teaching

It’s Monday night. That means essay mania.

Posted on by Mark Isero

 Every other Monday, my students write an essay in class to prepare for the AP test in May. Their homework is to type their essay on Google Docs before 11 p.m. so that their writing mentor and I can review it on Tuesday morning.

Usually, everything is quiet until about 9 p.m. Then the first text comes in. I tell my students that I don’t accept excuses but do appreciate knowing what’s going on. What’s even worse than a late essay, after all, is a late essay with no communicated reason. (That’s super bad.)

Here are the texts I received tonight:

  • Three students seeking online help on their essays. They had trouble figuring out Charlotte Bronte’s language in the Jane Eyre passage. I love working with students on Google Docs, switching back and forth from chatting to making comments on their essays. They seem to like it, too.
  • One student complaining that her Internet connection is intermittent again. AT & T says it’s something outside but has been unable to fix it. My student’s mom and I have been calling for three weeks. No solution yet.
  • One student asking for an extension until midnight because her job changed her hours today. Sure, not a problem, I write back.
  • One student telling me she’ll have to finish the essay tomorrow morning because she left her house after having a huge argument with her mom about college. The student wants to go to Los Angeles; the mom wants her to stick around. Her mom will come around, I write. Don’t worry.
  • One student informing me that he might be late on his essay because he was absent from school today to take care of his mother, who is ill. I tell him I hope his mom feels better and that his essay absolutely needs to be ready before morning, even though he wasn’t at school.

The bad news: Several students are still having trouble meeting the Monday night deadline, even though this is the fifth time we’ve done it.

The good news: They’re communicating with me. They’re telling me their stories. And they’re not lying.

Sure, I’d prefer if my students all had working Internet, didn’t have to worry about working 20+ hours a week, could apply to college without having to deal with parental interference, and didn’t feel like they had to skip school to take care of their mom.

But even though we didn’t achieve 100 percent on-time turn-in tonight, I do feel we achieved something else perhaps as important: that this class is a priority in my students’ minds, that they value our work together, that they want to do well, that they believe in the process of brilliance-making. 

teaching

Mondays seem strange at my school

Posted on by Mark Isero

 I can’t quite put my finger on it, but Mondays seem strange at my school.

It’s more than your typical Monday feeling. Things feel foggy, a bit other-worldy, like everyone is a little out of their bodies. Less homework has been done over the weekend. Students seem to forget what we’ve been studying. There’s certainly more surliness.

That’s why I try to be extra nice on Mondays. I welcome my students back, tell them I hope they had a good weekend, give them a frame for the new week. I offer a bigger-than-normal smile.

It bothers me that this kind of reboot is necessary. Can’t we just keep on going? I could push through, but it would be forcing things. As a teacher, I have to read the room, and most of the time on Mondays, my students aren’t quite at school yet. Real learning begins on Tuesday.

This, of course, frustrates me. After all, Mondays are 1/5 of the total time we have. It makes me think that I should do more on Sunday evenings to get my students ready. Maybe I should send more let’s-get-excited-for-the-week texts. Maybe my weekender assignments should involve more community building.

Whatever I decide to do, Mondays definitely need a kick start. The dread is palpable, and the energy needs a bold shift.

7th Kindle coming this week!

Posted on by Mark Isero

 This is starting to get exciting.

Thanks to a generous donor, a seventh Kindle is coming this week.

It’s getting me to think about next steps in integrating Kindles into my curriculum and classroom experience.

Up until now, I’ve used the Kindles primarily to promote free voluntary reading and to help struggling readers who might benefit from the device’s dictionary and text-to-speech feature.

This has been hugely successful.

But as the number of Kindles climbs, I start thinking about what’s possible once more students have access to e-readers.

1. Student book clubs. The social aspect to reading is crucial. Like adults, students like to read books together and talk about them. When I had just a few Kindles, I saved them for specific students with specific needs. As the number of Kindles increases, I don’t have to be as selective.

Kindles are great for book clubs. With print, you’re limited to how many copies of a book you have. With Kindle, every time you buy a book (or borrow one from the library), you automatically get six copies. That means if a group of students wants to form a book club and read the same book, they can do so much more easily. The cost goes way down, as does the time to find the books.

2. Student group projects. Too often, reading in English class is done in isolation, which is exactly what my students don’t need. That’s why I like to get my students engaged in group activities. Print books, however, don’t lend themselves as easily to collaboration, especially when it comes to annotations. Personally, I’m tired of spending tons of money on Post-Its.

