Related to something I mentioned in yesterday’s post, Peter and I found it interesting that the English teachers at school were given overhead transparencies to prepare students for the CELDT (California English Language Development Test).
Check out the instructions emailed to teachers:
In particular, Peter and I were trying to figure out how to best utilize the transparencies in the classroom since many teachers have Smartboards. Maybe they would look something like this:
In an effort to get all of the students to fit on campus, my school has converted our former woodshop into two different classrooms: a biology and a history class. Originally, one teacher was supposed to teach upstairs and one downstairs.
Both teachers agreed that the second floor alcoves felt too prison-like to actually conduct classes in.
I think these forgotten materials are pretty much all that’s left of the woodshop classes. So much for shop class as soulcraft.
Here’s the view from the top of the stairs walking into the main classroom space – you can see the history teacher’s desk at the bottom of the stairs and the biology teacher’s student desks in the background.
The high ceilings, walls lined with wires, and mysterious HVAC unit on the ceiling make it a little difficult to decorate and personalize the space. I imagine it’s got to feel like taking a class in an abandoned Costco.
That’s the history class in the small corner – they had to make use of the small space to offset the noise when both classes are in session.
I find the yellow lines left from the woodshop class fascinating. If I were a student here, I know they would be endlessly distracting to me.
I want to conclude this tour by briefly addressing the way that Manual Arts has been discussed in public lately. As much as I feel like I helped accurately represent the teacher concerns at school in Saturday’s column, today’s follow up column by Sandy Banks is disappointing in how little it actually says.
I’m also disappointed in Mike McGalliard’s response to all of this. While I’ve heard from many incensed teachers about the lack of respect and navel gazing that he accomplished, I don’t want to waste energy pointing fingers, sniping about details of what’s happened at the school, etc. However, I want to address being called a “whiny” teacher.
[First of all, really? Is this really what Mike is bringing our level of discourse down to? Really?]
When classroom conditions are clearly beyond what is equitable and are now a civil rights issue, I think it’s time to make sure you are whining in public. 22 extra days won’t do anything when teachers cannot work within an environment. I see the critical lens I am trying to shape on this blog as a way of advocating for a profession that is continually portrayed as “whiny” and the perpetuation of the label by the former head of an organization that teachers brought on campus via a grassroots campaign is saddening.
It all makes me wonder if Mike and the people that “want to see the needle move” ever feel like there is an okay time for teachers to whine?
Should my colleague that has had a leak in front of her classroom with overflowing buckets sit idly? (The leak’s been their since May.)
Should the students be wondering why we don’t have a librarian?
The students that haven’t gotten lunch because they don’t know where the line is for students without meal tickets and haven’t gotten the applications be allowed to whine?
Can I whine that I’m given overhead projector transparencies as an instructional aid even though we’ve spent hundreds of thousands on smart boards?
What about the signficant number of teachers still subbing for themselves?
You see, it’s not that any one of these is a dire problem in-and-of-itself, necessarily. However, when these different challenges (and the many, many more that have arisen this year) are compounded, they create a pretty dismal learning experience for students and a soul-deadening outlook on work for even the most leveled teachers. If Mike’s hoping to lead with the dollars of “corporate America,” maybe he should also think through his own recognition that he should be listening to why I am whining and for whom I am advocating.
I will be speaking at the DIY Days conference at UCLA next month.
The conference is free to attend but tickets are, I’m told, going quickly.
This should be a fun one if you are able to make it.
As the new school year begins, I’ve been catching up on young adult literature; being a teacher gives me an excuse to put down hefty literary tomes and cerebral collections of literature and jump into visits to Hogwarts, Paradise, Ohio, or Forks, Washington.
Last week I raced through the second book in the Lorien Legacies series, The Power of Six. I’m also in the midst of The Knife of Never Letting Go (book one of the Chaos Walking trilogy). I’m eagerly anticipating the final book in the Maze Runner series coming out in October, The Death Cure. During my daily commute to school, I’m listening to the Emerald Atlas.
And the good thing is, these are all largely popular series. By many accounts, the myth that the current generation of students is turning into illiterate buffoons is being debunked. Reports are showing that these students are reading more, not less, than other generations. And fears of a crumbling book industry–Borders excepted–are looking to be false.
If you’ve ever successfully navigated through my living room’s piles and shelves of books, it would be easy to see that I’m something of a bibliophile. Somewhere in the chain of schooling and parenting the concept of being a “lifelong reader” clicked into place and has taken hold since long before I exited the K-12 public schooling system. However, as I’ve been looking at the kinds of books that are being produced for young adults and children today, I wonder how much the publishing industry and its expectations of readers have shifted.
Largely, the biggest change I see is one that I find problematic–particularly with regard to creating “lifelong readers.” This change is serialization. All of the books I mentioned I’m reading at the beginning of this post are purposefully designed series with have-to-know-what-happens-next cliffhangers concluding all but the final book. Publishers are stringing teen audiences along more than before.
Yes, there were serialized books and series long before Potter and Katniss and Cullen. And yes, I would say that serialization has often been common in genres like mystery, sci-fi, and mystery. And yes, I would even go so far as to acknowledge that serialization has been a large part of the publishing industry’s modus operandi from the beginning; books by Dickens and Dumas, for instance, began as serialized chapters in newspapers.
The problem, today, is that if I am a young and avid reader there are limited options for me in the flourishing publishing market. I am being catered to as a very specific type of actor within the book market. The last remaining holdout of corporate booksellers, Barnes and Noble, now has shelves in their teen section specifically labeled for “Paranormal Romance.”
To put it more specifically, to be a lifelong reader is–for the most part–an explicit encouragement to be a consumer. Flying through one book with the need to finish the series is an expensive proposition. And with limited library hours and fewer library options for students particularly at my school (did I mention our school currently doesn’t have a librarian?), this isn’t a very feasible option. Teachers I work closely with often personally finance student reading interests, but going to Barnes and Noble nearly every weekend to buy the novels and manga that will interest students isn’t a sustainable model (my checking account can attest to this).
Finally, how are YA authors being encouraged to make the leap to from young adult to adult texts? Where the serialized gimmick is helpful in certain genres, I’m concerned that it is now replacing other ways young people traditionally related to and came to appreciate books.
What happens to book reading when it is trivialized to little more than long, continuing soap operas?
No, I’m not predicting any kind of death knell for the printed word or making a call for boycott or anything along those lines. I am however, worried that as a society we are not looking at the shifts in reading practices of young people and that, in turn, we are not looking at the shifts in capitalist practices of booksellers. Yes, kids like vampire series and post apocalyptic literature that goes on and on. But they like that, on the one hand, because they aren’t being offered many other alternatives. They are particularly not being offered many self-enclosed novels.
Ultimately yes, of course I hope all of my students are passionate “lifelong readers.” But I’m also hopeful that all of my students are offered the opportunity to choose the kinds of books they read. I am hopeful that they are not limited to series because series equal more money for publishers.
NOTE: In snapping some pictures at my local corporate bookseller for this post, I was reminded of just how white popular YA is. What happens when the racial and cultural experiences of my students are not expressed as popular literature?
Sandy Banks wrote a new column about what’s happening at Manual Arts today. Yes, the class sizes she reports are accurate; the photo above is from the online attendance system for one of the teachers I work with. I appreciated the conversation I was able to have with her in preparation for this column (and it sounds like there may be a follow-up column next week, too). As we exchanged emails to schedule the interview, I sent her a link to a blog post where I was critical of her analysis of what’s happening at my school. It’s also striking for me to review the timeline of what happened in terms of tumultuous change at the district and at the school level last year.
As several of my colleagues and I continue to develop our plans for the Schools for Community Action, I can’t help but think about the many missteps from school admin, the district, LA’s Promise, and–yes– even teachers in the past year that are making this a very unfortunate beginning to the school year for the more than three thousand students at our school.
