Macbeth Unfriends Duncan

Above is the invitational video to my recent presentation at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention, "Macbeth Unfriends Duncan: Students Creating an Online Social Network for the 'Scottish Play.'"

If you are interested in the idea of creating a parody social network online for Macbeth, any of Shakespeare's plays, or any literary work that has a cast of inter-twining characters, then you may like to check out the online version of my 20-minute presentation here.  

At this link, you'll find resources and materials to replicate the project with your students.

When Did "Get" Become "Be"?

Recently I was on website devoted to education, where the author suggested that teachers "Get creative."  I bristled. Not at the idea, but the phrasing.

When did "get" become "be"?

Somewhere between the 1980s "Get psyched" and the 1990s "Get amazed."  Or do we need to go back to the early 1970s and the Partridge Family's "Come On, Get Happy." Or even further to the depression era tune by Arlen and Koehler, simply "Get Happy."

In all of these phrases, "get" is a verb that should mean "acquire," and therefore, I expect a noun not an adjective to follow. As in:

"Get creativity."
"Get excitement." (I'm guessing at a rather homophonic aural morph from "excited" to "psyched")
"Get amazement."
"Get happiness."

Okay, so these phrases are not the stuff that advertisers or cheerleaders are going to bark any time soon.

The problem is not really with the adjectives, it's with the verb. "Get" has taken over "be."

How does this happen? Perhaps there is something existential going on here.  After all "get" is much more aggressive than "be."  "Get is active, and "be," well, being intransitive, it just is.  The zen of be first, do second, and have third, comes to mind. "Get" puts us in reverse.

I fear, though, in this acquisitive consumerist culture, I'm on a loser.  But maybe we can "be creative" and discover something we can do to save "be," and save "get" for those things to be had. 

For certain, I would  be excited, be amazed and be happy if we could.

Let it Snow!

Like many teachers and students in the Mid-Atlantic States, I've been experiencing a week of snow days. After quickly reminding my envious friends that I must make these days up on fairer days, I settle in to catching up on grading papers, replying to student blogs, and prepping for next week's classes.  Then calm.

A chance to think, to mull, to surf, and to read unlike what I had been accustomed to save my salad days of grad school or dog days of summer. Being unable to get out of the house, with two feet of fluff on the ground and a few more inches falling, I'm granted that rarest of commodities--time unscheduled.

Time to be reflective, creative, thoughtful, intellectual, sentimental, and focused.  I'm catching up with the September issue of Educational Leadership and the November issue of English Journal. I'm chairing a curriculum committee on 21st Century Learning Standards and both have periodical have offerings on the topic.

In EL, Terrence Clark's article "21st Century Scholars" tell of a program inspired by the curriculum framework of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. "The district's high school developed a program that gives students the opportunity to build an impressive electronic portfolio documenting an array of mind-stretching experiences, which take place outside of regular school hours in the afternoon, evening, on weekends, or during vacations."

In EJ, Jim Burke's piece for the English Journal's "From the Secondary Section" column, presents "Reimagining English: The Seven Personae of the Future."  He gives Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future an English teacher's perspective and profiles a lucky seven archetypes for the Millennials in our English courses.  These personae have one common denominator: imagination.  Burke lists:

storyteller, philosopher, historian, anthropollogist, reporter, critic, designer. 

It may seem that some of these are far afield from how we English teachers have thought of our craft. Burke argues:

This is the future we must imagine, the one in which our students will live. These are the personae they will adopt and adapt as society and the workplace evolve. Some will wonder where literature is, where culture can be found in this model. Yet I see our rich tradition of literature and language, rhetoric and composition, prose and poetry already existent in all these roles. It is simply time to reimagine how our discipline might be reenvisioned.  

Even without these personae in mind, many English teachers know that their work has helped students who have gone on to create, innovate, and cope with cultural change.  Now to remain relevant our cultural change Burke joins the chorus of Daniel Pink and Ken Robinson (and many others)  in calling us to make imaginarion, creativity, and collaboration the brain, heart, and soul of our courses.  More on the challenge of this in a future post.

Right now I have some shoveling to do.

Mini Video Documentaries and Music Videos to Inspire Student Research

Motivating 9th Grade students of the millennial generation to read nonfiction to research Shakespeare takes more than a trip to the library. A year ago I developed a 9th grade project on Shakespeare that combines a traditional research paper assignment on a with PhotoStory video groups, thus classic meets 21st century.

