There's a big difference in the two ways that sex education is taught. You have either abstinence-only or abstinence-plus. We are to teach students that abstinence is the only way. I would nickname us Positive Polly. Knowing the high school boys that I do, abstinence ain't gone happen.
But, with the abstinence-plus option, we can at least give students information about contraceptive use and let them know that options are out there. That does not seem to be the option in Texas.
In Texas, course materials dealing with sexual issues are reviewed by local advisory councils of parents and community members. This council decides what can be taught. And contraceptive use is omitted from health textbooks.
In 2006, 82% of parents surveyed wanted sex education that not only teaches abstinence, but also methods for preventing pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases. Nearly 70% of parents want schools to give lessons in the proper application of a condom. Yet, even though this demand is out there, Texas, leading the nation, has pledged nearly$20 million for education that teaches the psychological and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sex.
What is wrong with this picture? The parents want it; the kids need it. If your high school is anything like mine, we should start talking contraceptive use in the fourth grade. There are plenty of YA novels to help ease this conversation. Angela Johnson's First Part Last is one of those. No matter what text you use, we have to open to channels for conversation about safe sex. Teenage pregnancy is nearing epidemic proportions and we must do our part as educators to educate our children.
Monday, July 14, 2008
Black Males and the Reading Acheivement Gap
What do we do with the students who come in, sit at the back of the room, put their iPod ear buds in, and tune us out? We know that they need specific instruction, but what can we do with them when they adopt their "cool" pose and insist that nothing we do is for them?
Alfred Tatum states that effective teachers of black males understand the need for moving beyond reading instruction. Its all about the texts. We must put texts in front of them that address the psychological and emotional scarring that occurs when you grow up black, male, and poor in America. And how do you do this? By building relationships. By understanding where the students come from. By integrating knowledge gathered, not only as an educator, but as a sociologist, an anthropologist, and a social worker.
In his book, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males, Tatum explores the roots of black turmoil and its effects on the teens that sit in our classrooms every day. Imagine going from a place where you are allowed to develop your own personal power and shared values in a strong community setting to a place where you have no political rights, are considered a piece of property, and are forced to live a new worldview. So much time in this new world convinces you that you are inferior. Inadequate. This is the historical lineage of our black male students. After coming to America, they were bombarded with the image of the black male as "subhuman, unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, idle buffoon" (27).
There are also present day factors that lend itself to this inferiority complex and the aftermath--urban economic neglect, pop culture, and the persistence of racial discrimination. (And if you don't believe that racism is alive and well, look at the Don Imuses of society. It is still alive and well.)
So how do our black male students respond? They adopt the "cool pose" (29). You know the student--pants below the waist, prolific profanity, the fist bump. The cool pose is a defense mechanism. It can account for just about anything--inner conflict and anxiety; social environment; rage in the face of racism and descrimination. The cool pose is a way for young black men to keep the world at bay until he figures out how to handle it.
But this coping mechanism has unfortunate side effects. It leads to authority issues, refusal to find experiences to aid in growth, reluctance to share with teachers, and a refusal to 'turn the other cheek' in the face of violence.
In order to help black males close the reading achievement gap, we have to lose the mentality that test scores are the sun and the students are in orbit around them. Data can be helpful, but can also pigeonhole students. We also have to ward off barriers to learning. If we expect students to be low acheivers, then they will be. We have to raise our expecations and beliefs of them so that they will have something to work for.
Lastly, Tatum addresses the need for multiple literacies. We must beware the misinterpretation of the cool pose--it isn't that they don't care. This misinterpratation can lead to "negative reciprocity". The student thinks the teacher doesn't care and the teacher thinks the student doesn't care so no one is doing what is best for the child. (And when it boils down to it, no matter the age or size, they are still children.) As we move away from a reading instruction style that is focused on test scores and begin to develop a complete understanding of the turmoil faced by young black men, we can work on the multiple literacies in the lives of black men: academic literacy, cultural literacy, emotional literacy, and social literacy.
As teachers, it is our responsibility to become personally invested in our black males and to move them beyond the existing curriculum. Instruction must hit students at their "life-level", not necessarily at their reading level. How would you like to be a 16-year-old boy, the bread winner of your home, and stuck in class all day reading Dick and Jane?
Alfred Tatum states that effective teachers of black males understand the need for moving beyond reading instruction. Its all about the texts. We must put texts in front of them that address the psychological and emotional scarring that occurs when you grow up black, male, and poor in America. And how do you do this? By building relationships. By understanding where the students come from. By integrating knowledge gathered, not only as an educator, but as a sociologist, an anthropologist, and a social worker.
