pauseRReport: June 2015

Tags

blogging, Blogs I like, writing, Writing Process, writing skills

Summer Talk: A Sneak Peek

I didn’t think I’d be able to write this week, but the coastal sun has driven us indoors for a few hours and I find myself with an opportunity to write. Yay!

June has been a great month here on thepauser. Again, the site has seen slow, steady growth, and I’ve noticed that posts are getting more comments, especially on this month’s most popular posts, The Red Bowl, and Larger than Myself?: A Riff on Inspiration. Overall, I feel much more comfortable in the blogesphere than I did when I started ten months ago.

Reflections:

• My writing feels like it’s undergoing a sea change. For the first few months, it was a struggle to meet my internal deadlines, and there wasn’t much revision in the mix. I wrote, edited (checked everything for spelling and grammar mistakes) and posted. I’m not sure why, but now I feel comfortable holding off on a post for a couple of days after writing.  Sometimes I go all James Joyce on my first draft, knowing that I’m coming back to it. I’ve been able to pluck some gems out of that loose way of drafting.  It feels like I’m maturing as a writer.
• Ten months ago, I thought this blog would be focused on my exploration of social media, but that really hasn’t been the case. Since I promised myself this blog would be a place to explore discomfort, I haven’t been pushing the boundaries enough. I need to return to some of the topics I’ve let drop. I fully intended to learn some html, and what pingback and trackback mean.
• I’d also like to explore how social media has changed the way we respond to and think about important world events. I know that others have used their blogs as vehicles for voicing their opinions on society’s concerns, but I don’t know how I feel about using this blog as a platform. I need to reflect on it.
• I’ve started to think about SEO this month.  Here’s why. I wrote a post months ago called Getting a Pedicure.  I don’t think it’s particularly good or even characteristic of the writing I’ve done, but every single week somebody reads this post.  The only thing I can think of is that the word pedicure is in the title and people see it in the search engine when they look for a place to get a pedicure.

Blogs I’ve enjoyed in the month of June:

Aunt Beulah: Parading Season

Bones Don’t Lie: Let’s Talk About Death (This chart is something a teacher could use to discuss the interrelationships between science and popular culture)

The Carter Library: Trying On Swimsuits with Miss Kentucky

In Other’s Words: Tiny Little Girl

The World Is A Book: 5 Photos, 5 Stories, Bill the Photographer (Amy is an amazing photographer, and this story is not to be missed)

Next Month:

In July, look for Summer Talk, a series of posts dedicated to the days of laze.  I’ll write about that metallic cup you used to drink iced tea and cherry kool-aid out of.  And the taxi ride you took with that interesting driver when you were on vacation, and the conversation you overheard while watching the boys of summer chase fly balls all over the outfield.  And the cool sensation of sticking your hot feet into water.

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paus(ed): Sharing the World through Paired Texts

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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.

pau(ed): If you have 1 you have 18 brainstorming for Why I’m Selfie-Conscious

Tags

Brainstorming, Selfies, writing, Writing Process

I  used Kelly Gallagher’s   1 topic = 18 topic brainstorming technique to think on paper before writing, “Why I’m Selfie-Conscious.”  Gallagher’s book, Write Like This, has been absolutely instrumental to the work I’m doing with the Write for Texas initiative.

My 1=18 Pre-Write
Express and Reflect: How does this topic affect my own life and experiences? How does the topic speak to my past?
• I do not like to take selfies, and what this says about me and my place in society.
• How I feel about the attachment to the phone that the selfie-selfish implies
• My thinking about how selfies have affected the learning environment
Inform and Explain: What’s my main point? How can I present this information in a surprising way? What is unexplored about this topic? What new take can I give it?
• The etymology of the word “selfie.”
• The history of the “selfie.” Is this really new? Or maybe the historical roots of it?
• Story of Myselfie- a biography the selfie. ( Maybe personify it- what would its personality be like?)
Evaluate and Judge: Is this good for me? For my family? For society? How do I judge whether this is good or bad? What is my criteria?
• The Kim Kardasian model: Selfies are sooo bad
• The Parisian family model: Selfies are benign, and sort of sad
• The 13 year old One Direction fan model: Selfies are good and fun.
Inquire and Explore: What’s the question? What’s the problem? How should it be handled?
• How far should parents go to monitor their children’s use of and receipt of selfies?
• Why do celebrities feel the need to take embarrassing selfies and then publish them to the world? Do they not feel any responsibility to be role models?
• Or what happened to the concept of role models?
Analyze and Interpret: Why is this so difficult to understand or explain? What makes it so complex?
• Why do I hate taking selfies so much? Why am I selfie-conscious?
• What’s the big uproar? Isn’t this kind of like Elvis or the Beatles?
• Why has the selfie phenomenon reached critical mass now?
Take a Stand/Propose a Solution: What should we do about this issue? Why should you (the audience) do what I want you to do?
• Proposal: Improved parental controls on children’s phones(i.e. a “kill” button to use during school hours, a parental approval of all outgoing materials on your child’s phone.)
• On why Kim Kardashian should never ever take a picture of herself again.
• Why old folks like me need to get with the program and start taking selfies so that the young folks will go off of them like they did with Facebook.
My 5 Minute Brainstorms
Express and Reflect
On Mother’s day this year, my daughter sent me a beautiful scarf. I texted her to let her know that I had gotten it and was wearing it to work that day. She texted back and said, “That’s great. Take a selfie so I can see it.” This was the first time I had even considered taking a picture of myself. I had to find the button on the phone that turned the camera around to my face, and no matter how many times I tried to take the picture, I looked awful. No I mean it. I’ll show you the picture. There was something very different about taking my own picture. It’s hard enough to make my face and body look acceptable to me when I’m getting my picture taken. Now there’s the added disappointment that I can’t make myself look like my mind’s eye view when I’m taking my own picture. I am selfie- conscious and I wonder why. It could have something to do with my age, but maybe it’s also about the world I grew up in. I could probably find a way to blame my mother for this. That would be convenient.

