A is for Assessment

Oddly enough, I think I had more difficulty completing the small student learning map than I did constructing an entire unit from scratch. I spent a long time considering where to even being approaching this assignment from. First, I spent a while considering which short story I should focus on. Finally, I selected one of my favorite short stories, "Ordeal by Cheque", thinking that it would be both fun and engaging. While I think it is still both of those things, it turns out that it is not an easy piece to structure an objective assessment around. One would think coming up with simple multiple choice or true/false questions would be easy, but when your entire text looks like the pictures in this post, it becomes a bit more challenging. Ignoring the objective portion, I started by creating my alternative assessment; this was fairly easy and straightforward. My students would (closer to the end of the unit) be assigned a creative writing paper. In this piece they would take the contextual clues and characters from "Ordeal by Cheque" and decide what actually happens in the plot themselves. In the instructions, I had them writing a minimum of two pages typed. The only kind of difficult thing about creating the alternative assessment was structuring an appropriate and usable rubric. Once I got that started, however, it was pretty simple to complete.
After I finished all of the alternative assessment, I moved on to filling in the student learning map. Since I had already created the written assessment, I had a good idea of what some of my standards and essential questions would be. As it happened, creating the alternative assessment first was ultimately helpful in filling in the learning map cohesively. When I was looking up the Common Core standards, I found that they were rather limiting. The did not really cover the students' learning of things like literary devices, and I often found the standards to be lacking in general. I did, eventually, find applicable standards for each of the sections and then moved on to deciding the overarching essential question. I found it easier to create this once I already had the more specific essential questions created. Two areas I had specific issues completing were the vocabulary and the key learning sections. This story is hardly one to focus on vocab, but I still felt weird about leaving any of the boxes blank...so I ended up adding some relevant vocab but not many. I was not entirely sure what was supposed to go in the key learning section, as all of the examples sort of took it in different directions. Ultimately, I decided to take the "answering the main essential question" approach. It seemed like the right thing to put in there; I suppose we'll see if I was right when I get it back with Dr. Shannon's green pen having viciously attacked it.

Finally, I began the objective test. This part took me a good hour to complete, which I find completely ridiculous. Seriously? How do you create object questions for a text comprised entirely of these:

It's virtually impossible to do well. Try, I did though. The test ended up being 4 multiple choice questions that dealt mainly with who the main characters were and simple facts from the checks. There were 2 true/false questions as well. I ended the test with two short answer questions. The first was a simple, open-ended question that had my students writing a few sentences about events that likely occurred in the story and backing it up with evidence. The second was a question about each students' reading experience. If I had to use an objective test like this I would at least like to use it to get my students' opinions, thoughts, and feelings about what we're reading. In this question, I asked what they thought about the general structure of the text. I kind of multi-purposed the test :)

After completing all of the components of this assignment, I realized that the objective assessment seemed entirely unnecessary. It is hardly demonstrative of anything the students could have "learned" from the story. The alternative assessment, on the other hand, accomplished many things in one assignment. For one, the students demonstrated that they had read and at least somewhat analyzed the text. Two, the students were able to put their own interpretation, perspective, and twist on the base story line. Three, the students were able to practice their creative writing skills. The objective assessment merely tested the students on unnecessary information from the story. I much prefer the application assignment over rote memory.

Text Satellite

[There are PLOT SPOILERS in this post: readers BEWARE!]

When I first began to consider which piece I wanted to use as my central text, I made a list; it was short:

• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
• Looking for Alaska - John Green
• The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins

"Monstros e Baloes"

Almost immediately, I decided to do The Hunger Games with its themes of dystopian societies, class warfare, and the like. It seemed like a solid, simple choice. I toyed around with orbital texts for a while, and upon speaking with Dr. Shannon I decided to change to change my main text to Looking for Alaska (which you can see the finished product here: Looking for Alaska ). I wanted more of a challenge and I wanted it to see where I could take it.