With synchronized Kindles, students can highlight text and make annotations that get shared on their peers’ devices. This not only builds a social component to reading, but it also helps students construct meaning together. When students work together on an assignment that involves close reading of a passage, that’s when you build analytical thinking skills.

It’s exciting to think of all the possibilities. I do worry, however, what more Kindles will do to my physical classroom library. After all, more resources will go into purchasing Kindle books because of all their advantages (6-for-1, never lost, never damaged). Does this mean that I’ll buy fewer print books, and if so, will that prevent the tactile experience of discovering new titles? Will my physical books become unread surrogates for their electronic counterparts? (My gut is saying that my students won’t care about this and will instead reply, “Don’t worry. Just get us more Kindles.”) 

teaching

5 reasons why my students don’t know text conventions

Posted on by Mark Isero

 My students’ essays look funny.

No, I’m not talking about improper grammar or strange usage. I’m talking about extra spaces between words, or a space before — rather than after — a comma. Or quadruple spacing between paragraphs, or using an 18-point font. Or choosing not to capitalize “I.”

It’s all very strange, and sometimes, it makes me a little crazy. My colleagues think an incorrect there/their/they’re reference will set me off. Not really. But spacing    likethis      really makes     me mad.

The past three years, I’ve noticed a huge rise in my students’ misunderstanding of text conventions. When I read an essay that doesn’t look like a conventional essay, it’s physically hard to read. There’s no chance for the reader to get at meaning if significant energy is spent decoding.

I’m trying to figure out what’s going on. Here are some of my theories:

1. Less reading = less understanding of text conventions. To know about text, you have to have significant experience with text. If you’ve read hundreds of books, you know that there’s a space after, not before, a comma. As reading scores have dropped at our school, so has understanding of text conventions.

2. Lack of keyboarding skills = less understanding of text conventions. Most schools don’t have keyboarding classes, so students learn to type on their own. I observe ninth graders hunting and pecking, spending all their energy looking at the keyboard rather than seeing what they’ve typed up on the screen. They seem lost, confused, and stressed. When it takes two hours to type a page, there’s less emphasis on making your formatting perfect.

3. Rise of SMS conventions = less understanding of text conventions. If you don’t capitalize “I” in a text, why should you in an essay? If computers don’t recognize the apostrophe in “don’t,” is it really necessary in an essay? It’s likely that students do far more reading of SMS messages than of regular print.

4. Lack of precision in general = less understanding of print conventions. One of my favorite things is when a student complains that it’s the computer’s fault because she can’t log in and then realizes, with my help, that she hasn’t spelled her username correctly. Sometimes I attribute my students’ weird conventions to laziness, but that’s only partly true; after all, they don’t always catch their errors unless I’m there with them. They’re way more precise on a peer’s essay than they are on their own.

5. Lack of seeing text conventions as important = less understanding of print conventions. Why does print have to look this way, anyway? Aren’t the rules arbitrary, and aren’t they made up by some random dead white guy? For many of my students, the problem isn’t learning something; rather, it’s learning why they should learn it, why it’s valuable. The conventions of print seem like yet another racist system designed to keep them out of power, and the notion of learning text conventions seems like unnecessarily adhering to dominant culture. To say, “This is important” or “You’re judged on this kind of stuff” doesn’t always resonate with my students. Rules, after all, are to be questioned.

There are probably other things going on, too, to explain why weird text conventions have sprung up over the past three years. My list of possible reasons, however, gets me thinking that I can’t approach this issue as an easy, fix-this-now problem. Rather than just telling my students that their text conventions are wrong, I need to teach them, from the ground up, what’s right. 

teaching

Battling the many distractions to learning

Posted on by Mark Isero

 I was really looking forward to my AP English class today.

It’s the first time I’ve seen my students since last Friday. Classes usually meet four times a week. But with Monday’s holiday, Wednesday’s PSAT, and tomorrow’s field trip to the city college fair, today was my only chance this week with my students.

I had so much planned: a Socratic seminar on Oedipus, essays to turn in, a new online assignment, an introduction to Beloved.

Then came the fire alarm.

I’m convinced we have four times the number of fire alarms than any other school in the United States. When I taught at a suburban school, I don’t remember so many.

I’m convinced it’s part of a conspiracy to limit the opportunities of urban students of color.

I’m exaggerating, of course. But I’m struck by how many distractions there are to the flow of learning. Even though my students are flexible and can negotiate the twists and turns at our school, I get mad that they have to.

We have a lot of work to do, after all.

The good news is, The class was still successful, though I had to shorten the Beloved activity. This seems part of a pattern: I’m doing well pushing my students’ writing and analysis, but I could be doing much more to help my students understand the books more deeply.