Riveting YA Lit

I stayed in the bath last night long after the water ran cold in order to finish Todd Strasser's Blood on My Hands. It was phenomenal. While I had some ideas about the ending, it was still a compelling ride to see the story unravel.

The main character, Callie, is found leaning over the dead body of the "it" girl at her high school...with knife in hand...and then cell phone pictures were snapped. Add to all this, Callie's older brother is serving 8 to 15 for attempting to murder their abusive father. The natural assumption is that Callie is as guilty as they come.

What do you do in this situation? I'm not sure I would have the wherewithal that the main character did--she took off running. She felt as though her only chance would be to find out who really did kill Katherine, so she hides until she can do so.

Callie's foray into eluding the law and amateur detective work makes for a fascinating story. Strasser paces it well, especially for the short attention span of a teenager. For an adult, it's a quick read--maybe just a night or two. But definitely one worth picking up.

Hothouse by Chris Lynch

Several years ago, I read Inexcusable by Chris Lynch--the story of a young man who is convinced that he is a good boy and did not do that which he actually did. (I'll leave you to read it and figure out what it is he did.) The book was written as such where you really felt you were in the speaker's mind. In fact, at times, you started to believe him because he believed it so much. Reading it was a powerful experience.

So I was happy to see a new Chris Lynch novel in my school library, Hothouse. This is the story of heroes and how hard they can fall when we lift them up high enough. It is a good story for your teenage boys sitting in your high school English class. You, however, dear teacher, might just struggle with it.

What came across as the narrator's stream of consciousness in Inexcusable comes across as a botched writing attempt in Hothouse. There were times when the writing got in the way of the story. There were times when the plot just drug along. Truthfully, the plot isn't action packed. The story is slow to develop and slow to resolve itself.

Would I recommend it? Definitely to a student. Their tastes are refined enough for a character's rambling to get in the way. But it isn't one I would read again.

Click, Clack, Moo and Follow-Up Questions

Today was step one towards a successful podcast about our nonfiction texts. It is time to have meaningful conversations about literature. I feel that this will help me in my quest to create lifelong readers.

The first step to meaningful coversations is to create meaningful questions. When students are dropped into a discussion setting, they don't know what to say to one another. They know how to share answers, but they don't necessarily know how to ask for help from a peer. They know how to say that they don't get it, but they don't know how to vocalize what it is that they don't get. They have to learn how to ask good questions about their reading in order to take them to the next level of understanding and analysis.

To do this, we started by discussing characteristics of good questions. I have to be honest here--I tried to have the students generate characteristics, but it fell totally flat. They didn't have a clue what I was asking for or what I wanted. They knew what a good question was when they saw one, but breaking one down and explaining why it was good was a bit too much.

So I listed characteristics of good and bad questions on chart paper and we started by looking at that list. We contrasted the two. We looked closely at the pros and cons. We cleared up any confusion as to what was expected. After our brief discussion, we created a six-celled chart using a piece of notebook paper. The left column was for the start questions and the right column was for the follow-up questions.

Now for application. I decided to start with a brief piece by Pat Conroy. His writing is so deep and it is something that I want my students to be familiar with. They might not come Conroy lovers today, but I want them to see the goldmine that is in their backyard. After reading a brief, controversial piece that looks at a situation of spousal abuse, I gave them think time. They had to write down a start question using the characteristics of good questions. After everyone had a chance to write down a start question, I asked for one volunteer to share. We took that question and added it to the first cell of our chart. We discussed possible answers and the created follow-up questions based on those answers. This went on a for a few minutes, and we repeated the process with a new starter question. I pointed out how the conversation could only continue with a good question. Failure to ask a good question would lead to a dead end. I demonstrated this by asking a few bad questions of my own and showing that the conversation could go nowhere.

That scaffolding led to Click, Clack, Moo. Students used the cute children's book to generate starter questions that met the characteristics of good questions. It was a nice lead up to individual work. Just a little more scaffolding and we'll be having powerful conversations about texts that are meaningful to us.

I hope.

