Being Happy with Writing

So I'm reflecting this week on the influence Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin have had on my teaching practice. Later this week I'm headed for New York City for the National Council of Teachers of English Convention and plan to participate in a round table discussion that celebrates New York University such luminaries in the English Education department as Britton and Martin. I had the opportunity to have Jimmy Britton and Nancy Martin as tutors during the Oxford Study Abroad Program for English Education.

As tutors neither never lectured in this program; they had you over for Scotch on the rocks and talked with you. Conversation as learning, learning as conversation.

I remember showing Nancy a handmade book project I put together in response to our group's having seen an RSC production of Romeo and Juliet. It was something I called, "Risk: Mercutio's View of Verona." It was a response that explored the portrayal of Mercutio as a victim of the feud, reading the interpretation of the actor's take as a gay, lighthearted friend of Romeo and his poignant end, essentially that of a victim of a societal events he criticized, participated in but from from which the pundit was marginalized. To accomplish this I layered contemporary graphics clipped from London event flyers and newspapers with lines from Mercutio. It was as esoteric as it was powerful. I was not sure what Nancy thought about the work, in fact, I don't remember her ever passing judgment. As she was looking it over, I wondered whether she "got it." She was in her 70s and the work dealt with plague, intimacy, fantasy, and political injustices in some very esoteric and aesthetic manners. I was unsure, that is, until she finally noticed a part that I knew was weak. She noted, "This page doesn't really fit with the others, does it?" I thought, "Wow! Nancy gets text. Any text. Full stop."

Not to miss the chance in this tutorial, I asked her what she—the one who had already spent more than half-a-century researching the topic—thought was the most important thing about writing. She scoffed at the question, at first. "Charles, oh, I can't answer that." After a pause she reflected that "maybe it is that the most important thing is the writer is happy with what he or she has written." She went on to say of course there are times when we aren't completely satisfied, we know we can do better, but for now at least, it's all right.

Not bad advice for a blogger, I think. Blogging, regularly does not allow the sort of revision process of "sleep on it" or "see how it sounds in a week." Although I must admit a good amount of backspacing, cutting-and-pasting, and on-screen rewrites, blogging means getting thoughts down and hitting the publish key without much of a gestation period.

Perhaps I was just fooling myself with those polished drafts of yore. Writing is never final, right? A blog post connotes a tentative, idea-floating aspect—a fly in amber, in a sediment of chronological posts.

Being happy, having something good enough for now, must be all right.

Image: Nancy Martin and me

Only As Good As Your Last Workshop

Participating in the Three Rivers Educational Technology Conference, held this week in Cranberry, Pennsylvania, I rediscovered that idea that I blogged about a few posts ago. One of the obstacles for teachers to using technology is knowing about it. It's not a high hurdle. Often you just need a name of a website or piece of free downloadable software. Or maybe to watch a colleague present a how-to and watch click-click-drag-save-file.

But it's a race of a thousand and one of these low hurdles. Learning the user-friendly technology is easy, finding it is the trick.

Bit by bit over the past year, I've gained IT knowledge from other teachers through blogs and conference presentations. It's pizza by the slice. How to podcast, how to screencast, how to photostory, how to scrapblog, how to convert file types, how to create a wiki. One slice at a time.

Yesterday I went to two sessions, one on Photo Story, a free video packaging system and Moviemaker, yet another way to create video presentations in digital form. Two days ago blank slate, tomorrow's potential expert. Just add awareness.

Image created by ceyo at the National Gallery of Art (USA)'s KidZone Collage Machine .

Time Flies in the Real World

This last month I've done little else in the moments spared from school prep than work on presentations at a variety of conferences, including a few halcyon days in the United States' most southern commonweatlth at the invitation of the University of Puerto Rico. In working on the workshops I've learned even more about technology, education, and art. The conferences have had the respective foci of Web 2.0, writing, and art museums.

I'm more sure that I'm not an expert on these topics than I am sure how I've come to be regarded as one. It seems I am just one step ahead or to the side of someone else. As I mentioned in my last post, their is a subtle difference between the novice and the veteran.

At the four conferences in which I've participated in the past month, I have been awe of the collective knowledge that abounds in a variety of fields and how instructional technology can bridge so many gaps. While at the Carnegie Museum of Art, we were making connections from scrapbooks to Scrapblog, in Pittsburgh's South Hills, we were sharing knowledge from practice, in Cayey y Ponce we were bridging art and technology, and in Pittsburgh's North Hills, blogs and writing research. With blogs at the center of the sessions, the diverse and overlapping themes of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, excitement at what's possible and potential with the Web 2.0 paradigm became abundant.

The irony is of course with all of this real world activity, my presence in the virtual waned. I guess that's not a bad thing. It's an ebb and flow.

Avoiding the risk of making another surf metaphor, I'm going to wrap up this reflection with a recollection of the opening of Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." It's not the plot or characters that I'm thinking of, but the occasion that allows Marlow that space to spin his yarn--the men are sitting aboard a merchant ship on the Thames in London "waiting the flood." Nothing else to do, but wait and tell of one's adventures.

