pauseRReport: Year One

Tags

blogging, creative writing, Education, social media, writing

At home, examining the light.  A description that fits for the last year.

The Pauser marked its one year anniversary just a few days ago, and I feel like celebrating!  Here are the big lessons I’ve learned this year:

• Digital, schmidgital! People make social media interesting.  I have enjoyed the personal connections I’ve made more than any other aspect of blogging.  While my virtual relationships are not the same as those real-world, on-the-ground ones, the generosity, kindness, and encouragement you all have shown me has helped me grow, and to heal hurts that I hadn’t even been aware of.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.
• Starting a blog was not that hard. I still don’t have the “bells and whistles,” skills my children have, but I can drive the boat.  Blogging is a testament to life being doable.  In year two, it’s time to learn at least one bell/whistle.
• Blogging is a measuring tool. When I look back at some of my early writing, I can envision ways to make the writing more effective than it was then.  I also look back at some of the writing I did about my husband’s journey with prostate cancer and I think about the way the writing helped me to achieve some emotional closure.  Because I flung my words out into the universe, they became a kind of commitment to my soul, something I had to go back to when the downs came calling.  Those words, once spooled out, became a permanent record of all I have felt, all I have achieved, all I have hoped.
• I’ve been fairly consistent with my posting, but I have learned that sometimes I just can’t keep up.  I’ve also learned not to worry about it.  The earth won’t stop spinning on its axis if I go a couple of weeks without a post.

Year One STATISTICS

Blog Posts: 86

Blog Views: 3027

Total Comments: 293 (Half of these are mine, because I always reply to comments. I’m Southern.)

Followers: 117

Top Three Posts:

# 3  Daily Discomfort: Frozen

# 2   Daily Discomfort: Love and Time

# 1  Daily Discomfort: Getting A Pedicure

The post with the most comments:

 DD: Mozart and the Beautiful Tears

Up Next:

My editorial calendar for the year: It will probably change, but at least I’ve got a plan.

For year 2, I’ve changed the editorial calendar a bit.

Each week I’ll write a feature article based on a monthly theme.  I’ll also write once a week from a prompt I generate in a new way each month.  Each month, I’ll write an article for the paus(ed) category based on how to use that prompt generation in the classroom.

In September, I’m writing about the New Guard.  You know, my kids and their kids.  I have just learned from NPR that I am of the Old Guard.  I (and apparently many of you) am classified as the Old Guard because I am are still using Twitter.

I’ll also write from a series of prompts generated by my Personal Universal Desk.  It’s a cool tool.  I’ll write about how it works so you can use it too if you want. I’ll also write about how to use the PUD(makes me feel good just to put it into writing) in your classroom.

paus(ed): Sharing the World through Paired Texts

Tags

Education, Paired Passages, Paired Texts, Reading, Reading process, teacher writing, Writing Process

In my work with the San Antonio Writing Project, I needed to spend some time with student groups on paired texts. The necessity of doing this work now is, of course, related to the dratted test, but I made the decision not to use pre-fabricated testing materials to teach students about how to negotiate two related texts.  I went in search of texts that were relevant, interesting, and (ever and always) likely to evoke an emotional response.

In the March 30, 2015 issue of Junior Scholastic magazine, Abby Grissman interviews her grandfather about “Life in Germany During World War II.” Since I’ve been to Germany myself recently, I decided to write a related article about my visit to Dachau Concentration camp. After we’d read both articles, we answered some questions comparing and contrasting the two articles.  I have included my article below.  Please feel free to use it with your students. However, an activity like this will have much more appeal to your students if you write the work yourself.  Here’s how a teacher model paired with published texts will benefit your students:

• It helps them see the connection between reading and writing.  You wrote it, and they will read it.
• It shows students that you are willing to be vulnerable enough to let them see what you’ve written.  Don’t worry about whether it’s perfect or not.  Their writing won’t be perfect, but if they see you try they will be more likely to try themselves.
• It will provide you with an avenue for further exploration and inquiry about the topic.  I was able to follow up on this work by showing students some pictures I had taken and answering some of their pressing questions about the time period.

