Oh I should be writing so many other things right now. That is why this is so critical.
Today I promised my 7 year-old daughter I would open her a Facebook page. I did think ahead enough to say I would only do so under our dog's name as an alias. I messed up though because I entered in my daughter's birthday, and quickly learned that my daughter does not meet Facebook's minimum age of 13. I didn't even know that you had to be 13 to have a page. My hand was sort of forced into this thing because my daughter's best friend, who is 8, has recently opened her own FB page. This has been sort of annoying for me because, even though I've blocked her from seeing most of my information, she can still see when I'm online and she jumps in to chat--ugh. My daughter quickly began insisting that she was old enough, and as a compromise, I thought, maybe a dummy page.
She did not take the blow well. I sent her out of the house with a promise to find something age-appropriate. We'd tried last year, but there was nothing there. I searched around quickly and found Togetherville. It looks ok. We're trying it today. I've already had to tweek my own FB settings because it was posting what I was saying to my daughter on my page, which was embarrassing. It was also posting invitations to family and friends to my page. So it's a little like a Farmville app in that sense. You can go into your settings and adjust them to not allow the applications to post to your wall. There are games, art projects, quizzes, and some pre-chosen Youtube videos in the app. It says it's ad free, but the pre-chosen You-tube videos contain enough trailers for movies to pay for the site, I'm sure.
All this is weighing on my mind enough to postpone what I really should be writing on imagetexts because I think that parents do play a role in children's early online education. When my daughter got online for a while, we talked about the layout, about the safety issues, about the privacy, even about the way advertisement was built into the site. She saw a girl with the same name as a girl in her class and thought it was that girl, so we started the conversation about the power of connectivity of the web. I do not want to leave these conversations up to her teachers. I hope (and know) her teachers have these conversations with her, but I also know that parents cannot count on media and technology literacy being covered in the classroom. Engaging children on the web, even social networking sites like Webkinz, Club Penguin, and Togetherville, is engaging the very real literacies they will be interacting with throughout their lives.
Now to Blake, anime, and imagetexts. Wish me luck.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Standardized Tests
I have had the opportunity to volunteer at my daughter's school these past two weeks. Subscribing to the volunteer ideal that it's not what I want to do but what they need me to do, I do what I'm asked, which is how I found myself volunteering to proctor standardized tests. I do not support the use of standardized test as a major decision making factor for funding schools and their teachers. So I was quick to recognize the irony of my position as I sat, passing the time by reading Mark Prensky's book Teaching Digital Natives. In my head I was enacting partnering pedagogy with teacher education students and in professional development workshops. Physically, I was practicing a banking model of teaching by complicity supervising this test. What a contradiction I was in!
The testing reality of the public school system is antithetical to the student-centered, passion-driven pedagogy encouraged by writers and researchers such as Prensky, Gee, and Schaefer. Weeks of time at the end of school are spent preparing and testing. In some places, benchmark tests are given every week to assess student's progress. These tests take time and energy. Take a week when there are 5 school days. Assuming that the course or class meets every day, which is not necessarily the norm, a test a week means that there are only 4 instructional days left. However, some teachers spend significant time doing test prep during those 4 days and sometimes use the day after the test is taken to go over the test. This is not teaching. This is assessment-driven drill and skill. Most teachers I know do not like this at all. In fact a teacher recently said to me that she wished parents would do something about this.
I am a parent and a teacher educator and researcher. I am in a perfect position to do something, to raise voices against the tyranny of the test. Yet, I don't. Maybe next year I won't volunteer to proctor. Maybe next year I will say, "I can't support testing by being there to help you with it." But that doesn't seem right to me. They need help, but I'd rather be of help by volunteering to lead an exploratory class. Well, my conscience nags me and surely will not let this rest.
At least it gave me time to read.
The testing reality of the public school system is antithetical to the student-centered, passion-driven pedagogy encouraged by writers and researchers such as Prensky, Gee, and Schaefer. Weeks of time at the end of school are spent preparing and testing. In some places, benchmark tests are given every week to assess student's progress. These tests take time and energy. Take a week when there are 5 school days. Assuming that the course or class meets every day, which is not necessarily the norm, a test a week means that there are only 4 instructional days left. However, some teachers spend significant time doing test prep during those 4 days and sometimes use the day after the test is taken to go over the test. This is not teaching. This is assessment-driven drill and skill. Most teachers I know do not like this at all. In fact a teacher recently said to me that she wished parents would do something about this.
I am a parent and a teacher educator and researcher. I am in a perfect position to do something, to raise voices against the tyranny of the test. Yet, I don't. Maybe next year I won't volunteer to proctor. Maybe next year I will say, "I can't support testing by being there to help you with it." But that doesn't seem right to me. They need help, but I'd rather be of help by volunteering to lead an exploratory class. Well, my conscience nags me and surely will not let this rest.
At least it gave me time to read.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Why I care about poetry
No, they do not ask your students to write poems on the end of course test. But writing poetry can do so much more for you than writing about integrity in a 5 paragraph essay. When you use poetry in your classroom, students get to play with language. They get to feel the shape of the word, hold onto the meaning for a while, weighing whether it is really what they mean to say. The sub genres of poetry are endless. Villanelles, sonnets, free verse, and our students' favorite, haiku's. Poetry writers tell stories, paint pictures, explain situations. With shape poetry they get to mold the form of the poem, perhaps into a house or a flower or a spiral. They get to listen to the sounds of words for staccato, vibrato, innuendo. Writing poetry allows them to push themselves into places they can't go in the essay.
I hope that the future teachers of writing I work with will see poetry as not just something to consume, dissect, and critique, but also as something to create, finesse, and read aloud. Teach students to write poetry, then when the time comes for them to write that sterile essay on the end of course test, maybe they'll remember some of the lessons of language learned in writing poems.
I hope that the future teachers of writing I work with will see poetry as not just something to consume, dissect, and critique, but also as something to create, finesse, and read aloud. Teach students to write poetry, then when the time comes for them to write that sterile essay on the end of course test, maybe they'll remember some of the lessons of language learned in writing poems.
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