Some scenes from the field

personal commentary on consumerism & the holidays

I recently taught a lesson on the personal commentary genre, using the inquiry method of teaching championed by Katie Wood Ray, among others. We used a great PC on consumerism and the holidays. The link to that is here, in case you'd like to check it out: http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2011/12/06/142890136/pepper-spraying-the-holidays-time-and-the-ethic-of-consumption?sc=emaf

It's just money

Since many of you have asked, here is the outcome of my meeting yesterday with the Jeffco's executive director of finances.
1) I was one of ~12 people in the second largest CO school district to which this salary mistake happened. Whatever that means. The irony of how the mistake was found should also not go unmentioned.
2) Usually, once the mistake is uncovered, the deduction (they call it "correction") begins that next month. In my case, the mistake was found sometime in September and it was rolling around in negotiations and legal red tape, largely because of my principal and Amy Weber's advocacy (thanks, Rod!) since then. My case was even taken so far as Jeffco's superintendent.
3) I will be losing between $250.00-$300.00 per month after taxes, beginning in my January pay period. That's bad.
4) salaries in the District are frozen until...sometime around the next ice age. So that's bad, too. However...
4) I will not be required to pay back the salary discrepency from 2007 to now, so that's good.
5) Legal action on my part would not yield positive results on any level, so that nuclear option is off the table, which my principal will be pleased to find out :)
6) Though my salary has been drastically reduced, at least I still have two secure jobs in a world where millions of highly qualified people find themselves unemployed, so that's good. (It's clear that I'm trying to find that elusive "silver lining" people talk so much of these days, and that's good).

Thanks for all your support through this. I'm looking for more holiday hours at my second job, Alisa is making some "creative" budget decisions, and most of our Christmas presents will be organically-produced this year. (Read: hand-made). No way around this being a real kick in the head, but it's forcing my family to think about what really matters and what is only superfluous...so that's good, too.

Greetings from Nirvana

One of our charges as educators is to be agents for change. For this week's journal, please explain something that you will advocate for in relation to the ideas you've read about and explored this week. Change does not always need to be on a grand scale - start small! Perhaps you will have a conversation with a colleague, bring an article to discuss at your next department meeting, or schedule a time to discuss something with your instructional coach or an administrator. What is something that you are thinking about as a result of your learning from this session and what is your plan of action for initiating change?

Sometimes, I just get tired of writing the same-ole-same-ole. I wrote this journal entry for my Advanced Genre Study class from the perspective of one lucky guy who has attained Nirvana. Nice work, buddy.

In one of my previous lives, I was a secret agent for a certain world super power government. That is as specific as I can be, due to the constant vigilance of that government's agents monitoring my activities even beyond the grave. Sorry). Anyway, in doing that work, I was often backed into the existential corner of 'kill or be killed'. This is never a comfortable place to be, as either outcome is preferable only to a nice night alone with a dull razor blade and the Lady Gaga Pandora station. But I digress...

On these occasions, I found it necessary to suspend certain beliefs and philosophies in order to complete the missions assigned to me. Oftentimes, I felt like a traitor even to my own country, the one that paid my heating bills and fed my pet iguana. When the smoke cleared, though, I usually realized that the reason I was struggling with my beliefs was that those beliefs were outdated or in desperate need of revision. Example: war is about economic gain, whether I liked it or not, and oil fuels the choice of which African nation to assist. Life is harsh, and letting go of comfortable paradigms to which we hold dedications is painful.

Those years of deep inner turmoil and moral dilemmas wormed their way deeply into subsequent lives, and I'm sure I could benefit from some counseling, even three lifetimes later. It certainly affected my lives as a Green Peace boat captain, refuse collector with Western Disposal, and my just-completed life as a Colorado public school teacher. I just couldn't stop teaching like a piece of 20th century masking tape, even when, if I looked out at my students and their work, a newer, more adhesive adhesive was required. I did what I did without question. I had the mythology memorized and the rationale ready. And I truly believed. Truly. That should count for something...shouldn't it?

