#randy bomer

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Dr. Bomer's Class

Dr. Bomer just said the best thing about the texts we've been reading. Louise Rosenblatt wrote these books: Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem. They're both pretty good books about transactional theory of reading. 

He said that what she has to say it that words aren't anything on the page by themselves. They aren't anything until the reader brings something to the table to make them mean. This reminds me of what Dr. Harpold used to say about signifiers and signified, and how the reader connects those things (point de capiton). Rosenblatt says that the reader has enough, that the reader comes to the table with enough, to make those words mean.

Dr. Bomer, you kill me. That was awesome. I am slain.

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I guess I'm taking my class notes here right now. I just brought up one of my students' trouble with miscueing when he's reading. "Illustrate a paint" vs. "Illustrate a point." Dr. Bomer explained this as a kind of miscue that indicates an over-reliance on grapho-phonic cueing, an over-reliance on the letters that he sees in front of him rather than a syntactic or semantic cueing system.

He also suggested that rather than argue with him about whether or not his interpretation (Illustrates the paint) had any meaning, I should have probably praised him for his ability to use graphophonic cues before starting to bring in syntactic and semantic cues. Too bad I already argued with that kid and made him feel bad about his note taking because I'm a monster.

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Thoughts on Smagorinsky Slash Revisiting Bomer

I really enjoyed the last Smagorinsky chapters that we read, which I've already forgotten and have to look back at literally right now (omg do I get why high school is hard? rememberizing is hard.) I kind of don't get how I read and took notes on this a week ago and I literally can't remember anything. At all. Even looking at the chapter titles, I just can't remember. I think my brain is broken. There's a big Out of Order sign on it.

Scaffolding and ways of knowing. Right. I kind of remember. Yeah, my brain is definitely broken.

I had to think about this third chapter. A lot. Don't get me wrong, this Smagorinsky fellow seems pretty well-regarded among teacher types, to which I am aspiring, and I totally loved the first two chapters, but I'm stretching to appreciate the third chapter with the same way. I'm not saying I wouldn't use any of these activities. The four square thing in particular seemed like a really neat way to start a discussion. But that's just it, I don't think I would use a coat of arms project or creating Facebook pages for characters (not on this list, but in the same family) in place of good, rich discussion. That's because I generally trust my students to at least try and build a neat convo, and even if I didn't, I think maybe there are better ways to scaffold discussion (refer to chapter 2!). These are cool strats, they are, and I have faith in Smagorinsky if nothing else, but I keep thinking that if I had students that were super into an activity like this, they'd be capable of deep thinking and building cool thoughts in discussion, which seems more practical - but yeah, maybe tedious, as noted at the end of the chapter. Let's talk about this some in class, huh?

We also (re)read some more Bomer, revisiting these chapters is super fun because I get to look over my highlights and little margin notes and they're fun. Chapter 4 was probably my favorite, so it set the mood nicely with all of the wonderful gem-quotes that I reread and squeed over. What can I say? I get excited over smart text selection and getting students excited to read occasionally.

I feel like Bomer's methods in chapters 5 and 6 for modeling different strategies for deep thinking and then opening up the road for discussion is super great and pretty much what I used last semester with the 6th graders. The 10th graders are a little more resistant, but they always seem a little surprised when I tell them that envisioning or drawing from their own experience or making connections to movies they've seen is a thing and it's good. They're ready to learn and super cool and I have faith in them to develop deep thinking skills without too much strict activity-based stuff.

However, maybe it's time to insider that these super open-ended strategies don't work for every situation and that sometimes you need more strict activities. And then maybe sometimes you need something in the middle, like starting a discussion with a four square or a somebody wanted but so. This typing it out is helping me think more clearly. COOL.

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Randy Bomer and What is this Christenbury Character?

Okay, so I was totally stoked to read more Randy Bomer because..um duh, it's Randy Bomer and he's amazing. I realized that I'd read some of these chapters before, but rereading them was fun and kind of meta because he's always talking about the usefulness of rereading and stuff - reading strategies, etc. 

I enjoyed reading more (and some again) about teaching literacy. I love what Bomer has to say about relating to students, the workshop, how to relate to students and facilitate their learning. I was particularly interested in the workshop model, and I think that I want to read that book by Lucy Calkins, because I will never stop hearing her name, it seems. The notion of moving away from lecturing and into mini lessons has kept us going since last semester, and while it's been what I've been doing, because I'm not a lecturer, I think that I'm finally starting to let go of the wish to be a lecturer. I love hearing students talk. 