I gave the students my three tips for reading more than one piece of text at a time:

• Read and complete work on paired passages FIRST if you are taking a test.  Do this difficult task while you are wide awake and able to focus best.
• Read the passages TWICE.
  • The first time through I always recommend reading both passages at the same time, just like chapters in a book, without stopping. I include the questions and answer choices in this first read.  I tell students not to worry too much about what they don’t understand on the first read.  Folks disagree with me about this, but I think it is critically important for the students to have a chance to enjoy what they are reading, even if it’s part of a high stakes test.
  • On the second read, I ask students to interact with the texts. I DO NOT ask them to write the key word or main idea of every single stinking paragraph. Talk about a joy killer.  I just tell them to write down what they are thinking as they read.
• Think about how the passages are alike and how they are different.

When this time of year rolls around, it’s good to balance the students’ need to understand test formatting with a judicious dose of authentic literature, and that includes something you’ve written yourself.

Here’s the article I wrote:

Dachau- Germany’s First Concentration Camp

By Joni Koehler

On March 24, I visited the first concentration camp that the Germans established during World War II.   This experience changed the way I think about the events surrounding the war, and the role that the German people played in the war.

It’s an eleven minute train ride from the city of Munich to the stop at Dachau.  My fellow tour members and I emerged into a brilliant sunny day in downtown Dachau.  As our guide, Steve, spoke about the town of Dachau, I put on my sunhat and shed my jacket.   While we waited for the bus to take us to the camp, Steve said something that surprised me.

“When the camp was established in 1938 as a place for political prisoners, it was even more isolated than it now is.”  Many of the citizens of Dachau did not know what happened to the prisoners at the camp, because it was so far away from the city.  I had never before considered that the atrocities visited upon those in the camps were well away from the view of the average German citizen.

Steve spoke to us about what happened when the Americans arrived at the camp and took it over at the end of the war.  They found 36,000 people in the camp.  Many of them were starving, and many had diseases that threatened their lives.

One of the first thing the Americans did was to go to the city of Dachau.  They made all German citizens of the city ride back to the camp with them.  Many citizens were shocked by what they saw— so many people were crowded into a camp that was meant to hold only 2,000.  The men of Dachau stayed to assist the American soldiers with burial of the many prisoners who had been killed right before the camp was liberated.  Because the German government had hidden their acts of murder from their citizens, the leaders of all the concentration camps were ordered to kill every prisoner before they could be overrun with the American victors.  They wanted to hide the evidence of their terrible crimes.  Thank goodness they ran out of time before every prisoner could be exterminated.

World War II was a terrible time in the history of Germany.  But through my trip to Dachau, I learned that you can’t judge every German citizen for the acts of a few.  I think the citizens of Germany still feel ashamed of what happened in their country during the War, and have an honest wish that these horrific acts will not be repeated.  That’s one of the reasons every school child has to attend a concentration camp during their years in public school.  It’s a law that will keep the phrase, “Never again,” fresh in the minds of the German public.

What about you?  What have you written and shared with your students?  I’d love to hear about it.

Paus(ed): Finding Poems at Christmas

Tags

Christmas, Christmas Poetry, Education, Found Poem, poetry

See the torn cover on this much loved tome?

Let’s face it. Students come back from the Thanksgiving holiday with one thing on their minds.  How long until the Christmas break?  This is not the time to assign the first thirty chapters of War and Peace or the fifteen Latin declensions of the root par including past, past perfect, and pluperfect iterations.

(Note: I wouldn’t know what a declension was if it bit me, but it sounds like the sort of snooze worthy assignment guaranteed to kill peace and goodwill among all nations.)

At this time of year, there is a delicate balance between providing enough cognitive load to ensure learning and keeping the content light enough to engage distracted, sugar laden young brains.

