"The parents aren't involved."

This ironic statement comes from Ron Hampton, head of the PTA at Roosevelt High School in Washington D.C. I use the term "ironic" because it appears at the end of an article ( http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/22/AR2008042203631.html?nav=rss_education ) in the Washington Post about the No Child Left Behind-mandated overhaul of 27 D.C. schools to be carried out under the direction of Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee. Hampton is expressing his belief that an insufficient number of parents are involved in, or even aware of, the forced restructuring. What a tremendous surprise that so many parents are in the dark about an important happening at a failing school. The five options at Rhee's disposal are almost laughable, as well: For each failing school she can hire a private outside company to run it, turn it into a charter school, turn it over to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education--getting another government agency involved, yeah, that's likely to work-- replace the staff, or try something else. I have a specific suggestion for that fifth option: How about getting the parents involved in their kids' educations. How about requiring those parents to provide supportive, nurturing, structured, disciplined home lives for their issue. Such a requirement is the only government mandate that would have the power to fix Washington D.C.'s and the rest of our nation's schools.

George Will, coincidentally, writes about the very same topic in today's column. ( http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/18065089.html) He opines that "schools cannot compensate for the disintegration of families, and hence communities." We're probably a long way away from any kind of government-mandated "restructuring" of families. As long as that's the case, continual tinkering with our schools and our education system will effect no significant improvement.

Funnest Post Ever!

A recent newspaper column referred to Minneapolis as the "funnest" city in America. The term came from a comment by a spokesman for the mayor in support of a 4:00 AM bar closing time, and in the context of the piece it was repeated with sarcastic, if not outright mocking, intent. However, it did have quotation marks around it, which indicates to me that the columnist does not consider "funnest" to be a legitimate word.

This prevailing reluctance to accept the superlative of "fun" has gotten me into many arguments with many dilettante grammarians. The disagreements often make me think of Frost's "Mending Wall."

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says it again, "Funnest isn't a word."

OK, perhaps I've taken some liberties with the poem, but that is usually the extent of the case against "funnest." People have heard somewhere that it's not a word, and repeating that proscription helps them feel as though they are intelligent, perhaps as though they are defending the language against abject vitiation, I don't know. When you ask why, these folks, like Frost's "stone savage," can only repeat their one line: "Funnest isn't a word."

Let me tell you something: "Funnest" IS a word! And so is "funner." They are not the most descriptive of words, and I would advise against using them in any kind of formal essay, just as I would recommend using words other than "thing" or "great." But as long as "fun" is used as an adjective, those two inflected forms are perfectly valid. Notice that I wrote "is used" rather than "may be used." The latter connotes permission and implies that there are grammar police out enforcing the rigid laws of some official grammar body. This ain't the case. Grammar and usage should be descriptive, not prescriptive. If you use any supposedly nonstandard form long enough, and convince enough others to join you, that nonstandard form will become standard. "Fun" has been regularly used as an adjective for well over fifty years. The same people who rail against "funner" and "funnest" have no qualms about describing a "fun trip" to the mall or asking if you had a "fun time" at the park. Standard practice for creating comparative and superlative forms of monosyllabic adjectives is to use inflection. Thus, we get "funner" and "funnest."

I know this won't convince all of you dilettantes, but please come back armed with something more potent than that one line. And please don't turn me in to the grammar police.

The Continuing Case for Poetry

As the calendar, if not the weather, ambles toward spring, my thoughts turn to poetry. I know that today, as a means of personal expression, it faces formidable competition from texting, tricked-up mySpace pages, YouTube videos, podcasts, and all manner of other glitzy electronic applications. I realize full well that few read poetry these days; fewer still would ever buy a volume of verse. However, I believe that in the midst of today's digital clutter we need more than ever the clarity and beauty of a well written poem.

While the digital media mentioned above are easily accessible and decidedly entertaining, none of them is what I would call word-centered. Most of them rely to a great extent on graphics, still or moving images, or music to make an impact. The explosion of blogs, though, demonstrates that communication by mere language continues to matter. Such communication can be difficult. Theodore Dreiser lamented that "words are but the vague shadows of the volumes we mean." Poetry represents a different way of casting those shadows, maybe a way that is not quite so vague. At its best, poetry reveals more of the essence of the entity we are attempting to describe or convey-- whether it be an observation, a truth, an idea, or an object-- than prose ever could. But don't take my word for it; let a poet explain what poets are able to do. Beat poet Gregory Corso ( http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/creeley/corso.html ) said of poets: "They can help you realize something you could not understand before-- they can illuminate the spirit with long forgotten beauties and uglies."