Appreciating existing literacies and learning about our students' literacy practices was rereading. And it was great rereading. I enjoyed thinking again about how I read at home and how I'm expected to read in a classroom and what kind of disconnect exists there. I think I want to hold classes outside.

In regards to this Christenbury character, OMGOD. I love her. I mean, the introduction to the book was a little "look at all my cool accomplishments" but then I got to the end and I was like, man, those are some cool accomplishments. I like all of the practical advice she has for dealing with students and classrooms and situations. The fact that she even went into how to dress (I never know how to dress) and what not to do if your students come in wearing cat bones (yeah, that's still terrifying, I think) - she just seems to have so many situational advice things. 

And I love all of it. How to organize a classroom, when thinking about that in terms of Bomer, how to facilitate a comfortable reading and learning environment, it's nice. Christenbury makes the institution of "school" sound terrifying, but her optimism and the comfort of Dr. Bomer's book and constant "you can do it, teacher! literacy is the bomb!" is super helpful. I'm still afraid of cat bones.

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Best Week Ever

So, I read Randy Bomer's chapter and thought "this is such a great chapter, the articles can't be better." And I was sad that I read it first instead of saving it for last. Or like, a pick me up in the middle. And then the articles were SOGOOD. I loved them all, and they all made me so happy to be reading them. Because, omg, I love digital literacy. Here's a thing for you:

And yeah, that's hastily put together, but ain't it grand?

While I appreciate that we're moving forward at a very fast pace, and the "artifact" that is Chapter 14 may very well be obsolete in terms of language and references in not-too-long, I think it's a wonderful guide for appropriating digital literacy for a classroom, especially in the context of a classroom that is maybe not-so-well-funded or if you have a lot of students that aren't terribly computer literate (yet!). I didn't say enough, but there is so much to say today that I don't want to bore everyone or make you be the last person in class reading if you have to read my blog.

That said, such great readings! I loved Schillinger's article about bringing the two sets of students together via wiki to discuss "growing up girl." It sounds like maybe they had a little bit of trouble connecting, but I would do this assignment absolutely, even if they couldn't meet up at the end, just to get classes thinking together. This is a project that could be done with little to no funding with another class across the country, across the world, and broaden your students' (and your own) horizons as learners and readers and thinkers. Like Dr. Bomer said in chapter 14, why not get your students in Florida talking with students in Alaska and Singapore? We have this amazing, largely untapped mode of connecting with thinkers everywhere.

And the blogs? Oh the blogs. We blog here, it's great. I feel like I can sit here and write all day, and you have to read it (or at least pretend to) and my thoughts are out there, and they're mostly run-ons, and I'm not even that embarrassed because this is an informal place where I can admit to crying over When Kids Can't Read or squee-ing every time we read something by Dr. Bomer. This is something else I would definitely use in class, perhaps in tandem with the cross-cultural wiki (wikis can be blogs too, okay, man). West was wonderful in choosing her students, but I wished that we had gotten to read more of their blogs instead of just the one excerpt. I feel like the glimpse into their developing literate lives wasn't enough.

Yi was great, too, and now I just sound gushy and annoying I'm sure, but every few minutes, this article made me Google something and yell at Pat about how cool it was. For instance, the relay novel. I'm really biased toward the idea of the relay novel, because my dad is one of the pioneers of web-based hypertextual relay novels. His original Web site is no longer active, but I remember reading it when I was younger and thinking that it was the coolest idea ever (but his relay novels were all horror themed and I wasn't allowed to read them then because they'd give me nightmares). But yes, it was cool, and it is such a cool idea, but the problem is that people want to keep the story going so badly and conclusions are so hard.

Which brings me to the highlight of Yi's article, which I don't think was her intention, but oh my goodness can we talk about it ya'll - Let's Compliment. This is a wildly popular reality tv show in Korea where people compliment each other for doing nice things? WHAT? As a critical literacy advocate, I'm going to embrace the multimodal literacy that is reality television as a reflection of our current society's commodification of attention (another thanks to Dr. Bomer for pointing that one out) and say LET'S COMPLIMENT? We watch Jersey Shore and Here Comes Honey Boo Boo. That is the best show idea ever and I'm sad that we don't have it.