In his book, Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males, Tatum explores the roots of black turmoil and its effects on the teens that sit in our classrooms every day. Imagine going from a place where you are allowed to develop your own personal power and shared values in a strong community setting to a place where you have no political rights, are considered a piece of property, and are forced to live a new worldview. So much time in this new world convinces you that you are inferior. Inadequate. This is the historical lineage of our black male students. After coming to America, they were bombarded with the image of the black male as "subhuman, unintelligent, sexually promiscuous, idle buffoon" (27).
There are also present day factors that lend itself to this inferiority complex and the aftermath--urban economic neglect, pop culture, and the persistence of racial discrimination. (And if you don't believe that racism is alive and well, look at the Don Imuses of society. It is still alive and well.)
So how do our black male students respond? They adopt the "cool pose" (29). You know the student--pants below the waist, prolific profanity, the fist bump. The cool pose is a defense mechanism. It can account for just about anything--inner conflict and anxiety; social environment; rage in the face of racism and descrimination. The cool pose is a way for young black men to keep the world at bay until he figures out how to handle it.
But this coping mechanism has unfortunate side effects. It leads to authority issues, refusal to find experiences to aid in growth, reluctance to share with teachers, and a refusal to 'turn the other cheek' in the face of violence.
In order to help black males close the reading achievement gap, we have to lose the mentality that test scores are the sun and the students are in orbit around them. Data can be helpful, but can also pigeonhole students. We also have to ward off barriers to learning. If we expect students to be low acheivers, then they will be. We have to raise our expecations and beliefs of them so that they will have something to work for.
Lastly, Tatum addresses the need for multiple literacies. We must beware the misinterpretation of the cool pose--it isn't that they don't care. This misinterpratation can lead to "negative reciprocity". The student thinks the teacher doesn't care and the teacher thinks the student doesn't care so no one is doing what is best for the child. (And when it boils down to it, no matter the age or size, they are still children.) As we move away from a reading instruction style that is focused on test scores and begin to develop a complete understanding of the turmoil faced by young black men, we can work on the multiple literacies in the lives of black men: academic literacy, cultural literacy, emotional literacy, and social literacy.
As teachers, it is our responsibility to become personally invested in our black males and to move them beyond the existing curriculum. Instruction must hit students at their "life-level", not necessarily at their reading level. How would you like to be a 16-year-old boy, the bread winner of your home, and stuck in class all day reading Dick and Jane?
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
The Death of the Sentence? Oh my!
At the recent release of the NAEP scores, Librarian of Congress James Billington sent out a cry concerning the "slow destruction of the basic human thought--the sentence."
The most recent test scores show that only one-third of 8th graders in this country can write with proficiency. Billington, among many others, blame online communication and herald the end of the sentence as we know it.
This is no new debate. Text messaging and IM speak has been seeping its way into student writing since the turn of the century. If you work with high schoolers, you know that most of them come to you as poor writers. It is what has lead to such an influx of writing workshop-style classes, even at the collegiate level.
But the demise of that basic human thought goes back even further than the late 90s. Wilson Follett wrote for Atlantic Magazine that the sentence is a "structure greatly faithful to the pattern of consciousness" and insisted that the sentence was under attack. In 1937. At a time when sentences were long, loopy, and followed no strict grammatical rules.
Now our students are concise. To a fault.
What scares me more than the imminent demise of the sentence is the soon-to-follow revival of DOL--daily oral language. Grammar in isolation. My arch-nemesis. Students are not going to learn how to use commas correctly by copying a sentence with no commas and guessing where they are supposed to go. In fact, I would bet my next paycheck that more than half of the warm bodies in the room sit there and wait for the correct answer. So they are copying down WRONG SENTENCE STRUCTURES and then adding in commas, capitalization, etc. arbitrarily. Hmmmm...sounds like a sure fix.
So what can teachers do? Work with mentor texts. One teacher had great success with inner-city minorities and dictation. I have used short snippets that showcase what I want students to grasp. Working with descriptive passages? Pull out brief examples from a variety of young adult novels and let students highlight what they consider to be excellent details from the passage. Then they can go back to their own piece to make revisions.
Grammar instruction in isolation is not the answer. We can however embrace text-speak and teach students appropriate times to use it. This isn't a new battle for teachers. The enemy has just morphed into a new shape.
The most recent test scores show that only one-third of 8th graders in this country can write with proficiency. Billington, among many others, blame online communication and herald the end of the sentence as we know it.
This is no new debate. Text messaging and IM speak has been seeping its way into student writing since the turn of the century. If you work with high schoolers, you know that most of them come to you as poor writers. It is what has lead to such an influx of writing workshop-style classes, even at the collegiate level.