Moving between the virtual and the real life of a blog is something like that perhaps. While sailing amid the high tide there's little time sit and talk about it. Maybe as the flood ebbs.

Image created by ceyo at the National Gallery of Art (USA)'s KidZone Collage Machine .

Novice to Expert in a Few Clicks

It's my understanding--not my experience-- that in terms of snowboarding, the difference between a novice and an expert is two weeks. That may not be true--and I'm sure for those who are "extreme" it is not. We all know the when it comes to making a PowerPoint slideshow the difference is 15 minutes (just to make one) and 15 hours (to make a really good one).

So what does it take to be a Teacher 2.0, a poweruser of Web 2.0 tools in the classroom?

Well, at the BOSSAC 2007 In-service Day, I witnessed 30 teachers go from novice to expert in under 5 hours. Where the were only two teachers who could define seven out of twenty-five Web 2.0 terms at the start of the day, everyone was creating their own blogs, wikis, and podcasts by day's end. It was great witness.

Two perceptions (of many) I took away from the day. One: how easy Web 2.0 technology really is, even for digital immigrants like our "shift happens" generation. And two: how powerful just a few Quick Starts can be to making that shift happen for the willing. I have no doubt that that Monday won't make a difference that shows up in the classrooms of our region. Here's my challenge to those of you who were part of the workshop and learned something new: Pass it along to at least one other teacher.

Now that you know, pay it forward.

For those of you who weren't at the workshop but are interested in learning about a few ways to use contemporary Web tools in your classrooms, find the handouts and Quick Starts at http://www.charlesyoungs.com/ under Media for Educators. Soon you, too, will be "catching some air."

Image credit: Smith, Jonathan. "Snowboard Air." Dziner. 10 Jan 2007 flickr.com.

eLearning: Not for the Faint at Heart

This month I am participating as session presenter in four conferences on Web 2.0. Every presentation is a bit different than the other. Prepping for diverse audiences on the same general topic has its own challenges and rewards. The challenge is obvious, but the reward is what interests me.

As I work on my presentations--to be "an expert in the room"--I find out how little I know about a vast subject. There are so many wonderful meanings and applications of Web 2.0. Everyday there are new blogs, widgets, wikis, videos, podcasts ad infinitum. As I prepare to mention some "old standbys" I notice new tools on the horizon. It can be overwhelming to consider.

Likewise it is exciting. By sussing out the answers I need for the next presentation, I find new ways to use the Web. The "teacher-as-expert-training" in me panics over not having all four corners of the World Wide Web pinned down. The digital immigrant in me is thrilled to know a few more tools in the lexicon of educational media literacy.

The best advice I can give for those who attend my presentations and have the same feelings of trepidation of swimming in an ocean of information and technology that becomes fathoms deeper and leagues broader every minute is to embrace the concept of "perpetual beta." Yes, the world is changing--it has changed, it will continue to change. Most likely we teachers will never again "know it all." We may not even ever "know as much" about some of the emerging media as our students already do. That's okay.

As digital immigrants, we may never loose our BG (Before Google) accents, but if keep at improving our understanding of the IT lexicon and rethink our pedagogies that have served us well, we can offer our students one of the best models: that of a genuine learner.

How to Endure: Work Around or Break Through

If teaching in world of "perpetual beta" isn't enough, as I reach the midpoint of my career (inshallah) with "sixteen years down, sixteen to go" my sciatic nerve, damaged in an accident years ago, is acting up. I'm moving slower, having to ask for help to move boxes, not able to make the mad-dash to the copy machine as I used to. As one of my doctors told me a couple of years ago, "Welcome to middle age, Mr. Youngs."

Far from burnout (I hope, I would know), it is daunting to think of the road ahead. It's a thought I've started the year with and so I was struck by a comment made by author Philip Roth, speaking with consummate interviewer Terry Gross on her show Fresh Air, which was aired yesterday. Referring to the character of his new book Exit Ghost, Roth notes that he has come to a point in his life when he has to figure out how to endure.

How to endure. Hmmm. I am a different teacher than I was when I started. Sure I have more tricks in my bag, multiple intelligences, authentic assessment, process drama, narrative inquiry, web technology. But because of the oxymoronic constant change, I'm not sure if I am any better equipped. What will I be --have to be, get to be--in another sixteen years?

No matter how much I learn about teaching--so much is changing! Do I teach the old stuff to give context or the new stuff to be relevant? Finding time to teach into the future while still teaching the background, the classics, the histories, the foundations can be very frustrating. And finding ways to explain it to parents, administrators, colleagues, and students is another great challenge.

Now, don't get me wrong: I believe the alternative--i.e. to stop trying new things and keeping up with the kids and the world--is a nonstarter. Call the engraver and put no hopeful verse on my tombstone.

But how to endure? I can remember in my first year of teaching my principal, Ralph Packard, said "have a hobby." In many ways I've tried to wrap my hobbies into my teaching. Perhaps this blog is a hobby. (I'm an amateur, I don't get paid, It's at my whim, right?)