This capacity means that poetry is still relevant, still powerful, especially to teenagers, who are often struggling to understand who they are and what is truly important. Illuminating the spirit never goes out of fashion, does it? Our students, though, are not going to accept on faith that poetry can assist them in better comprehending their inner beings, or in beholding the world with a bit more acuity. We need to show them.

To do this we need to put a great deal of thought into how we present poetry. We, as teachers cum poetry mentors, should select poems that we know well and about which we are passionate. When we read poems aloud--and we should since poetry is meant to be heard-- we have to make sure we read them well. We need to practice ahead of time and be prepared to explain clearly what we like about each poem, what really grabs us, or what we are intrigued by but can't fully understand. Students will pick up on our enthusiasm. They may not, in fact they probably will not, connect with all of the same poems that we do, but they will see how a poem can create a spark of inspiration, a better understanding, or maybe just a heightened curiosity. If we make the case that poetry is cool, and we argue convincingly enough, students might just believe us. Stranger things have happened.

Read-Alouds

I read recently that an elementary-level teacher should aim for six read-alouds per day. That is, the teacher should find six times during the school day when he or she can read out loud to the students. I think it was Mem Fox http://www.memfox.com/welcome.html who wrote this.

Although I'm not certain that six times per day is the perfect number, or whether it's a reachable goal in the midst of a typically busy elementary school day, I have no doubt that reading aloud to the early grades is tremendously beneficial. But when do you stop reading aloud to students? Surely you can't read aloud to cool, mature, sophisticated high school seniors. Yes, you can. And you should. Many of the reasons for reading to first-graders are still valid for reading to the upper grades.

Chief among these is probably to show your love of the written word. Model your enthusiasm for reading. It's likely to be infectious. Demonstrate to your students how powerful well-crafted prose or poetry can be. It follows from this that you should always read with passion and expression. Be prepared to read well; go over the passage you'll be reading a couple times beforehand. Choose selections that are especially well-written or that employ literary techniques you are teaching about in your class.

Another reason for reading aloud that applies equally well to all grades is, to paraphrase Fox, to get the sound of language into the air. Isn't that a great line? In any language arts classroom the sound of language should always be a fairly fresh echo. It wouldn't be a bad idea to start or end every single day with the recitation of a poem or an excerpt from a poem. Just as you should never limit vocabulary to its own unit (http://englishteacher59.blogspot.com/2008/03/willy-stratagem.html), you should similarly not restrict poetry to one small part of the curriculum. Confining poetry to its own little corner of the syllabus reinforces the idea that it is not relevant, not vital, not applicable to everyday life. This is an erroneous notion that we as English teachers must try hard to refute.

Whether it be poetry or prose, reading aloud to the students should be a regular part of a high school English teacher's day. For secondary classes six times is obviously unrealistic, so start with one. You may well be surprised by how attentive the students are, possibly even by how captivated they appear. Just don't ever let them hear you refer to the activity as a "read-along."

Toward Better Student Writing

If we are going to see more of that "advanced writing" I wrote of in the previous post, we need to design our writing assignments according to the best practices currently available. Gleaned from personal experience and a variety of other sources, here are what I consider a few of the most important considerations:

• Give students some of the responsibility for generating assignments and topics. If they are more personally invested, they are more likely to give their best effort.
• Assign writing tasks that have a real audience and purpose.
• Encourage experimentation. Don't ever grade down a student for taking a chance or trying something new. The only way for students to develop new techniques is by trying them out. High school writers often get stuck in the same narrow stylistic rut.
• Force-- don't merely encourage with some kind of checklist-- meaningful revision. Students often fall in love with a neatly printed page. By force, I mean assign; you might say something such as: "I want to see that paragraph completely reworked as cause and effect." Or maybe, "Rewrite that section from the perspective of a different character." Or, "Try that page in a much more light-hearted/sarcastic/formal/combative tone."
• Strongly consider creating a class blog on which students could post their work. This would go a long way toward encouraging that experimentation and revision that is so vital. It would also automatically create an audience, which could be students in other grades or classes at your school, or students from across the globe.
• Write along with your students. Writing teachers should also be writers. Showing them both your struggles and your successes can be a very powerful lesson.
• Provide models for each writing task you assign. The first step in learning is sometimes following the pattern of an expert.
• Find a way to get your students to read. Anything. The elephant in many writing classrooms is the knowledge that good writing requires good reading. One might even say that the two are flip sides of the same coin.