But the demise of that basic human thought goes back even further than the late 90s. Wilson Follett wrote for Atlantic Magazine that the sentence is a "structure greatly faithful to the pattern of consciousness" and insisted that the sentence was under attack. In 1937. At a time when sentences were long, loopy, and followed no strict grammatical rules.
Now our students are concise. To a fault.
What scares me more than the imminent demise of the sentence is the soon-to-follow revival of DOL--daily oral language. Grammar in isolation. My arch-nemesis. Students are not going to learn how to use commas correctly by copying a sentence with no commas and guessing where they are supposed to go. In fact, I would bet my next paycheck that more than half of the warm bodies in the room sit there and wait for the correct answer. So they are copying down WRONG SENTENCE STRUCTURES and then adding in commas, capitalization, etc. arbitrarily. Hmmmm...sounds like a sure fix.
So what can teachers do? Work with mentor texts. One teacher had great success with inner-city minorities and dictation. I have used short snippets that showcase what I want students to grasp. Working with descriptive passages? Pull out brief examples from a variety of young adult novels and let students highlight what they consider to be excellent details from the passage. Then they can go back to their own piece to make revisions.
Grammar instruction in isolation is not the answer. We can however embrace text-speak and teach students appropriate times to use it. This isn't a new battle for teachers. The enemy has just morphed into a new shape.
Tuesday, July 01, 2008
The Power of Book Clubs
"We were to experience how the ordinary pebble of ordinary life could be transformed into a jewel through the magic of fiction." (Reading Lolita in Tehran, 8)
To anyone who is a reader, there is no doubt that books change lives. The only thing stronger than a good book is the powerful conversations that surround that text. This is where the true power comes in.
Reading instruction at the secondary level is a tricky thing. How do you teach a seventeen-year-old mother to read? Where do you start? Do you do a miscue analysis and examine her grapho-phonic mistakes? You can. But imagine engaging her with literature that is on her life-level (Tatum) instead of on her reading level and then following up those textual experiences with genuine conversations. It is this type of reading, the reading for a discussion, that changes the nature of reading itself. This type of dialogue, with peers and with the text itself, help readers to rethink and re-envision who they are in context to their lives and how those lives relate to the text and the world around them.
Book clubs are our best chances to reach these students who feel like school has stopped reaching out for them. They view reading as a chore, not something that is enjoyable. Reading is a stringing together of symbols on a page. It's a scavenger hunt for similes and metaphors and foreshadowing, but not for understanding. Students don't search for how these things relate to the beauty of the work; they just know what these things look like in order to bubble in the right answers. But imagine a group of girls looking at the way a simile wraps itself around a comparision to create the image in a reader's mind. Imagine looking at the way a metaphor showcases the craftiness of an author.
This won't happen in isolation. But it can happen in valid, real-life conversations about books. It can happen in book clubs.
I'm looking forward to seeing the year-long effects of book clubs on teenage girls. The potential for life changes is great. As I work my way through the Nafisi memoir about her female book club in Iran, I see that book clubs can and will change the lives of the students involved in them. The conversations just need to be guided.
To anyone who is a reader, there is no doubt that books change lives. The only thing stronger than a good book is the powerful conversations that surround that text. This is where the true power comes in.
Reading instruction at the secondary level is a tricky thing. How do you teach a seventeen-year-old mother to read? Where do you start? Do you do a miscue analysis and examine her grapho-phonic mistakes? You can. But imagine engaging her with literature that is on her life-level (Tatum) instead of on her reading level and then following up those textual experiences with genuine conversations. It is this type of reading, the reading for a discussion, that changes the nature of reading itself. This type of dialogue, with peers and with the text itself, help readers to rethink and re-envision who they are in context to their lives and how those lives relate to the text and the world around them.
Book clubs are our best chances to reach these students who feel like school has stopped reaching out for them. They view reading as a chore, not something that is enjoyable. Reading is a stringing together of symbols on a page. It's a scavenger hunt for similes and metaphors and foreshadowing, but not for understanding. Students don't search for how these things relate to the beauty of the work; they just know what these things look like in order to bubble in the right answers. But imagine a group of girls looking at the way a simile wraps itself around a comparision to create the image in a reader's mind. Imagine looking at the way a metaphor showcases the craftiness of an author.
This won't happen in isolation. But it can happen in valid, real-life conversations about books. It can happen in book clubs.
I'm looking forward to seeing the year-long effects of book clubs on teenage girls. The potential for life changes is great. As I work my way through the Nafisi memoir about her female book club in Iran, I see that book clubs can and will change the lives of the students involved in them. The conversations just need to be guided.
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