Close Text Reading Support

In response to my renewed invitation at last week's faculty meeting, I have enjoyed locating and analyzing resources this week from teachers' queries about hydraulic fracturing, adaption of the peppered moth, the mills at Lowell Massachusetts, and the Erie Canal. I set up some stacks (see links in this post) for ease of sharing and updating. This collaboration is the result of a presentation about Close Text Reading procedures we need to be adopting and the service that I can provide in locating and analyzing resources, as well as drafting questions of rigor for the readings. I am excited about the prospects for myself, our teachers and outr students.

Reading before Researching

An article in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education presents the results and recommendation of an investigation into Freshman Composition research papers on the college level. In their broad survey they concluded that students  "don't know how to analyze their sources." They recommended the following:

Rather than spending time in first-year composition trying to teach students how to find sources—or using computer programs to chase down plagiarism—faculty members in such courses should scrap the research paper altogether, the researchers said.

After all, students exhibit the same kinds of mistakes at the end of their first-year composition courses as they do at the beginning, regardless of the type of institution or whether the course is taught by a full-time faculty member or an adjunct, Ms. Jamieson said.

Part of the problem, she added, is the expectation that faculty members trained in composition have expertise in the subject being researched, whether it is abortion, the death penalty, or gun control: "Unless it's in your field, you don't know what a good source is and what isn't."

Instead, she said, students should work on shorter papers that are based on source materials assigned through class, with more guidance from the instructor throughout the process.

And, though she said she is startled to hear herself say it, Ms. Howard recommends changing the paradigm governing the teaching of the course. Typically, students are taught to begin a rough draft fairly early in the writing process, she said. But the evidence suggests that students should start writing later, after they are trained to read, analyze, and synthesize their sources, so that they can identify the argument and sort through the evidence.

Transparency

There is a great call for transparency among those we might suspect: corporations, government agencies, officials of every ilk. "If only we knew" what they were doing in board rooms, between loop holes, beyond gated entrances we would be better off, they would be more accountable, things would improve.

Myself, I have been making my library and my professional-self invitingly transparent (and I would argue more positively visible) through this blog for several years to the benefit of my programs, my students, and to the climate of learning I hope to cultivate.

It seems to me that if other teachers within the district were similarly open about their teaching, sharing: nuggets of choice knowledge, compelling resources, personal teaching/learning epiphanies, professional development tips, topical readings and recommendations, excerpts of student accomplishments, etc. - that our mission here would be well-served.

Transparency. The new collegiality.

March: look and listen

Much going on up there this month!
Of course, there is always much going on down here too; if you listen for it.

Poetry on the rack

After many years of deferring, we have subscribed to Poetry magazine. Our first issue arrived on Friday. Why did we wait so long?

It features new poems, poems from the last 100 years, essays of remembrance of poets by poets, and comments: something for everyone.

I especially like the epigram-like poems of Vera Pavlova in the Comments section: here are a few:

- Inspiration: when I have confidence in myself.


- I put words into my poems the way I pack a suitcase for a trip abroad, choosing only what is most necessary, the most presentable, the lightest, and the most compact.


- A cowbell is the opposite of an alarm system: when you hear it, everything is fine; when you don't, something is wrong. My poetry is a cowbell, not an alarm system.


- Mom, on the exam should I play "March of the Wooden Soldiers" with inspiration or with no mistakes?

Reading about basketball tech

The Wall Street Journal had an article about Krossover, a recent sports-tech company that processes game film (mostly from high schools, at this point) and provides next-day online indexed analysis, metrics, and video highlights; including things like graphics of shot selection for individual players with accompanying video of the shot tied to the X or O on the chart (see their short video). Pretty amazing algorithms.

I mention this in my library blog 1) in the spirit of March Madness, 2) to point out why competitive players and coaches READ to improve their game, and 3) and to submit that this sports/tech/ethics development would make a good argumentative essay topic for students.

