Author Archives: laurelchinn

It went so fast…

Giving my presentation was sort of fun in a way, but it was difficult as well.  I had a plan.  In my living room, the presentation went smoothly; twenty minutes, start to finish.  When I got to school, I practiced in the empty classroom.  The presentation went perfectly.  The thing that I did not account for was the nervousness.  I knew I would be a little nervous, that is why I practiced.  In the end, though, I did not account for the fact that my brain would go blank as soon as I started, that everything would become muddled in my brain for a few minutes.  It was weird, because the befuddlement lasted for only a few minutes, but it threw everything out of kilter in a way.  It took a while to recover and then I felt rushed.  In reality, there was no rush.  There was time.  It all came out in the end.  I think that in the future, this experience will pay dividends, because I will account for an initial nervousness, a winded feeling, and give myself time within the timing of the lesson to settle down.  I will expect a rough start and just relax into it and wait for it to dissipate rather than being all stressed out about it.  It was a good experience all in all. 

 I think that my plan was good, the packet came out exactly as I had hoped.  I think that because I have never had to plan a lesson or execute a lesson, the timing was the most difficult part.  Facing people in a real situation was difficult as well, but once the jitters left me, it was all good.  Thanks to everyone who joined in and contributed to the lesson.  That participation was very helpful.  The fact that the packet worked out as I had planned that it would, as it did for me when I did my own analysis, was very important to me. 

 All of the lessons that we have learned in this class seem to be effective.  I think that what they do best is to give the student confidence, as they did for me.  I know now that I can take these exercises and use them with students and on my own for my own benefit or to complete an initial analysis before creating a lesson plan.  It has been a confidence builder to struggle through this class, to acquire the teaching strategies, to apply them to my own analysis for this lesson plan and in the development of this lesson plan.  I think that in the end, the fact that I could develop a plan like this is proof that they work.

Also, I’m glad to have been a member of this group.  You guys all made it fun.   

Progressive Traditionalism

Progressive Traditionalism:

A long time ago, my dad mentioned to me that discipline in our age is difficult because we do not work with our children. He said that in his day, his dad left him a list of farm chores to do, went to work as a carpenter, and then came home and helped his wife and children finish up on the work he had assigned that morning. As a greater challenge, my grandfather assigned my father the whole list and had him delegate the work among his siblings. It taught my father management skills that he used for his entire life. Not all of the children in my father’s immediate family went on to college, but they all succeeded in their own way. Two of the four children went on to college and professional degrees. Two worked as laborers. All of them were responsible and productive in the community and their families. What my father mentioned about his work beside his father is that it taught him responsibility and respect. He saw his father work and respected his authority because he saw his father’s expertise and ethics while they worked together. In a depression, my father’s family was fed, dressed and functioning.

Meier states that we must integrate the classroom in such a way that the students become a part of the same community as the adults. She insists that the teachers must maintain authority intellectually. The most compelling part of Meier’s theory is that she has applied it and we see that it is effective. Just as the students in this class have applied some of the ideas we have learned –difficulty papers and poetry

analysis– and have seen that they are effective in the classroom, Meier has applied her theories. To integrate progressive and traditional concepts, insisting on respect among students and teachers for each other and themselves, yet fostering intellectual thought, works. It works because it allows children to learn in an environment of respect, where they see their teachers working and delivering the goods. It divorces them from the pressures of social hierarchy and frees them to experience another type of challenge: realizing their own intellectual potential.

This is our last blog, and I have to say that this summer I will be making lists of lesson ideas. This chapter will be copied and put in my ideas folder. I believe that the concept here rings true as something we need desperately in our schools. When children take advanced classes just to avoid the mainstream population, there is something wrong.

The challenge will be to find a school that has adopted these ideas. I hear some schools have vertical teams that work to ensure progress through grade school and high school. I hear other schools try to mask grade inflation through no-flunk policies. I find that disrespectful to the students. Hiding from them their weaknesses is cruel. An F now at 16 can be a learning experience. A failure in the workforce can mean devastating consequences. It seems that Meier has got the idea. Many of our lessons during this semester are valid and meaningful, but to find a school that has these principles in place as an active part of the learning process may be a difficult task. I’ll let you know where I find it, if it’s out there.