My conversation with Howard Rheingold is up over at DMLcentral. [Embedding below as well]
A little less than a month until conference proposals are due. I’m really hoping more teachers will participate this year. Feel free to tweet me if you want to talk through your presentation ideas.
(apologizing in advance for being a bit stuffy during the interview.)
Seeing the Classroom as a Hub of Technology-enabled Social Change from DML Research Hub on Vimeo.
The critical media part of me is fascinated with how this line of thought came up.
(I imagine that the archetype of the “magical negro” probably had a lot to do with this…)
[In case you were wondering, RIFd teachers like Peter are not qualified to be department chairs at Manual Arts.]
As I’ve been thinking through the role of spatial literacies in the classroom, I’ve also been thinking about the interrelation of space and time within the texts we read.
A clear example of this is below. No, it’s not down there at the bottom of the screen and, likely, you didn’t look to your toes to see if I had miraculously transferred an example asynchronously to your current time and location. Instead, the word “below”, as typically used in texts, is a spatial marker that is used to signal time. When a writer talks about something that will be discussed later, she or he will likely say something parenthetically like, “(see below)”. When we see this phrase (or its less frequent sibling, “above”), we do not frantically scan the page in a Waldo-like search for this illusive information skulking above the bottom margin of a page. Often, we wait patiently and read on. As skilled readers we know that the below is found more in time than in place when reading a text.
We are so sure, in fact, that we will find “below” later on in a text, that the phrase often acts as a misnomer. Let’s say that you are reading “see below” and it appears at the bottom of a page. Clearly, there are no longer any lines of the text that can go below the appearing phrase. In fact, as you continue to read, you find that the referenced “below” actually appears later on much higher up on another page. Below can be above.*
When we write about below we actually write about later on. We foreshadow in text through place.
What I’m curious about (and painfully–American-ly–ignorant of) is if similar mixtures of spatial and time-based phrases are mixed in other languages. Do French or Japanese or Portuguese or Arabic academic texts have the equivalent of “see below” in their rhetoric? Or is this downward quest solely American? A literary Manifest Destiny?
So all of this can seem like another one of those quirky things about language that people just kinda point out (“a pineapple is neither pine nor apple, discuss”). However, I’d argue that this rooting of time and place within a text is counter to the possibilities of digital production.
When we type in Word or in the body of a new email message, our cursor is programmed to wrap text after a predisposed length not because it has to, but because that’s what paper and books have conditioned us to expect. When I simulate turning the page in my ebook, it’s not because the screen has run out of space but because, as someone who has come of age reading and producing on physical products with tools that make prominent use of my horrible handwritten scrawl, I expect my computer and phone and kindle and iPad to look and function like a book.
Our students today and the students coming after them do not have to cater to these same predispositions. For them, “see below” could just as easily be “see over there to the left” or “see on this link” or “see by floating your cursor over a word and an image will appear.” It doesn’t even have to be “see.” When we want to relate ideas that are to follow, digital technology allows us to disrupt within a text. There is nothing but our own imagination to stop an audio file or an embedded video or an interactive game or feature I’m unable to imagine to appear as a way to explain an idea or enrich a text.
As I typed that last sentence (on an application on my iPad), a thin line bisected my prose. The line told me I was now typing on a new page and was now writing further below. The spatial privilege we place on production and consumption of text is one that entire industries hinge upon. The constant updates about the book world’s uncomfortable crawl into eBook ubiquity, software giants, the size, shape, and functionality of printers in our households, and cultural semiotics of paper and what reading “looks like” as we teach it to young people suggest that “see below” isn’t likely to lose its meaning anytime soon. However, as we add to other ways to signal time in text than simply through textual geography, it is necessary for us to point young people to new ways of producing text that isn’t necessarily 8.5″x11″1-inchmargins12pointfontdoublespacedtimesnewroman.
*The footnote or endnote, however, stay rooted firmly in place and are easily found piling up and wandering sequentially at the bottom of a page or document (they are the true “below”).