The assignment:

1. students read texts and research on individual topics related to Shakespeare’s life, times, and work in service to
2. subsequent small group work to produce mini-video documentaries that are in turn
3. posted to the Internet

Introducing the research unit and positioning the mini-video documentary as the end-game, excites students about gathering source information and insists on their being sticklers about getting it right and documented correctly. They ask questions to check their own understanding of their reading. Students immerse themselves in source documents via “the mantle of expert” strategy (Heathcote qtd. in Wagner, 1999), and thus, approach the task with interest, ownership, and attention to detail.

Students read between the lines to find key information to include in their paper and video. Efferent reading as a way of knowing (Rosenblatt, 1978) becomes critical as students previously unfamiliar with Shakespearean topics learn of his plays, poems, songs, and aspects of his biography (e.g. students initially can’t tell that “Antony and Cleopatra” is a play whereas “Venus and Adonis” is a narrative poem, and “Stratford-upon-Avon” is a place). Lessons in critical reading, research technique, media literacy, visual representation, and audio speaking skills come to the fore of this multimodal project.

Products include a mix of old and new: individual evidence of reading and research (note-taking) and writing of a documented source research paper, and collaborative media work of storyboard, script, PhotoStory video. A closing activity consists of a class screening of all of the videos, in which students take notes on key points, and use a rubric to vote for the best “Willy”-winning mini-documentary.

For 12th Grade, I've used Animoto for music videos, each based on a soliloquy of Macbeth.

The assignment:

1. cull key lines from the soliloquy at hand
2. consider theme and imagery
3. collect copyright friendly images
4. upload images and text  to Animoto, select music and mix

In addition you can see the12th Grade's music videos for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales pilgrims.
It's all part of link  (below) to my presentation at NCTE's 2009 Annual Convention in Philadelphia. It featured ways and materials teachers can inspire research and analysis of Shakespeare's life and works through digital media, particularly PhotoStory and Animoto.

Some updates since the presentation are worth mentioning. Windows PhotoStory, that I used, is not to be had on newer computer operating systems, as its feature have been worked into Windows Movie Maker. This is a bit of shame because PhotoStory was so intuitive and idiot-proofed.  At any rate, depending on your school's computer operating system, I'd suggest using PhotoStory (XP), Movie Maker (Vista, Windows 7), or iMovie (Apple Mac OS X).  Regarding Animoto, it now not only takes still images, but short clips of recorded video.

You are welcome to revisit this session as it is slidecast with video clips and 40 pages of PDF files. Click Here .  If you try these ideas, I've love to hear about how it works for you.

References:  Wagner, Betty Jane. Dorothy Heathcote: Drama as a Learning Medium. 1999. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem. 1978.

Get the Shmoop

No, that's not a typo.  Shmoop is the latest study guide site for students and teachers of literature, poetry, and history.  It's put out by professors and grad students at Stanford, Berkley, Harvard, Yale, and other ivy-draped halls of humanities. 

English teachers and students are bound to like it for its scholarly-yet-breezy take on literature. It's cheeky in a nice way, comparing Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Lucas' Star Wars rather than Coppola's Apocalypse Now.  No snobs to pulp, you'll find Shmoop tells it like it is on everything from Hamlet by Shakespeare to Twilight by who-it-that-wrote-that?

I find it's got more goods and easier to access than Sparknotes, and a great improvement over Cliff Notes.  For a free account sign up, you can also save your favorite bits of information, organized in folders. They boast that the information on the site is documented and cited, and they help students cite for MLA, APA, and Chicago styles.

One downside is ads appear in the margins of the site that some teachers might not approve of for their students.  At any rate, it can be a guilty pleasure for teachers to have a reference. Looking up Tennessee William's The Glass Menagerie for such things as "Brain Snacks" (interesting trivia and allusions), pictures of playwright and performances, lists of literary devices (with examples), and 27 quotes on "Memory." 

Williams might agree that Shmoop is one of those "long-delayed but always expected something that we live for."

Look to This Day! And the Convention of the Class of 2009

Today, on my first day of school I started class by asking my senior English students if they were excited to get up today. It was afterall the first day of their senior year. Before they could answer, I told them I was.

If they had started with Kindergarten, by my figuring this was the occasion of the thirteenth year that the Class of 2009 convenes--and the last. I could tell by their reactions they had not thought of it that way before, but in that instant I had underscored the importance of our meeting. I told them they were born the year I started teaching. This also got their attention. So they and I had been on an eighteen-year trajectory. I had thought of them in 1991 when they had only been a thought.

