That’s what I say now, but if someone offered me a house nicer than our apartment (not easy to do, by the way) and could prove that the cost to me would remain steady, I might change my mind and break out the cardboard and packing peanuts.

That’s what’s happened with me in Planet Blog. I’ve moved on from Edublogs, not completely, but for the most part. I took my personal/teaching blog over to Wordpress.com mostly because I gained customizing features – page banners, arrays of widgets (including text widgets where I can stick interesting links), and if I ever find the time to learn the CSS and find a couple pennies to fund the upgrade, some CSS editing options. In a sense, I’ve grown up a bit and was ready for the next step in blogging.

The customizing thing is important to me because the blog (and the website I operate for school) is such a creative endeavor. It’s creative in the presentation itself, of course, but more than that, it’s a holding place for some of my most cherished creative projects – my writing. I blog because I love to write, and though I read a number of bloggers who discuss learning and technology, I read them like I used to read trade magazines when I worked in radio (I rely on folks like CogDogBlog and CoolCatTeacher as tipsters to new technology). And like with radio, that trade material is what I read, not what I discuss. When I discuss and post to the blog, I write the material I want to write as a writer and thinker, which means what I write tends to be personal and important to me, even if not to anyone else. I consider audience, sort of. Mostly I consider whether I like it and whether it meets my minimal standards of good writing – and good writing for me usually means it is a kind of imitation of E.B. White or Annie Dillard or Andy Crouch.

I’d like to think I have a bit of the Tolkien type in me – I heard on The Writer’s Almanac that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit for kicks:

He showed it to a few friends, but he had no intention of publishing it until a former student of his got a job at a publishing house and began pestering him to give her the manuscript. He finally relented, and it came out . . . in 1937.

Could I write an entire novel without any prospect or intention of publishing it? I’d like to think so, but I doubt I’d have the tenacity or discipline. At least, I suppose, I can be a mini-Tolkien and publish a few blog articles with only my family as readers.

But those won’t be at Edublogs any more. I plan to use the Edublogs space as a “motherblog” (a term I picked up from Barbara Ganley) for my classes and I will continue to recommend Edublogs as a starting spot for teachers new to blogging. I have had great support from James Farmer and fellow users at the Edublogs forum (like Cerebral Odd Jobs) and think they’re the perfect folks to help teachers get started with blogging. I hope I can contribute in a smaller version to the blogging world as they have.

And on a final Edublogs note – for some reason I like to use a long e when I say “Edublogs,” but one of my co-workers always uses a short e. It weirds me out in the same way it threw me off when when a teacher would pronounce a character’s name differently than I had been saying it in my head. And like with the reading, my frustration over it is not so much that the other person has it wrong, but that I know I probably have it wrong, and I like it my way better. So no offense, James, if you intend a short e, because I plan to continue with my long e pronunciation.

Like usual, if you get a chance to push your thinking, you reveal great insight. Here is a batch of noteworthy comments on “The Minister’s Black Veil.”

Emmerz points out that the Minister carries secrets, even as he makes his point.

Also read Bumblebee, LemurLover, pretzelpocketz, punchdrunklove, and jean2008

On a related note, I read this post from a gal who is considering not blogging anymore, and in a sense, her resistance to blogging reveals her discomfort with revealing what is behind her veil. I would guess that if I assigned you to read her blog, most of you would agree with her concerns and resistance to openness, and yet in your responses to Hawthorne, most of you agreed with him too. What is the difference? (I have an idea about what the difference is, but I’d rather hear your thinking).

On another note, today’s assignment is for you to read blogs for 30 minutes and then spend 10 minutes telling me your thoughts – on what you read, on blogs and whether reading blogs is a worthwhile pursuit, or more on veils and whether we should have them. Make your thoughts minimally seven sentences.

How do you find blogs? Head to the Technorati homepage and use it to search for something you’d be interested in reading. Try the tags, general subject areas, or try searching for a particular keyword. What you read is up to you, as long as what stays on your computer screen is school appropriate.
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Original image: ‘Theres no escape from this town‘ by: Danny Williams
www.flickr.com/photos/77671572@N00/310457944

Original image: ‘Hossein on Toronto Star‘ by: Hossein Derakhshan
www.flickr.com/photos/51035636095@N01/150008159

Now that you have thoroughly picked through “The Minister’s Black Veil” and discovered Nathaniel Hawthorne’s expression against secret sin, please move to the third level of reading, considering if Hawthorne is right – if he describes what you believe to be an accurate depiction of life, and if you think it is accurate, whether you agree that it is problematic, as Father Hooper believes.

To write well for this blog, I recommend that you begin by explaining in your own words what you think the moral is of Hawthorne’s parable. Then you can build your discussion from there, explaining how right or wrong you think it is, how insightful or profound you think it may be.  Please remember to give Hawthorne credit by naming him and the title of his story.

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Original image: ‘Ameba‘ www.flickr.com/photos/18548550@N00/5123578
by: Max Boschini

In the past week I have invited comments on two areas – reading stories and writing essays. Here are some of my observations, and I’d love to hear your reactions, rebuttals, or agreement.