[Edit: I suppose I should tell you a bit about Looking for Alaska] Green's novel. So, Miles Halter, the main character, transfers to his father's old boarding school in the south. There he meets the rest of the characters of the book: Alaska, the Colonel, Takumi, and Lara. He and his new friends pull a variety of pranks while also attending classes. The entire novel is about growing up, life changes, love, learning, and overcoming loss. [Big Spoiler] At the end of the novel, Alaska disappears and is later found dead from a car accident. The reader is left to decide whether she killed herself or it was an accident. 

Now that I was set in my selection, I sat down to brainstorm a variety of orbital texts. I knew I wanted them to vary in genre as much as possible. It ended up taking me a solid hour to compile and revise my list of texts and then begin my Prezi. The Prezi took another 3.5 hours, at least. In the rest of this post, I will endeavor to justify why I chose a few of the pieces that I did. (WARNING: Some plot spoilers!)

Novel: The Giver by Lois Lowry

While an obvious choice for its heavy theme of loss of innocence, The Giver was one of my last minute additions. I simply did not think of it at first (and I'm sitting here typing this and wondering what else I may have forgotten). The protagonist of this novel grows up in the most sheltered, controlled life you can possibly imagine. The event in the plot that ignites his loss of innocence is when he becomes "the receiver" and is transferred all of the community's memories from "the giver". It is a crushing dose of reality for someone who didn't even know bad weather existed and only had one memory of feeling pain. I think that this novel would pair along side of Looking for Alaska beautifully.

"War and Peace"

Art/Image: "Monstros e Baloes"

This and "War and Peace" are two of my favorite sketches of all time. I think the themes that one could interpret from both of these images fit perfectly with the themes laid out in Looking for Alaska. Despite both of them being very simple in color and content, they are both incredibly dynamic. I believe that they would easily integrate into a unit with Looking for Alaska.

An Open Letter to Students Returning to School & Is College Worth it?

Enjoy :)

Readicide: Is our children learning?

My prevailing mood after reading chapters one and two of Readicide is dismal. Kelly Gallagher provides, if not overloads, his readers with a mountain of statistics about current [well, sort of] reading levels and habits. While these statistics are not really full of sunshine and rainbows, I would argue that Gallagher describes many valid and accurate observations and provides his readers with numerous ideas and concepts to begin reversing the reading habits and levels of our students. I suppose I will begin this blog post by talking about some of the interesting observations Gallagher mentioned and my personal reactions/interpretation of them. Then, I will discuss some of the suggestions Gallagher made in chapter two.

I would like to start with this quote: "Want to extinguish an adolescent's curiosity? Cover as much material as possible" (Gallagher 10). Gallagher mentions how assigning texts such as Dickens and Fitzgerald only kill the curiosity of the students. This was exactly my experience in high school and has become a longstanding joke between me and my 10th grade English teacher. I didn't read either of the Dickens texts that were required for her class, nor did I read the Shakespeare texts; they simply did not interest me. Instead, I would bring books that were physically smaller in size and conceal them inside the massive, intimidating Dickens books. On the whole, I would consider myself an avid reader and a good student. While I didn't do the required reading, I read the Sparknotes (gasp), participated in class successfully, and managed to pull an A in the class. I think that some "classics" should be included in the curriculum, but it most definitely should not be a schedule of classic after classic. Like Gallagher stated, it will simply "extinguish an adolescent's curiosity"; I have absolutely zero interest in anything by Dickens now. If we, as teachers, balanced the classic novels with more modern/interesting/relevant novels, our students would be much more intrigued and prompted to read more.

