The Reading Life of Locker

Last year after school ended I made a list of all the books I was going to read over the summer. The list was a combination of "teacher books", nonfiction books about food, and classic fiction novels that friends always recommend but that I never actually get around to reading. The truth is, that if I were a student and my goal was to read all of these books, I would have failed miserably. Yes, I read some, but what I actually read differed substantially from this original list.

Okay, I'll admit it, I've had a problem with reading fiction over the past few years (except for the Harry Potter series, which I couldn't put down for a second). I think it's mostly because I've been so busy and so caught up in wanting to read as much as I can about teaching and students, not to mention keeping up with my favorite news stories. So I was proud of myself when I actually followed through with reading a novel called The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. This was totally my kind of book: very heady, philosophical, political, and also about love.

I slipped back into my old ways again after the summer. I spent most of this past year reading lots of educational research articles, political blogs (especially during the election season), and bits of pieces of teacher books and historical resources to help me plan lessons and units for humanities class. Even though I call this "my old ways", one thing I learned this year is to spend my time reading wisely. I used to feel like if I read a magazine or a resource book that I had to read the whole thing cover to cover. I felt, in some weird way, bad for the articles and authors that I would skip. But this year I managed to read a lot more text that mattered to me and what I was trying to do.

In addition to my lovely teacher journals I spent a lot of time reading online, and I'm not just talking about online newspapers, I'm talking about reading facebook updates, twitter updates, and other useless (but fun) things online. You should see me when I have to pick out a restaurant to go to on a Saturday night. I will visit several sites, comparing all sorts of reviews, until I can't even make a decision. The same is true for almost anything I want to buy... I think it took me two weeks to decide on a new cell phone because I wanted to make sure I ended up learning as much as possible about all my options. Throughout this process I've learned which people write facebook updates worth reading or reviews I can trust. Now, I can read smarter online.


This year was also marked by me starting to travel a lot more. As many of you know, I have a pretty intense fear of flying on airplanes. So, as my mega-trip to Buenos Aires in Argentina approached my anxiety increased. I bought two books written for people who have a fear of flying (I wanted all the help I could get) and gobbled them up like medicine. I took my favorite one on the plane with me and I still travel with it on planes now. I am happy to report that I have gotten MUCH better at flying. Since the trip to Buenos Aires I have flown to Florida and to San Francisco and I did fine both times. I can't give the books all the credit, but deciding to get them and reading them certainly played a big part in helping me.

Finally, I must give a shout out to all the travel books, maps, and local publications that guided me in my adventures in new places this year. The local papers in Washington DC the weekend of the Obama inauguration, the travel guides in Buenos Aires that helped us find the best places to go, the maps that helped me climb the steep hills in San Francisco. Next up... I am looking forward to picking out the best travel books to take with my on my dream trip across the country this summer...

Writing, Writing, Writing?

What does it mean to write?

That is the question.

Locker and I have been struggling with finding a way to help our students love writing since we began teaching. Right, Locker?

That's right, Shah.

In the past we have always favored creative forms of writing over non-fiction writing. It was all about projects and the process of writing, discovering yourself through your writing.

Blah blah blah.

Be nice, Locker. But this year, we decided that our students really needed to learn how to write an essay and write it well. We focused ENTIRELY on non-fiction writing.

Except in communication arts.

Right, except in communication arts, where we focused on poetry. In humanities we weren't doing our students any favors by skimming over non-fiction writing.

So we went to the other extreme.

All we did was non-fiction writing. And we got really caught up in test-writing-

No way.

What Locker is trying to say is that maybe we focused too much on test writing and not enough on what we call "authentic" writing. We got so worried about whether or not our students could organize our essays that we put aside developing their voices.

Writing that you do in real life.

I would say that we didn't really get to this kind of writing until the end of the year, when we started this blog project. And honestly, since we've started, I've been so impressed with the writing our students have done. Their voices are stronger, they are engaged -

AND their writing is organized! With transition words and everything!

Yes, Locker (he gets excited about this stuff). It's like all the skills we have been teaching all year finally sank in and our students were able to use these skills to produce honest and compelling writing. Of course, it's not perfect yet - we have a way to go - but I really feel like our 8th graders have come a long way.

Okay, Shah. That's great. But we are supposed to reflect on our own writing.

Oh yeah, right. Okay, the next post. I promise.

The Reading Life of Shah

In August I went to Mexico for a month and besides seeing pyramids, walking around the winding streets of Mexico City, and swimming in the Caribbean, I read. The month before I had gotten married and this was our honeymoon, but for my husband and I, it was a vacation of reading. Some days we spent hours in a cafe or in a plaza reading, finishing an entire book in a day. It was a relief in a way, to have so much time to read and to read anything I wanted. The month before we were consumed by wedding preparations, visiting family, and entertaining friends. Reading became something we would only do on the subway, going from one place to the other. But in Mexico our days were open and unplanned, and while we felt the urge to run around the country and see the sights, we felt a stronger urge to read.