My Day

Began by spending some time at the Scholastic Book Fair site; downloading graphics and documents in preparation for our Fair.

Located an online version of our SchoolArts magazine  and sent a link to our Elementary art teacher.

Sent the 8th grade Social Studies teacher a synopsis and link to a trench warfare clip from Paths of Glory that I had remembered as especially authentic for her WWI unit. Also located some excerpts from Goodbye to All That for her to consider.

Set up a laptop and projector in the auditorium for an 11th grade assembly.

Posted new entries to our 1902 student blog.

Framed two "Read Every Day" posters under glass for display on our endcaps.

Posted a poem and two other entries to this blog.

Suggested an alternative assessment for a group of MS Technology students. Reviewed the draft idea with the teacher.

Shared NY Times article about fiction with Lit & Psych teacher and one about the beauty of sentences with the English 9 teacher.

Fiction on the brain

News on fiction from the Opinion section of ᔥNY Times:

"The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings."

World War 1.0

A primer on trench warfare and no-man's-land from Stanley Kubrick's, "Paths of Glory."

Poem

Had a request for the basketball poem in a previous post:

A good friend of ours at eighty
told us that she was
still surprised by her image
in the mirror each morning
because she felt herself to be,
   in that part of her
   that defined her identity,
the 14-year-old girl
that was her first real self
and that was, in fact, her.

When I look at this yearbook photo
of myself in ninth grade
I see what I always see
in my mind’s eye as myself -
while others see the silliness of years.

Of course there are
those pencil legs of mine
which, nonetheless, have managed
to carry me through the years:
lifting shots, missing some,
but reminding me
that some of the apparent
disadvantages of youth
are unimportant in the long run.

What has remained thirty-five (40) years later
are the shoulders squared to the basket,
elbows in,
shooting hand directly behind the ball,
and releasing at the top of my jump.

Hit or miss.  Me. Giving it my best shot.

Holocaust Post

Our library will be hosting a Holocaust speaker later in May that has been schedule by our Middle School teachers. In advance of that program, I suggested the following reading opportunity. I will be using the letters from the The Stroop Report; a collection of facsimile primary source documents written by the Nazi commander responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. My intention is to "send" an addressed Stroop letter each day for two weeks to the Social Studies teacher as though intercepted by her.

These first-hand reports portray in a callous calculating manner the systematic, brutal, and nightmarish steps in this defining Holocaust action. I believe they will provide a compelling backdrop for their immersion in this event.

Final Four

Along with student/staff brackets, my Final Four library bulletin board includes a WSJ article on the birth of brackets in sports, a poem about basketball, a statistical prediction from a NYTimes political analyst, and a review of books by basketball coaches from the WSJ.

The Curator's Code

If you agree, like I do, with ᔥDavid Carr of the NY Times, that "as custody of content becomes more tenuous, there’s a risk that we may end up passing around and putting topspin on fewer and fewer original works," then the idea of a curator's code seems like a good one; especially for students learning to sort-out and identify the range of bogus to authoritative stuff online.

The idea, according to Kerry Lauerman of Salon is, “Increasingly, when people go online, it’s like stepping through the looking glass,” he said. “Whether you follow a link from Twitter, an e-mail, or Pinterest, you wind up on a site where you really don’t know where you are. It would be nice if there was a way of signaling what the standards are and how trustworthy the information is.”

The old is new again

A new exhibit of illuminating artifacts (gorgeous) is reshaping our understanding of the nomadic peoples of the Central Asian past.  Scythian and Saka  legacies as post-hunter/gatherer wandering hordes is now being reconsidered because"these people were prospering through a mobile pastoral strategy, maintaining networks of cultural exchange (not always peacefully) with powerful foreign neighbors like the Persians and later the Chinese."

Indeed, the curator of the exhibit said, “The popular perception of these people as mere wanderers has not caught up with the new scholarship;” this through the discovery and analysis of artistic treasures unearthed in burial kurgans.