All Writing is Writing 101

Whenever I think about student writing, I recall a girl who was in the writing program at Sylvan a couple years back. This young woman, either a 10th or 11th-grader, was also in some kind of "advanced composition" class at her high school. At the center we generally teach writing within the confines of the standard five-paragraph essay. What I remember so clearly about this one particular student is how she proclaimed, almost in a condescending tone I thought at the time, that she and her advanced composition class were "way beyond that." What I remember with equal clarity is that she was not a very good writer. Her class assignments, a couple of which I saw and found very confusing, may have been convoluted and may have required all manner of rhetorical devices and organizational forms, but this girl could not put together a concise, natural-sounding sentence. My experiences with her reinforced my strong belief that there is no such beast as "advanced writing;" there is only writing. And the more we can simplify the teaching of it, the better our writing instruction will be.

Writing hasn't changed since its inception. We write, as we always have, to instruct, differentiate, explain, argue, persuade, describe, inform, entertain, clarify, analyze, shock, make uncomfortable, or any one of several other verbs I could list. The general framework we use is similarly unchanged: we introduce our subject, put it in some kind of perspective, state our opinion, support it with details or evidence, and tie it together in some kind of conclusion. And, hopefully, we accomplish all of this with precise, sophisticated diction, appropriate tone, distinctive voice, originality, and maybe a bit of panache. There are many ways, five-paragraph essay and otherwise, in which we can organize our thoughts and our words to meet these criteria. Writing can be called advanced only to the extent that it impacts the reader in a new or significant way.

Whither the Bard

Discussion topic: Should Shakespeare be a required component of sta0ndard high school curricula? Permit me to step into the devil's advocate role (perhaps). Having witnessed far too many ninth graders completely turned off by the often impenetrable verse of Romeo and Juliet, I have to say no. And I don't want to hear about the dumbing down of American education. I would suggest that by substituting a rich, more relevant, much more contemporary work of classic American drama for a 500-year-old essentially foreign-language relic peopled with stereotyped, outdated characters we would be substantially upping the quality of secondary education, not diminishing it. Even Shakespeare's most accessible play says next to nothing to the vast majority of today's freshmen. Think about the ludicrous plot: two 13-year-olds (13, mind you) from rival families that fight openly in the streets consult with, among others, a batty nurse, a friar, and a ditzy friend who speaks of tiny fairies; conspire to elope; then decide quite literally to kill themselves when their plans go awry. And all the while they are speaking in some strange kind of figurative code. How many modern-day kids can relate to that?! This is American language arts we're talking about. Our students should be learning about the joys and struggles and themes of contemporary American life; and they shouldn't need extensive bottom notes to do so. Let Shakespeare be an elective for upper classmen; or better yet, let him be tackled in college. Here's a place to read about one possible replacement:

http://www.augustwilson.net/navigate.htm

Parting ways with the Bard will be sweet, but not sorrowful.

A willy stratagem

I see a lot of what I would consider bad instruction in vocabulary development. The title of this entry comes from a vocabulary sheet for The Color of Water that one of my students was working on today. Her English teacher had, as is so often the case, merely handed out a fairly lengthy list of words and told the class to look up the definitions. This is what she had written for "ruse." I asked her if she knew what a stratagem was, and she said she didn't. I casually mentioned that "wily" was misspelled, but I assumed that she didn't know what that word meant either. This was just one of several problems with the student's sheet. But, she was perfectly willing to turn in--and probably receive significant credit for-- an assignment that really didn't cause her to learn and understand any new words at all.

Vocabulary is difficult nowadays because so few students are doing substantial amounts of outside reading. However, I consider it to be the single most important aspect of reading comprehension. There are, of course, many other facets of comprehension instruction, but a student can't get very far with any of them if he or she doesn't know what the words mean. We need to start spending more time with vocabulary. In fact, many of us need to rethink the way in which we teach the subject. Vocabulary should be a DAILY concern in English class. It needs to be embedded in all of the other work we do. Unless we are willing to go through the sheets with the students and make sure they have accurate definitions for each word, we need to do away with instruction by vocabulary list. The Reading Rockets site,

http://www.readingrockets.org/article/9943 ,

has many great ideas about vocabulary instruction, but perhaps most important is its assertion that vocabulary is best learned in context. Ideally, it is learned through varied and multiple contexts. We as teachers need to use our expertise and show through direct instruction how new words are used in contemporary writing. We see and know the words, our students don't. If you are one who wants the students to do more of the work, Joseph Pettigrew has a terrific idea that reverses the traditional model.

http://people.bu.edu/jpettigr/Artilces_and_Presentations/Vocabulary.htm

Pettigrew starts with the definition or synonym then tells students to find in a given passage a word that has the same meaning. His site has many other clever strategies, especially for use with younger students.

Vocabulary can't be left to student chance or to willy stratagems. Don't be lazy; get out there and teach it!

the blog is up and running

March 9, 2008 is the start date for my new blog, which is devoted to ruminations on my work as an Englisher teacher.