We did something similar in my CT's classroom a few weeks ago. The girls read each other's unit project and wrote "affirmations" (read: compliments) on sticky notes and put them on the papers so that individuals could read 20-some-odd compliments about their writing and recognize emerging patterns of what they did well. It was great. I love the idea of doing it in a format as informal and natural (can we say it's natural now? typing feels so natural.) as a blogosphere or classroom wiki.

I don't have a way to conclude this particularly well, because while I drew connections and constructed some valuable knowledge, I'm still a little drained from the psych test and positively reeling from the idea of Let's Compliment. Yeah, it's a thing.

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Randy Bomer - My Hero 9/24

This week's reading in Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms was enlightening, and definitely introduced different ideas about reading than the ideas that I grew up with. Fabulous timing as well, as my cooperating teacher is putting a lot of Dr. Bomer's ideas into practice in her own classroom. The first thing I noticed about the kids in her sixth grade class, was that most of them came in with a book that they were excited about, and immediately sat down to read it on their own before class even began. Some of them were walking down the hall reading their books, and a few even tried to hide their reading during class time. My CT devotes a solid 20 minutes at the beginning of every class period to what she calls "Choice Reading," when the kids bring a book from home or the library to read. This independent reading, although maybe scary at first (what if they don't pick anything? how do I evaluate their choice?) is something that I'm very excited to try.

A thought that resonated for me was that "the purpose in secondary and tertiary education was to make sure they read good things; the result is that they don't read anything." My CT noted that statistically, most kids stop reading around middle school, because what they're told is "worth reading" is rarely what they want to read, therefore signifying the reading materials that students DO find interesting as somehow lacking worth or value to a mature or sophisticated reader.

Dr. Bomer's ideas about what is valuable to growing readers, particularly the young adults that we will be responsible for teaching, was particularly interesting. If someone had told me growing up that my collection of 154 Saddle Club young adult novels were not stupid kids' books or made me feel embarrassed that I wasn't reading Hemingway, maybe I would have grown into more "literary" works. Or maybe I wouldn't have, and maybe the kids that we work with won't all the time either, but at least they'll be reading and not self-conscious that their reading skills don't fit into the stuffy box of the public school and standardized testing systems many administrations are so hung up on. I am so in love with this idea (an idea that is new to me, by the way) that you don't have to read and enjoy Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which I hated) or Jane Eyre (which I loved) or any number of books in the canon to learn to think while you read. Learning to build valuable thoughts throughout the reading process doesn't have to happen by the light of Shakespeare's halo, quill out, in a library.

Which brings me to another point of Dr. Bomer's discussion of emerging as readers, the creation of these kinds of reading havens for students. The idea of "reading clubs" is wonderful, and something we'll be exploring further in class, that I'm very excited about. My CT has a "What I'm Reading" board, where she posts pictures of book covers and the students sign around the books that they've completed, but everyone is encouraged to bring in their own titles for the board. Everyone was so excited to talk about what they were reading, where they read at home, how they read with each other - it was really inspiring to see a group of kids developing these thoughtful, passionate feelings about the books that they were reading. As a student, it seems so very important to participate in various environments of reading, as Bomer says, "to participate in a community of readers." In comparison to my own classroom experience, his methods seem revolutionary, and after watching them in a classroom after just one day, I'm so excited to learn more about helping students to learn how to build their interactions with various texts.

A point that stood out as crucial that I'm curious to discuss is the notion that, while reading, a student is continually self-auditing to gauge understanding of the text. In many cases, this self-audit does not happen or is not successful, and students will just read the words without absorbing the meaning, which could be the result of the text being too difficult, ideas being out of place, or simply not interesting. My question is how to gauge the level of ability and interest in a classroom and select books that students will read and enjoy, while enhancing their understanding. I find myself struggling with texts often, due to distraction or procrastination, but usually manage to force myself back on track. How do you develop that quality in a reader? I suppose this is also a question related to the motivational discussions we're conducting in our Psychology of Learning class right now - but alas, they're all ideas we haven't quite nailed down yet.

This post is maybe getting long. These chapters were a wonderful and inspiring read. There are just so many ideas I want to try myself with reading as well as in a classroom setting. His section about visualization was puzzling for me, because like the boy with the black and white sketchbook dreams, I visualize in a similar way to my dreaming. However, instead of clear pictures, it's almost like looking at a half-formed scene through the bottom of an empty glass of milk, very vague and definitely circular, difficult to make out. If I thought that I could tease out a visualization process with students without making it seem to linear or mandatory, it would certainly be interesting. And here is another half thought for you - in trying to wrap up it seems that I've made it even longer.