I find this article/exhibit important for two reasons. One being, that it transforms an already iconic artistic image for me (above) into a vehicle for ground-breaking thinking among several disciplines. That's a powerful reminder of the power of the arts. And secondly, I am reminded of the value of my role as a librarian/reader in that I will share this article and its context with our social studies and art teachers so that this scholarship might take hold in our students before our now-undone popular perception does.

In common

 Back and forth with excerpts from a NY Times article, "From Show and Tell to Show and Teach."

- Two summers ago, the Walker [Art Museum] took a fallow field adjacent to the museum and turned it into what Ms. Schultz described as a “cultural commons.” “It’s meant to be a mash-up of creative life,” she explained.

A few years ago, I was feeling that my library was a fallow field adjacent to our school. At that point I adopted the concept of a "library commons;" a physical place to create meaning from information.

- Among its offerings is “The Drawing Club,” a collaborative artwork that someone might start — a simple drawing on an 11-by-13 inch sheet of paper — that another person will then pick up and add to. The person who thinks it is complete starts a new drawing. “We invite local artists to come and participate,” she said. “It’s about trying to break down hierarchies.” 

Independent of classroom hierarchies, students who come to the Library Commons have painted chairs, created map-graphics on our carpet, constructed book sculptures, and exhibited their drawings from home.

- In Washington, at the National Gallery of Art, Lynn Pearson Russell, the director of education, said she saw “a bigger return to teaching from original objects and less of a high-tech approach.”

Our focus has been less on being a virtual destination than it has on being an actual one.

- In this high-speed information age, one of the museum’s newer programs is geared toward just the opposite kind of experience — slowing down. “Families are invited to spend 60 to 75 minutes investigating one work of art,” Ms. Russell said. “It’s a less-is-more approach. In this increasingly fast-paced world, it’s an alternative way to spend time together, learning to look and revealing the complexity of art in a group conversation.” The program also includes a component of drawing. “You’re not dependent on technology, but you’re doing it yourself,” she said. 

There are no due dates for Library Commons projects; focusing instead on revision, process, community critique, and attention to detail.

- The space is just the kind of thing the public wants these days. “Audiences today are more interested in participatory events, not just being talked to,” Ms. Potts said.

We think so, too.

Promoting single lesson Khan Videos

Incoming

An update about how I am gathering news these days to share with staff and students:

Each day I flip through the entire hard copy of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. I do the same with hard copies of The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Review of Books when they arrive. I also take home copies of Smithsonian, NewScientist, Wired, Harpers, Architectural Record, and the Economist to read for articles I can share.

On Twitter I follow @arstechnica (tech news), @ProPublica (investigative reporting), @RealTimeWWII (World War II simulcast), @ukwarcabinet (WWII news from the Brits), @chuckobryan (professional development insights), @anoved (arts & science, pithy musings), @NickKristof (tracking page-2 World concerns), and @JFK1962 (another simulcast from the past).


My subject headings on ZITE’s trawling site are: Creativity, Painting, Librarianship, Architecture, and Critical Thinking.

 I also check news and perspective on the BBC app.

I will try to post an Outgoing entry in the future.

TED-Ed

The folks at TED are getting into educational video production. Here are their opening selections.

P.S. This is my 600th post since starting this blog in November 2007.

Booktalk

I have just finished Tea Obreht’s book, The Tiger’s Wife. Like other significant books in my life, I am having a hard time leaving it. I still bring it home every night, still set it on the end-table next to my coffee cup and and newspaper, and still open it to reread a paragraph that I have noted on the bookmark still pointing from the pages.

It is hard to leave the layers of the story, the simplicity of the truths, and the urgency of the telling. So many of the experiences and perspectives ring true although the back- drop of tale is so foreign to my stable world. How can that be?

The story takes place across generations within the broken Balkans - broken now, broken in the Bosnian War, World War II, and explosive as its fractured self at World War I. That minefield of religions, languages, terrain, and exploitation provides a setting of constant instability and triage. And yet individuals within that dissolution must endure that reality or one of their making.

