads is that my father and his brothers did not have fun in war, and they didn’t serve so we could all have a day off to go shopping.<br /><br />In Book XI of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Odyssey</span>, Odysseus meets Achilles in the underworld and praises him as a great warrior, “strongest of all†and almost immortal in life. To this Achilles responds that he would rather be a slave on earth than king of all the dead. In Book II of <span style="font-style:italic;">The Iliad</span>, the Greeks soldiers are struggling, so Agamemnon attempts reverse psychology on the men, telling them it is time to go home. He expects them to say no and rally themselves for the fight. Instead, the men rush for the ships, and the chiefs have to beat them back. But then Thersites, the only foot soldier named in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Iliad</span>, steps forward and condemns Agamemnon, Achilles, and the other chiefs for hording the spoils of war while leading the sons of their homeland to the slaughter. In response, Odysseus beats him down.<br /><br />This scene always reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s letters to his mother. In letter 480, from January 1917, Owen describes trench warfare in graphic detail. As one of my former professors once said, Owen’s letters show how a generation of British boys raised on romanticized notions of war gleaned from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Iliad</span> and other works believed as they sailed for Europe that they were to be the next Agamemnon or Achilles. The realities of war disabused them of such ideas, and soon they knew that they were Thersites.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-18896703022953604292019-06-10T05:15:00.000-07:002019-06-10T05:15:04.619-07:00Great Students<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Membaca Di Blog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarq">bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>Many people ask me if I love working at UConn more than working as a high school English teacher, and I tell them truthfully that there are things I like a lot better, like a flexible work schedule not determined by a bell system, but that there are things I really miss about teaching high school students. Namely, I miss the students. <br /><br />At UConn, I am primarily an direktur with a teaching assignment. I only teach one class a semester and then the summer institute courses, so I typically only have about twenty students a semester. I know many of you are thinking that you’d love to only have twenty papers to grade at any given time. And I agree. I would have felt the same way back when I had 87 to 126 students (my smallest and largest loads, respectively, in twelve years in a high school classroom). But I truly missed students—well, perhaps not all of them but most of them. <br /><br />But now that I am a few years into the position and have become the official advisor to the dual degree students in English and Education, I enjoy seeing a regular crew of students. At this point, I have around forty advisees, mostly future high school English teachers but also Special Education and Elementary Education students. I meet with them all at least once a semester, and many of them more often than that. And I have several students who have taken more than one course with me, not to mention the many interns, tutors, and graduate assistants that I get to work with in various capacities. I find working with all these students to be one of the most rewarding aspects of my job.<br /><br />One day last week I had my graduate assistant, my intern, and two other students from my class hanging out in the CWP office talking, not to me, but to one another—talking about books, teaching, graduate school, and other related subjects. I was just in my office area answering emails and feeling proud that my office was a place where all these students felt comfortable hanging out and where students from all different areas of the major could get together to talk about the field of English.<br /><br />A few days later, my intern and I had lunch together and talked about his work, the novel we are currently reading in my class, and his plans for graduate school next year. The following day having lunch by myself, a former student came by very excited. I had written her a letter of recommendation for an internship, and she wanted to thank me and share with me that she would be working for CPTV this spring, and the internship director had loved her writing sample, which she had written for my class.<br /><br />The following day I met with another former student to talk about graduate school. This young woman had made a tremendous impression upon me in my Advanced Composition class, and I had written her a letter of recommendation for a tutoring position with the University Writing Center, which she got. She later was assigned to work with a graduate student to run the Writing Project-Writing Center collaboration and to organize a fall conference. She also parlayed this position into some grant work with EASTCONN. Now she was hoping for a letter of recommendation for graduate school. I emailed her about a week later to let her know I had a draft if she wanted to come by and let me know which schools she had decided upon. <br /><br />So, one afternoon earlier this week I was talking with my graduate assistant about her career goals after she completes her MA. We talked about the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates and the Alternate Route to Certification, as well as teaching in the community colleges or as an adjunct. We took a break to go get coffee and bumped into the young woman who was inquiring about a letter for graduate school. Coincidentally, she had been headed to my office, so we all walked back together, and it was nice for the two young women to meet and talk because they have such similar interests. <br /><br />Then, in my office, I let the young woman read a copy of the draft of the recommendation I had written, which she initially thought wasn’t permissible, but I assured her that it was my prerogative to share the letter with her. While she read, I talked with my graduate assistant about something, and when I turned around to see if the young woman was finished, she had tears in her eyes, and she said, “That’s the nicest letter anybody ever wrote about me.â€<br /><br />These are the things I love about my job. I love being around so many smart, interested, and interesting English majors and future teachers. I love being able to help students. I love to hear of their successes and to play even a small role in their accomplishments. They are always so thankful for the advice or the letters of recommendation, but of course they are the ones who write the papers and do the work that earns them my and everyone else’s good opinions, that earns them positions as interns, tutors, graduate assistants, and, ultimately, teachers. The day the young woman who got the position with CPTV came by, I was actually having a sort of crappy day, and her good news, enthusiasm, and sincere thanks lifted my spirits for the afternoon. I was perhaps as appreciative of her as she was of me that afternoon.<br /><br />This Thursday morning, Jon Andersen, Monica Giglio, and I are leaving for the NWP Annual Meeting and NCTE Annual Convention in Philadelphia. We’re hoping for a great experience. It usually is. The following week the university is on break for Thanksgiving, so I will be taking a brief hiatus from this column till the first week of December. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and thanks for reading.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-18090742360364298002019-06-03T05:15:00.000-07:002019-06-03T05:15:04.655-07:00I Was Not That Kid<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Jumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="ceme 99 online">ceme 99 online</a></font></span></span></center>I was not the most serious undergraduate student. I was happy as an unfocused English major. I took an eclectic set of courses, wandered into most of my classes late, and never brought a notebook. I just stuffed a novel into my pocket and took notes in the margins. I would spend my afternoons ensconced in little nooks around campus, just reading. I had a girlfriend who was a physical therapy major, and she used to get mad at me because she’d be lugging her copy of <span style="font-style:italic;">Grey’s Anatomy</span> to lab classes while I would be sitting under a tree somewhere meandering through a paperback. One of my current colleagues remembers me coming to class barefoot. I said, “Yes, that sounds like something I would have done at nineteen.â€<br /><br />Entering senior year, I was a few courses shy of graduating on time, and I had no idea what I planned to do the following year. I hadn’t even begun to look at graduate schools. I wound up doing the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates, in large part because it was a one year jadwal that allowed me to defer making a decision for another year. And then, once I completed the program, I went to graduate school at Humboldt State University in Arcata, California because I knew a girl who went there, and she told me I could crash with her till I found an apartment. It was the only place I applied.<br /><br />So I am always amazed by my advisees. They are so much more focused and serious than I was at their age. They transfer in whole semesters worth of ECE and AP credits from high school, which frees them up to do all sorts of cool things. I took only AP English in high school because I liked only English, and I didn’t transfer any credits from the AP test because I blew it off, even though I had registered for it. By contrast, I had this one advisee come in a couple of weeks ago. She’s a dual degree student in English and Education in the Integrated Bachelor’s/Master’s program, she’s in the Honors Program, and she’s minoring in French. I’ve got another dual degree, IB/M student who’s in the honors jadwal and pursuing a music minor. And another who’s doing an additional Concentration in Creative Writing. <br /><br />I was not that kid.<br /><br />A lot of students are not that kid. The Neag School of Education admits twelve students into the English Education jadwal each year. By contrast, the English Department has more than eight hundred declared majors. And in a survey the department conducted two years ago, more than forty percent of those students indicated Education as their first career choice. Roughly speaking, that’s twelve focused students and three-hundred twenty less-focused students. That’s not to say that all three-hundred twenty students are as lackadaisical as I was, but generally speaking the students who get into Neag declare pre-teaching as a major during their freshman year, and apply to the School of Education at the end of the Fall semester of their sophomore year. At the end of the Fall semester of my sophomore year, I was more focused on trying to date my RA than trying to consider a career path.<br /><br />So in mid-October, as I was meeting with my forty or so mostly over-achieving advisees, I was thinking about all the students who didn’t get into Neag when they applied, or who didn’t get around to thinking about Neag or graduate school or career paths till their bau kencur or senior year. About the more than three-hundred students who think they might want to be teachers but who are not type-A, French musicology minoring, honors students. I wanted to help those students become teachers, because being self-directed at eighteen is no guarantee of becoming a good teacher, and being undecided at twenty-two is no indicator of certain failure, either.<br /><br />So I wrote up a anjuran for a Concentration in Teaching English to complement the English major. It would become the third Concentration in the department, joining Creative Writing and Irish Literature. The idea follows directly on the heels of the University Senate’s approval of the dual degree and my appointment as the advisor to the dual degree students. As it has been for a while, English majors must take thirty credits in the major to earn a BA. Prior to the dual degree, English Education majors needed twenty-four English credits. Now, the dual degree students need thirty-nine credits. Basically, their jadwal of study is a traditional English degree, plus three additional courses. Those three courses are Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers, which I teach, The English Language, which is a grammar course, and Young Adult Literature. Equivalent courses that can substitute for one of those three are Advanced Expository Writing, The History of the English Language, and Children’s Literature. <br /><br />My anjuran was to award a Concentration in Teaching English to any English major who completes the three Neag required courses, and one of the equivalents. This would provide the students with a solid background in the teaching of writing, in the structure of the language, and in literature for children and adolescents, with added emphasis in one of those three areas. It would also funnel those English majors into courses populated mostly by Education students, giving them the opportunity to be exposed indirectly to the field and to reap the many benefits that would come from this exposure. It also would give them something tangible and helpful for their files and thus their applications to graduate school.<br /><br />I’m happy to say that the English department faculty approved my anjuran Wednesday afternoon, without a dissenting vote. Some of the faculty members in Neag have expressed hope that this Concentration can become a model for other departments in CLAS. That’s great, but for now I’m happy to be able to offer something helpful to those students who, like me, take a little while to find their focus.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-20171819677166526402019-05-27T05:15:00.000-07:002019-05-27T05:15:00.349-07:00Marley Was Dead, To Begin With . . .<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Hallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Blog Ini</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="judi ceme terpercaya">judi ceme terpercaya</a></font></span></span></center>When I came home from work yesterday my son came up to me and said, “Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that,†and walked away. I asked him where he learned that, and he told me that there’d been an assembly in school. Fourth grade students put on a production of Dickens’ <span style="font-style:italic;">A Christmas Carol</span>. Cormac was fascinated with the character of Jacob Marley, and couldn’t stop talking about the fact that the student actors were dressed in heavy winter clothes in the gym. “They must have been hot, Dad!†said Cormac.<br /><br />Cormac’s fascination with <span style="font-style:italic;">A Christmas Carol</span> brought back many good memories for me. When I was in second grade, a year older than Cormac is now, my grandmother gave me a copy of <span style="font-style:italic;">A Christmas Carol</span> as a gift. She was a dietician but she loved to read. She had floor-to-ceiling book shelves on either side of her fireplace, and they were filled with paperbacks. Her favorites were detective fiction and mystery novels, but she also had a great love for classic literature.<br /><br />The book was obviously advanced for me, but I plugged away at it, determined to complete the work. I remember thinking how long it was, and of course it’s not very long at all. I still have my copy of that edition. It’s 128 pages, and Stave One begins on page nine. I fell in love with the story. From that point on, I read it every year around Christmas time. I would hide a candle and matches in my bedroom, and after I was supposed to be asleep I would get up and surreptitiously light the candle and read by its light. The candle was my way of creating some sort of nineteenth-century atmosphere to accompany the text and get myself into the right mood for reading about Scrooge. I did this every year through high school. Eventually I knew the work inside and out, and could quote long passages of it. I also watched every production I could find. My favorites are the 1970 version with Albert Finney, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim, and the 1999 made-for TV version with Patrick Stewart. <span style="font-style:italic;">Scrooged</span> (1988) with Bill Murray is pretty good, too, as is the Muppet version (1992) with Michael Caine in the lead.