Finding time for a good idea

Good ideas are not easy to come by. Let me specify--the idea is the easy part. The logistics are the hard part. I can come up with some ideas, but figuring out how those ideas are going to work in my classroom is something totally different. I have had the great idea that my students need to podcast about their newest literature circle books, a nonfiction text. I am sure that they have little to no experience with podcasting. This is something I will have to scaffold carefully in order to move them along at a good pace, but also ensure that everyone works in their ZPD. One minute of frustration and this balancing act can collapse. There are not a lot of lesson options with podcasting out there. I have experienced this before--I have an idea for a lesson, I know what I want it to look like, but I can't find exactly what I am looking for. I can get lost for hours on the Internet looking at things that don't quite do what I need them to do. I am not quite at ground zero with podcasting. I did fine a great PBS lesson that lays out great steps for scaffolding a podcast lesson. Now I just have to take my own materials and merge the two for the perfect podcasting book discussion lesson!

Like a well-oiled machine

Some days just run that way. Things fall into place, students are agreeable, and good instruction takes place. Today was one of those days.

We are in the middle of several activities. Students are creating a photo challenge project, which involves finding pictures under particular categories and then writing about those pictures. We are also working on close readings of articles and writing article reflection essays. In addition to that, we are getting geared up for the end of course test by reviewing the technical vocabulary that they will need to learn. Lastly, students are reading nonfiction texts chosen during a book pass.

That is a lot going on at once. And it's the last week before spring break!

I have tried to scaffold the article reflection essays as best I can. We have read articles together to model annotating/marking up a text. I assigned articles related to their nonfiction text to push their thinking a little further. I wrote my own article reflection essay and we looked at it as a class, discussing what things the writer did while working on the essay. By doing that, we created sort of a recipe for the essay. With that recipe in hand and correctly annotated articles, they were set free.

While they wrote on their own, which they could only do through extensive scaffolding, I was able to hold conferences with each child on their project progress. We were able to talk one on one and they all got the attention they needed.

Sometimes, the chips just fall into place.

Sometimes, you get lucky.

Oh snow you didn't!

At the beginning of the month, we had an extended Christmas break. Most have named it their snowcation. I have dubbed it Snowmageddon 2011. A week off from school was a bit much. I came back to that four day week like a gang buster. I was on fire...en fuego!

Since then, well, let's just say time has slowed around me to a crawl. The fact that I'm still sitting upright at 9:30 in the evening is an amazing feat in and of itself. I'm exhausted. I'm dragging my feet. I can't bring myself to read essays. I can't bring myself to plan. At this point, I can't hardly bring myself to lift my body from this chair to go upstairs for bed!

It's a sad state of affairs for me this week. There's no way I want more snow days.

But a long weekend would help.

Unplugged

I wrote this yesterday after forgetting my purse at home.

It is not a lifestyle I'd choose.

I only happened upon it by chance.

Just a pen and a scratch piece of paper

And forty minutes to spare.

Usually I would tweet.

Read the news in less than 140 characters.

I'd curse my phone for being so slow

and snoop through pictures on Facebook.

But today I'm unplugged.

I forgot my phone.

No news, no Twitter, no Facebook.

No iPod, no music, no Angry Birds.

I've left myself with no outside entertainment,

Only this green pen.

I really thought time would crawl,

But I've only 15 minutes to go.

It's been a long time since my brain has worked,

instead of passively received.

Let me tell you about this "noble" profession

"What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation?" -Marcus Tullius Cicero

So far this morning, I, this woman of most noble employment, have argued over ear buds, argued over a breakfast list, been ignored, snapped at, and summarily dismissed. When I tried to correct a student's essay by telling him not to add spaces between paragraphs and indent each new paragraph, he informed me that he was doing it the way his resource teacher taught him. To which I informed him that I was the one grading his paper, not his resource teacher, and it needed to be done my way.

All in all, another stellar morning.

The only nice thing I can say about teenagers today is that when I asked two of them to take off their hats, they said yes, ma'am and actually did it.

I read everywhere that teachers need to be paid based on performance levels of students. Let me tell you about 14-year-olds. They are unreliable. They are lazy when it suits them. They are hard-working when it suits them. It's all well and good to design creative lessons to grab their attention. If they aren't feeling it, then that is that. Oh well. They are still in the self-centered level of moral development. I'm going to do what I want to do because I want to do it and it makes me happy. Period. End of story.

