Thanks, but no thanks

My journey through Margaret Thatcher’s career continues. Here’s item of evidence number two that Lady Thatcher was a no-nonsense gal. And shouldn’t we all love to be as indelicate and irreverent as she was

she immediately ignored the convention by which maiden speakers begin with some modest expression of humility, a tribute to their predecessor and a guidebook tour of their constituency. Margaret Thatcher wasted no time on such courtesies:…

I’m sexy and I know it

Just started reading a biography of Margaret Thatcher. (and may I just say I’m taking my own advice and using the biography genre as my vehicle to reading more nonfiction- it is working).

Anyway, things I’ve taken away about Lady Thatcher are that she was a little bit of a bitch. In a completely awesome way of course.

“Her mind dealt in facts and moral certainties. She left Oxford, as she went up, devoid of a sense of either irony or humour, intolerant of ambiguity and equivocation.”

More to come.

And we’ll take a cup o’ kindness yet, for auld lang syne

Well, readers, it is nearing the new year and I suppose it is time for New Year’s Resolutions.  Resolving something seems so final- think of the things we resolve: debts, conflicts, plots.  Synonyms for resolve that come to mind are conclude and resign and complete.  I find it interesting that we’d then call New Year’s Resolutions just that.  As if this goal we’ve set for ourselves, this change, is already set in stone.  Already finished.  How does that set us up for success?!  I’ll admit that I can’t think of a single resolution I’ve accomplished.  Not one. And, I think in knowing that about myself, I haven’t set any resolutions that are attainable.  Does that make any sense?  I’ve spent valuable time setting goals that I have no intention of meeting, but I still file away that I was unsuccessful at them.  What?  In my field, we talk about SMART goals.  It is an acronym of course- Strategic, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.  This method of goal setting is used in numerous workplaces. And if it works for teams, why wouldn’t it work for individuals.

So here’s my proposal:  Let’s be accountabili-buddies.  Post here your SMART Resolution and we’ll use this forum as a vehicle for holding ourselves accountable for our progress.  Let’s meet a fuckin’ goal this year.  I’ll put mine below just to get us started:

- Post more frequently to this blog in order to get my writing muscles back in shape.

- In January, I commit to posting once a week.  To be reassessed in February.  Content will include topics related to being your accountability partner, but also thoughts based on phrases read and heard that week.

Alright team, lets get resolving!

Street husslin’

Hi Stakeholders,

I just wanted to thank all of you who contributed to our donor’s choose project.  You helped us get a Vermi-composting kit!  We’ve got a new project posted.  And Donor’s Choose is actually MATCHING all donations! That means we can fund our projects twice as fast!

Find our website here: http://www.donorschoose.org/manderson  Then you type the word SPARK into the Promo Code box while you checkout.

Thanks!

The boys are back in town

But by boys I mean me. While watching the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show and grading assessments, I came across this gem of perfect kid-dom.

Kid 1 waits for her partner, Kid 2, to begin record.  We hear in the background say, “3! 2! 1! Cut!”  and continue record.

Then, farther in the background, we hear Kid 3 say, “No! You’re supposed to say Action at the beginning!”

Kid 2: “Oh, whatever.”

 

Don’t worry Kid 2, I hear they confuse the two phrases on movie sets all the time.

Give me, give me more, give me more

Donor’s Choose is a grant writing community in which anybody can donate any amount to support grants of their choice.  The Aviators have an account with them, and presently we’re trying to get a worm bin for the classroom (in which we can compost organic waste). Below is the website where you can see our project and donate if you decide to.  It’ll be updated throughout the year, so check back to see new projects as they get posted.

http://www.donorschoose.org/manderson

Hasa Diga Eebowai

John F. Kennedy says this, “Not every child has an equal talent or an equal ability or an equal motivation, but children have the equal right to develop their talent, their ability, and their motivation.”

Thoughts?

Also, watch this: Hasa Diga Eebowai.  It combines the carefree of Hakuna Matatta and the irony of first world problems.