Inform and Explain
As long as there have been little girls, selfies have existed. I think my mother used to call it “mooning.” The British would call it swanning I think. When I was 8 or 9 I vividly remember looking at my reflection in the picture window at my grandmother’s house and taking note of the expressions on my face as I sang “Autumn Leaves,” a very contemplative piece that was too deep to belong to my childish repertoire. My daughter went through a phase (several times) in which she took pictures of herself with a camera. We’d go to the Walmart and pick up the pictures thinking they were of our latest vacation to Old Faithful or whatever and there’d be a whole roll of pics featuring the 100 faces of Amy. So I don’t think selfies are new. Only now two things are happening: these ad hoc representations of id get posted to the whole world before id has had a chance to formulate, and people don’t seem to be growing out of the fascination with their own faces. Maybe that’s why I don’t like taking selfies; it’s been years since I admired my own face freshly cleansed by intense emotion in the mirror.
Evaluate and Judge
My husband was recently in the airport in Paris. He watched as a family of four took out a device that looked like a long arm and attached their camera to it so that they could take better group selfies of themselves. While I think using our cameras for the purpose of taking family or friend photos is pretty benign, isn’t it also a little bit sad? The last time I visited Paris with my husband, we asked a stranger to take a photo of us on the steps of the Sacre Couer. Part of the expression on my face was related to the joy I shared with the stranger taking our photo. That photo says to me, “Here we all are, on this planet together, sharing this beautiful day in this beautiful place.” Have we lost that? Are we too afraid to let strangers into our lives for long enough to release the private experience for a more planetary one? This makes me feel sad.
Inquire and Explore
What happened to the idea of being a role model? My theory is that reality television has created so many celebrities that have no talent, no purpose, no ambition, that the idea of being a role model has been pushed aside for the idea of playing a role. Even though folks with notoriety are starting to reap some of what they’ve sown (Ray Rice) it seems like the only thing that is really expected of those who make a lot of money as athletes, actors and actresses, or celebrities is that they not get caught doing anything too bad. I deplore the idea that celebrities think it is okay to take naked pics of themselves and then protest when they are publicized.
Analyze and Interpret
Why has the selfie phenomenon reached critical mass right now? Or maybe it’s just that I started contemplating it just now. Maybe that is the definition of reaching critical mass and moving over into the cannon of what is a real cultural thing. Somewhere in a small town, a middle aged woman recognizes a cultural idea for the first time. Maybe that’s the tipping point. Or maybe it’s when a writer pitches a show about a selfish girl who alienates all her friends with her irresponsible use of social media and says the show will be called “selfie,” maybe that’s when we know we’ve started to reach critical mass with a new cultural thing. Of course, when it becomes a real thing, and not just something the teenagers are doing, the teenagers will find a new “thing,” that isn’t part of the mass consciousness.
But Hip-Hop is still around so who knows?
Take a Stand/Propose a Solution
From what we know about brain research, children’s brains don’t really fully develop for a long time. Some people are 24 or 25 when their brain becomes a full blown adult brain. And the last center to develop? Judgment. That’s only one of the reasons why it’s important for parents to protect their children from the Carnation Instant Breakfast philosophy. To a child, snapping a picture of yourself with your cell phone and sending it to your friends or posting it on Facebook is just something you do without thinking about the possible future consequences. Children don’t think about things like consequences, because they lack judgment. This is why I love my father’s saying: “The most amazing thing in the world is a grown man.”
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This tool has been very helpful for me, because it gives me the freedom to explore the topic fully. Now I know that when I sit down to write about selfies, I will not only have a choice about the purpose I want the article to achieve, I will have other ideas I might not have thought of had I just started writing cold.
If I was asking students to try the “If you have one, you have 18,” activity, I would stand in the room and show them my own writing as I was doing the writing. Gallagher says that modeling has the most impact on the quality of student writing of anything that he has ever done in his classroom, and I agree. I also agree with him that it’s important to show students polished writing doesn’t come from anyone’s first draft. The sloppy copy is where all the ideas (and all the learning) reside, and students need to see sloppy