I've always been a teacher with bundles to and from school. I don't know whether I am more in admiration, disbelief, or frightened by my colleagues who can walk in and out of the school parking lot with nothing in their hands. If the paper load weren't enough, there's the artifacts, the foods, the music, the art, the books that I use to teach literature. Tomorrow I am going to have to make few trips with all the India stuff I'm going to be using in our wrap up of reading Siddhartha.

As I age as a teacher, I suppose I am going to have to lighten my load. Maybe find tricks that don't require a bag.

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.

Productive Tension

One of the many elements of Dorothy Heathcote's Mantle of the Expert approach that can inspire all sorts of lessons, not just those which utilize drama-for-learning methods, is her concept of productive tension.

Heathcote identifies levels of engagement in process drama activities in the classroom, that might be worth considering for learning activities in general. The levels are

Attraction
Attention
Interest
Involvement
Concern
Commitment
Productive
Obsession

Productive obsession--how often do our lesson plans engage our students to this level?

This idea of productive obsession reminds me of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's ideas of flow pronounced in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In his Introduction this concept is described:

The optimal state of inner experience is one in which there is order in
consciousness. This happens when psychic energy--or attention--is invested
in realistic goals, and when skills match the opportunities for action. "Flow"
is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously
ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.

It seems much of school is managing to bring students to the level of attention and sometimes interest. Surely, the power of educational drama is a great means by which to deepen students' engagement.

But we can't always be in a drama process. The challenge is to devise lessons that are so relevant to students that the levels of involvement, concern, and commitment are reached and then the level of productive obsession hoped for.

Battery Recharge #2: A Li'l PD

Personally, this has been one of the toughest summers for relaxing. Not to bore you with the number of homestead projects (painting, gardening, fixing, fixing, fixing, and a guerrilla war on some surreptitious carpenter ants) or the number of academic ones (lecture presentations, editing textbooks, and curriculum writing), let's just say I'm not getting much of a tan.

Still when I had the chance to work for three days in "A Seminar with Dorothy Heathcote" at The Ohio State University's Department of Teaching and Learning, I backed my bags and headed for Columbus and some professional development in the realms of process drama and "mantle of the expert." Dorothy Heathcote, internationally renowned for pioneering work in educational applications of drama, is indefatigable as she is inspirational. Three days running at on hot August days at OSU, after a week at my alma mater NYU, she was raring to go as the forty of us students were ready for our naps.

I've been using process drama for the past 14 years and have always wanted to know more from the grand dam herself. Indeed it was a very worthwhile trip . . . and will take some time to make sense of the whirlwind of ideas and stories and structures shared.

Before I sift through my notes and recordings, I want to simply pause to reflect on how different the worlds of dramacraft and I.T. are. One as ancient as the first story, one momently emerging. Yet, imagine the mashups that could come about in putting the two together!--as students can not only capture their dramatic expression in media but also share them in a vast forum. Moving from the very private integral audience of process drama outward to product. Indeed their are possibilities, but I am wary of the price to be paid of moving in that direction necessarily. Some things are better--indeed precious--when left unpublished. Process drama might be one of them.

This leads me to weigh other processes, such as the writing process, and in fact, the learning process. Sometimes publishing process means a tombstone or albatross.

P.S. When I titled this, I meant PD as in professional development. But I suppose "process drama" works, too. PD on pd.

Recharging the Batteries #1: Mali's Viral Slam

It's midsummer. A time by which I hope some of the stress of the previous school year has melted in the Western Pennsylvanian humidity of July. A time when I start to shift through all of those piles of "to file." A time when I begin go to a mall and not wince at the sight of teens. A time when I start preparing for next year with some enthusiasm.

Today, I got a boost as I watched slam poetry bard Taylor Mali on YouTube on "What Teachers Make." Almost anyone who's been a teacher more than a year has run into one of dozens of sophomoric spams about how teachers "make a difference." So true perhaps, but so cliche. Yet, Mali's take on the topic entitled, "What Teachers Make, or Objection Overruled, or If things don't work out, you can always go to law school," refreshes the defense.

If Mali's answers are much the same as other similar "make a difference" poems, his ramp up to the answer provides a good context having a lawyer ask the question, and the clever: "I decide to bite my tongue instead of his." Granted, at points Mali's language and gesture may offend some people, but it is these that give the verse (and his delivery) versimilitude and freshness, if not an echo of a few union meeting diatribes. Bottom line: it got to me.

It added to my annual recharging of batteries, and thinking it might do the same for you, I've included the links here. Again, warning: it has content that might be objectionable to some. It's slam poetry after all.
According to Mali, 'turns out that many of those spams I've seen in the past few years are likely to have been the work of plagiarists at the school copier. (Teachers would do that? Nah!) Suffice it to say the original is best and delivered most believably and powerfully by its author. Take a look at what is another viral video for pedagogs. At least if it gets spammed, it will be the genuine article.



The full text of the poem is available at YouTube page, or, better by far (i.e. worth the visit), at http://www.taylormali.com/.