<br /><br />The Albert Finney version is a musical with Alec Guinness as Marley. The only thing I don’t like about this one is that there are some odd scenes created for the movie that don’t exist in the novel, like Marley’s ghost taking Scrooge to hell, where it is always cold, like it is in Scrooge’s office. What I really like about the Patrick Stewart version is that it includes many scenes normally elided from film versions, like when the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Scrooge to see miners working in the moors, and two men living alone in a lighthouse, as well as sailors on board a ship. I don’t know of any other production that shows these things. <br /><br />Another favorite scene of mine that I have never encountered in any production takes place with the Ghost of Christmas Past, who forces Scrooge to revisit the moment of his estrangement from Belle, the girl who was his fiancèe. Every version of the book shows the scene in which the two argue and Belle walks out, but what follows is that the “relentless†ghost “pinion[s]†Scrooge and forces him to see what Belle has become and thus what he has lost. Dickens’ description of the mature Belle and her almost identical-looking daughter grew more captivating to me as I got older and understood some of the subtleties of Dickens’ language. <br /><br />The narrator shifts to the first person in describing Belle’s daughter’s beautiful hair, face, and figure as she plays with children that must be hers, as well as perhaps some nieces and nephews. The children climb upon the young woman, encircle her waist with their arms and let loose her braided hair. The narrator says, “I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips, to have questioned her, that she might have opened them, to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush, to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price; in short, I would have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest license of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.†I read that as an adult and understand so much more fully the agony that Scrooge must have felt to witness this scene. And yet we never see it in film. Perhaps it is too erotic and too difficult to convey. The narrative voice would have to be done in a voice-over.<br /><br />My wife and I also used to go see the Hartford Stage production each year. We used to live in and around Hartford, and before we had kids we had season tickets to the stage, and we went to see <span style="font-style:italic;">A Christmas Carol</span> every year from its inception in 1997 till 2002. Cormac was born in 2003. I think next year he might be old enough to see it and not get scared by the ghosts, but not yet. My almost three year old daughter is crazy and fearless. She could probably go tomorrow and not get scared.<br /><br />So Cormac has been acting out scenes from the play he saw, and drawing pictures of scenes he remembers. He drew me a picture of Marley’s ghost, and another funny one in two panels, with the Grim Reaper on one side and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come on the other. Cormac said, “The only difference is that one has a face and the other carries one of those things for cutting grass before there were lawn mowers.†<br /><br />“A scythe,†I said. “How do you spell that?†asked Cormac as he picked up his marker.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-15153434191771060262019-05-20T05:15:00.000-07:002019-05-20T05:15:00.900-07:00Race To The Top. Details To Come.<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Terima Kasih Sudah Kunjungin Blog Ini</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="ceme online terbaik">ceme online terbaik</a></font></span></span></center>I was just reading the latest issue of <span style="font-style:italic;">NEA Today</span>. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has an article in there titled “Elevating the Teaching Profession.†In it there is much discussion of the evaluation of teachers and its link to student performance. Of course this subject is a core component of the Race to the Top funds that the US Department of Education has made available to states, which is why Secretary Duncan is talking about it.<br /><br />Duncan’s article attempts to put a very positive spin on such a controversial subject. He talks about teachers being treated as professionals, being given more support, and being compensated for their work. He also makes the effort to point out that student performance must not be determined by test scores alone. He writes, “Student growth and gain, not absolute test scores, are what we are most interested in—how much are students improving each year, and what teachers, schools, school districts, and states are doing the most to accelerate student achievement?â€<br /><br />Now I appreciate the sentiment and the lisan gesture, but, as the old saying goes, the devil is in the details. I can’t find anywhere—not in Duncan’s article, nor on the US Department of Education website nor on the Connecticut State Department of Education website (which is really difficult to navigate and search!)—any details about how “student growth and gain†is to be assessed other than through the use of test scores. In a Connecticut SDE press release from November 10, Commissioner Mark McQuillan writes that, as part of the Connecticut SDE’s efforts to draw up and submit an application for federal Race to the Top funds, the SDE has formed various committees to research ways to comply with the guidelines for Race to the Top funds. Among these is “an advisory group of education organizations … that has been charged with exploring how Connecticut can best respond to the grant’s call for performance-based evaluations of teachers and principals.†Advisory group. Charged with exploring. How best to respond. The grant’s call for. OK, how many degrees of separation is that from any actual details?<br /><br />An Associated Press article published this past Tuesday in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Norwich Bulletin</span> describes some of the challenges that New York teachers are facing on this very subject. In a tawaran that sounds eerily familiar, the New York Board of Regents offers a plan that “would link a teacher’s job evaluation to student performance under improved tests and as part of a variety of factors.†The article does not make clear what those varied factors are. It sounds as if the New York Board of Regents plan has more details in it than the Connecticut SDE’s exploratory advisory group does at this point in time, but not having seen the actual plan, I don’t know if that’s the case, or what those details are.<br /><br />I suppose that when it all shakes out I am of two minds on this. Duncan talks about “exemplary teachers [who] toil late into the night on lesson plans, shell out of their own pocket to pay for supplies, and wake up worrying when one of their students seems headed for trouble,†but who for all their toil, pay, and worry are compensated no better than “the weakest teacher†in the school. This sentiment resonates strongly with me. I’m sure I am not the only teacher who can think of a few colleagues who just don’t pull their weight, to say the least in some cases. And it’s a shame they are in the profession at all, little yet that they might be getting paid more than some of us just because they have hung on for years or decades. <br /><br />But I just haven’t heard anyone offer a viable set of criteria by which to evaluate teacher performance other than student scores on standardized tests, or other student performance factors such as graduation rates. Grades will be deemed too subjective. Administrative observations and evaluations, besides being highly subjective, are just unrealistic. Administrators are so overworked in most cases that they don’t have the time necessary to properly observe and evaluate their teachers. I still remember being a first year teacher and being observed twice by an direktur who then said to me after the second visit, “Look, you seem to be doing just fine. I know I’m supposed to observe you several more times this year, but I have too many other things to do, and frankly, I’m not worried about you. Keep up the good work.†This was a nice compliment, of course, and I suppose something of a blessing. I know many of us would be happy to be left the hell alone by our administrators, and I understand the ‘I have too many other things to do sentiment,’ but it demonstrates the unlikelihood of using administrative observation. I have read articles on peer evaluation committees, but these are fraught with many of the same problems of subjectivity and availability.<br /><br />So if anyone has some good suggestions, I’d love to hear them, because, honestly, teacher evaluation, promotion, and compensation that is tied to student performance is coming, whether we like it or not. And it would be nice if we, as teachers, could exercise some control over how the state and the federal government are going to measure student “growth and gain.â€<br /><br />Well, the university semester is officially over today. I am done with undergraduates for almost exactly a month (my first spring semester class is January 19). I have grant deadlines, conference tawaran deadlines, and a revise and resubmit request on a scholarly article to worry about for the next several weeks. Oh, and the holidays and my daughter’s birthday! So I will be taking a break from this column till the university semester resumes right after the Martin Luther King holiday. I hope everyone has a good break and a successful and stress-free end of the first semester (I know that’s probably a little unrealistic). See you next month.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-82210586933768344022019-05-13T05:15:00.000-07:002019-05-13T05:15:01.986-07:00Tracking My Ambivalence<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Datang Lagi Di Blog Ini</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="bandar ceme terpercaya">bandar ceme terpercaya</a></font></span></span></center>I’m very ambivalent about the State Department of Education’s tawaran to eliminate tracking. I was talking to one secondary colleague from Mansfield and another who teaches elementary school in East Hartford who are both supportive of the decision. The dyed-in-the-wool liberal in me is supportive, but I have my reservations about practicality. I spoke with my mother last night about tracking. She recently retired after thirty-six years as a first grade teacher, and she’s very much against the move.<br /><br />My first memories of tracking come from first and second grade. My first grade education was very much a product of the times—1975. Ridge Hill School in Hamden had six classrooms that opened onto a common amphitheater-like pit. All students in the first, second, and third grades were together, as in a Montessori school. And we were placed in groups according to our abilities. I was in Mrs. Davis’ homeroom with all first graders, in Mrs. Plummer’s Language Arts class with a mix of first and second graders, and in Mrs. Oates’ Math class with all third graders. I was very intimidated in that class, and my mother had me moved to Miss Rochford’s Math class, where I was one of three first graders with mostly second graders. Other than my brief time with Mrs. Oates, I thrived in that environment.<br /><br />At the end of first grade my family moved to Madison, where students were grouped more traditionally, and to my mother’s great surprise I was placed in a special education class for students with severe learning disabilities. When she demanded to know why I was placed in this class, the administrators told her that the placement was based on my score on a standardized assessment I had taken in the spring of the previous year. When my mother demanded to see the exam, she noticed immediately that I had completed the bubble sheet by making geometric patterns. Turns out that the teachers in my previous school had made me take the exam with the older students while most of the other first graders were brought outside to play. The teachers must have told me I could join the other first graders when I completed the exam, and so I just made squares and rectangles and trapezoids and the like on the answer sheet. I would remember this experience years later when I first read Mike Rose’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Lives On the Boundary</span>, in which he recounts a year spent misplaced in a low level track.<br /><br />So I feel as though even these earliest of personal experiences demonstrated for me the benefits and the potential atrocities implicit in any system that sorts or tracks by ability. And I see this now with my own children, who are three and six. My daughter now and my son before her have thrived in a multi-age Montessori preschool, but my son is struggling mightily in a traditional first grade classroom in a so-called failing school where the focus is on basic reading and math skills, where ELL and ESL students outnumber native English speakers, and where science and social studies have been eliminated from the curriculum and specials like music and art have been reduced to being offered at best once a week and sometimes only a couple of times a month. He is bored and unchallenged most of the time, and occasionally gets bad reports for task refusal. When we ask him what happened he simply says that he hates doing all the baby work. <br /><br />There is no gifted and talented or enrichment jadwal at his school, though there are various remediation programs funded by state and federal grants, but I agitated enough to get him thirty minutes of enrichment every afternoon with one of two graduate interns from Eastern Connecticut State University. To get this I had to make a Faustian bargain, basically that the enrichment would only come at the end of the day if my son had complied with all tasks during the morning and early afternoon. If he refuses to do what he calls baby work, he loses his enrichment time. I feel like Atticus Finch when he tells Scout that if she agrees to put up with the teacher’s demands he will continue to do real reading with her in the evenings when he gets home from work.<br /><br />And I think of course about my years teaching high school. I taught many senior electives that were open to students from all tracks, and there was something wonderful about that. In fact, I distinctly recall one girl remarking that she had not sat in a class with some of those students since before middle school. On the other hand, I also taught sections of American Literature at all levels—Advanced Placement, Level 1 (college prep), and Level 2 (basic). And while I was teaching works like <span style="font-style:italic;">The Scarlet Letter</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Moby-Dick</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Huck Finn</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">As I Lay Dying</span> in the AP class, and moving onto a new text every two to three weeks, in the Level 2 classes I had students who simply could not read those books. I would assign short stories by Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner, and maybe take four weeks to methodically make our way through <span style="font-style:italic;">Huck Finn</span>. I really don’t know what I would have done had all those students been mixed together in one class. My wife teaches Spanish and Italian, including UConn Spanish, and she has similar concerns. At one professional development workshop at her school, she asked the presenter for suggestions for differentiating a Spanish class in which she might want to teach <span style="font-style:italic;">Don Quijote</span> but would have students who clearly could not read the book, and the suggestion was to put the students into ability level groups within the class. This, of course, is tracking, just done within the four walls of a classroom and hidden behind the façade of a homogenous class.<br /><br />Anyway, those are my myriad concerns, and I welcome any insight others could give on the subject. I remain profoundly ambivalent.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-74337093638567460492019-05-06T05:15:00.000-07:002019-05-06T05:15:00.319-07:00Dictionaries And Vending Machines<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Kembali Lagi Bertemu Di Situs Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="situs bandar ceme">situs bandar ceme</a></font></span></span></center>Down the hall from my office are soda and snack vending machines, and both are notorious for stealing money. The Coke machine sometimes just takes your $1.25 and gives you nothing in return. The snack machine typically has food get stuck somewhere in its descent into the bin. The lucky undergrad who finds a stuck bag of Fritos can sometimes win two bags for the price of one by purchasing one of the same item and hoping it falls in such a way as to knock down the stuck bag. Yesterday I walked out of my office when I heard the snack machine being assaulted. I saw four undergraduate girls attacking the machine. One rather long-limbed girl looked as if she were trying to scale the side of the machine. She was standing at its side, feet planted wide, knees almost embracing the ends, hands clasping both upper corners. I realized she was trying to get enough leverage to tip the machine forward—while her three friends stood in front of the machine, alternately banging, punching, and pounding on the glass. If the long-limbed girl ever got sufficient leverage to tip the machine, she would surely bring it down on top of her more conventionally-limbed girlfriends. <br /><br />I walked over to the assailants, stood aside in case the climber succeeded in her attempts to tilt the machine, and asked them (rhetorically) if the machine had stolen their money. All three girls in the pathway of doom replied at once. Apparently, not only had the first bag of Doritos they had attempted to purchase gotten stuck, but the second and third bags they had attempted to purchase in the hopes of knocking down the previous bags had also gotten stuck. There was now a stack of Doritos bags right about at the girls’ eye level just taunting them by its refusal to fall. The long-limbed girl was still at it, and so I asked if they had ever heard of the Darwin Awards, which are awarded each year to “those who improve our gene pool by removing themselves from it.