1. Very many students refer to any story, no matter how short, as a book. Why is this? “The Devil and Tom Walker” is is not a book, it is a short story, spanning only ten pages in the textbook. Maybe I’m being picky, but I find it weird and I don’t understand.

2. Many people are faking the reading. They are pretending to read but really just scanning around waiting for someone like me to explain what is going on in the story. I am NOT going to tell you what happens in these stories. Seriously – I am not going to restate the story and explain it, because I don’t think you learn anything that way besides, maybe, that if you want to know what something says, ask someone else. This is not a good plan, because you don’t want to rely on second-source information. You’ll find that people who tell you things about other documents are often wrong – many people cannot read well or they read hastily, and if you rely on other people all the time, you might find yourself being misled – especially in a world where blogging and interactive web elements are becoming normal. Take as an example this woman who complained about another person’s blog – she accuses the blogger of being sterile and a neat-freak, but the blogger specifically declared herself the opposite in her original article. And I’m not even going to start looking for examples in politics – let’s just say if you don’t want to be manipulated and misled you better learn how to read – carefully.

3. Many people are not bothering to figure out why they’re stuck. This is related to #3. You hit a hard part, but instead of figuring out why you can’t read it, you decide you can’t read it and look for something else to do – chat, write a note, fake reading while spacing out, see if you can sneak an earphone in without me seeing, etc. But here’s where I get riled up – you are capable of figuring these texts out! You are smart people, and I firmly believe that if you begin to figure out why you don’t understand the text, you can begin to clear them up. I’ve talked with you about reading strategies – I give you one with every text we read (connecting to background experiences, questioning the text for clarity and for conversation, breaking down sentences into bite-sized pieces, identifying difficult parts). What I don’t like is the faking and the quitting. I’d rather see a group of students take three blocks to read 10 pages as they look up words, write down questions, ask each other about particular parts, and summarize pieces of text to see if they’re right, than to see a group fake like they’re reading and then pretend to have read it. I can’t teach fakers – you’ll get the grade if you care to turn in enough homework, but I can’t teach you if you’re pretending. I have too many students for me to reveal every faker – I’m counting on sincerity to be able to help you.

4. You want to hear the story read out loud if at all possible. That’s nice – you know by now how much I like to read things out loud and how much I like radio/podcasting communications – but I have a feeling you want the out-loud element because it’s easier than reading – because it sounds like it makes sense when someone reads it. Here’s one thought on this, though. When I read The Old Man and the Sea, you couldn’t stop if things got hard to understand. We pushed on and you had to ignore what might have tripped you up if you were reading by yourself. Then, you understood later parts of the text, and you may have figured out what was going on broadly enough that the part you didn’t understand didn’t matter anymore. That will happen every now and then – a part may be difficult to understand; but often if we read on, push a bit further, we’ll discover a textual clue that will make it possible to understand the hard part, or we’ll find that it’s not so important to understand it.

5. You like writing on a blog, but you seethe at the mention of an essay. Did you know that an essay is basically any short composition? That means these blogs are basically essays without the formality of a teacher hovering over you. So maybe it’s not the essays you hate, but the hovering teachers and the grading . . .

6. You don’t like to revise your work. Most of you like to throw your thoughts down in a stream of consciousness and then move on – maybe run a spell-check on those fellas, but never examine it to consider serious changes. I can’t blame you here, and I won’t pretend this isn’t a difficult task. I can’t even find the famous writer who said it wasn’t that he was a great writer, he was a great rewriter. (I’ll find that quote for you sometime). But, that is the basic difference between essays as I assign them and the blogs we do – for the essays, I want you to organize it. This is part of becoming a writer who considers the reader, because it is much easier for the reader if you organize your work – if you revise it, put similar thinking together, and eliminate any unneeded phrases and examples. Now, knowing that I will not be able to turn you into thorough revisers (I have to know my limits as a teacher) I will offer this tip – if you want to avoid having to revise too much, but you want your writing to make sense to the reader, organize it before you write. Jot a couple notes and maybe an outline to map out where you’re going. Then, when you spit out that flow, hopefully it can follow that prearranged order rather than a potentially random stream of consciousness.

7. You are very smart – when motivated. I know this because whenever I can get you to invest yourself in the assignment, whether it’s reading The Old Man and the Sea or explaining your thoughts on a book of your choice, you express insight and intelligence. But if something does not interest you, many of you are not manufacturing enough curiosity to motivate yourself. Motivation comes from within, and if you cannot actively build an interest through questioning and inquiry, you may live out your life plagued by ennui, desperately flipping channels as a passive recipient, waiting for the world to entertain you, wondering why life is so woefully dull. It is dull – to those too inactive to discover what it has to offer. There is a reason this quote sits atop my website:

“Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning.” - Eugene S. Wilson

Be curious. Overcome obstacles. Discover the world by taking charge of your learning. I am here to help you begin your journey, and I hope you can be more serious about being real, being determined, and being educated.