A few times in these chapters, Gallagher elaborates on how in some schools, they are removing the novel entirely. This seems asinine to me....we want to increase the literacy of our students, so let's remove all of the novels. Um, how about no? That is the most counter-intuitive idea I've ever heard. Gallagher quotes another text saying, "It is not simply a matter of the number of words unheard and unlearned. When words are not heard, concepts are not learned. When syntactic forms are never encountered, there is less knowledge about the relationship of events in a story. When story forms are never known, there is less ability to infer and predict. When cultural traditions ant the feelings of others are never experienced, there is less understanding of what other people feel." (Gallagher 32, Wolf 102) This is a long way of simply saying that if students are not reading, there is no feasible way that they are learning. If this is going to be a concept that many schools adopt, I would much rather see teachers only teaching classics. I just want my students reading books.  Gallagher cites two other sources with statistics about what happens when students simply read. He summarizes, "poor readers tended to have greater gains in vocabulary with 15 minutes of reading and they had better gains on reading comprehension with 40 minutes of reading" (Wu and Samuels 2, Gallagher 42) and that, "students who read a novel with many unique words actually learned the meaning of those words from context clues only" (Krashen 10, Gallagher 43). With statistics like these, I do not understand why every teacher across the nation isn't offering self-selected reading [SSR] times, or free voluntary reading [FVR]. As a student with a bunch of after-school responsibilities, I would have killed for 20 minutes of free reading time during the school day.
One thing I found particularly interesting in these two chapters was Gallagher's findings between his students in California and the students he interacted with in Wyoming. On one of the standardized tests, Gallagher noted that the title of one of the reading sections was "The Farrier". Upon polling his 12th grade classes in southern California [Anaheim], he came to realize that not a single student knew that a farrier was someone who puts shoes on horses. He asked this same question to the students in Wyoming and almost every student knew the meaning. From this, he inferred that where one grows up and what one is exposed to, impacts their cultural knowledge. I think that, in the back of my head, I knew this, but I've never really thought about it. Gallagher believes that, "What the reader brings to the page is often more important than the ability to read the words on the page" (Gallagher 33). I would completely agree. I think that we, as teachers, should definitely include literature that is of interest to our students. But I also believe that we should expand our students' cultural knowledge base. I love Gallagher's concept of an article a week is a wonderful one. Not only are the students getting good experience reading nonfiction news articles rather than the typical novel, short story, or poem; but, they are also expanding on their cultural knowledge base. Beyond this concept, I believe that SSR and FVR time should be more prominent in all English classes. While I was reading these two chapters, I noted how successful Gallagher was in bringing a library to his students. I had a thought that I will most probably employ in my classroom: I would like to devote a bulletin board to recommended readings. One of my favorite parts about going to Barnes and Noble is seeing what the staff picks are and why. I think that having a bulletin board where I post my weekly recommendation and leave a large area open for students to post their own recommendations/descriptions would be ideal for spreading the love/desire to read interesting and engaging novels. "Children grow into the intellectual life of those around them"....let's be the intellectual life surrounding our students! (Vygotsky 88, Gallagher 44)

A little introduction...

As I don't know everyone in this class as much as I would like to, I decided to steal Sam's idea to start off this blog with a little post about me! If you already know me, feel free to ignore this post entirely :)

Where to start? Let's see....My name is Nicole and I'm from Mechanicsburg, PA. My interests include:

Reading- I like Jane Austen, JK Rowling, John Green, Mark Z. Danielewski, Charles Bukowski, and many others.

House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

Knitting- I spend a lot of my free time knitting.....a lot.

My very first attempt at a sock.

Travelling- I spend a fair bit of time in California every summer. I also lived in a monastery in the Dominican Republic for about a month. We built a community center and taught a summer school. It was freaking amazing.

El Mango, Rep. Dom.

and gaming- Portal I/II, Final Fantasy, Lego Harry Potter [don't even!], Bioshock, Day of Defeat: Source, and moar.

During the summer, I am a live-in nanny for two adorable children (a 3 yo and a 6 yo). I've spent most of the last three summers with them in southern California. During the school year, I watch them and children from about six other families interchangeably on the weekends.

Silver Strand Beach - Oxnard, CA

One other thing you should probably know: I'm a nerdfighter! If you don't know what this is, I would suggest viewing this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyQi79aYfxU

Me meeting John and Hank Green! Squeeeeee!

And if you haven't already figured this out...I like pictures. Pictures are awesome. Get used to it! :D

But yeah...that's a bit about me. I hope the rest of you write similar posts so I can learn a bit more about everyone in the class! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments :]