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Learn to Read by Reading Texts?

Amazon Rapids might sound like a new product to do something very exciting like record your heart rate while skydiving. Or maybe like a network of drones that will overnight a parcel to your raft. Dramatic as the name is, in reality, it is the brand of a new ebook format, geared at children of the 7 - 12 set, where stories are told in SMS dialogue. Characters text-chat their way through the plot, bubble for bubble, one static profile pic against another.

The novelty of the product is not just that the ebook form is altered, but that a new genre -- part drama, part choose your own adventure book, part comic book, part eavesdropped conversation -- has been invented to add to the arsenal of reading-adjacent activities designed to transform reluctant readers into bookworms.

A new genre? This does not sound bad! Novelties that encourage reading practice can be great stopgaps until reluctant readers have the skill and patience to attack more advanced texts. People who barked about comic books as illiteracy-breeding garbage have been shown up by Marjane Satrapi, Art Speigel, Chris Ware and many others. So I hate to be the early barker, but it this text-convo as reading thing catches on, I see some things that are seriously demoralizing about the format.

First off, unlike the speakers in other all-dialogue types of writing, like comic books and play scripts, the characters are disembodied, or at least not active. Kids are not meant to imagine them anywhere, doing anything besides typing absorbedly into the phone. The other thing that separates the characters of these text stories from characters in literature at large is their necessary lack of interiority. Do the characters stop to reflect? Do they have a moment to pause the chatter, step away from the phone and be present with themselves and their thoughts? To step out of the endless feedback loop of texting and social media? It seems like this is a problem shared with the characters and the text-happy readers alike. To normalize phatic-chatting, environment-oblivious behavior is not helpful to anyone pedagogically.

Maybe at this point Amazon Rapids is just meant to be a harmless little bit of edutainment for parents to give their children, but when a technology geared at reading reinforcement is developed by a giant like Amazon, the district-wide clients / investments / purchases are not far behind. Sure kids are enthusiastic about reading text messages, and sure a text dialogue written by educators might be able to deliver a whole bunch of meaty vocabulary words, but just because you have a vehicle that offers a little enrichment does not guarantee that the sum total isn’t awfully depleting.

Dino Burgling, Influence Borrowing

Write for an adult audience and, though you might try your hardest to disguise your influences, you can probably name them. Look on your nightstand. Teach to a room full of teenagers and you’ll know what is your own unique pedagogy and what tips and tricks you’ve picked up from your colleagues. I’ve even had students call me out on this one, it’s that obvious.

But when I first wrote a book for children in my mid 20s, I spent very little time with anyone younger than 9th grade and even less with their story time books. This year I reworked the text of Dino Burglar for my son, and since I knew a little more about reading to an audience of babies and toddlers, I edited accordingly. But it got me wondering just where this text had come from, what were my writerly influences back when I spent so little time with picture books?

The influences began descending on me one night as I was reading to my son from Maurice Sendak’s Pierre, a book about a boy in the habit of saying “I do not care.” That was my refrain in Dino Burglar! Or rather, it was the naughty little dachshund’s refrain, that I unwittingly borrowed from Sendak. The more I thought, the more points of reference I found … There were the slant rhymes and metrical irregularity of Bemelman’s Madeline. And I looked at my white male middle aged caretaker, known simply as master. Why this demographic choice for the human presence in a book about a mischievous pet? My intense childhood exposure to Curious George and his ubiquitous “Man In the Yellow Hat” was the answer I found.

Even after all these years and all these tweaks and realizations, I was pleased with the book -- the text read well and my son liked it. But one thing grated on me: it was narrated in the first person. Not a single one of my son’s other books played with voice, and I grew concerned. First person narration is a cornerstone of the high school English class -- is this where younger me had let something developmentally geared at my older students leak into this picture book?

At the library I searched far and wide for another book with the rare “I”, until finally I stumbled upon Jon Agee. His books My Rhinoceros and Life on Mars are charming, have vocabulary geared towards kid’s Henry’s age, and most aptly beg the question -- why is first person narration so out of fashion in the world of children’s books when it reigns supreme in the realms of YA and beyond?

Camillus and the Schoolmaster of Falerii, Nicholas Poussin According to Livy, Roman General Camillus leverages students against their treasonous schoolmaster.

...sisters who wrote more complex personal essays in their youth tended not to develop the disease...

#essay writing #high school english

Los Angeles rents are rough for everyone (57 percent of people living here can't actually afford to do so) and keeping a roof overhead is notably hard for teachers....

Money might be better spent raising teacher salaries?

rorysacks-deactivated20160612

Good guy, Stephen Colbert gives a lesson in charitable giving.

In his autobiography and in Tom Sawyer, the author skewered the test-centered teaching of his day. It's not hard to imagine what he would have thought about an exam that grades student essays via computer.