Yet, politicians want to make teachers more accountable for what they are teaching and doing in the classroom. Not a problem with me. Not at all. But if you want to hold me accountable for what I am doing in the classroom, come watch what I am doing in the classroom. You can't judge me based on a 60-question multiple choice test at the end of the year. My door is wide open to anyone who wants to come and watch me teach. My door is open to anyone who wants to evaluate me.

But if you are going to administer a test that judges my abilities, this morning I would fail. These children are grouchy.

Writing Workshops with Freshmen

I'm always looking for new ways to teach writing to young writers. I struggled with some of the formal writing assignments in college because I didn't have a strong background in high school. There's a fine line between teaching enough and teaching too much. Between giving them too little information and between giving them too much to handle.

My freshmen are working on literary analysis essays to end their reading of Romeo & Juliet. A ton of research went in to this lesson. I'm not sure that I've ever taught it well enough. Sure, graduates come back and tell me that I helped them, but I've never been sure of exactly what I did to be so helpful. I try to be reflective on my practice, so it frustrates me when I can't put my fingers on what I did.

After my tons of research, hours of frustration, and countless e-mails with no good responses, I came on a plan that just might work. We started with notes, of course. Probably too many notes. Definitely too many notes if you ask my kids. I know that I didn't give them enough time to think between each section. I fixed that with later groups, but my poor first period class kinda got the raw end of the deal.

After we took notes that defined a literary analysis, thesis, and textual evidence, we spent some time thinking about the topics for our essay. We wrote thesis statements together, we shared them, and then improved them. Again, this part got better as the day went on. I learned from my mistakes very quickly. We spent time creating topic sentences for the body paragraphs. We spent time looking at examples of textual evidence. I know without a doubt that we didn't spend enough time with shared writing. Shared writing would have made the whole thing easier, but then you have to deal with students who only want to take what you wrote and copy it. There has to be a better way to do shared writing, but I'm still looking for that part.

Today we are drafting. I didn't plan enough time in the classroom to get through everything, and I booked the library for today. Everything is booked for Monday so I can't even push it back for another day in the classroom. However, my hastiness is going to come to my rescue.

Students are often hesitant to come to a teacher's desk when they seem to be working. And they also sit in those tiny student desks all day long. So we are in the library. We are spread out and I am by myself. I laid out the rules before we came in. Students can sit no more than two to a table or can work on the computer. I have to be left at a table by myself. If I'm alone, then I am available to help and answer questions. If I'm with another student, we are not to be interrupted because that is there time.

It's working.

They are writing. They are coming over and getting help. I'm getting to do differentiated instruction by talking to each student as an individual instead of addressing the whole class. Everyone is getting what they need. Including me. I'm getting time to write.

This changes things for next week. But it's also feeding my instructional plans. We took notes on introductions (so very effective, I know) and we looked at some examples. But they have no clue where to start. It shows me that we need a mini-lesson on introductions next week. We all need it. What we're going to do, I don't know. But I have a weekend to figure it out.

Twas the night before break...

The last day of school before Christmas break is a special day that cannot be replicated no matter what.

Freshmen finished exams yesterday, but we still had school today. A half day would have been ideal, but that was not to be. So instead there was movie time. Lots and lots of movie time. And students got to play Santa between teachers who did not have the chance to leave their classrooms. And there were Christmas parties. Oh the parties...

I only allowed one class to throw a party and that was my dual credit Teacher Cadet course. We had some good discussions and they finished up a major project today, so the class wasn't a total waste. And the food was terrific.

When you give kids a free hand, it is amazing what they will come through with. We had pizza, bugles and dip, crackers and dip, brownies, cookies, and cupcakes. For my part, I gave out Christmas cards featuring pictures from our class.

The day before Christmas break is a day like no other. Teachers have the same fever that students do. You can't hide it. There is a feeling in the air. As the students deliver cards and gifts from teacher to teacher, they have to know that we feel it to. That we are ready for a vacation too. It's a bonding experience. Like the song? Everybody's waiting for the man with the bag.

We were all waiting for the man to ring that bell.

When he finally did, we all knew that the next two weeks would be like heaven. Like a little reminder of summer and the feeling of nonchalance that comes with it. Just a taste--just enough to remind us it is coming.