†Basically, the award is given to people who unintentionally kill themselves in the most abstrak ways, like the guy who tried to kiss his pet scorpion. When it stung him in the face, he got angry and tried repeatedly to force the now terrified and defensive animal to accept a kiss. It stung him repeatedly, and he later died from the poison. None of the girls had heard of it before, so I explained what it was, and I pointed out that I distinctly recall reading about one young man who won the award by pulling a soda machine down on top of himself. The girls seemed incredulous at first, but the climber was sufficiently credulous that she stopped wrestling the machine. I assured them that I was serious, and then left to finish my errand. I could hear them resume their banging, punching, and pounding of the glass, but no more tilting or climbing.<br /><br />So I chose to share this odd story because of something I read in the paper this morning, and which inspired me to propose that we develop and grant a similar award in the field of education, maybe call it the Dewey Award or something like that, and give it to the educator(s) who make the most boneheaded, educationally unsound decisions each year around the country. We’d have to have a separate category for idiots who seduce their students, or else they would dominate the awards. It seems like we have had at least a half dozen of those in Connecticut alone just in the last couple of years. But I digress. This award would be solely for educators who make unsound educational decisions—poor pedagogical or administrative decisions, not just stupid personal decisions that impact education.<br /><br />Anyway, I have my first two nominees. They are Linda Carpenter and Linda Callaway. Mrs. Carpenter is the Principal of Oak Meadows Elementary School in Menifee, California, and Linda Callaway is the Superintendent of Schools for Menifee Union School District, Mrs. Carpenter’s boss. David Kelly of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Los Angeles Times</span> reports that last week a single, unidentified parent called Oak Meadows Elementary School to complain about the inappropriate content of a book being made available to students in the fourth and fifth grades. The book? <span style="font-style:italic;">Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary</span>. The parent was particularly concerned about the dictionary’s definition of oral sex. I checked. The entry reads “oral sex, noun, oral stimulation of the genitals: cunnilingus, fellatio.†Now an isolated complaint from a single parent is not uncommon, especially about sex in a book (I still can’t get my mind around why I never hear of complaints about violence) but Mrs. Carpenter’s response was uncommon. She ordered that the offending books be removed—“temporarily housed off locationâ€â€”and that a committee “of parents, teachers and administrators†be composed to meet and discuss “the extent to which the dictionaries support the curriculum, the age appropriateness of the materials and its suitability for the age levels of the students.â€<br /><br />I should know enough by this point in my career to not be aghast, but I am. They are banning the dictionary. Fortunately the school board president has called the decision “absurd,†and others have come forward to protest the decision of the principal. I particularly like one quote from Peter Scheer of the First Amendment Coalition. He said that when you ban books “eventually you end up with a library that is empty or partially full of dumbed-down or redacted versions of books. … Given what’s on television, let alone the internet, it is refreshing that students are actually looking up sexual terms in a dictionary. … At the end of the day, if my kid is digging through the Merriam-Webster dictionary to find words he and his friends are going to giggle over but along the way find other words they will use, I think that is a day well spent in school.â€Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-55237357085377946942019-04-29T05:15:00.000-07:002019-04-29T05:15:07.879-07:00Remembering The Catcher In The Rye<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="bandar ceme">bandar ceme</a></font></span></span></center>My cell phone rang last Wednesday while I was getting coffee. It was a student who wanted to know if I had heard that J.D. Salinger had died. As the day went on, several more former students contacted me to express their sadness at his death, or to speculate about unpublished work that might exist. Several of us spent that evening posting our favorite quotes from <span style="font-style:italic;">The Catcher in the Rye</span> on one another’s facebook walls.<br /><br />I loved <span style="font-style:italic;">The Catcher in the Rye</span> and the Glass family novels from the moment I read them as a anabawang and senior in high school, and I loved teaching <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span> and the stories from <span style="font-style:italic;">Nine Stories</span> to my students. I never knew <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span> to fail with any students, high school or college, male or female, low level or high. One year I couldn’t find enough copies in the book room, but the students had heard so much about the book and wanted so badly to read it that they found copies on their parents’ book shelves and in the public library, and a couple even went out and bought their own. The <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Times</span> sponsored a blog about Salinger and <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span>, and I read a lot of negative comments mixed in with the mostly good ones, but those negative sentiments didn’t agree with my experience as student or teacher. Maybe there is some testament to my teaching in this, but honestly that novel just always seemed to strike the right chord with every student.<br /><br />The young woman who called me did not read <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span> when she took American Literature in high school. Her teacher didn’t assign the novel, and she felt cheated, so she read it on her own while her best friend read it in my class, and we would talk about it outside of class. Or sometimes she would sit in on her friend’s class and join our discussion. Years later she read it again in college, and this time she had a professor who assigned a paper on the novel but then never discussed it. So she volunteered my services to her classmates, and I met informally with her and a couple of other students to have the discussion they never had with their professor. Our lunch-time meeting looked like something from a coming of age film. We sat at a picnic table on campus beneath an old oak tree, drinking coffee and talking.<br /><br />Years earlier I had a similar experience with <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span> and my brother, who is seventeen years younger than me. He was a freshman in high school and had the hockey coach for honors English. That guy was a great coach, let’s put it that way. My brother loved to read, and so I gave him a syllabus of books, from Classical works like the <span style="font-style:italic;">Iliad</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">Odyssey</span> to contemporary stuff like <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span> and <span style="font-style:italic;">On the Road</span>. I remember driving around in my car one day from Hamden to Windham, bringing him to stay with me for a couple of weeks in the summer, and just talking about <span style="font-style:italic;">Catcher</span>, about Allie and the baseball mitt, about the title and the Robert Burns poem that it derives from. Two years later my brother would read the novel again for his American Lit teacher, Mr. Shread, who was also my American Lit teacher almost twenty years earlier, and the person whom I first read the book with.<br /><br />Mr. Shread was a great teacher and a little quirky. We had all heard from the seniors how he was going to make a big deal out of reading aloud the passage where Holden finds “Fuck You†scratched into the stairwell of his sister’s school. This was Catholic high school, so saying or reading the word “fuck†in front of your students was supposedly scandalous. It was almost as if the moment of Mr. Shread’s reading aloud the word were supposed to be some sort of rite of passage for us, from boys to men, a demarcation point to commemorate the end of our anabawang year and our entry into our simpulan year of high school. I think it was also supposed to make Mr. Shread look cool. It didn’t, really, but we mostly liked the guy anyway, so that was OK.<br /><br />At that time, my parents had gone through a terrible divorce. I had gotten moved around a lot and was estranged from my father but not feeling very close to my mother or my new step-father, either. My new step-mom was Jewish, and so now I was part of a blended Jewish-Catholic family like Salinger or the Glass children. And I also had a good friend who was sick with leukemia and would die the following year from the disease. It also didn’t hurt that I had spent the summers between the ages of seven and twelve living with an aunt just outside of New York City, and so I knew Manhattan pretty well, especially the area in and around Central Park, where so much of the action of the novel takes place. So <span style="font-style:italic;">The Catcher in the Rye</span> didn’t just speak to me; it practically sang to me.<br /><br />The following year for Sister Rosemary’s AP English class, I wrote my big term paper on Salinger after having read “A Perfect Day for Banana Fish.†I read the rest of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Nine Stories</span> and the four novellas, and even did research on Zen Buddhism to better understand the Glass children. I wish I knew where that paper was now.<br /><br />The copy of the book I teach from is the same copy I read in high school. It has all my marginal notes from when I was seventeen, and many more written since then. The white space around the text looks like a crazy palimpsest. And the binding is pretty shot now. I have to hold the book in place to keep pages from falling to the floor. In fact, I remember Mr. Shread’s copy looking much the same way.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-39951940967317212232019-04-22T05:15:00.000-07:002019-04-22T05:15:01.957-07:00Snow Days<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Hai.. Bertemu Lagi Di Website Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="situs bandarq">situs bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>Last night I thought it would be fitting to write about snow days. That idea seems moot since the big storm missed us. I just plowed my and my elderly neighbors’ driveways, even though the snow is still coming down and I will just have to do it again tomorrow.<br /><br />I was hoping we were going to get hit with a lot of snow, that I could spend the day outside with the kids. I thought we’d build a snow fort at the back of the driveway where my plow had piled up snow, and then go down to Windham Center School and sled on the hill in back. Not so. We were able to drive across town to our friends’ house—also teachers with young kids—to drink coffee and let the kids run around. If they were disappointed to not have more snow, they didn’t show it. Last time we had a storm, Cormac asked me to build a fort. I spent an hour shoveling and packing and then hollowing out a cave. He played in it for twenty minutes before deciding he was too cold; he went inside, changed into warm clothes, and curled up with hot cocoa and a book.<br /><br />Last night, I tried to think of my earliest memories of snow storms and school cancellations. Before I entered nursery school at the age of three, I used to spend my days at a neighbor’s house. Her name was Helen. My parents lived in my mother’s parents’ basement, and Helen was the next door neighbor. She watched several neighborhood children. I have surprisingly good memories of being watched by Helen. One of my strongest memories is of getting angry with my mom for bringing me to Helen’s on the day of a snow storm. My mother was a first grade teacher who usually left for school early. On this day my mother got me bundled up to go for a walk along the sidewalk. I recall the snow towering over me. I thought she had no school that day and would be spending it with me. She must have merely had a late opening, and what she did was walk me straight to Helen’s house to drop me off for the day, and I remember feeling as if I had been tricked and getting really angry with her.<br /><br />I have a similar memory, without the anger and trickery, of walking down tunnel-like passages of snow a few days after the Blizzard of ’78. I was almost nine.<br /><br />My elementary and middle schools were right next to each other, and the elementary school had a good sledding hill I recall going to after a few snowstorms. We could start at the playground and sled right into the woods. Madison was a pretty wealthy town, and I knew many kids whose families went skiing throughout the winters. They’d come to school on Mondays with their ski passes still attached to their jackets. It was popular to leave them on all season to show off how often you went skiing. My family was not well off, and I never went skiing. My friends were mostly from modest backgrounds, too, and the things I remember were playing hockey on a couple of nearby ponds and hiding behind stone walls to throw snowballs at cars. That and trying to ride our dirt bikes on the ice. Just dumb stuff, other than the hockey.<br /><br />In high school my friends and I did really reckless stuff in the snow. We would go street skiing by holding onto the back bumper of someone’s car while wearing our dress shoes (Catholic school dress code!) and driving down poorly plowed streets that had a good covering of ice. Or we’d go driving on the back roads in the Naugatuck Valley. My buddy Jack had an old convertible, and he’d drive with the top down and deliberately spin the steering wheel so the car would lose control and plow into a snow drift. If we left our seatbelts off and he car hit just right, we might get launched out of the car and into the snow bank. Believe me, I think about those things now and am amazed at how stupid we were, and how lucky we were that none of us ever got killed. Every now and then I hear about high school boys getting hurt or killed in some dumb stunt, and I think, “There but for the grace of God …†I also try to let my memory give me empathy for those boys who do such stupid shit.<br /><br />Nowadays I mostly dread snow days because I feel like I get behind in my work, I spend a disproportionate part of the day removing snow, and my wife and kids just end up losing another day off in June. They seem like more of an inconvenience than anything else. At the beginning of our teaching careers, we were living on the campus of a boarding school in Simsbury and I was commuting each day to Hebron. On snowy days I would have to leave extra early to get to work on time, and one day I got all the way to RHAM High only to find that school had been cancelled. This was before we all had cell phones. <br /><br />UConn was late to close today, and I found myself thinking about when I was an undergrad and there was less sensitivity to commuters. Seems like the campus never closed then. I would trudge across that field to Arjona in the worst kind of weather. I had a couple of courses in rooms with fireplaces, and on snowy days I would fantasize about classes held beside roaring fires. Of course some poor student would have had to haul wood and another would have had to get the fire going, and it was probably too hot by the fire and too cold on the other side of the room, but I liked the fantasies nonetheless.