Infiltrating Internet Filters

A while back I wrote about the problem of schools blocking student access to the internet. The types of filters that are widely used by schools impede access to a lot of important information. For instance, at the school where I work, here is what happens when I look for an ebook:

It is easy enough to write this off as an exception, but even for some educational sites that I have intentionally had removed from the blocked list, the utility of the sites is badly marred by the remnants of the filter. For instance, I use the site Poetry Genius, a channel of Rap Genius, as an annotation platform for one of my classes. Although students have access to the site, large swaths of what is to appear on a given page is blocked from view.

In case you cannot read the text of my assignment above, the YouTube embed that is blocked by "AutoExec" is a video of an Aeolian harp being played by the wind. It is part of the student's assignment to watch the video and reflect on the harp's value as a metaphor for poetic inspiration. Questionable, hmm?

Obviously these videos related to Robert Hass and W.H. Auden are obscene... Below you see "Auto Exec" infiltrating the page to block the social media panel, because there is nothing worse than a student tweeting her love for Countee Cullen at countless other teenagers.

#internet in schools #internet filters #edtech #rapgenius #poetrygenius

Good luck to all seniors taking the AP Literature exam tomorrow.

And don't forget your diction descriptors.

#new sat #teaching diction

"We have study hall at the beginning of our meetings." says Jeff Bezos. Staff meetings at Amazon begin with 30 minutes of silent reading. Powerpoint is easy for presenter, hard for audience "The tr...

People tend to agree that Power Point can be a mind numbing format for presentations, though I do find that it is a great way to help students impose a little structure on their class lecture and discussion notes. What is particularly great about this article about meeting protocol over at Amazon is that Power Point is not supposed to be replaced by a better lecture, but by a better piece of writing.

Students seem so unaccustomed to reading except when they are in search of specific answers that I love the idea of kicking off a class meeting with a silent reading "do now," where kids are not given a specific direction, but are meant to form their own critical responses. While I would love to do this with specific literary passages, maybe to catch up students who are behind in reading homework, I also am interested the idea of presenting the lesson itself as a well fleshed out essay. There is something counterintuitive about presenting a lesson as an idea fully formed, but then again, it might allow students to start at a deeper point of discussion. It does seem too rare that I have an opportunity to model the craft of writing for students and let them see me exposing my own work to debate and criticism.

Two signboards for schools painted by Hans Holbein the Younger: A School Teacher Explaining the Meaning of a Letter to Illiterate Workers (above) Principles of a Schoolmaster, teaching scene for children (below).

theparisreview

Stanley Kubrick’s annotated copy of Stephen King’s The Shining.

edtechpentameter

Now that the new NYS Regents exam will require students to read an average of 6,200 words (up from about 2,000) over the course of a three hour test, I'll be emphasizing active annotation more than ever before.

#nys regents #annotation #close reading

Not GEDs. Diplomas.

Feigler has a magnificent vision of radically more diverse groups of adults contributing to the school day: artists, creatives, professionals. In the meantime, she's got the discipline to start by solving a critical, well-defined problem: Getting a reliable sub that can help, not hurt. (If you're curious, substitute teaching happens to be a $4B problem in the US.)

#education #arts education #substitute teachers

Henry of Germany delivers a lecture to university students in 14th-century Bologna.

This image appeared last week in the other Atlantic article about lectures. It might be obvious from the title "Lectures Haven't Worked Since 1350 -- and They Still Don't Work Today," that the interviewee's opinion is a bit extreme to mesh with mine. That us why my absolute favorite part of the article is the wonderful commentator who writes a play-by-play of the illustration, illuminating the fact that actually most of the audience is listening: attentively:

It's odd from a illustration that you can tell if someone is droning on. Many of the students appear to be paying rapt attention to the lecturer or to the written material in front of them. Several sport large greying beards, suggesting they may not be traditional students. Some might be women. There seem to be 3 pairs where one is giving the other the eye, while the other is paying attention to the lecturer. There is only one pair with both turned to face each other, possibly in conversation.

Only one person might appear to the casual observer to be asleep. They are in the second last row, closest to us, with their hand to up to their forehead, covering their face, leaning out towards us, clearly beyond the end of the bench they are on! You can see the end of the top of the bench (sharp point) visible slightly above and behind their head. Much of the body, especially the elbow and head, is clearly beyond the end of the bench since it is in front of the edge of the bench blocking our view of it.It is the position of a distraught individual leaning away in shame having realized they have completely misunderstood an illustration!

Thanks 99Luftballons!

#lecture #henry of germany #99 luftballons

... technology has led us to use written language more like speech—that is, in a real-time, back-and-forth between two or more people. “[P]eople are communicating like they are talking, but encoding that talk in writing,” Clay Shirky recently told Slate. This might help explain the rise of the line break: It allows people to more accurately emulate in writing the rhythm of speech. It has also confronted people with the problem of tone in writing, and they're trying to solve it with the familiar punctuation marks that the line break largely displaced.

Awesome article that deals (in part) with versification of emails!*

*the exclamation point here shows sincerity.

#punctuation #composition #tone #shady characters

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