Clueless

I read for this class with an open mind every week.  Sometimes I am annoyed, sometimes enthralled.  This week I read Clueless in Academe, and I have to shake my head.  I have looked at the dates on many of our readings, and I see many dated in the ’80s.  This book is dated 2003.  So here we sit in a progressively modeled class, blogging of all things, and we read a book by someone who supports the simplification of English instruction in our universities.  But it has been more than 20 years since this movement started, and we are still reading about it as if it is new and needed.  I see that it is applied in this class, but I have to wonder how many others employ these new techniques.  I wonder how long it will take for these techniques to trickle down through the ranks.  I wonder how long it will take for those who are being taught by these methods now to become the leadership that will grow the movement until it becomes commonplace.  And isn’t ths sort of education ancient?  How is it rejected by the very people who study the ancient?

If we look at any technical manual, any software documentation, we see the same problem with difficult language there.  I think that all professions maintain a sort of corporate culture that requires certain verbiage and subtleties.  I think that English in academe is no different, but the fact is that the very nature of English instruction is to teach clarity.  It is a language, and to teach it in such a manner as to promote obscurity is ridiculous.  In fact, every time I read for this class, even those authors who are promoting a more simple approach, I have to pause and rethink at times.  It is fascinating and amusing.  It is ironic, I think.

In general, the message has been driven home, to teach and promote clarity.  What makes me smile at times is that those espousing such clarity fail to achieve it.  Many of these pieces could have been written in plain language or more simply than they have been.  But somehow, the deciphering does exercise the brain and make it a bit more fun to read.  I wonder though, if these authors could have written to amuse and pass along their thoughts without pretension, how many more interested students would have perused their writings, settled in for a good read, and perhaps adopted their theories in classrooms of their own.  If the reading is burdensome, who will tackle it except those members of the authors’ own club?  I guess if the audience is comprised of the offenders, and they read the new ideas and make changes, great.  But how many potential converts are missed because the writing caters to only a few.

In reading the blogs today, I see that one student left American University in part because of issues caused by the standard academic writing, and good for her.   Another mentions spending time planning a curriculum and having it 86’d by her county.  It seems that the ideas are out there, they have been proven to work and that they do not preclude academic writing, but the establishment in collegiate English departments is just as unyielding as the establishment in so many industries to include government and medicine.  What baffles me is that the people who are resistant are the people who stand for education, who see these methods work, and fail to implement them.   

lchinn

Princeton, not so hip as us

The ideas that we read about week to week, the inclusion of writing in the reading process, the use of writing to understand, seem to be relatively new. As I peruse the citations for each our readings this week, I see references to pieces written in the ‘80s, ‘90s, but little bits and pieces from the ‘60s and ‘70s are there. I wonder if in the ‘60s, the authors of those pieces were the radical, new thinkers. Hearing how effective these techniques have been for my classmates, I wonder about how long it has taken for these ideas to become mainstream.

In Greene’s Reinventing the Literary Text,” students practice writing from a character’s perspective. This is an exercise that I intend to utilize in my final teaching project. We will read The Harlem Dancer, a poem, and then write letters from the stripper to her grandmother and a friend. After reading Greene’s piece, the idea settled as perfectly suited to this work. How better to get into the mind of a stripper in Harlem? I am sure none of us have had the experience, and yet somehow, I think that we can imagine the anguish this woman feels. I am toying with the idea of having students write a letter from her to her Southern Baptist grandma in — I don’t know — Georgia, the one she supports, and then rewriting it after they have read more about Harlem and survival in New York during the ‘40s. I wonder, what lies would she tell and why? The answers seem obvious. But if the assignment were repeated in the form of another letter to a friend, perhaps someone in the same position in another state, how would the tone change? How much would students gain in understanding from this type of writing?

From the very beginning of this course, each reading has been enlightening for me and encouraging, as I have stated before many times. I do find that they are somewhat repetitive now in theme and content, some more enjoyable than others… But they all say essentially the same thing: that we must allow our students to explore freely.

We visited Princeton this week. We do not anticipate that our son will gain admittance, but we went anyway. We went to the admissions off ice and checked the admissions stats. Twenty-six percent of freshman students had an SAT of 2300-2400 last year. Obviously, writing skill made the difference for those students that were accepted.

The most impressive aspect of the application packet was the description of freshman coursework. They said that all freshman are encouraged to explore an area of interest in a seminar style classroom. Freshman, exploring. I thought that it must be difficult for a lot of those freshman to work for a seminar class, to be free to research., but I had to laugh a little because so many of my fellow classmates are already pursuing this format, at the high school level.