To me teaching is a special calling. To teach literature and its power, nothing less than sacred. I explain this to my students with the example of the Sankrit "The Salutation of the Dawn," reciting it to them from memory as one of my great teachers had done to me:

Listen to the salutation to the dawn,
Look to this day for it is life, the very life of life,
In its brief course lie all the verities and realities of our existence.
The bliss of growth, the splendour of beauty,
For yesterday is but a dream and tomorrow is only a vision,
But today well spent makes every yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well therefore to this day.
Such is the salutation to the dawn.

The same sun that dawned on the Class of 2009 today, rose on the same eastern horizon some 3200 years ago and one of our great-great-great ancestors realized the miracle of the ever-returning sun, ever-beginning day, and took out a slab of wet clay and reed, and carved this poem for our inheritance. That's what excites me about teaching ever-returning students, ever-beginning years. The human conversation over time and space is both our inheritance and our duty.

In this class, in this convention of the Class of 2009, we shall celebrate such conversations across cultures as take a literary travel around the world in 180 days.

We are the only species that saves its stories, I remind my students. We are stories told together. By the time my students are my age, it will be 2037 and they may have seniors of their own graduating. (This frightens them a bit--they can't imagine being my age let alone the year 2037 or having teenagers of their own.)

I tell them this is important and a key mission of this convention. They must pass on our stories. In 2060, I tell them, they'll be headed for retirement, and I'll be dead. I count on them to save the stories and share them.

"Look to this day!" It was written 3200 years ago. It's up to teachers and their students to see it through for the next 3200. "Look to this day"

FROSH: "TXTNG ISNT LANG"

Today a freshman student told me texting isn't language. Well, it sounds oddly like Orwell's Newspeak but I disagreed. Sure, it's language, a specific register for a specific purpose. He was a freshman, what do they know, right?Here's a recent article on the topic of texting and its effects on English that features the comments of William Kist, author of New Literacies in Action: Teaching and Learning in Multiple Media. Texting, too, is at the ominous heart of this PSA from the AdCouncil's prevention series on Online Sexual Exploitation: "Acronyms," perhaps playing on adult fears of the texting phenomenon.

Out of the loop? For texting dictionaries see Lingo2Word and a quick reference sheet is at dominounplugged.com. Some opportunities to talk about what language is and how technology and media are changing it once again. Remember the invention of the book?

According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project report Teens and Technology, almost half of teens have a cell phone and a third of teens text.

With things wordsome, I turn to Google to find out if Geoffrey Numberg has weighed in. Sure enough he's interviewed, along with Naomi Baron on NPR's On The Media in a piece called "Generation Text" recorded in October 2004. These two experts offer a lively debate for consideration.

The whole is not long and worth reading (or listening to). Here's a excerpt:

NAOMI BARON: We know that children learn to talk because there are some people -- we call them adults or older kids -- who already know the system, and the younger kids pick up an awful lot of what we model for them. My question is not "Can you have a range of different registers -some informal, some formal, some texting, some essays that you turn in for class" -- but "Are we modeling those more formal forms of writing that we used to?" And I don't think we are so much any more.

GEOFFREY NUNBERG: The more you write, the better you write. The best way to learn to write is not to learn the rules or take courses. Just sit down and write. To that extent, I think you could argue that the kids who are now doing text messaging and email and, and IMs and so on and so forth, will wind up writing at least as well as and possibly better than their parents or than any generation in history.

Numberg goes on to say that he finds this generation of teens using writing to communicate where previous generations did not. So it's not a matter of different but more.

Insomuch as teens are going to do what teens are going to do when it comes to socializing, the best angle for teachers of English to take is "can't beat 'em, join 'em." Work with the language they love in comparison and contrast to lovely language. Teach the registers of appropriate use. When is texting best? How can texting create better note-taking in class? What sort of poetry evolves? What phonetic tricks do we use when we text? 4XMPL

Finally, in regard to the above excerpt, I agree with both linguists. Baron's right when she says we don't present enough models of good formal writing (how many research papers have students read, besides their own attempts? yet we insist they get it right with one try a year). The more one reads, the better one writes. I can always pick out the avid readers by marking teens' essays. And Numberg's point is generally agreed upon--the more one writes, the better one writes.

Baron adds, "Those habits are easily broken if somebody cares to break them." Teens will text, we must teach.

Students Surveyed Said

My end-of-the-year survey of my seniors about their experiences with blogging for class are in. Many of the comments are perennial: "I liked seeing what others thought" and "The hardest thing was remembering to do it."

This year, because of the size of the course roster being nearly 100, I also received the comment that it was "overwhelming to read so many," not that it was mandatory to do so. But I felt that, too; so for next year I'm brainstorming new configurations. May be there could be several blogs on various approaches to literature.