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-59916813687242573912019-04-15T05:15:00.000-07:002019-04-15T05:15:02.007-07:00The Bad News First<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Membaca Di Situs Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="judi bandarq online">judi bandarq online</a></font></span></span></center><span style="font-weight:bold;">Spring Meeting</span><br /><br />The administrative end of things is not my favorite part of being CWP director. I would much rather be teaching or writing. But someone has to do the administrative work. <br /><br />Likewise, when I write this column I enjoy writing about teaching and about students and teachers. I don’t usually enjoy writing about things like policy. However, I have to mention this week that President Obama has made proposals that would radically alter the way NWP sites are funded, and should his anjuran go through, the national infrastructure for the NWP would lose funding, and all 210 individual sites would have to complete with other educational entities for federal block grant funds. <br /><br />Sites could wind up competing against each other and/or against other educational entities, like their own departments of higher education or host universities. For instance, because our site is housed in the English Department of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, we could hypothetically find ourselves competing against the Neag School of Education for funds. <br /><br />In truth, I think our site would do all right; the English Department, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the university in general would be supportive of co-sponsoring grant proposals. Ironically, in fact, we could win a grant that gives us greater funding than we currently receive. However, but we’d still lose the support of the NWP, and we’d see many of the smaller, less well-supported sites around the country disappear. <br /><br />So this makes this year’s Spring Meeting in DC especially important. We not only need to persuade our senators and representatives to re-authorize the funding for the NWP, we need to persuade them to re-write the legislation so that direct funding is restored. Emails to senators and representatives would help the cause.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting</span><br /><br />On a brighter note, plans are coming together for the New England Writing Projects Annual Meeting, which we are hosting this year on April 9-10, here in Storrs at the Nathan Hale Inn. All eleven NWP sites in New England are sending representatives. (There were ten New England sites when we submitted the mini-grant proposal, but since then the satellite site at the University of Southern Maine has been made official). <br /><br />We had hoped for around forty participants, but we are going to see closer to sixty. Buzzards Bay at UMass-Dartmouth is sending ten participants, and even the two Maine sites are each sending one Teacher-Consultant. Including Jane Cook and myself, around ten TCs from our site will be participating in at least one day of the meeting.<br /><br />Jane and I will be giving a presentation on Friday about the work we have done to promote and use technology at the CWP. We’ve given some version of this presentation the last two years at the New England Association of Teachers of English (NEATE) annual meeting.<br /><br />On Saturday we’re really fortunate to have a presentation from Paul Oh of the NWP and Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project at Michigan State University. Paul and Andrea are making a presentation on social networks and teaching. Andrea will be joining us via videoconference from Michigan.<br /><br />On Friday night we’ll be collaborating with the Creative Writing Program to hold an Open Mic in the CLAS Building. The plan is to have students from Denise Abercrombie’s creative writing classes at EO Smith High School join undergraduate and graduate students from UConn, and kindergarten through college teachers from all the participating sites read their poetry at the event.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight:bold;">Stacy DeKeyser to Speak at Recognition Night</span><br /><br />Currently the office has been abuzz with Sharlene, Shawna, and Ben organizing the submissions to <span style="font-style:italic;">Connecticut Student Writers</span>. Last year submissions dipped slightly below the one thousand mark, but this year we were able to climb back above one thousand. Reading Day is next weekend, the twenty-seventh, and soon the magazine will be in production. <br /><br />One big change this year is that we will not be holding the Recognition Night in Jorgensen Auditorium. Jorgensen will be closing in early May, right after selesai exams, for renovations. Basically, the building needs to be made compliant with current fire code regulations. So we will be holding the event in the von der Mehden Recital Hall, which is a much smaller venue but that should be just big enough for us. Von der Mehden holds 470 people, and last year we had 430 people RSVP for Recognition Night, so we should just make it! Lizzie Searing and Taking Care of Tummies will still be catering the event, so good food can be expected, but the lobby of von der Mehden is much smaller than that of Jorgensen, so we’re hoping for good weather that will allow folks to spill out into the open air.<br /><br />This year’s keynote speaker will be young adult novelist Stacy DeKeyser. Stacy’s novel <span style="font-style:italic;">Jump the Cracks</span> has received many recent accolades and good reviews. The book received the Connecticut Press Club Award for Best New YA Novel, and was just nominated for a Truman Readers Award, which is presented by the Missouri Association of School Librarians, and interestingly is decided upon by the votes of middle school readers. Stacy ran workshops for the CWP last year at the Student and Teacher Writing Conference.<br /><span style="font-weight:bold;"><br />Barry Lane Coming to the Summer Institute</span><br /><br />My last piece of good news for this week is to announce that the CWP will be bringing author Barry Lane to the summer institute this July 8 (tentatively). We used Barry’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Discovering the Writer Within</span> two years ago and are very excited to have him come work with the teachers this coming summer. This was important to me because I feel I put so much emphasis on secondary and college instruction—that being where my experience is—and I really wanted to do something more for the elementary school teachers this year.<br /><br />By the way, we are still accepting recommendations for the Summer Institute. Email me the name and contact information of any teachers you think qualified!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-70183002541273678732019-04-08T05:15:00.000-07:002019-04-08T05:15:02.235-07:00Welcome To The Twenty-First Century<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Datang Di Blog Kesayangan Anda Dan Selamat Membaca</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarq terbaik">bandarq terbaik</a></font></span></span></center>My first experience with a computer took place in 1977, when I was in the second grade. I was placed in a gifted and talented jadwal that had Saturday classes at a local high school. A bunch of elementary school kids were piled into a computer lab where we learned how to jadwal in BASIC. At the end of each class we were allowed to play rudimentary video games like Pong. Do you remember Pong? Just a blip on the screen moving back and forth and you and a partner each had control of a longer, more stationary blip that you could move to prevent the floating blip from getting past you for a score, sort of like air hockey on a video screen. Other than Atari video games and arcade games, I don’t think I touched a computer after that till my freshman year of high school.<br /><br />Mine was the first entering class to be required to take a computer course. This was 1983. The class met in a small lab. It was a one quarter course, and afterwards I never saw the inside of that lab again. Senior year we were required to take typing with Brother Benjamin. Brother Benjamin sat at a desk on a raised platform from which he could observe us. He was ancient then but was still teaching seventeen years later when my brother graduated from the same school. We typed lessons from a book. Brother timed us using the wall clock, and signaled when to start and stop by bringing his hand down upon one of those bells you see on hotel lobby desks. When Brother rang the bell to stop, we had to count our own words and errors and calculate our own scores. We were left to our own recognizance. God was watching, of course. Literally. There was a huge crucifix above the chalkboards in each room. <br /><br />One classmate of mine, Bryan DiBuccio, always got in trouble with Brother Benjamin. Bryan always tried to type a few extra words after Brother had rung the bell, but as old as Brother was Bryan never succeeded at deceiving him. But still he tried. Eventually it became a game between the two. Brother Benjamin would glower at Bryan from behind his raised desk and say, “Brother knows, Mr. DiBuccio. Brother knows everything!†The only time I ever saw Brother Benjamin get out of his seat during class was to strike Bryan. As usual, after Brother rang the bell, Bryan kept typing. Brother yelled, “Mr. DiBuccio! Stop!†But this time Bryan kept typing. Brother yelled again, louder, but Bryan kept typing and said something foolish like, “You can’t make me stop, Brother.†Well, Brother Benjamin may have been ancient, but he had also been a Gold Gloves boxer in the Navy before entering the Brothers of Holy Cross, and he was not to be messed with. With quickness that defied his age, Brother leapt from his seat and smacked both of Bryan’s cheeks with open palms. We all gasped. Bryan started to laugh and then said something like, “Brother, I didn’t know you still had it in you!†To which Brother Benjamin replied, “Don’t mess with Brother, Mr. DiBuccio. Don’t ever mess with Brother,†and resumed his elevated seat. Our ethics teacher told us that once Brother Benjamin had actually thrown the bell at his head when he was a student, but he had ducked, and the bell went right through the window. Brother forbade anyone to say anything about the incident, and had his dear friend Brother Theodore, the Latin teacher, repair the window over the weekend.<br /><br />When I went to college I brought a Smith Corona electric typewriter that actually attached to a monitor where I could see what I had written and do my own proofreading on the screen before printing. When I was ready to print, I had to manually feed one page at a time through the carriage of the typewriter. When I began writing for the <span style="font-style:italic;">Daily Campus</span>, they had just purchased Macintosh computers. Mac Plusses: no hard drive for storage, just a slot for a 3.5 inch floppy. These were hooked up to a networked printer, a big LaserWriter IISC. We had no software for layout, however, and so we had to make our columns on the screen and print them out. We’d walk the hard copies downstairs where the editors would cut the columns with exacto knives, run the paper through a waxing machine, and then manually paste them onto full-sized pages taped to the boards. These photoready pages would go out to the <span style="font-style:italic;">Willimantic Chronicle</span> at some ungodly hour to be made into the newspaper.<br /><br />These days I exist as a full-fledged member of the twenty-first century. I have a two screen monitor for my computer. I run a paperless classroom. The old Blue Whale for the Summer Institute is now on a flash drive. We call it the Blue Minnow. I blog. I can even do a little web design, though I mostly leave that to others. But I couldn’t help but shake my head last week when I read two articles in the <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Times</span>. One reports that Macmillan Publishers is now selling what it calls DynamicBooks, which are basically wiki-texts. A professor or school district can purchase a text that can then be altered using wiki technology to suit the needs of their course and students. There’s been controversy regarding the implications for copyright law, as well as regarding possible scenarios like a district or instructor who might alter a section on evolution to support creationism.<br /><br />The other item that grabbed me was Tufts University’s decision to accept one-minute long YouTube videos from students applying to Tufts. The videos have become so popular that the admissions office even plans to run a “Tufts Idol†contest that will allow undergraduates to vote on the best applications videos. Brother Benjamin would roll over in his grave if he knew, but I think he’s still teaching.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-18467265352072618762019-04-01T05:15:00.000-07:002019-04-01T05:15:02.876-07:00What Makes A Good Teacher Good?<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Hallo Jumpa Lagi Kita Di Website Ini</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="judi bandarq">judi bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>When I finished my MA, I really wanted to remain in California. I wanted to move to San Francisco, but I had no job and no savings, and housing in the Bay Area was exorbitant. In short, I wound up applying for jobs back in Connecticut. But since this was before wide-spread use of the internet, I had to write the State Department of Education for a listing of all school districts and addresses, and I proceeded to mail a version of a single letter to all one hundred and sixty nine districts in the state of Connecticut expressing an interest in a job teaching high school English. I used my grandparents’ Madison address as a return address. Then I drove cross country in my old Hyundai Excel, got an apartment in the west end of Hartford, and a job waiting tables at a country club in Simsbury. Worst job I ever had, but that is clearly another story. And I waited for calls for interviews. Over the next several weeks, I got seven interviews, and ultimately I was offered six jobs. <br /><br />The job I wasn’t offered sticks out in my memory for two reasons. I won’t name the school, but suffice to say it was on the Gold Coast. Besides using my grandparents’ Madison address as my return address, I also gave my then girlfriend’s Simsbury address as an alternate contact. I did this because I mailed out the letters before I had my place in Hartford. One reason I remember this interview so well is that when the secretary called to arrange the interview, she said to me something to the effect that “We see you list Madison and Simsbury as your residences. We think this is important because it is essential that teachers understand our kind of kids.†That alone should have made me decline the interview, but I needed a job, so I just said, “Yes, of course,†and was thankful that I hadn’t used my Hartford address or my parents’ addresses in Hamden.<br /><br />The other reason I remember this interview was because my answer to one question doomed my chances. The head of the English department asked me what made me a good teacher, and I answered that teaching seemed to come naturally to me, and perhaps this was because I had grown up in a family of teachers, and so the profession in general was simply salient to me. Teaching was just intuitive. Well, the department head made no attempt to conceal his eye roll in response to my answer, and I knew I better head back to my hole in the wall in Hartford and my table-waiting job in Simsbury, and remember not to give that answer at the next interview.<br /><br />I have thought about my answer to that questions many times over the years, and was reminded of it today when I read Elizabeth Green’s article in the <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Times</span>, titled “Building a Better Teacher.†The article is a lengthy report on Ms. Green’s observations of two educational researchers’ work on what makes good teachers good. One of the things Green attempts to dispel is the notion that good teachers are born, that the skills requisite for good teaching are ever inherent or intuitive in some people, as I seemed to feel they were back when I was twenty-four.<br /><br />Honestly, I must admit that I am ambivalent on the issue. But I am not as arrogant as I was at twenty-four. (My wife, mother, and good friends might challenge me on this, but I insist …). And so today I much more readily acknowledge the excellent pembinaan I received at UConn from Mary Mackley, Cheryl Spaulding, and Judy Irwin, in particular, as well as from my cooperating teacher Roz Rosen, and the faculty members in the English Department at Humboldt State University—notably Karen Carlton, Kathleen Doty, Tom Gage, and William Bivens. In retrospect, I <span style="font-style:italic;">was</span> smart and confident and creative, and comfortable in front of a room of strangers; teaching <span style="font-style:italic;">was</span> salient because I had grown up in a family of teachers; but I also received a great deal of truly excellent pembinaan from my professors and cooperating teachers. <br /><br />So one of the things Green explores in her article is whether or not we can identify and thus recruit or teach those essential traits of the best teachers. Her conclusion, in a nutshell, is that yes we can. But as in all things of any complex nature, the devil is in the details. <br /><br />I won’t summarize all of Green’s conclusions here. Her article is excellent and interesting, and you all can read it for yourselves. But what I found myself doing after reading the article was thinking about the best teachers I had—not the professors I listed above, but the elementary, middle, and high school teachers that really succeeded with me. Not simply the ones I liked, who may in fact have been mediocre teachers but nice people, but the truly talented teachers. Mrs. Plummer in first grade. Mr. Brucker in second grade. Mrs. McGough in sixth grade. Mr. Suprenaut in eighth grade. Mr. Miata and Mrs. Moakley in ninth grade. Mrs. Bonn in tenth grade and Mrs. Leary in eleventh. Language Arts, English, and History teachers all, except for Bonn (Spanish) and Leary (Math). I had lots of other <span style="font-style:italic;">good</span> teachers, but this would probably be the short list for great teachers, K-12. <br /><br />So, why so few, and what made them different? It’s so hard to say. All were kind and liked their students. I can’t recall any of them ever raising their voice (which is more than I can say for myself, that’s for sure). They knew their material. They were organized. They were demanding without being unreasonable or cruel. They all did <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> teach the same way, however. What, if anything, could I extrapolate and universalize from my experiences with them? What could I ever reproduce in a teacher pembinaan program? Truly, I’m not sure. Are you?