These are ideas that seem to have come into mainstream acceptance in the ‘80s, but it has taken years for them to trickle down through the ranks. I wonder how many kids will be left floundering because their teachers refuse these newer, somewhat freeform ideas. And I wonder, as more colleges adopt this method of instruction, how difficult it will be for kids to adjust to the idea that they can be free to explore and research what interests them.

Lessons from Textual Power

I had promised after reviewing my past blogs not to glow about our future readings, but in Textual Power I found a few things to put into my Future Lesson Plans file.  I also found myself reviewing every other paragraph and, like somebody else had mentioned, wanting to bang the text and my head against the wall.  The language Scholes uses left me wondering.  Gee, do I know enough to be an English teacher.  I mean, there were years of voracious reading for pleasure and then the transcribing volumes of text as a reporter, the vocabularies of scientists and business people, physicians and those who specialize in the production of time release capsules, the pouring of grout into cinder block walls, any variety of very specific language, and Scholes left me grasping for my dictionary.  Belletristic: writer of letters.  Peripatetic: itinerant.  reification: the process of regarding something abstract as material or concrete.  These are a few of the stumpers I encountered.  They would comprise the first paragraph of my difficulty paper, were I to write one connect with this book.

The lessons that I would include in my notebook for use later were mentioned in class, so I guess that they are not particularly innovative, or perhaps Scholes came up with them and they have become commonplace.  I thought the rewriting of the story from a different character’s point of view would be interesting.  It would require a close reading and an indepth understanding of that character’s motivations. 

The most interesting idea, and it appeared early on in the text, was the breaking down of the text.  How many of the sentences were required to create the story?  Again, this would require a close reading, it would focus the reader, help determine exactly what the story is. 

Scholes, I thought made what could have been an entirely pleasant read, annoyingly dense, and his insistance that Hemingway must be read along side a feminist work was insulting to me.  Hemingway is a masculine genre, but to assume that women cannot handle it without a counterpiece to “soften the blow” is politically correct and likewise, chauvanistic.

Reflecting on Reflecting

I went back and read my entries and realized that I really do believe that the class must be interested only in what I like about a specific reading.  I tend to go through and sort of touch on the readings and glow about what is so neato in each. 

In my defense, I have no real experience to draw on or application of the techniques described to share.  So what would I discuss?  In reading through I realize that I do focus, and criminally so, only on what I like.  Others go on about what is annoying, how they feel it may or may not work in class.  I just drone on about the happy joy, joy.  The piece about Sonny’s Blues really annoyed me, so I did not write about it.  I should have.  All of my anger at that teacher — I sat across from my husband bellowing about her — should have been included in my blogging.  I have never blogged before, though, so the whole concept, while getting easier, is a little bit wide open for me. 

I have been obviously sort of sponge-like.  I go on about how the readings have been resolving some of the stress I have at the prospect of teaching and my hope of being effective in the classroom.  In reading the other entries, I have found more solace than in writing my own.  Seeing the application of the information we learned teaches.  I trust the other students’ experience and their application of these concepts more than Blau.

My writing in the blogs has relaxed a little.  Still, it is hopelessly in agreement.  I tend to go through and pick out what jives with class discussion, what concurs.  I see in other entries the open discussion of annoyances and grievances that I have never felt “allowed” to mention in class before.  I guess I have perfected “schoolish” behavior and will discipline myself against it in the future.  How good of me to do so. 

I see how my writing changed in style a little.  It has eased.  It is less formal and sort of paper-ish.  Blogging, as I said earlier, is a new and strange idea.  I like it, and I can see myself easing into the practice over the few entries I have made. 

Not much else to say here.  There is nothing else I can express that is likey-likey today.

laurel

So glad to hear it works

I cannot seem to leave comments…so Renee, I’ll just say here that I did not mind your supersized post.  It was terrific to hear exactly what I have been thinking or wondering about during the course of our readings.  I kept thinking that the group discussions were so tedious as a student.  No one works in them.  They chat.  I have always considered them hangover days for the instructors.  But to hear that you had these same concerns and as an actual teacher, which I am not, had some hesitation to use groups made me read on and really enjoy your post.  I do not have that sort of classroom experience, so it is essential that I learn a lot from those of you who do.  I especially liked your adjustments.  I liked that you worked with the difficulty papers and then proceded and that those papers excited your students. 

