Once More Into the Breach

Work starts tomorrow. I have had an oddly easy going prep for the beginning of school this year. My room was set up, I prepped all the paperwork for the first week; I even wrote and turned in my first lesson plan five days before it was due. I feel as if perhaps I have lulled myself into a false sense of security. Last year I had the best group of students I have ever had in 18 years of teaching. I fear that they have made me feel the need to be less prepared. Although when I go over what I have done, I really haven't done anything less than I have done before. In fact it seemed easier this year than in the past. Maybe I'm finally getting the hang of it.

I finished Myers' "Changing Our Minds" for Bomer's class. Lots of things to write about from that, but I think it will have to wait. I found it interesting however that when a shift from one form of literacy to another occured it happened in the elite first. It corresponds, I think, to the way we as teachers get blasted for not teaching what we did not know was wanted by society, when we were doing quite well teaching what we were teaching. I have also thought, Each time the state changes the "test" there are dire predictions concerning how poorly the students will do. Yet, amazingly: the students do better than was expected. Perhaps both teachers and students are smarter than we are given credit for.

Summer Reading's Over

I went up to the school today with my last load of big things: my rocker, five bean bags, the standup cutout of the three stooges dressed in graduation gowns, two boxes of books, and my two new plants. We have to report to work next Tuesday for inservice stuff. I want to spend my time writing out plans (something I have never done very well, at least writing them out so my evaluator can understand what it is I'm doing). But my doc classes are going to keep me busy, so I am trying to get organized at work in hopes that things will go easier. This working full time teaching and taking two grad classes each semester keeps me busy, not to mention three teenage children at home. The extended summer was good however. I got a lot read. Except for the adolescent novels ( which were ones I chose to read for one of my doc classes this summer) the rest of the books on the list were just for my own whims:

Chomsky-Foucault Debate
Democracy and Education: Howard Zinn
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep: Philip K. Dick
The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick
Wolf: Jim Harrison
Teaching Community: bell hooks
Literacies of Power: Ralph Macedo
Stargirl: Jerry Spinelli
The Giver :Lowis Lowry
The Chocolate War: :Robert Cormier
Greater than Angels: Carol Matas
The Year of the Hangman: Gary Blackwood
Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes: Chris Crutcher
Tunes for Bears to Dance to: Robert Cormier
Living Up the Street :Gary Soto
Hope was Here: Joan Bauer
Bad Boy :Walter Dean Myers
Joey Pigza Swalled the Key :Jack Gantos
The Tequila Worm:
Before We were Free: Julia Alvarez
The Crazy Horse Electric Game: Chris Crutcher
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows :J.K. Rowling
The Kite Rider: Geraldine McCaughrean
and chunks of Democracy and Education: John Dewey, and Metaphors We Live By: George Lukacs

Work will limit any free reading I do in the fall. I guess that is why I tend to read poetry on my own when work in going on. I can read a poem fairly quickly and savor it as I go through my day.

Silly stuff

I found this site on another person's blog. You too can be a Simpson's character. Just go to http://simpsonizeme.com and you can be yellow too.

Pickles

I am adventurous, I eat pickles on my hamburgers now,” my oldest son bragged this morning. He was being sarcastic, albeit honest, about his eating habits. His comment made me think about the importance of taking risks, unsettling the normative patterns of my life. A few weeks ago I bemoaned in this space about why I couldn’t make up my mind whether to continue in my Doc program or not. I am going to continue in the program; I will probably continue to whine and worry about it nonetheless. However, I do enjoy thinking about all the stuff that makes up my field. I also enjoy thinking about how all of the stuff that is tangential to Language and Literacy influences all the stuff that makes up Language and Literacy. In a recent article in the newspaper, the influence of friends on each other’s habits and life, ranging from smoking to depression to obesity to autism was recounted. It is not a surprise that we are influenced by those around us. I think everything and everyone we come in contact with, to a greater or lesser degree, influences us. This is not a one way shaping, we in turn influence everyone else. It is not a compromise, nor a consensus: “Superior learning lies in knowledge more widely distributed across units, with common rather than disparate interpretations. Huber, following Morgan and Ramirez, (1983), writes of such knowledge as “holographic” in that each unit carries at least a rough picture of the whole” (p. 13 Salomon and Perkins). I think it is more of a genetic metaphor rather than a holographic one, where the DNA for the whole is contained in each cell. The knowledge of the culture as a whole is determined by the mass of individuals acting together. It is not just individuals acting alone (as the Romantics were wont to say), but individuals acting in and as groups. In my class, again and again, a theme that comes up, in the literature we read, is the balance between being a part of the whole and apart from the whole. I don't think it is an either/or binary, but rather an ongoing dance where the two parts merge and reemerge, changing and changed. “As pointed out by Damon (1991): Even when learning is fostered through processes of social communication, individual activity and reflection still play a critical role. Sometimes . . . individual activity may build on collective questions and insights. Other times, however, individual activity may need to resist the collective illusions created by a group . . any paradigm that assumes a one-way, deterministic relation between the collective and individual knowledge construction is over simplistic (Damon as cited in Salomon and Perkins, p. 17). My classes combined with all of the education books I have read, the literary-crit theory, the philosophy, and poetry, all combine to create how I have come to think about what it means to learn, teach and live. They are like the pickles on my son’s hamburger, perhaps leading to a larger view of what there is to be a part of in the world.