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-16416341177458149672019-03-25T05:15:00.000-07:002019-03-25T05:15:02.455-07:00What Makes A Good Teacher Good, Part Ii<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Hallo Ketemu Lagi Di Situs Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="daftar bandarq">daftar bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>I had two requests to write a follow up to the column on what makes a good teacher good. So I’m going to give it a try.<br /><br />One thing I did last week was go into Bulkeley High School and teach a demonstration class in one of my advisee’s classes. His name’s Mike. He’s student teaching there. The situation was not ideal. Besides the fact that Bulkeley is more than a little run down and the classrooms were cluttered and overcrowded, this was during CAPT administration. So these were seniors who had been detained in the auditorium for the duration of the science test. Then they were released for a seventy-five minute period prior to lunch. Furthermore, two classes were combined. Therefore, I had more than thirty seniors crammed into one basement room, who had just endured being essentially locked up for more than two hours, and who hadn’t eaten yet. Oh, and even though this was a British Literature class, they were reading <span style="font-style:italic;">The Catcher in the Rye</span> because there were not enough copies of anything on the Brit Lit curriculum for all the students. My advisee, an education student from University of Hartford, and three members of the English department came to observe.<br /><br />Mike suggested that the students might like to ask questions about college in general and UConn in particular, so after introducing myself I opened it up to Q&A. I was met with deafening silence. I waited. Thirty seconds into the silence a boy laughed, so I said, “Great, you get to ask the first question!†He responded with shock, so I said, “Don’t you know that rule? First student to laugh has to ask the first question? C’mon, you mean you’re a senior in high school and you never heard that rule? Everybody knows that rule. And then after I answer your question you get to pick the next student to ask a question.†Well, that’s all I needed. I asked the boy his name. It was Joshua. Joshua asked a question. Conversation began. He got to pick another student. Soon discussion was pretty fluid and I didn’t have to use that ploy anymore. The students asked many personal questions, like how did I get into teaching, and did I like students, and what did I like to teach, and what was the difference between high school and college students. I asked them similar questions. I spent no more than fifteen of the seventy-five minutes, but in that time we built some nice rapport that was easy to build upon once we began talking about the novel.<br /><br />When I began thinking again about the question of what makes a good teacher good, I kept thinking about this day with the students at Bulkeley, and how easy it was to walk into an unfamiliar classroom with students I don’t know in a less than optimal situation and still manage to facilitate a really successful discussion. There was a content component, since I did know the material really well. And there was a pedagogical component, since I designed an effective series of writing activities and I know how to ask good questions and get students to respond to one another and not just use me as an intermediary through which all responses must pass. But I think the big thing was taking a few minutes to get to know the students and let them get to know me. They were willing to listen, participate, and behave because I had taken the time to humanize them and myself. I thought that perhaps this is the most important thing in making a teacher good.<br /><br />I was part of two conversations yesterday and today that reiterated this to me. First, yesterday, I had another advisee who is currently student teaching come and speak to my juniors in the Advanced Composition course. Ostensibly he was there for them to ask questions about his approach to composing the big term paper for my course, but the students also wanted to ask him a million questions about student teaching. And when they asked Shaun if he witnessed good teachers and good teaching, he responded that there were plenty of really good teachers who connected with their students, but that there were also plenty who were just mailing it in, who sat aloof behind their desks and handed out worksheets, and who hit the parking lot before the busses had even left.<br /><br />Then I had a conversation today with an advisee about Sandra Cisneros’ <span style="font-style:italic;">The House on Mango Street</span>, and I found myself telling her about my colleague Dennis. After a few years of teaching that book, Dennis began asking the students to write their own memoirs in imitation of Cisneros’ style. This was a pretty popular and successful assignment. But then one year Dennis’ mother died a few weeks before he began teaching <span style="font-style:italic;">Mango Street</span>, and when it came time to ask the students to write their memoirs, Dennis began writing down his own memories of his mother. And he shared it with his students. In a word, they were captivated. It would be hard if not impossible to quantifiably demonstrate that the students that year became better writers than the students from previous years, but clearly they were more engaged than ever before.<br /><br />Yes, Dennis was doing some really sound pedagogical things, such as using Cisneros’ book as a mentor text and modeling the writing processes of a capable, adult writer—himself. But I am inclined to say that the most important thing was that Dennis and his students shared their stories with one another. The rapport that emerged from this enabled Dennis to push, require, and demand more from those students than if he had been to them nothing more than a remote authority figure. Had he remained so, he would likely have encountered the same stoniness I did before Joshua’s laughter broke the silence and reminded us all that there were thirty-some-odd people sitting together in that overcrowded basement room.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-4778409765246006672019-03-18T05:15:00.000-07:002019-03-18T05:15:02.074-07:00Lassoing The Rain<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Terima Kasih Telah Kunjungin Web Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarq terpercaya">bandarq terpercaya</a></font></span></span></center>I generally hate political labels like liberal or conservative. I think they tend to categorize and limit rather than define and clarify, and they are often misnomers. How otherwise do you explain calling an environmental conservationist a liberal? Doesn’t wanting to conserve nature make one a conservative?<br /><br />That said, I acknowledge that for me becoming more conservative with age has meant changing my voter registration from Green to Democrat, and if I were a politician and one were to look at my voting record I would probably look more liberal than Ted Kennedy.<br /><br />On yet the other hand, I enjoy reading both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ political columns. My two favorite columnists are Molly Ivins and George Will, a most unlikely pair of bedfellows. I miss Molly Ivins, who died in 2007. She knew how to make smart writing funny, which isn’t easy. What I like about George Will is that, even though he’s rarely funny, he writes well and is reasonable. I rarely agree with him, but he always strikes me as someone I could civilly disagree with, someone who, unlike say Charles Krauthammer or—God forbid—Rush Limbaugh, would not jump to the mistaken conclusion that name-calling, dishonesty, and volume are valid rhetorical devices.<br /><br />On Friday the <span style="font-style:italic;">Willimantic Chronicle</span>, that bastion of journalistic excellence (OK, that’s name calling, which is why I’m not syndicated), jumped on the current anti-teacher bandwagon and ran an editorial that attacked teachers and teachers unions, arguing, among other things, that teachers in Windham whose students did not show adequate yearly progress under the definitions of No Child Left Behind “should eventually be terminated,†and concluded by advocating that school systems be allowed to bring suit against teachers unions “on behalf of any students who fail to meet the minimum test levels, seeking damages for the lives ruined by incompetence.†Notice that the emphasis is on “minimum test levels†and not on learning, progress, or education. Test levels.<br /><br />In today’s <span style="font-style:italic;">Hartford Courant</span> (and in every other Connecticut paper, I assume) the headline on the front page proclaimed that the Connecticut Supreme Court has declared that the Connecticut Constitution guarantees “not just a public education, but one that can prepare [students] for employment, higher education and civic responsibilities like voting and jury duty.†To which every public school teacher should probably say, No shit. But this is being hailed as a groundbreaking decision. And I understand that this decision will drive reform-minded educational legislation, but in truth the Supreme Court isn’t deciding anything that public school teachers haven’t been striving for day in and day out since forever. We don’t need a condemnatory editorial in a second rate newspaper or a self-evident conclusion from a court of law. We need a lot of funding and even more social justice. Which brings me back to George Will, believe it or not.<br /><br />In his most recent column, Will criticizes Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (and liberalism in general) for a myopic vision of education. Now I agree with Will on his criticism of Duncan but not of liberalism on this one, and in part because Will places his critique in the context of the Civil Rights movement. What Will writes is that Duncan and Obama’s education policies ignore two essential facts: that the greatest predictors for educational success are family and income. He writes that “the best predictor of a school’s performance is family performance.†Kids from reasonably well-off, well-educated, two-parent families, kids whose parents are involved in their children’s education and go over their homework with them and meet the teachers and so forth succeed far better than those kids whose parents are poor, under- or unemployed, under-educated, and working too much and/or lacking the education to be involved or to help with homework. Likewise, Will writes that “the best predictor†of individual student performance is “family income.†High SAT scores, AP course enrollment, graduation rates, and college acceptance and enrollment rates all rise as family income levels rise. Teachers have always known this.<br /><br />But this is where I disagree with Will, because if these aren’t civil rights or social justice issues, I don’t know what a civil right is. I don’t know if Will intends to attack families or social classes. I doubt he does. More likely he means to attack liberal economic and social programs like welfare as being causal factors in the failure of urban or impoverished family structures. Now I know there is dead wood in the teaching profession, as there is in every profession, and I know there are great teachers who defy the odds, but I wish someone would please tell me how teachers are supposed to effect large-scale changes in student success rates when the social and economic realities of so many of their students are dismal and dismally beyond their control.<br /><br />Teachers are just an easy sasaran in this debate. We generally enjoy stable and good if not great salaries, and our unions and our tenure give us enviable job security that few outside of the profession perceive as a function of academic freedom. For these we are envied, and in a poor economy envied all the more. At the same time, broad, ill-defined, faceless factors like racism, classism, generational poverty and the like seem impossible to attack because they are amorphous, overwhelming, mercurial, and daunting. When the ancients couldn’t make the rains come they slaughtered a goat because it was easier to lasso the goat than lasso the rain. The same principle seems at play here, just a different duduk perkara and a different target.<br /><br />My last question for all the pundits who think firing teachers will solve the problem: since just about every certifiable content area is in critical shortage, once you fire all these teachers, where do you think you’re going to get anyone to replace them, never mind anyone of any quality whatsoever? And if you think anyone with content knowledge can do the job and we’ll be easy to replace, you really have another think coming.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-34202437699193813452019-03-11T05:15:00.000-07:002019-03-11T05:15:03.136-07:00Dogwood Blossoms And Direct Funding<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Datang Di Website Kesayangam Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarq online">bandarq online</a></font></span></span></center>In “The Waste Land,†T. S. Eliot wrote that April is the cruelest month; having been an expatriate and born in Missouri, Eliot could not have known that he was off by a month. At least by New England standards. Those of you who spent yesterday evening bailing out your basements know what I mean. I feel as if I have been wet for days. Thank goodness the weather is supposed to clear up. The only nice days I have experienced recently were the first two days of my trip to Washington, DC for the National Writing Project’s Spring Meeting. When I first arrived it was warm and sunny when I got off the train, and it was a delight to walk the three blocks to the hotel.<br /><br />The cherry trees were not in bloom yet but the dogwoods were. I think the dogwoods and other flowering trees in DC get overshadowed by the cherry trees. All their white blossoms were just spectacular. They literally weighed down the branches of the trees and made them droop toward the sidewalks. I frequently had to duck beneath them as I passed below. The walk from the hotel on Capitol Hill to the legislative office buildings passes through a beautiful park filled with flowering trees and historical plaques marking the locations of various buildings and homes where famous men and women once lived and worked. The sunny spring days we enjoyed on Wednesday and Thursday made it hard to keep walking to the other side of Capitol Hill where we had work to do lobbying for the reauthorization of funding for the National Writing Project.<br /><br />This year had threatened to be especially difficult, as President Obama’s and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s budget proposals for education involved, among other things, consolidating many directly funded programs such as the National Writing Project, Reading is Fundamental, and Teach for America, just to name a few. The idea is to provide block grants to states that various discrete educational institutions could then apply for. This concept is not new and has been proposed before, more typically under Republican administrations, and the idea is to treat education more like business; to make educators compete and thus design innovative proposals to earn funding for their projects. Of course in the case of the National Writing Project and other directly funded federal programs, this would mean even in the best case scenario that the national infrastructure which supports all 210 Writing Project sites would be eliminated, as would many small, poorly funded sites.