Writing poetry fits nicely into this time frame, because poems can be drafted, revised, edited, and turned in within two or three days, and because it gives the student an immediate sense of success and accomplishment.

I like using the literature we are already reading to have students create found poems. To produce a found poem, students borrow words or groups of words, rearranging to create their own poems.  When generating a true found poem, students should add punctuation only, and none of their own words. This is more challenging than it may seem at first, but almost every student can find lines, words, or groups of words that appeal to them, and almost every student will be able to complete this assignment.

I really liked this teacher’s explanation of the found poem.  It may give you some more ideas about how to get students to think of the found poem assignment as word play.  He even says that words are toys at one point in the video.  Students will listen to toy related talk any time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0czPlqh4DEo

I used Christmas literature during December, because there is no shortage of well written mentor text on this topic. I always had other literature available for students who did not observe the holiday, and it never presented a problem in my classroom.  If your school district has policies against using Christmas literature, just let students use the great literature you are already reading with them

Here’s the found poem I wrote last week.

With so much great Christmas literature out there, I’m sure you already have some of your favorites, but here are some of mine. . .

The Best Christmas Pageant Ever by Barbara Robinson- Best first line in a book, ever.

Santa Calls by William Joyce: This book has a letter in the back of it.  You could also use this book as a springboard to write some Christmas letters.

Santa’s Twin – Dean Koontz

How the Grinch Stole Christmas By Dr. Seuss.

The Polar Express by Chris Van Allsburg

What Child is This? A Christmas Story by Caroline Cooney

Happy Finding!  If your students write great found poems, send them to me.  I’d love to see them.

paus(ed): No Pain, No Brain

Tags

Conceptual Learning, Education, Learning Theories, Procedural Learning, scaffolded learning

Do you remember when you first learned how to hit a baseball?  The first time you held a bat in your hand, you were probably six or seven.  Unless you were a kinesthetic genius, you didn’t hold the bat the correct way the first time you tried to use it.  Remember how frustrated you felt when someone tried to take the bat away from you to show you what you were doing wrong? What you wanted was time to learn how to do it yourself.  Any number of people could have told you the procedure to use in order to hit a ball with a bat.  However, the only way to learn to hit a ball was to try, again and again.

In order to hit a ball with a bat, a person has to know more than procedure.  They have to understand the concept of how to hold the bat, how to swing the bat, the plane that the bat comes across, and how fast to swing the bat in order to make contact.  In order to build that conceptual knowledge, you have to take what you’ve been told about procedure and practice it until the concepts behind hitting a ball take hold in your brain.  Once you have conceptual knowledge, you can hit a baseball with a baseball bat repeatedly, for your whole life.  Without conceptual knowledge, you have to re-learn the procedures of hitting every time you pick up a bat.

In his book, Concept Rich Mathematics Instruction, author Meir Ben Hur states that when we build conceptual knowledge we actually adjust our schema, creating physical changes in our brains!    Here is a link you can follow to read more of what he says about this.   http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106008/chapters/Conceptual-Understanding.aspx  

I’m still in the pre-amoebic phase of learning about social media.  I have a cursory procedural knowledge of the buttons to push to make pictures or video appear, but I don’t know why I’m pushing those buttons.  I don’t know how portions of the internet, like facebook and pinterest, relate to one another.  And forget html.  What’s that?  Somebody poked me the other day and I had a serious moment.  Am I supposed to poke back or what?  In order to change my brain, I have to keep trying new applications related to social media.  I have to think about how those applications relate to one another. I want that new brain, because I know that without sufficient conceptual knowledge, I won’t be able to grow this blog, or sustain it as social media changes.

It took time for me to learn how to hit a baseball, and learning how to blog will take time as well. Teachers have students forty-eight minutes a day, five days a week for nine months.  We have a mountain of objectives that our States expect us to teach.  However, my teacher buds, try to remember that the only way to learn how to hit a baseball is to hold the bat yourself, miss the ball multiple times, and continually try until the process becomes automatic.  Ask yourself this question: Who is holding the bat in my classroom?