Back then, it wasn't my life on the line, just my posterity. What would I leave for the future? What would I leave behind? One thing I decided--no matter how much I loved teaching poetry, classics of literature and analysis of those things, and having my kids write about those subject, I would not do that [much?] anymore. I decided to make a shift toward relevancy and practicality.

Being English department head at my campus, the shift was a bit easier, not having to convince the Tall People in the building in this profitable course of action. I began slipping pills in the drinks of my department through off-hand comments in meetings about how students were more invested if the writing was realistic and relevant, and the true value is in process over product. I even once espoused the idea that not all our students are going to grow up to be literature critics. Weird, that. ("Look! An elephant!"). I gave them pdfs of articles and snippets from professional journals about 21st century learning and writing, even going so far as to share a chapter by Peggy Kittle about her struggle letting go of the old and embracing the new. Finally, I led the charge by pilot teaching cornerstone genres in class, and supported them all when it became a mandate one year later. Little did I know that those small things would earn me a place in the all-beautiful Beauty of Nothingness. It's pretty much all it's cracked up to be. Except there's not any non-dairy creamer.

Writing From Nirvana,
You Can Call Me Al, who had his coffin lined with books, still.

PS-For this particular educational shift, I have a few people to thank. First, Deborah Dean for her dense but studied thoughts on genre theory and how to teach it, especially her considerations on how to make genre study practical and contextual, not isolated and forced. She also made an appropriately big deal about having mentor texts and exemplars available for kids to review and even emulate to a point. (This was all found in chapter 3 of her work Genre Theory). I also appreciate Peggy Kittle and her educational masterpiece Write Beside Them. She enlightened me and emboldened me with her ideas of why we must, and how to break out of the norm and head into true relevance in writing instruction. She put the cost out on the table: 1) we risk students becoming topic dependent and 2) the writing task will become the driver of revision. Bad karma, there. Those attitudes, she asserts, will only persist our students to keep on "playing school". She says "if we try to craft meaning from our lives right beside them, they'll see that story is more than formula and writing is more than an activity, and it will entice more students into rigorous work" (154), very much encouraged me to jump off the ledge into the Great Wide Open. Apologies to James Bond, The Buddha, and Tom Petty.

more on the concept-based curriculum

The concept-based curriculum is designed this way:

CONCEPT-BASED FRAMEWORK

OVERARCHING UNDERSTANDINGS
-deep, enduring understandings that represent
-the essence and complexity of a discipline(40-year learnings)

BIG IDEAS
-are the same, P-12
-single word or phrase
-represent core concepts of a discipline
-represent 40-year learnings

OVERARCHING ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS
-written in grade bands
-not unit-specific
-are "broad and deep questionsthat remain alive in the disciplineperhaps forever" (from UBD)

ORGANIZING CONCEPTS
-a word or phrase that spans multiple grade levels, though it may not be used every year.
-are "clustered under Organizing Concepts in a planning template
-makes connections more clear and planning easier
-help make connections to previous and future units

thinking about genre study

Recently, my school district has taken a different direction with our curriculum. We're focusing on the concept-based approach, as opposed to the standards-based approach.
This switch has definitely affected the way we're doing business in the classroom. In Language Arts, we've chosen one genre to study each quarter. The hope and expectation is that, within the genre study, we will be able to hit on the valuable (and CSAP test-able!) skills students need in order to write that genre, and that those skills will be transferrable to other writing tasks. The other hope is that this approach will be embraced by students as being more practical and compelling. That's the hope.
As with any systemic change like this, there is a lot of confusion, trepidation, and sideways glances from the interested parties being asked to change their ways. Teachers are mostly positive and willing to make the shift, but it's not easy, emotionally or pedegogically. We're in our fifth month of implementation and it's a thumpy-bumpy success, so far. More later...