<br /><br />Anyway, without going into too much boring detail, it does not look like the National Writing Project is going to lose its direct federal funding. In general, the legislators we talked with said that in principle they like the idea of providing block grants to states to promote innovative education proposals, but not at the expense of programs with documented track records of success. And no legislators want to see universities in their districts or states lose federal funds. And Representative George Miller of California is a big supporter of the National Writing Project and he’s the chairman of the Committee on Education and Labor. So, in short, it looks like we’ll be all right. Though I am crossing my fingers and toes.<br /><br />Lobbying legislators sounds like it might be a dull process, but I actually find the experience interesting and kind of fun, at least sometimes. Perhaps the most surprising thing to teachers when they first experience lobbying at the Spring Meeting is that so much of the actual work of running the government is done by underpaid aides and college interns. I’m perfectly serious. It’s rare that anyone gets to meet with an actual congressperson or senator. I had appointments with Senators Dodd and Lieberman, as well as Representatives DeLauro and Courtney. Other TCs from Storrs as well as Central and Fairfield had appointments with the other three representatives from Connecticut. Only Himes and Courtney actually met face to face with any of us. And both of them are ingusan legislators. In every other case we were met by aides. Senator Lieberman’s education aide was the most interesting one we met. He’s a twenty-year teaching veteran from Kansas who is on sabbatical from his high school to do an internship in Washington as a legislative aide. He was great to talk to because, of course, he knew what we were talking about. <br /><br />But the long and short of what typically occurs is that there are far too many pieces of legislation for the senators and congresspeople to keep track of, and so the aides basically tell them what to support. We asked Lieberman’s aide to have the Senator sign the Dear Colleague letter, and so if he thinks support for direct funding for the National Writing Project is something consistent with the Senator’s positions on education, he makes sure to stick a copy of the Dear Colleague letter under Senator Lieberman’s nose and get him to sign it. When we ask Representatives DeLauro’s and Courtney’s aides to submit letters of support, those aides (or more likely someone working beneath them) type up a letter and give it to the aide who then gets it under the Representative’s nose for a signature. On the one hand, this might seem discouraging, as the elected officials themselves appear to be doing so little of the work of government. But on the other hand, it is rather encouraging to know that regular people are doing the work of running the government. And I do mean regular people. The aides are rather modestly paid with small, crowded office spaces. They are often young, and many have second jobs. Two of the four I met with moonlight as adjunct professors at local schools, one at a DC area community college.<br /><br />On the last day in DC the bad weather returned. It was cold and threatening rain the whole morning, but the dogwood blossoms still looked beautiful against the grey sky.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-60082678563108085592019-03-04T04:15:00.000-08:002019-03-04T04:15:04.853-08:00Travel And Transformation<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Menambah Ilmu Dengan Membaca Di Situs Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="judi ceme online">judi ceme online</a></font></span></span></center>Lately, one of the toughest things about writing this column has been deciding what to write about. There is plenty of education news to discuss, but it’s mostly depressing—budget cuts and job shortages. I feel awful for the students going onto the market now. There are so many talented students in both English and Education that are entering a bleak job market and are essentially competing amongst themselves for a handful of positions. So anyway, I didn’t want to write about that because it’s nothing everyone doesn’t already know and isn’t already upset about.<br /><br />So then I thought I should write about the New England Writing Projects Annual Retreat we’re hosting at UConn this weekend, but I really should write about that next week after it has happened and I have something to report on. Right now the only thing I could really write about is how frustrated I am by people who cancel at the last moment. <br /><br />OK, so I will stop writing about that because I don’t want to get worked up. Especially since I’m really looking forward to the retreat and to the open mic event we organized with the Creative Writing kegiatan for Friday night.<br /><br />But organizing a conference has certainly made the week a little crazy. And if that weren’t enough, my wife and six year old son leave tomorrow morning for Spain. My wife Amy is the head of a high school world language department, and she typically takes students abroad every other year. She has taken students to Spain (several times), Costa Rica (twice), Ecuador and the Galapagos, and Argentina and Uruguay. This year there was a trip to Costa Rica in November that had been planned well in advance. Then one day last spring a high school teacher named Cesar from Cordoba, Spain contacted Amy about doing a one-and-one home exchange between their schools. Students from the school in Cordoba would come to my wife’s school in the fall and then students from my wife’s school would go to Cordoba in the spring. The plan was for this to take place in 2010-11. Amy was eager to agree. Later that spring she got a call from Cesar, who said there was good news and bad news. The good news was that his school had gotten the grant they had applied for to get funding for the trip. The bad news was that the grant was for 2009-10, meaning Amy had to prepare to host students from Spain that coming fall. The insanity that ensued from that phone call is for another day. But now it is time for Amy’s students to head to Spain for the second half of the exchange. Tomorrow morning Amy, another teacher, eighteen high school students, my son, and the other teacher’s twelve year old daughter leave for Cordoba, where they will be till April 24.<br /><br />Cormac is six and by the time he returns he will have been to thirteen US states, Quebec, London, Paris, Florence, Pisa, Madrid, and Cordoba. I didn’t go abroad to Spain until I was fifteen, and then not again till my girlfriend and I backpacked around Western Europe the summer after her senior year and my completion of the Teacher Certification Program for College Graduates. Amy and I are so happy to be able to offer our kids the opportunity to travel, even if it means being ancillary to a group of high school students.<br /><br />My trip abroad during my sophomore year of high school was simply transformative, and I only spent three weeks in Spain. For most of that time I lived with a family who had two kids my age—Susana, who was a year older than me, and Raul, who was a year younger than me—and a younger son. They lived in a contemporary flat in the new part of Valladolid, which had been the capital during the time of Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus met the king and queen in Valladolid, and he died there not long after his voyage. We took a day trip to see the castle of Ferdinand and Isabella, which at the time was under no special protection, and I remember high school boys riding motor cross bikes up and down what had once been the moat.<br /><br />I went to classes most days but took frequent day- and weekend trips. My favorite trips were to Salamanca and Segovia, and also an overnight trip to Toledo. Our trip to Segovia was memorable, in part, because we took a bus to the outskirts of town to visit a famous garden, where I got ‘lost’ with two Spanish girls I had met, and the bus returned to town without us. We had to hitchhike back. Oddly enough, when the Spanish students had come to my high school the previous fall and we took them on a day trip to New York, I got separated from the group with one of my classmates and one of the Spanish girls, and since I had spent the summers of my childhood in New York, I just gave the two of them a walking tour and made sure we got back to Penn Station by five in the evening to meet everyone for the train ride home.<br /><br />So while I don’t hope that any of the students on this trip with my wife pull any of the stunts I pulled as a fifteen year old, I do hope that they—and my son—see amazing places and meet amazing people, and come back feeling transformed in some small way.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-76190181794441307952019-02-25T04:15:00.000-08:002019-02-25T04:15:05.436-08:00Poetry Of The Socially Networked<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Hai.. Jumpa Lagi Di Blog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="ceme online terbaik">ceme online terbaik</a></font></span></span></center>Two years ago we held the New England Writing Projects Annual Retreat at Whispering Pines in Rhode Island. It’s a beautiful facility. Old cabins along a lake beneath tall pines. We spent the days in professional development workshops, learning from one another. But come eight o’clock when the last workshop ended, it was truly Whispering Pines. There was no town. There was no pub. There was no television. I think they even gated the compound. It was a little too secluded for me. Most (OK, all) of my colleagues turned in early. I did, too, and in truth got up early and went for a nice run.<br /><br />Last year we held the retreat at the Hotel Northampton in Northampton, Massachusetts. It’s a great hotel, and I love the town. There are art galleries, coffee houses, bars and restaurants, book stores, a hot tub place. It’s just a cool town. So we had our workshops and our dinner, and then night time arrived and … nothing. I tried to drum up interest among the teachers in a night on the town, checking out the galleries, finding some live music, doing a little kafe hopping. But no. I got a few folks to sit with me in the lobby and have a drink before bed. I thought, OK, this is not Whispering Pines, and I am not turning in early and going for a run in the morning. So I went out alone, checked out the art gallery, got a cup of coffee, people watched, found a nice kafe to have a drink, got to bed around midnight and slept in a little.<br /><br />So this year when we hosted the retreat at UConn, I was determined to arrange something social for the evening, if for no other reason than to have something to do myself. Now Storrs is not Whispering Pines but it is also not Northampton. For night life there’s Starbucks and then there’s Starbucks. Therefore, I approached the Graduate Assistant Director of the Creative Writing Program, Sean Forbes, who will be the CWP’s Graduate Assistant Director next year, and asked him to arrange an Open Mic event for Friday night.<br /><br />Sean did a great job, as did Denise Abercrombie from E.O. Smith. We held the event in the Stern Lounge of the CLAS Building, just upstairs from our office. The room was filled almost to capacity, with people sitting in the doorways to find room to stretch their legs. The readings began at 8:30 and went almost to 11 PM. The evening began with about a half dozen of Denise’s high school students from her creative writing classes, and also included both her teenaged son and her nine year old son, who read a very playful poem and showed no reservations at the mic. Denise also read, as did her husband Jon, who teaches at Quinnebaug Valley Community College. From there Sean took over and introduced another seven or eight undergraduate students from his creative writing classes and from the undergraduate staff of the <span style="font-style:italic;">Long River Review</span>. Two girls from the drama department even read a one-act play written by another student playwright. <br /><br />From there we opened up the night to the teachers from the various New England writing project sites, and perhaps a dozen came to the mic to read their work. In all we had perhaps thirty readers—a third grader, more than a dozen high school students and undergraduate students, a couple of graduate students, another dozen or more K-12 teachers, and a couple of college or university faculty members. And the poetry (and some prose) was terrific. One undergraduate student even wrote an impromptu paean to Denise and Jon’s nine year old son and read it as our closing piece for the night.<br /><br />On Friday prior to the open mic, Jane Cook and I presented a workshop on our efforts to build a web presence for the CWP, and to increase our efforts at offering professional development in technology. But the highlight of the workshops was Saturday’s presentation by the NWP’s Paul Oh on Pedagogy of the Socially Networked. Paul actually co-presented with Andrea Zellner of the Red Cedar Writing Project in Michigan, but Andrea remained in Michigan. We video-conferenced with Andrea via skype, a laptop, an lcd projector, and a microphone. Paul put Andrea’s image on the right hand side of the screen, and on the left hand side he projected the google document he and Andrea created, so that all of us could see the document that Andrea and Paul were referencing live, and for those of us with laptops, since the Nathan Hale Inn has wireless internet access, we, too, could type in the URL and link up to the googledoc, launching its embedded links and files and even participating in a sidebar chat with other TCs from across the conference room. It was pretty cool, and I think much of it was new to many of the participating teachers. People left a little blown away but filled with ideas, particularly from the planning and sharing sessions that followed each workshop presentation.<br /><br />But as always, there is no rest for the weary. The following Monday through Wednesday, Kelly Andrews-Babcock and I resumed and completed interviews of candidates for the Summer Institute. Today I sent out acceptance emails to sixteen teachers to become our newest cohort of Teacher Consultants. This will be our twenty-eighth Summer Institute since 1982, and these sixteen teachers will bring our total to 438. It’s exciting to think that in two years we will celebrate our thirtieth anniversary, and soon thereafter see our numbers reach 500.<br /><br />One last piece of good news. This past Tuesday was the deadline for the Senate Dear Colleague letter to support continued direct funding for the NWP. At four o’clock I got word from Lieberman’s education aide that he had signed the letter, and at six o’clock I heard from Dodd’s aide that he, too, had signed. Things are looking good for that thirtieth reunion.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-27995072781562297382019-02-18T04:15:00.000-08:002019-02-18T04:15:00.561-08:00Education And Its Alternatives<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Hello.. Selamat Datang Kembali Di Blog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="bandar judi ceme">bandar judi ceme</a></font></span></span></center>Now that they are finishing up the spring semester of their ingusan year, my students in the Advanced Composition for Prospective Teachers class have begun to apply what they have learned in their education courses and clinical placements to their own classes. They have begun to meta-analyze the teaching practices of their own professors, and the first few minutes of every class end up being an interesting lembaga for their own discussion of the merits and often the demerits of many of their professors. Sometimes this devolves into a mere gripe session that I have to squash, but often it provides a fruitful analysis and discussion of the pedagogies of the men and women they are supposed to be learning from. Yesterday’s discussion was especially insightful.<br /><br />For me, yesterday’s conversation came at an interesting time for a number of reasons. One reason is that we are at the end of the semester and so one of the things all of the professors have to do is submit merit reports. And although there have been many efforts lately to alter the merit review process to be more considerate of service and administration, it remains heavily biased toward scholarship and includes little consideration of teaching.<br /><br />At the same time, just this past Monday the <span style="font-style:italic;">New York Times</span> ran an article about efforts to create alternative teacher certification programs akin to Connecticut’s Alternate Route to Certification. After I posted that article on my wall in Facebook, I ended up in a lengthy discussion with my friend Jim who teaches at one of the SUNY campuses. Jim basically was arguing to get rid of education programs entirely, and I was countering by saying that most professors could benefit from some coursework in teaching methods.