Keep In Touch

The New York Times reported yesterday on how people are catching up with their former teachers on Facebook.   Facebook has allowed me to stay in touch with hundreds of former students (all of them adults now), and I’m grateful for the fact that I can still know them, even if I’ll never see many of them in person again.  While it’s great to keep up with personal news, it’s also interesting to see where they wind up.  Gauging your former students’ success on Facebook  isn’t exactly scientific, but it might provide an informal look at how your school (and the community at large) prepares its students for life.

The article also made me realize that I am not in touch with any of my former teachers.  After reading, I found my old AP Government teacher on Facebook and sent a friend request.  His page didn’t allow me to send a message, so hopefully he’ll see the name and remember me–but I was his student 17 years ago.

Waiting for “Superman”

Davis Guggenheim, director of An Inconvenient Truth, has a new documentary about the state of our educational system.  Waiting for “Superman” argues that the “system” is broken.  I wouldn’t exactly say that; the system is broken in places, maybe a lot of places.  There are also plenty of places where the system is just fine, and the reforms proposed might have little or no effect.  Still, I have high hopes for this film because the producers and director want to start a dialogue on public education, and they encourage volunteerism (you don’t have to have kids in school to help out there!).

Here’s the trailer.  I haven’t figured out how to embed it yet.

What Do Teachers Do All Summer?

Since the Kennesaw Mountain Writing Project has ended, I have a month of summer left.  The conventional wisdom is that as a teacher, I have nothing to do until I return to work in August.  Of course, that isn’t true, so for the benefit of cynics, here’s my game plan for the next four weeks:

1. Prepare to implement my KMWP research into my curriculum map for the year.  Everything we did was packaged for an audience of teachers; now I just have to rework it so that I can deliver it to students.

2. Revamp my vocabulary instruction.  I’ve been teaching SAT vocabulary for a few years now, mainly because my seniors are freaked out about the big test.  Generally, they do see the words on the test are grateful for the vocabulary.  What surprised me recently, however, was a former student’s comment that the SAT vocabulary helped her during her freshman year of college as well. That shouldn’t be a huge surprise, but it does make me wonder how I can gear second-semester vocabulary towards preparing seniors for that first year of college.  I hope to have word lists and quizzes (up to a full year’s worth?) ready to go by August.

3. Continue in my professional reading.  My upcoming education-related reads are not organized under any particular umbrella, and they vary widely in ideology.  I just started Kieran Egan’s The Educated Mind (and I’ll probably comment on that soon), and after that, I’m thinking Jacques Barzun’s Begin Here, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and (for something more practical) Kelly Gallagher’s Deeper Reading.  Then I have to figure out how to take the best ideas I encounter and work them into my classroom.

4. Student leadership stuff.  I don’t know much about this yet; I just know I’ve been asked to help out with it.

5. Keep writing!  I’ve always modeled my reading life for my students, and I look forward to figuring out how to model a writing life for them.  Now I just have to cultivate a writing life…

6.  Keep blogging.  So far, that seems to be going okay.

All of this work contributes to my effectiveness as a teacher, and it will keep me very busy.  And although I will still have a paycheck at the end of the month, that will be for work performed during the school year, not for the work I’m doing now.

Real-Life Dystopia

From Uglies to The Giver to The Hunger Games, kids just love their dystopian novels.  In an earlier post I mentioned that even The New Yorker had taken notice of this trend, and on the last day of the KMWP Summer Institute, I recommended a quasi-dystopian novel (Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go) that might interest high school students.  The science-fiction component of these novels gives us a tendency to distance ourselves from their urgency.  Even though they are meant to be cautionary, we still assume that what happens in these books will not happen here.  Never Let Me Go cuts away at this in that it’s set in the 1990′s (the novel was published in 2005) and is absent of any technological wizardry.

That science-fictional distance is also why it’s important for students to know about the real dystopian society that is  North Korea.  I’m encouraged that this year’s winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for nonfiction is Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea.  I haven’t read the book, but I would be shocked if it was anything but a compelling look at just how oppressed that nation is.  I’m excited to get my hands on a copy and possibly share it with my classes.

If any of this interests you, I’d also recommend Guy DeLisle’s graphic novel Pyongyang, in which the author-artist details his own business trip to North Korea.  DeLisle’s artwork portrays the bizarre, egomaniacal urban planning and architecture of the city in a seriocomic light, and his empathy for the North Korean people (supposedly among the saddest in the world) keeps readers from simply hating the country.  It might be the only place on earth I could describe as tragically fascinating.

“Tired of Public School?”

On my way home today, I saw several signs with the above words bluntly displayed over the website and phone number for a local private school.  I’m not opposed to private school, or homeschooling, or whatever you think is best for your child.  There is something sleazy, however, about promoting your school primarily by making a cheap dig at public education in general.  You know what a public school does that this little private-homeschool-hybrid “academy” doesn’t?  It takes all comers, regardless of background, ability, or family support.  Students with two working parents, or with single parents who work their butts off.  Students who struggle with all their might to pass.  Students who don’t give a rip about education–but still have teachers who do everything they can to persuade them that it matters.  Students with all kinds of problems that may or may not be their own fault.  And public schools give all of these students a chance.  Again, I have nothing against private schools or homeschooling; I just think programs like this might want to promote their own strengths instead of insulting the place where most of America learns.

By the way, I went to the school’s website.  You know what’s funny?  Their limited facilities force them to have their athletic program at a local park.  No big deal, but wait: what if I’m tired of public parks?