The funny thing about the reading this week is that I had the same reaction and have had the same reaction that I think students will have to the prospect of not getting “the answers” from the instructors.  I read Sonny’s Blues and when I began reading the piece about it, Confronting Resistance, I was set back on my heels at first to her mention of homosexuality in the piece she had been teaching to her class.  I thought, what homosexuality?  Did I misread this?  As I read on, I realized that her title is odd because she only touches on Sonny’s Blues and that she was discussing a different story.  When she finally arrived at Sonn’y Blues, I was very happy to see that my interpretations had been correct, at least according to her.  I was, in spite of our readings and the fact that I am sold on the idea of self-exploration, really happy about that.

 So the reading goes on, and in the Blau book I had the same reaction again.  I really wanted to get through the chapter to the final analysis of each poem that we read.  I wanted confirmation.  But something else happened as well, the tension has eased as I think some of the teachers in class have mentioned as they experiment with these techniques in their own classes.  I am less “freaked out” by the prospect of weeding though a piece and picking out those parts that I used to gloss over.  I want to do more.

At the gym one of the trainers said to me something along the lines of, so why do you study English?  Why don’t they just write what they mean instead of hiding it?  I wanted to ask him why he liked going to school and studying muscle tissue and nerve response, but held back and wrote out the l(a poem by e.e. cummings for him.  I told him to go through and pick out what hurt in the poem. (Word choice he understands only too well) He stood there for a moment and asked me difficulty questions.  He asked, was this a parentheses.  He asked why is was written that way.  I told him the form may have to do with meaning.  He told me he got a really high math SAT.  I told him I did not.  And then, while I struggled through leg raises and scissor kicks, he figured out the poem, or a lot of it. 

So I am not a teacher yet, but the readings do support me as an individual and give me some confidence that I may know how to approach this idea of teaching when the time comes.  As far as the lecturing, which someone wrote about, now I find it a relief in a way but I think also that it depends on the teacher.  My writing teacher talks for two hours a night and the time flies.  She uses the readings to illustrate a specific style and then expounds on it before we read our own work.  She is truly an excellent guide I would say rather than lecturer.  But, that said, I do now see through the experiences I have heard about in class, in the readings and from Renee today that these techniques are truly effective.

meaning

 Do Readers Make Meaning was a terrific read.  Tying it together with the thinking aloud exercise drove the points made in the article home.  I focused on the Gretel poem, and throughout the reading exercise, the students made their own meaning.  The funny thing was how intent they were and we all tend to be on finding the “correct” meaning.  According to Crosman, there is none, really.  There may be the accepted interpretation, but here we are, daily, searching for the “right” meaning, and what a relief it is to think about and relax into the idea that there may not be a right meaning.  Certainly, as he mentions, there are the far-fetched ideas that some people bring to the table, but even those may be entertained and perhaps some part of the idea accepted.

When Edith focused in on the idea that Gretel may be about Nazi Europe, I sat up a little straighter.  I wondered, could that be.  I liked her reference to those events and how she tied them into the poem.  (Not to talk about you like you aren’t here, Edith)  I do not know the accepted meaning in the poem or accepted analysis, but I like the way the Crosman discussed analysis and the search for meaning.  Edith’s analysis, right or wrong according to experts, held water.  The group listened to her.  She supported her ideas.  They were real and based on her knowledge of the poet, the poetry of the time and genre. 

I think that as students and I guess teachers, we tend to want to be right, and there is a time for sticking to the mainstream concept of a thing.  We gather meaning based on our experience, expertise and insight into a certain subject.  We do reflect on and place meaning on certain readings.  We are not always spot on according to the mainstream but our ideas have validity. 

Crosman says “The text, in other words, supplies me with words, ideas, images, sounds, rhythms, but I make the poem’s meaning by a process of translation.  That is what reading is, in fact: translation.”  During the poetry reading, the group did in fact translate.  JJ asked questions about meaning throughout the discussion.  So did Edith.  They reached for meaning and discovered meaning.  They used their expert and common knowledge to work together in their exploration of meaning.  Crosman talks about giving an Ezra Pound poem to a dairy farmer, finding out what that guy thinks.  He wonders if the dairyman’s interpretation will include his expertise, milk.  He says that we all bring to the table what we know and that knowledge develops the meaning in each work for us.

The expert brings different and rich knowledge to the table.  The expert brings with him or her the ability to decipher through expert means.  The decisions made about a text by an expert will be different than the decisions made by a novice reader.  Nonetheless, the novice reader has put his own meaning into the text or rather, pulled from the text whatever meaning he can.