Just about everyone, whether they liked or disliked it, felt they had gained something from the blog. "It helped me spellcheck and re-edit my writing," "It's public so people are more careful about what they say," "Reading different opinions," and "Gaining confidence in voicing our opinions."


One student felt that it was a way for students to copy other students ideas. I was wondering about this myself. What could be viewed as copying could also be modeling. I have learned more about blogging in three months by blogging than I have in three years administering the blog, simply by reading other blogs, coming up with entries on my own, and reading comments. Modeling from blogger to blogger can be a myopic inbreeding at times, but I have faith in the evolutionary urge to develop beyond what is familiar, comfortable territory. Sure we all look around and adopt styles and ideas from each other. Then something happens by accident or by intention, and with a jolt, we move the bus forward.


What was new this year in the survey responses was the answer to the question on whether they had heard of blogs before working with the class blog. Whereas last year it was a mixed response tending toward "no," this year was a resounding "yes."

How We Read Is Determined by What

Or, Should English Language Art Teachers Widen the Net They Cast for Texts Students Ought to be Taught How to Read?

I've been swimming in The Fischbowl. On this turn of Littleton, Colorado's school administrator Karl Fisch's blog The Fishbowl, chock full of thought-provoking ideas and links for educators, I found myself in the deep waters of Terry Sales blog, particularly Sale's take on a Locus magazine column by Cory Doctorow, "You Do Like Reading Off a Computer Screen."

The article makes good reading and points out how technology has had a more-than-we-might-think impact on the arts, in particular literature.


In response to Doctorow's ideas, Sale, an English Language Arts teacher, ponders whether we should be teaching traditional literature texts or teaching reading in its wide arrayof textual forms, i.e. not just novels, short stories, poems, and plays, but the mutlitudinous variety of things we and our students read everyday. Sale notes that our curriculums mostly center on books,

"Traditionally, we require our students to read and pretend
to appreciate stories and novels. Yet the novel, along with being an
“invention,” as Doctorow suggests, is an art form. We don’t require all students
to take art appreciation classes, or study music theory, or attend the ballet.
But aren’t those forms as viable and important as literature? I tout novels as
explorations of the human condition and windows into other eras and cultures…but
don’t paintings and operas and films do that too? Is reading The Kite
Runner any more enlightening than watching Babel? And if the goal
is an understanding of universal human nature, how does an hour of reading a
novel compare with an hour of reading off a computer that’s connected to Google, [or] YouTube . . . ?"

I think he is suggesting that our ELA emphasis should be on reading--all reading, of everything. (I can feel the cringes: "Isn't the load of the English teacher too much already? We can't do it all!" and "What we teach is much more than a skill--it's a body of knowledge on the human condition." Yes, well, as they say shift happens.

Much of that shift has to do with what and how we read different things differently. Doctorow touches on the idea that form in which the message is sent has a great effect on how it is received. He points out:

The cognitive style of the novel is different from the cognitive style of
the legend. The cognitive style of the computer is different from the cognitive
style of the novel.

This fact coupled with the question the end of the above excerpt from Sale's blog, is what interests me as a teacher-student of the every-increasing myriad texts we are presented with in our culture. I find myself reveling and reviling in the mix, let alone wondering what my students are doing with it and how I can help them. I suppose it depends on where an English teacher finds himself or herself on the spectrum of teaching literary skills and of teaching literary concepts and of teaching literary content (i.e. for the purposes of this discussion, I'll define ((albeit vaguely)) as the expression of the human condition).


As I mention in my earlier post, visiting the New York Kid Robot store was like stepping into a new culture. It's the same feeling I got this morning when I followed a link to Sakai and tried to figure out what an organization that touts itself as a "collaboration and learning environment for education" really is, how it works, and how I might use it in my classrooms.

I wonder if all reading skills are transferable. How is reading a novel like reading a culture? Instead of teaching the organization of a novel, perhaps we should be teaching our students how to figure out the organization of a novel.

And what about the novel? In a hundred years hence will novelists be considered as quaint as poets seem today, as Kurt Vonnegut suggested a few years ago in an NPR interview? He sees that newer technologies for storytelling such as film and Internet are better at keeping people's attention.

Will showing students the organization of a novel help them with ablog as much as a film? What if films start following the scheme of a blog rather than a film? I guess, that might be a video game, right? Okay, what if linear plot doesn't matter at all. Will it change the way we view the human condition? Perhaps will we construct a view of the human condition that is more aligned to it.