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Original image: ‘Using more iPod Book‘
www.flickr.com/photos/91303197@N00/117954591
by: Brian Moore

Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

and

Original image: ‘the pilot p-500‘
www.flickr.com/photos/40954787@N00/7283732
by: Matthew Chastain Wright

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/

 Podcast

I’ll restrict myself today to two observations, and the first is that education is a place where myths are dominant. Provenzo cites folks like Colin Greer and their work that has exposed “The Great School Legend,” a myth that schools are the key cog in the American Dream, giving poor and underprivileged people the opportunity to rise to the middle class. In response rose a group of “revisionist” and “radical revisionist” theories of educational history (pp. 32-35). In my experience, however, I would not accuse the early purveyors of the Great School Legend of being unique. In fact, I hear theory after theory about what schools are like and what they do and what they’ve done, and these come from fellow teachers, neighbors, students, former students, politicians, professors, and more. And practically each person has a unique theory, many more naive than the Great School Legend.

Schools and education are mightily complex. My wife and I marveled recently at the complexity of our oldest daughter’s personality. She is rambunctious and never stops talking at home (only the slightest hyperbole there), but when in Sunday School, she stands back and watches kids, observing closely, remaining on the outskirts almost the entire time. Add this one complex personality to 25 others, then throw in the complexity of an adult, then throw them into the bag with hundreds of other children and dozens of other adults, and is it no wonder no one has clear solutions to the problems that develop?

The theories vary according to their technique of data collection. A professor or professional researcher may have some fairly reliable data if SBR procedures were followed, but for most people in the world (and many of them decision makers), a quick anecdote or two trumps the research. The special place for anecdote in conversations about education makes myths especially abundant. Each person has some kind of schooling experience, and it takes a lot of data to usurp the perceptions that have developed. And even then, it’s likely that no amount of data will convince a person that you are right to have students choose their own books, even fantasy books, if he has declared, “When I was in school, we had to read Shakespeare in 4th grade!”

My second observation is directed toward Provenzo’s section on the school as the builder of “a new social order” (42-43). Like in the past, I object at this concept as I think it’s silly to think that any block can pass along just a neutral set of valuable values. A school that passes along a set of values, as Provenzo admits earlier in this text, makes a judgment according to where it is silent (the “null curriculum” p. 26), and at any given point, one could easily ask the question, are the schools substituting a set of values or complimenting them? Are they overriding or are they providing a part? Many religious believers rightly question public schools relevancy as they contribute towards a nation-wide secularism that has become somewhat intolerant of (or at least condescending towards) religious conviction. And even aside from questions of tolerance and non-tolerance, I wonder what will happen as people begin picking at further values, questioning whether this concept or this idea should be taught. Last year one of my colleagues was challenged by a parent for mentioning her husband in a letter home to parents. The case seemed extreme, but as schools become dominated by a culture of fear (fear of litigation, primarily), the extremes win out. And the schools could be left with nothing worth teaching.
Provenzo, E.F. (2002). Teaching, learning and schooling: A 21st century perspective. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Wow – you guys are smart and insightful!

Here are links to some articles about books that thoroughly impressed me.

Setting

Bumblebee reading My Sister’s Keeper

Plot

Nick examines the key external conflict from Bleachers.

Miscalaneous thoughts

Bumblebee on My Sister’s Keeper

Sparkygrl looks at the significance of the point of view in Cold Mountain

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Original image: ‘Big Sis Reads‘
www.flickr.com/photos/45889748@N00/32485879
by: Emily Walker

Released under an Attribution-ShareAlike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

And now . . . we will write an essay

And the student’s stomach twisted to a shape I saw in a modern art book.

Talk to me about essays – what do you think about them, what do you know about them, how often do you have to write them, and how good at them are you? Tell me your reaction in a 5-7 sentence article.

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Original image: ‘Non-Violence (1988) UN‘
www.flickr.com/photos/75811596@N00/21756084
by: David Phillips

Released under an Attribution-NonCommercial License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/

And I feel like a fool for knowing so little about chat rooms, because they were the big internet story in, what? 1996? But I always thought they were silly back then, and until today, I still thought they were silly – seemed like places for lonely people and sexual predators (I know it’s a simplification, but the point is not what is real, but what my impression was, because my impression was engough to keep me uninterested).

So my question: is there a way my district can use/access/host something like chat rooms for times like these? Chat rooms are blocked when I search general web sites that do them, so it would have to be a highly controlled area – I’m sure there’d be much more fear about these than there is about blogging or other Web2.0 technology.

But I’m determined, because this does not come out of a desire to use cool technology, but to help my students read better. My quest is for my kids as they read to be able to use their peers as resources – they’re working quietly, reading, writing double entry journals, but I can’t get to them to answer all their questions – but what if they could get to each other? If we were all signed into a chat room (or two if it got overwhelming) they could type questions as they came up, and their peers could answer them, and it would all take place silently, not disturbing anyone else. Is it possible without going blackboard? Is it doable for practically free?