<br /><br />So this was interesting to me as I listened to the young women in my class (I have only one male student, and he was absent that day) talking about their professors. They did praise a few of their professors. One was praised for being brilliant and for being able to facilitate lively discussions that involved the whole class. Another was praised for the quality of her writing instruction, particularly her ability to train the students how to run effective peer response groups. But then there were the complaints about one professor who flat out refused to read any rough drafts of the paper he assigned for the course because it was not a W class and so therefore he had no intentions of doing any writing instruction, even simple proofreading of a draft. Several professors were excoriated for being incapable of leading a discussion. Complaints ranged that they either just liked to hear themselves talk, or they cut off students, or belittled students, or did little more than ask a handful of questions that were answered by two or three of the same students every week, and somehow they thought this constituted discussion. Other students complained of professors whose writing assignments were so narrow and rigid that writing papers for them seemed like nothing more than a guessing game. Or the professor who bragged about giving only ten A’s in his lengthy career. (One student wondered aloud if this didn’t indicate a failure on the professor’s part, that in all his decades of teaching he never learned how to mentor students into doing their best work). And there were many complaints about papers with letter grades and no comments, or papers not returned for weeks, or not returned at all.<br /><br />Most of this discussion involved English professors, but Education professors did not get universal praise, either. Many students expressed incredulity at the professors whose teaching violates every pedagogical principle they promote. Many were shocked by how many Education professors have spent little or no time in K-12 classrooms as teachers.<br /><br />I encouraged the students to emulate the many examples of good teaching they mentioned, and to learn by inverse example from the others. I also pointed out a couple of things. One, for many of the professors who lecture rather than lead discussions or who assign papers but don’t teach writing, these were the dominant modes of instruction for decades, including the instruction they received. And two, as a result of that, it has only been recently (and certainly not universal) that graduate students in English have begun to receive extensive pembinaan in teaching, especially the teaching of writing. And it is likewise a recent phenomenon (and also not a universal one) to require students studying to be high school English teachers to have extensive content coursework. I recall when students at UConn studying to be high school English teachers only had to take one English course a semester their ingusan and senior years. Now, students have to take at least eight English courses, which is only two fewer than the straight English majors. And the students who pursue the dual degree in English and Secondary Education have to take thirteen English courses—three more courses than the regular English majors!<br /><br />To me, these are good signs, at least at UConn. In truth, good teachers do come out of alternate certification programs, and lousy teachers still come out of rigorous traditional education programs. (And some coursework in education does seem pretty superfluous—or at least it did to me twenty years ago!). And many professors figure out how to be damn good teachers without ever having received any formal pembinaan in how to teach. But these tend to be the exceptions. At least we know that UConn is producing secondary teachers who are entering the field with significantly more content knowledge than we used to have. And graduate students, at least those here in the English Department, are entering the field of higher education with significantly more pedagogical pembinaan than graduate students from earlier generations. So hopefully my friend Jim’s criticism of high school English teachers will come to have less and less merit, and my undergraduate students’ criticism of their professors will likewise become less relevant and normative.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-38896931003686972452019-02-11T04:15:00.000-08:002019-02-11T04:15:06.109-08:00Arts And Athletics<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Kembali Bertemu Lagi Di Blog Ini, Silakan Membaca</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="bandar ceme 99">bandar ceme 99</a></font></span></span></center>I hated playing Little League Baseball as a kid. I sort of liked soccer, and wrestling was OK the year I did it, but by and large I was not into organized sports. I was not good at them, I got little playing time, and they were a source of conflict with my more athletic friends who liked to brag about their prowess and tease those of us who didn’t play well.<br /><br />I was a good reader and writer. I won the award for Best Artist at my middle school graduation. I played guitar from the age of seven—first classical, then blues and rock, and later jazz. But I always tried to fit in as an athlete. I tried swimming, cross country, and track and field. I even did karate at the YMCA for one lesson. I did summer baseball camp for two years. But I was just not a good athlete. In high school I completely abandoned art and music, and joined the football team. Just about anyone could make the football team if you stuck it out, because they needed a large squad for practice. My team had fifty players on the varsity squad, and another thirty on the freshmen team. But I was terrible, and I never played, except in blowouts. I guess I was just trying to fit into jock culture.<br /><br />When I went to college, I got involved in martial arts, and did enjoy them for several years as a club or extracurricular activity, but even that I was only moderately successful in. I don’t know why I never embraced the arts. I did, of course, go on to major in English. And I wrote for the school newspaper for three semesters, and even resumed jazz guitar lessons on and off throughout my undergraduate years. But I never pursued creative writing classes, and never resumed drawing, painting, or sculpting. The closest I came to the plastic arts was working as an model for the art department. They paid well and always needed males, and I had no modesty, so it was a good fit. But no actual art for me. I really didn’t even write creatively again till I participated in the Summer Institute in 1999.<br /><br />If I wanted to oversimplify things, I could blame my father for pushing me into sports. He and his brothers were the consummate jocks, and my dad did put a lot of value on athletic prowess. But truth be told, my dad wasn’t that influential in my decisions, and in actuality he was a damn good artist, too. He had studied architecture and then later majored in biology and became a high school biology teacher. I used to love to look at his sketches in his architecture notebooks, as well as in his anatomy and physiology notebooks.<br /><br />I guess I was just more interested in trying to fit in than in trying to pursue my interests and talents. I still regret not honing my skills in art. To this day I have a lot of raw talent, and I dream of having the time to take classes some day.<br /><br />But what made me think about this was my son, who participated in his first poetry reading yesterday. He’s six, and one of his poems was selected for the Creative Writing Program’s Poetic Journeys program. It was called “Snow, Rain, Snow, Rain, Snow, Rain.†He wrote it last year in kindergarten. He read it aloud from a podium in the Benton Museum in front of a small crowd of adults and students. He’s a nervous kid, and I didn’t think he’d follow through and do it, but before the reading began he actually asked me if I had a copy of his poem on hand, and when I gave it to him he went and sat in a corner and read it to himself over and over again to practice. I was really proud of him.<br /><br />He’s had a lot of success in the arts these last few years. There’s no art or music at his school. They were cut or drastically reduced. (I believe he gets thirty minutes of music once a month, no exaggeration, and no art whatsoever). So we have enrolled him in drawing classes, pottery classes, and guitar classes at the Community School of the Arts, which is at UConn’s Depot campus (you know, the creepy one with all the unoccupied old buildings). He’s loved the classes, and has really thrived. He took drawing last summer and enjoyed it immensely, but when we tried to enroll him in drawing classes for the school year, there were none that worked with our schedules, and so we put him in the pottery class, which he’s loved. He’s even won two awards, one in each semester’s art show.<br /><br />We did try to get Cormac involved in sports. He took swimming lessons, and did all right. He has played sports at camp each of the last two summers, but spent most of his time in the art or nature rooms. He even won the Golden Cockroach award for correctly answering the most nature questions in his age group. We also signed him up for T-ball last year, and Amy coached. He didn’t hate it, but he spent most of his time looking for bugs in the outfield, and when asked this year if he wanted to do T-ball again, said no, and asked if we could put him in an art or science class.<br /><br />The other day, Cormac was reading a biography of John James Audubon, and since then he’s been telling everyone that he thinks he wants to be a Naturalist when he grows up. That way he can study nature and also draw what he sees, like Audubon did in his notebooks.<br /><br />I’m proud of my artsy kid, and I hope he never makes the mistake I made of making a false pursuit of sports at the expense of something he really loves and is good at.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-77936557236529205412019-02-04T04:15:00.000-08:002019-02-04T04:15:03.723-08:00Steal This Book!<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Datang Dan Selamat Membaca</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="play bandarq">play bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>Last week I collected term papers from my undergraduate students in the Advanced Composition course. One of the women in the course wrote about a time during high school when she fell in love with Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez. It was the spring semester of her senior year. One day she went to the school library to see what they had by GarcÃa Márquez, and she discovered a book that hadn’t been checked out in over a decade. On a whim, she stole the book. The weather was beautiful and she was suffering from a serious case of senioritis, so she skipped class and snuck out to the parking lot to stretch out on the hood of her car and read <span style="font-style:italic;">Love in the Time of Cholera</span>.<br /><br />I love that story. I told her that it made me want to be nineteen again so I could meet that girl. But the story also made me think that, despite the fact that there are several things she did that were ostensibly wrong—stealing a book and cutting class—my student demonstrated a love and appreciation for literature that would have made me proud. She probably had a deeper, more meaningful experience with that novel than if she had read it in class and completed weekly reading quizzes and a five paragraph expository essay with a thesis statement in the last line of the first paragraph. Etc. Etc.<br /><br />This week is the last week of the academic semester at UConn, and so this blog entry is going to be my last till the fall. I was thinking about this as I was thinking about what I wanted to write this week. And my original idea was to write about the kind of learning, reading, and writing we do over the summer. I know so many of us long for the summers so we can actually do some serious pleasure reading. So we can read all the great new novels that came out this past year that we couldn’t find the time to read amid all the paper grading and progress reports and PPT meetings and such.<br /><br />But that got me thinking about all sorts of unstructured and unsanctioned learning that takes place within and without school.<br /><br />Though this admission may annoy some of you—it certainly annoyed a few of my colleagues when I was a high school teacher—I used to let students hang out in my class when they were supposed to be elsewhere. My last year at RHAM, I had one senior who used to cut class to come to my second and my fourth period classes in American Literature. She didn’t have me for American Lit when she was a ingusan because I was on sabbatical, so in a sense she repeated her ingusan year by coming to my class regularly. She especially liked when we read plays. She would take parts and did a great job reading her lines.<br /><br />I had another student who was in my fourth period class who used to skip her seventh period class to come to my class a second time each day. It was the same prep but a nicer class—better behaved and more involved. In this girl’s case, she had some serious problems going on at home (a parent was in the process of getting arrested for embezzlement, of all things), and I guess my room was a safe place. The teacher whose class she was skipping was a good friend of mine, and I used to call him to let him know the girl was with me. We both preferred that she be with me than leave school grounds and go who-knows-where to deal with her problems. I don’t recall if the girl passed the class she cut so frequently, but because of the better rapport in my seventh period class, she learned more in there than she did in the fourth period class she was actually enrolled in.<br /><br />So I don’t mean to encourage cutting classes as a means to educational attainment, but simply to make a point. In this periode of high stakes standardized testing, merit pay for teachers tied to state tests, and even property values tied to CMT and CAPT scores, we should remember that not all learning happens in the formulaic, sanctioned ways we intend it to occur. Sometimes our best discussions of our subject matter take place in the hallways between classes and the best papers our students write are in personal journals they never share with anyone.<br /><br />Today we had a department meeting and yet another debate about our merit pay policy. Let me tell you, listening to a bunch of English professors quibble about whether a certain committee should be worth one point or two or whether a poem is equivalent to a scholarly article was simply disheartening. I kept asking myself if anyone else in the room besides me remembers falling in love with words, remembers reading novels beneath trees in autumn, or writing love poems to people out hearts pined for desperately. <br /><br />I spent ninety minutes in a windowless room on this glorious day thinking, I shouldn’t be here. I should steal a book and go read it on the hood of my car in the parking lot. Could you imagine if you had your class do that as a lesson? Could you imagine your building principal or superintendent doing that?<br /><br />Anyway, I know this summer we’ll all be teaching summer school and writing curricula and doing book orders and preparing new preps and such, but I hope that most of you find the time to read a book or two beneath a tree, or to write a poem or letter to someone you love. Just take the time to remind yourself why you fell in love with this field in the first place. Otherwise, it’s just a job, and we might as well be stacking boxes in a warehouse, or denying insurance claims in a Dilbert cubicle in some basement office of an insurance giant.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-44325113885010088302019-01-28T04:15:00.000-08:002019-01-28T04:15:00.322-08:00First Day Of School<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Senantiasa Menyambut Kedatang Anda Untuk Membaca</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarqq">bandarqq</a></font></span></span></center>So many bad and frightening and infuriating things to write about today in the world of education, but I am going to try to stay upbeat and positive—at least for this first post. <br /><br />This morning was my son’s first day of school in Windham, and it is his seventh birthday. He seems to be pretty OK with the fact that his birthday falls on or around the first day of school every year. He gets to be the first kid to bring cupcakes to school each year, and that must earn him some credibility among seven-year olds. <br /><br />His mom had to be out of the house and at her school before he was up, but she left him a nice card. Our daughter is with my mother for the next few days because she doesn’t start preschool till the eighth. I think Cormac kind of liked not having her there this morning. It made for a quieter start to the day. I wrote him a poem for his birthday, as I do every year. He could read it himself but he asked me to read it to him, and he gave me a big hug afterward. Then we went for a walk up to the green by our house, though we couldn’t go for as long a morning walk as we used to because his school’s start time is thirty minutes earlier this year. Then we walked to school, which is only two doors down from our house. He handled the whole thing much better this year. Last year he cried. This year a little girl who had cried with him last year was crying again and being comforted by the same teacher, but Cormac walked right by her and took his seat without incident. <br /><br />He wore a favorite bug T-shirt and his new sneakers, a baseball cap he knows he will be made to remove, and he smuggled in one lucky silly-band and a drawing pad and colored pencils. We got there and discovered that he had been switched to a different teacher, though we had received no notification from the school. I tried to be understanding since there had been some administrative turnover during the summer. His new teacher is the more experienced of the two, so perhaps the change will turn out to be fortunate. He had two best friends last year. One is in class with him and the other is in the other class. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, got permission to bring in cupcakes tomorrow, introduced myself to the new principal on my way out, and headed home to start my day.<br /><br />UConn began classes this past Monday but I didn’t meet my new students till Tuesday afternoon. They seem like a good bunch—mostly non-English majors. I have a couple of my own advisees and a former high school student of my wife’s. I overenrolled a couple of students who pleaded desperation. We’re discouraged from overenrolling students in W sections, writing intensive courses, but I always let in a couple. I had a lot of requests for overenrollment this year, but I don’t think it had anything to do with me. It’s because my course is on Evil in American Literature. Seems like many students found that to be an exciting topic. I sort of knew that would be the case when I wrote the course description. The only thing that likely would have sparked more interest is Sex in American Literature. Maybe I’ll offer that next fall. I impressed them by getting all their names right after one round of introductions. It’s a silly dog and pony trick, but it always seems to make a good first impression.<br /><br />I’m excited about the course. I’m teaching six novels, a play, and a book of poetry—<span style="font-style:italic;">Huck Finn</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Sanctuary</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">A Streetcar Named Desire</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Howl</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Interview With The Vampire</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">The Handmaid’s Tale</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Beloved</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">No Country For Old Men</span>. Four of the works (<span style="font-style:italic;">Sanctuary</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Interview</span>, <span style="font-style:italic;">Handmaid</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">No Country</span>) I have never taught before, so that will be an exciting challenge for me, though I have taught other works by Faulkner and McCarthy. I spent August re-reading those four novels to get ideas and to refresh my memory of the books. It was a good thing I did that, too, as I found several cool connections I wouldn’t have thought of or noticed otherwise. I forgot all the allusions Lestat makes to Shakespeare plays in <span style="font-style:italic;">Interview</span>. And I found an allusion to the rape scene from <span style="font-style:italic;">Streetcar</span> in <span style="font-style:italic;">The Handmaid’s Tale</span>, and a reference to Mammon in <span style="font-style:italic;">No Country For Old Men</span> that I can pair up with the references to Moloch in <span style="font-style:italic;">Howl</span>, both being false gods mentioned in the Bible. I also took note of the respective whiteness of both Pap Finn and Popeye Vitelli from <span style="font-style:italic;">Sanctuary</span>, and a reference to Anton Chigurh from <span style="font-style:italic;">No Country For Old Men</span> as a ghost, which can complement the ghost Beloved. It’s good to re-read!<br /><br />Fortuitously, one of the students took a class this summer with a colleague that focused on Satan in literature. They read things like the Book of Job, <span style="font-style:italic;">Paradise Lost</span>, and <span style="font-style:italic;">Doctor Faustus</span>. So I asked him to give a brief presentation during the second class in order to provide some helpful literary and historical context for the much more contemporary works we will be reading. He was excited by the request.<br /><br />So while my son is getting ready to dive into second grade and my daughter is about to embark on her second year of preschool, I will be discussing evil and Satan with a bunch of undergraduates. Strikes me as a funny contrast, the relative innocence of elementary school and the lack thereof in college!<br /><br />I hope everyone has gotten off to a good start and that all the recovered jobs that resulted from the stimulus funds remain in place beyond this year. Please look out for this column every week throughout the school year!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-58348975880865490992019-01-21T04:15:00.000-08:002019-01-21T04:15:03.218-08:00Just Don't Get Me Started!<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Selamat Membaca Di Blog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://77bandar.net" target="_blank" title="bandarq">bandarq</a></font></span></span></center>Last week I strove to be positive, since it was the first post of the new year, but this week I have to vent a little. This Tuesday the education budget in Windham goes to referendum for the fifth time. Last night was a public lembaga on the budget, and by all accounts it was pretty vitriolic. Honestly, this is not the worst budget session I have experienced. When I was teaching at RHAM High School it took four referenda to get funding approved for new school construction, and then subsequently it took twelve referenda to approve an education budget. (I won’t get into the fact that at the same time on a separate vote football was approved to be added as a varsity sport on the first vote. We lost four teachers and suffered the departure of a fairly pro-teacher superintendent, but we got football as a solace for our losses. Don’t get me started!).<br /><br />This budget vote has gotten me frustrated for myriad reasons. I am frustrated that the federal government can spend billions of dollars on war but so little on education. I am furious that the federal government spent billions of dollars to bail out financial institutions and auto makers but only recently approved a one time surplus for schools of ten billion dollars. It sounds like a significant amount of money, but consider that President Obama is currently seeking five times that amount for road construction. And furthermore, it is just a stop gap. The money will allow schools to save some jobs now, but what happens next year?<br /><br />I am frustrated that the federal government is playing cat and mouse games with the Race to the Top funds, requiring states to erode tenure laws and place undue emphasis on standardized testing to qualify for the money, and then awarding money to so few states!<br /><br />I am frustrated that the state contributes so little to local education. The high school reform act has been passed, with implementation deferred for several years, but there is no plan in place for how to fund implementation of the new law’s mandates when the time comes—and the federal stimulus money is gone. <br /><br />I am frustrated that we continue to rely on property taxes for local education funding, which only creates an incredibly unequal system that results in incredible disparities in funding and thus quality of education. I hate that magnet schools and charter schools somewhat address this provincial approach to school funding but in ways that erode teachers’ professional rights, much as the demands of the Race to the Top grants do.<br /><br />It drives me crazy to hear local politicians and newspaper editors and just local residents demean and blame the teachers and declare that they won’t vote yes for the school budget because the teachers have it too good and there are too many administrators. Do the folks who say this have any idea how much work it is to teach? Do the folks who say this really think their no vote is going to result in administrative positions being eliminated in the next budget round? Of course these are rhetorical questions. As a former colleague of mine used to say, the civilians would never understand. <br /><br />When there are cuts we just lose teachers and wind up with larger class sizes. An acquaintance of mine said the other day that he liked when this sort of thing happened periodically because it forced the boards of education and finance to “trim the fat out of the budget.†I asked him if eliminating teachers, eliminating aides, increasing class sizes, and reducing or eliminating world language programs, art, and music was his idea of trimming out the fat. He admitted that he never really gave the details much thought.<br /><br />I am insanely angry that the four referenda in Windham had voter turnouts of 13%, 12%, 11%, and 13% of eligible voters respectively. I don’t understand how so many people can just not bother, how so many people just don’t care. Apparently they don’t care if it passes or if it fails. They just don’t care. Period.<br /><br />It drives me crazy to see so many talented pre-service or newly graduated teachers with such poor job prospects. These young men and women could be doing such wonderful work helping our students, and they are just idle—going back to school to ride out the recession, living home, leaving the profession, leaving the state, taking part time and non-traditional positions. And even the ones who still have jobs are taking second jobs. Before the educational enhancement acts of the 1980s, second jobs and part time jobs were, if not the norm, pretty common within the profession. Then they became rare because they became unnecessary. Now they are becoming quite common again. Several of my wife’s colleagues tend kafe and wait tables on Friday and Saturday nights. Just the other day I was in the supermarket and one of the teachers from my son’s school made me a turkey grinder at the deli station when I stopped in on the way home after a late night at work. Just trying to pay the bills, she told me. She’s young, new to the profession, and very good, but the pay in Windham doesn’t cut it. <br /><br />This is why I want to scream when I hear some guy in the checkout line going on and on about how well paid teachers are and how little work they have to do and how bad they are at their jobs despite all this. And so he’s voting against the budget—again.<br /><br />We’re hosting a secondary writing centers conference here in Storrs again next month, and all the participating schools are asking us for a couple hundred dollars here or there to pay for bus transportation, to purchase a table, purchase some chairs, books, maybe a laptop—just one. Please. Their schools just don’t have the funds and they hope the university does.<br /><br />Please, just don’t get me started.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7102477073309158826.post-34294843834599097792019-01-14T04:15:00.000-08:002019-01-14T04:15:01.154-08:00Budgets And Other Happy Subjects<center><span lang=EN-GB style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB"><pont color=#0000ff><strong>Jejak Panda</strong>Jumpa Lagi Kita Diblog Kesayangan Anda</br><a href="http://www.99bandar.cc" target="_blank" title="ceme 99 online">ceme 99 online</a></font></span></span></center>I felt really good on my drive to work this morning. My happiness began late last night when one of our TCs from Windham High texted me to tell me that the Windham school budget had finally passed by 130 votes on the fifth try. There will still be cuts from last year, but at least we have a budget and the battle is over for this year. <br /><br />I slept well, and had gone to bed earlier than I usually do, so I actually got a good night’s sleep for once. My kids behaved well this morning—which is not always the case. Usually my four year old daughter is good for at least one round in timeout before breakfast, typically for scratching her brother for some unknown offense. But not this morning. I also had an eight AM conference with Cormac’s new teacher. He just began second grade, and had a couple of rough days. I was kind of dreading the conference, but it went really well. <br /><br />(This is a tangent, but his teacher told me one ridiculously funny story. Apparently he refused to do some math work because he considers it boring—can’t imagine where he got that idea—and then when he got really insubordinate the teacher went to remove him from class and he told her that he was going to turn into a vampire and come to her house at night and suck her blood. I laughed out loud when she told me that, and she said that as mad as she was at him at the time, she had a hard time not bursting out laughing when he said that, too). <br /><br />Then I drove my daughter to school in the beautiful morning sunlight, and listening to sports talk radio learned that the Yankees had won in extra innings and thereby had regained first place in the American League East. It was a good morning.<br /><br />Later in the day I finished a draft of an article that will be appearing later this semester in UConn Magazine about education in general and Windham in particular. It is not an upbeat article, but I was glad to get it done by deadline, which was 5 o’clock, and I finished by 3:30. So I took a short walk around campus and got myself some coffee, and watched the undergraduates walking to class—all listening to music, texting, or talking on their phones. But there were lots of students on this glorious day sitting beneath trees, reading. Several classes were meeting outside. In fact, I let my class have response groups outside on Tuesday afternoon. It was wonderful moving from group to group, each one in a different but equally bucolic location. It felt like something out of <span style="font-style:italic;">Goodbye, Mr. Chips</span>.<br /><br />But seeing all the students outside today and having my class meet outside the day before made me a little nostalgic for being an undergrad. I remember how much I loved being an English major as an undergrad because I would do exactly what these students were doing throughout the fall and spring. I would grab whatever novel I happened to be reading at the time, and I would sit myself beneath some tree or atop some stone wall or on a bench somewhere, and I would just read for an hour or two or three till I had to go to class or eat. I took nothing more than a pen with me besides the book, so I could write notes in the margins. (I rarely kept a notebook of any kind). <br /><br />I had a girlfriend for most of my senior year, and she used to experience such strong envy that it bordered on anger because she was a physical therapy major, and she couldn’t very well lug her copy of <span style="font-style:italic;">Grey’s Anatomy</span> and all her reference books and notebooks to the base of some sugar maple and commune with earth and sky. She also used to get mad at me when we’d study together and I’d laugh out loud at something funny I’d read in a book. Her anatomy texts never made her laugh. But that’s another story.<br /><br />However, I don’t get to do that much anymore. I spend an inordinate amount of time in meetings or in front of my two computer screens sending and answering emails, crunching budget numbers, and writing reports. And if you have ever been to the CWP office and have seen my private office space, you know I basically have a Bartleby set-up with a window that looks out on a courtyard that has one Japanese maple tree, one glass entryway, and three four-story high brick walls, and that serves as the departmental smoking lounge. Thank goodness for that Japanese maple and the oblique sky and sun I get from above my basement windows. So it was really nice to take the students outside Tuesday.<br /><br />This past weekend I was mowing the lawn in back one afternoon. While my daughter napped, my son kept me company. As I marched back and forth across the lawn, he sat quietly atop a big rock on the end of a stone wall that separates our yard from a large field owned by my neighbor. The field still has old apple and pear trees in it, and attracts deer and hawks. In the summer evenings it’s fun to take the kids to watch lightning bugs light up the darkness. The kids love this field. And so while I mowed, Cormac sat for a solid hour and just drew picture after picture of the tree line, the field, the clouds. At other times he will sit back there and read to himself, or take a field guide and try to identify trees or bugs. I love that he does this, and hope he ends up with a college major—and later a job—that gives him the chance to always do this, or at least from time to time on sunny Tuesday afternoons in the fall.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13181140837644548182noreply@blogger.com0