It seems a little strange to go to a foreign country to escape New York for a while and spend half your time there escaping through books. But sometimes, books can be the best way through which to see the world around you. One of the books I read, 1968: The Year that Rocked the World, was about the student rebellions around the world. One of the biggest movements was in Mexico City, and as I walked around the UNAM campus (the big university in the city) I kept seeing images of the book around me, young people rising up in protest and clashing with the police. It made visiting the college campus - something relatively boring - exciting.

However, the day after I got back from Mexico, time disappeared. School started (at least for the teachers - the students still had a few days left) and all the pressures of work and life returned with a vengeance. In Mexico, Chris and I had decided that we would try to read for an hour every day when we got home. Within my first week back in New York, I was again only reading on the subway, too exhausted to pick up a book at the end of the day. Most of what I was reading were articles about teaching or about history. I had a new group of students and it felt like I was starting all over again as a teacher. It was not exactly relaxing reading and definitely not about escape. Instead, what I was reading got me deeper into teaching and humanities, which was probably what I needed in September, October, and November.

And then, in January, when I was almost completely burnt out from work, I decided to change my reading life and force myself to make time to read other things. I needed to read fiction again and escape a bit from real life. So I started the Harry Potter series. I had read the first book a year ago and though I liked it, I didn't really love the second one. It wasn't as exciting. But I forced myself to get through book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and by book 4, I was totally hooked. I was almost obsessed and I talked about Harry and Hermione and Ron with anyone who would listen. When I finished the last book in March I felt like I was moving away from close friends and for a few days I was in a daze. I actually missed Hogwarts.

Now, I think I've gained some balance as a reader. I am finding time to read, books that help me with my work and others that help me escape from my work. Finding this balance has been the best way I've grown as a reader this year. Instead of feeling pressure to read about teaching and history all the time and then eventually getting sick of it, I make sure I'm always reading some fiction. Though fiction helps me escape, in some ways it also helps me stay connected to the real world. When I'm reading a good book, I feel like I can connect better with my students as readers, and make better sense out of life in general.

Now let's see what the summer brings....

The Question(s) About Essential Questions

These days we are all well aware of the power of the essential question to organize a unit of learning into a cohesive set of lessons and experiences for our students. We also know that essential questions, if used well, can motivate students to care about what they are learning and, therefore, learn better. Essential questions also help teachers to focus their thinking as they plan, develop, and assess each unit.

Think, then, about how successful you feel about your essential questions.

I, for one, often feel frustrated about the extent to which my students have truly delved into these questions. There are many reasons why this may be so: running out of time at the end of a unit, realizing halfway through that your students have much less prior knowledge than you originally thought, the convergence of far too many standards and skills into one unit, etc...

Lately I've been thinking more about this and wondering if the quality of the questions themselves are the biggest part of the problem. For example, this year our big essential question is "What does it mean to be an American?" We recently had a unit question that asked, "To what extent should the government be responsible for the needs of its citizens?" I think when Reena and I were planning we half-knew that these questions were probably not going to be greeted with excited "I want to know mores!" from our students, but we went with it anyway. After all, we're teaching "American History!" Mustn't our questions have to do with America? And government? And economics? And geography? I mean, these are the standards, so....

So, question number one: Do essential questions need to be geared more toward the content you wish to teach (what we hope students will be "interested in" by unit's end) or the current interests of the students? Clearly, if we effectively taught our economics unit, students will be somewhat interested in and able to think and speak about the government's role in the economy. As I reflect on this past unit and grade unit tests I am realizing that yes, some of them definitely "get it" and some "kind of get it", and others still have little more than a clue. And maybe there are two or three students who demonstrate some real enthusiasm and flare when engaged in these topics. But the collective "they" that we always speak about did not "get it" the way we wanted them to. But, most of them can now restate the question in a short response! And they can say things like "for example" etc. Isn't that grand?

In some ways, yes, it really is good. We definitely are teaching real-world writing skills. But, really? My new thinking is making me wonder if we should have true humanities units that ask questions about the human condition more generally, and that mean something to an 11 year old boy or a 15 year old girl. Might we start thinking about essential questions like "What makes people happy?", "Why do friends fight?", or "Should we have rules and who should make them?". In this way, we tap into the real issues our students are facing and illuminate their understanding by exploring the history, literature, sociology, economics, and arts that help us dig deeper into these questions.

So, stop and ask yourself an essential question. Why am I teaching? Yes, we need to teach our students survival skills--reading, writing, and the like--but do we not also need to inspire? Motivate? Build a better world? I was encouraged by an article in the most recent issue of American Educator called "The Burden and Beauty of the Humanities" in which the author, Wilfred M. McClay states,

It is the humanities that instruct us in the range and depth of human possibility, including our immense capacity for both goodness and depravity. It is the humanities that nourish and sustain our shared memories, and connect us with our civilization’s past and with those who have come before us. It is the humanities that teach us how to ask what the good life is for us humans, and guide us in the search for civic ideals and institutions that will make the good life possible.

It is the humanities that make me want to be a teacher, not ELA, not Social Studies, and not measurement topics. I am not sure where this leads me, or us, next, but we must question on...