According to Crosman even the author’s own interpretation of his own work may be ambiguous.  That drives home the point that the article makes: that meaning comes as the poem or work is read.  A poet begins, as Crosman says of himself, with one idea that morphs as the writing ensues.  So then, does the meaning.  So then, does what the reader takes from the reading. 

Laurel Chinn

Reading Posters

Scanning through the blogs so far, it seems that everyone liked the posters. I did. As someone who has not yet taught, they gave me relief. I felt as if I had tried and true ideas and directions on how to specifically apply them in the classroom setting.

In keeping with the difficulty paper idea, the suggestions on this page were all about the students teaching themselves and becoming excited as they dig in to what pleases them to pursue. The inquirey project was a great example of that. I liked that Rikki began to falter with her thesis, but because she had the freedom to explore, she was able to connect the dots and then continue on her path. I liked the

Education posters

 In reading the posts so far, it seems that most of the class liked the learning posters and ideas.  I liked all of it.  As an inexperienced teacher, I am filled with fear and trepidation at the prospect of developing my first year’s curriculum.  The ideas in the posters and the difficulty book have relieved some of the stress.

I especially liked the idea of blogging, much like we are doing here.  I think it provides that freedom that one of the students expressed with regard to the inquiry project.  The freedom to dig into what you like, to ask, to be frustrated, all without penalty.  I realize that is how the joy of learning must be fostered. 

The inquiry paper was especially interesting.  It follows the same lines as the difficulty papers, but the assignment seems very detailed, and as a semester project, I guess it must be.  I like the structure and phasing in of the project over time.  When Rikki had difficulty with her thesis, the project itself helped her to continue her work in the same vein, because the time restrictions and have-to-ness of the traditional term paper are eliminated.

I think someone else commented on how these projects tamp down schoolish behavior.  In fact, I think that these projects may encourage a new type of schoolish behavior, learning and liking it. 

With regard to genre and connectivity, I love the idea of bringing up similarities between texts of the time and then exploring them.  I think that would bring the idea of a genre or an era into bright focus for the students.  I know that sometimes when that bell goes off in a classroom and you have grasped an idea clearly, it encourages further study.  Teaching connectivity will help students to apply this sort of thought in so many aspects of their education, as is the goal.

I did not understand nuanced readings and will ask in class unless someone can enlighten me here. 

On the first poster they discussed the idea of having students critique other students’ writing.  What a great way to get the writing done and also to create interest in reading.  The story of a friend, current and interesting, has got to be more interesting, at least initially, than any of those in the anthology. I think it would open discussion of critique and it would also encourage the students to step out a little bit and take chances.

One of the most compelling things in the posters and the difficulty paper book was the idea that students had developed their skills on their own with these tools. It makes learning fun, because it is self-directed.  It makes learning stick, because it is your own process.  I think it would develop a sense of compassion for others as well as each student’s experiences are discussed in class. 

Laurel Chinn

Elements of Difficulty, Laurel Chinn

The Elements and Pleasures of Difficulty jived nicely with our discussion in class.

I just watched a snippet of The Paper Chase, a movie from the ‘70s about law school, and laughed when the professor tells his students that he will ask questions and they will answer. He states that they should not ever think they are correct in their answers or done with an answer as there will always be another question. And through this process, he drones, you will teach yourself.

I think that more than a test or a “put you on the spot” classroom setting would, the difficulty papers not only assess each student’s progress, but they provide a safe place for students to delve into the learning process with transparency in a way that is not embarrassing or promoting judgment. They allow for the student and teacher to stand back and observe learning calmly.

On page 43, the author describes how a confused student trusts her analysis. She realizes that her reactions came from the piece. The student also spent time looking up definitions and experimenting with the piece she had been reading. In my experience this sort of dickering in the learning process exists only in a very safe emotional place, far from tests and graded work; it comes up in hobbies.

The clues as to what responses such as “boring” may mean struck a cord with me. Long difficult pieces are off-putting. Cleaning your garage is off-putting. It is the overwhelming aspect of, “what the heck do I do with this?” that makes it frustrating. It is the moving around of things and the revisiting of the same unresolved questions. The journals act as a finger in the pages. They provide staging areas for unknowns or as the authors put it a “safety net”.

I think that the result of the difficulty papers would be a sense of accomplishment as the student came up with what he needed for a final paper on his own, no prompt required. I think that shows respect for the student. It reduces the need for tedious outlining and instead focuses the student on those elements of the piece that would be difficult and therefore interesting to think and write about. I really enjoyed the book and the ideas presented.