The wrecked world these characters inhabit is so unreal to us that the spirits, superstitions, and beliefs we encounter through them are wonderfully believable, even as they walk as allegory and myth through the pages.  Like the characters, we need them, as we do our own, to tell and understand the journey.

I offer the opening paragraph of Chapter 1 (in the spirit and letter of fair-use) to illustrate the author's command of her realities:



The Tiger’s Wife is a compelling piece of storytelling. It is poignant without being sentimental, wise without being preachy, and endlessly, fearlessly inventive without being fantastical. How can this be?

That is easily understood when reality is conjured with masterful words.

I'm on it

First thing this Monday morning the Tech teacher reserves the LibLab for Wednesday afternoon so that students can conduct research comparing hull designs of ships:

"Can the Technology class Period I (1:01-1:40 pm) use the library and computer lab for research on boats on Wednesday, March 14 and Monday, March 19, 2012? The expectation is that they would compare and contrast two types of boats, write two one hundred word paragraphs with pictures of the boats, a bibliography of the informaton and to print the reports. Thank you".

So I create a YouTube playlist about buoyancy principles, boat terminology, hull types, and hull engineering principles for speed, trim, and maneuverability. I embed this playlist on the library page.

By 9:30 I have shared this with the teacher so that students can learn these principle online at home, in study hall or class by Wednesday when they can apply that knowledge to comparing dhows, tankers, frigates and canoes for the actual assigned task.

TEDx @ BU

Yesterday, I attended Binghamton University's independently organized TEDx event: seven 20-minute presentation on "ideas worth sharing. A big crowd was on hand despite the sunny afternoon. I hope to write about some of the speakers as days go by, but I wanted to at least mention that in the closing address by BU president Harvey Stenger, he championed a "hybrid classroom" that provides teaching and resources on the students' schedule and turf as well as utilizing traditional classroom interaction. He used as a precedent-setting example the 120 million users of the Khan Academy's online learning videos.

Nice to know our first-step ACS efforts are aligning with the vision of our local university.

The Path of Learning

So my son, the geography-guy, Tweets a link about marinetraffic.com. It is late at night when I read it, so I email the Tweet to myself. This morning at school I use that email link to visit the site. It graphically represents port activity around the world in real time; indicating tankers, freighters, in transit/anchored, and destinations. Cool.

So I walk down to tell the Global Studies teacher who is immediately interested and who pulls out an article on the Strait of Malacca that he uses in class to dramatize global commerce. I return to the library and print out marine reports for him focusing on Singapore, Dubai, the coast of China, and Los Angeles . They lend themselves wonderfully to DBQs. A successful voyage; all the way to Afton HS.

Poem

An old favorite that still works for me. I just can't get over that it was thirty years ago. Could have been this morning.

March




Now is March
coming in like a lamb with a fleecing of snow -
a woolen morning, warm but white
And the sun at noon now steep enough
over the shed to shine on the last
of our winter wood. It’s rock maple, the wrists
and forearms of our front-yard grandfather; unsplit,
dense - wood that could sink like a stone
But it’s the bark of some of those brown-
skinned upper limbs that so reminded me
of something else - of a rather long conclusion

The bark, beaded and smooth, was
like the brown backs of brook trout, thick
at the fisheries in Spring. It was self-
satisfying to recognize the relationship
And I smiled as I stacked those
loaves of fishes in the shed, recalling
their cool color in the tank, their school motion,
their flash from green to gray to brown
like leaves, high in a tree, swimming in night.


March 2, 1981

Collusion

I installed the Collusion add-on to my Firefox browser. It "allows you to see all the third parties that are tracking your movements across the Web." I quick brought up tabs to the New York Times, YouTube, Gmail, and this blog. These are the companies and trackers interested in my Internet behavior:

For more about being followed on the Internet, check out this article from the Atlantic.