The Birth of a Word

View the Ted Talk here

Today I’m starting (and probably finishing) a book entitled Second Grade Writers- Units of Study to Help Children Focus on Audience and Purpose.  Sounds riveting, right?  Well, actually, to me it does; but it didn’t always.  The impetus for reading this book didn’t arise from some noble desire to be better at my craft.  I haven’t been trolling professional development websites to find just the right book.  If I’m really honest, brutally, disgustingly, honest, the motivation to read this book was social.  When my co-worker approached me, we’ll call her Robin Scherbatsky, I said yes so that I’d have an excuse to get together with a group of people and talk about something I like.  Which is just to say that sometimes we (maybe just I) get a little too ivory tower in the classroom, hoping that student will choose books because they are a “good fit” or they’ll expand their horizons.  And sometimes I find myself awed that a kid would read an obviously ill-suited-for-them book just because his friend did.  Today I’ve eaten my crow and put my foot in my mouth. So, now that I’m nourished and stretched, I’ll begin reading.

I’ll report back after I have some shocking revelation about how to teach kids to write good.

After Reading the Introduction

Firstly, I just need to comment that I didn’t start reading introductions to books and chapters of books until I was an adult.  Seriously, I had insurance of my own and a lease and a retirement fund before I started reading introductions.  Yet now that I do, I’m sad about the number of times I wasted what I’m sure were perfectly good introductions.  This intro laid out the format of the units and provided a rationale for each section within the unit.  None of this is particularly revolutionary, but I did appreciate Parsons’ discussion of revising.

Revision was a concept I struggled to teach throughout the year.  I revisited the concept time and again, maintaining consistency of language but varying the delivery technique. I modeled. I used small groups and individual conferencing.  But nothing motivated my students to revise. Similarly, when I tutored varsity athletes in college I struggled to get them to make any changes to a draft.  It seems that every writer is convinced they do it perfectly the first time.  Fair enough.  But Parsons says this about revising:

“We often think of revision as making our writing better, but a more helpful and friendly definition is this: revision is the act of making the writing match more closely the ideas and feelings of the writer.”

Basically, she argues that we not encourage the idea that bad writing is the type of writing in need of revision.  The opposite in fact.  She supplants the idea that good writing is what will eventually be publish-able- that is, writing we are invested in, writing we care about, and writing we think others will care to read.  Thus, good writing is the writing on which we should be spending our time;  no need to revise something we never liked to begin.

My auxiliary reason for liking this introduction is the additional reading it supplied.  Three books that made the imPenDing doom list are:

1. Carl Anderson’s Assessing Writers, 2005
2. Katie Ray Wood’s Wondrous Words: Writers and Writing in the Elementary Classroom, 1999
3. And Katie Ray Wood’s Study Driven: A Framework for Planning Units of Study in the Writing Workshop, 2006

Anybody read these? own them?

After Reading the First Chapter

I read the first chapter several days ago, but am only now getting around to writing on it.  Which is just to say that my thoughts am emotions aren’t fresh or raw like they were after reading the introduction; but I’ll do my best.

This first unit of study is all about building a classroom community of writers.  I appreciate Parsons’ method in designing the behavior management around what is necessary to be a group of writers.  I employed this strategy last year but in all content areas, which led to discussions about what we needed to be a community of readers, a community of writers, a community of mathematicians, social scientists and physical scientists.  It was a lot to manage because of the nuanced distinctions between subjects, but in the end it worked wonders toward providing children with some efficacy over their classroom.  Additionally, this method of behavior management helped the children distinguish what they had to do to learn and what they had to do as a personal favor to me- for example, there was to be no pencil sharpening simply because I hate the sound and not because it was a detriment to our learning.  Long story long, it was nice to see that strategy in print.  Parsons says this about classroom community:

The members of a true community care at least as much about the well-being and success of the group as they do about their own individual accomplishment.

I’m all about this statement.  About it.  However, I do wonder if there is some developmental inappropriateness to content with in this assertion.  I’m reminded while I reread this of all the times I said, “Ariadne, I appreciate that you’re trying to help Theseus, but it’s hurting your learning so please sit down and write.”  I spent a good portion of my year training children in when were appropriate times to help another at the expense of personal achievement and when weren’t those times.  And I think that training has some merit, because at the end of the day I’m trying to get my children to be college ready and they’ve got to have the individual skills to be such.  Thus, while I think the statement is terrifically representative of how we want our communities to operate, I wonder if it is a too little unforgiving for use in second grade…

Moving forward, I found the following quote hugely insightful:

If the only thing on the walls when your students walk into the rom on the first day of school is the last writing they did the year before, what better way to tell them their voices matter?

Not being particularly inclined toward making bulletins boards, I had definitely adopted the “this walls are empty because I’m going to fill them with student work” attitude.  Yet, truly, the thought had never occurred to me to hang work from a  previous year.  Brilliant!  Not only does this give children the sense that their voices matter, but also gives them a sense that their work wasn’t for naught (not? knot?).  If all teachers adopted this bulletin board idea, wouldn’t our students come to internalize their teachers as a team of stakeholders rather than isolated experiences that end on June 10 each year.

Likewise, Parsons names a possible minilesson in this unit- a good way to start a new day is by reading what we wrote before.  Here again, how completely intuitive! Of course we should be having children reread their work.  She says, “this is how they come to know themselves as writers.”  Way to go, SP!

Add a book to the imPenDing doom list:

1. Randy and KAtherine Bomer’s For a Better World: Reading and Writing for Social Action.

After reading chapters 2 and 3

Suspicions confirmed- I love this book. The second chapter is all about social justice writing.  Well, really it’s about persuasive writing as a genre, but Parsons does a nice job of allowing this unit to make children into advocates.   I am absolutely guilty of forgetting what and how much children know about current events, assuming that they don’t watch the news or talk with other adults about hot button topics. This unit is a perfect vehicle through which to put the kabash on those assumptions…

blah blah blah.  I for got to finish this post, but can’t figure out how to save it as a draft.

‘Cuz there is somebody waiting for me…

And we don’t give enough credit to women who actually do have people waiting for them, their children.  In a world that increasingly accommodates the word ‘and’ rather than ‘or’, there are still some stalwarts of the old system in which women had to chose between and family.  At MomsRising, women and men explore those hiccups and offer alternatives- why not utilize more job sharing?  why not allow children at work? why is paternity leave less valued that maternity leave?  and why is maternity leave so short? Systemic changes is necessary to even the workplace playing field.  These women advocate for that; they advocate for ‘and’.  That’s not a slogan of catch phrase…I just think they’re amazing.  Don’t worry, I don’t need a soapbox.  I’m good on the floor.  Just check them out- Momsrising.

Oh can’t you seeeeee, you’re the one for meeeee

In my class we do a “Photographer of the Day” thing.  We don’t call it that, but for the sake of context I will here.  One student per day takes two pictures and then blogs about them.  We do this every day (thanks in no small part to WAYNE LEONARD).  Yesterday’s blog was particularly winning because it exemplifies how I want my kids to feel at school.  See below:

Today I took two pictures: one of our daily count and the other of our class doing math. First I’m doing our class doing math. I took that picture because math is my favorite subject and it’s interesting for me. Now I’m doing my second picture. It was of our daily count. I really like this picture because it has characters we don’t really use like the @/at symbol. We don’t really use that symbol for example. Wednesday start@  185, n+5 or Tuesday start@ 237,   n +3. I also like these because they all involve our class.  We do the daily count every day and we always do math. It’s always us who do it. But no matter what we always do it together like a family cause we’re a family of Aviators. It’s always fun here.

This guy for the win!  Today one of my students used her blog space to celebrate the theme day of another student.  She appreciated the risk we took together and used her finite time and space to recognize him.  It doesn’t get much better than these kids right here!

Today is ____’s theme day wich is PJ day so I took a picture of Ms. Anderson in her PJ’s.

I also took a picture of my stuffed animal “Lisa” because you could bring a stuffed animal you sleep with.

Happy birthday ______!!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!! !!!!!!!!!!

Heart.