The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a staple around these parts. I've been to many of the places the protagonist--Junior--has been, himself. This book is similar in many ways to The Education of Margot Sanchez in that it offers a coming-of-age story from the perspective of a character who isn't one of the "usual" suspects--to mean white--and it can add a helping of multiculturalism to any classroom. What I said about Sanchez can be true of Part-Time Indian in reverse, at least as far as boys and girls are concerned. Boys will connect with Junior far more easily than girls will, even if they don't connect on a cultural basis. In that way, students are largely placed into the perspective of a student who doesn't go to a predominately white, more well-to-do school and punctuates that disparity by establishing Junior's surroundings on the reservation and then changing them to something students may be more familiar with. The effect in this way is twofold; students can see that not everyone is as privileged as they may be, or they might feel some measure of validation in sharing similar experiences with Junior, and students may learn not to take what they have for granted, as many don't have the same opportunities that they do, be it for cultural reasons, skin color, socioeconomic status, or location.

What would be tough to teach is the fact that the more...intimate parts... of students' lives may be laid bare via Junior as a proxy, dealing with pornography and masturbation and how to approach the opposite sex. However, these issues are simply a part of the "coming-of-age" formula and are separated and underscored by life lessons from which all students can learn. As I said with Sanchez, let this book be available to teachers who have the necessary experience and command of the classroom. Those of us who are still a tad damp behind the ears probably won't want to get into such a complicated book so soon in our educational career.

World War Z Book Talk

https://drive.google.com/open?id=18ZpY_BdPiiwVamCz8hrdqg6kZaW-vh2Y

The Education of Margot Sanchez

What I enjoy about literature such as this is its ability to bring more perspectives and cultures into the classroom, thereby creating a more worldly, inclusive, and accepting classroom culture. While others might see the difficulty in getting boys in a class to read it, I see an opportunity. Sure, it'll be a rough start, but I think proper encouragement and consideration for points of view and opening students up to the possibility of seeing things from another angle is incredibly important, especially in a world where the common societal attitude is "my opinion is the best and everyone else is wrong." By showing students events that occur through someone else's eyes, we're not only helping the students at a scholastic level, but at a level of empathy, as well.

As to whether it's appropriate to teach in a classroom is another matter entirely. I think new teachers would struggle with the content in this book, especially if the students are below 10th grade. Personally I wouldn't teach it below 11th, but that's just me. For more experienced teachers, I think that this book could work wonders in a multicultural classroom with the proper support and class discussion. The romance may be a tough sell for some teachers, but I think it's a good way to have students relate to the novel via the experiences they're currently muddling through. In fact, the entire "coming-of-age" subgenre deals with issues that these high school students deal with on a daily basis--that's why we call them "coming-of-age." I know that as I read, I found myself reminiscing about my own experiences at that age and how differently--and yet similar--the experiences are between Margot and myself; confusion about romance, the intrusive sexual thoughts, issues regarding friends and enemies, the notion of experimentation with substances, all of that. And on these bases, I'd likely teach a unit on this novel once I'd gotten a few years of teaching under my belt.

Readicide

Kelly Gallagher, with his book Readicide points out that the act of reading in classroom instruction is slowly yet surely finding its way, as its title implies, among the extinct, like the dodo or Tasmanian devil. Gallagher shows that reading is no longer as stressed as it once was in the classroom, and he thinks our society is suffering for it. I tend to agree. When we use reading as only a practical tool, it pulls the joy and the art from it. When, during World War II, Churchill's advisors suggested cutting funding for the arts, Churchill said, "Then what the hell are we fighting for?" Literature is an art. Poetry is an art. Art exists to help us explore our existence and create our own meanings for existence. If we undermine reading as a pleasurable activity, we're only doing ourselves a disservice.

In my placement classroom, we operate with Springboard curriculum. My mentor teacher commonly remarks that she doesn't like how Springboard has gutted literature, leaving us with a literary skeleton crew with which to man the ship of our students' learning. Most of the students in our classroom read only because they're supposed to. They read the bare minimum to maintain the illusion that they are trying, and otherwise ignore their literature. Some students, namely in the accelerated programs, avidly consume books with a ravenous hunger. And they'll be fine. The rest, though, they represent our society's relationship with reading. As Gallagher cites in his introduction, roughly 27% of all adults didn't read a single book in the last year. While they may be reading news or magazines or Facebook comments, they're not engaging with literature, with the art of human expression in the written word. And it's a shame.

I think the best way to counter this steep decline of pleasure reading is to become knowledgeable about literature. To know and understand a wide variety of novels and books gives us the means to help students pursue their interests while simultaneously and surreptitiously giving them the chops to become better readers. Standardized testing is a big beast, and it will take more than one knight in shining armor to bring it down. Until such a monster withers away, we must learn to move around it and fill the gaps it leaves behind ourselves.

I Read It, But I Don't Get It

The part of this book that stood out to me the most was the identification of different voices that a reader uses while... well... reading. I consider myself a strong reader and I find myself often making use of techniques such as the ones Tovani discusses, but I wasn't aware of the names they had before I read what Tovani had to say on the matter. The four voices are the interacting voice, the conversation voice, the reciting voice, and the distracting voice. I often find myself grappling with the distracting voice, usually when I'm tired. The fact that I generally read as I'm in bed may be a contributing factor. Of course, this predilection for wandering thoughts is what makes my job as a cartoonist possible. When I'm well enough engaged with a text, the other three voices make themselves known.
What's difficult for students, as Tovani recognizes, is that reading ability is its own sort of positive feedback loop. What I mean by that is that students who struggle to read are less likely to read more and thereby will fail to become better readers. However the opposite is also true--students who are good at reading are more likely to read more and thereby become better readers. It is a self-reinforcing system that we as teachers need to steer towards the latter rather than the former. By the time students end up in middle school or high school, they may have decided, either subconsciously or otherwise, that the content is either too difficult or too boring to even attempt. As Luke (in the book) said, "When I get stuck, I quit reading." It becomes necessary for teachers to make reading into something that's engaging and fun so as to avoid students utilizing online summaries or asking friends for what happened in assigned readings. We need to give students the tools to succeed. We can throw up our hands and say that "you can lead a horse to water," but we have the ability to give them a big ol' straw, too.

edTPA - extremely daunting Teacher Preparation Apparati

I'm a senior in my education program. I've written a few TPA lesson plans by now, and I've got a trembling grasp on how to create lesson plans. I do as the artist does and recycle those parts of previous lesson plans of which are renewable. And yet there are still parts of the lesson plan that I end up not "getting." Practice makes perfect, I know, but no amount of practice will make the edTPA less daunting, less looming and sinister somewhere in the middle-distance of my educational career. With the addition of the guidelines on Dr. Agriss' blog, they help ease some measure of burden, but as a college student with a separate-yet-parallel adult life full of bills, parenting, debilitating chronic insomnia, and finding time to regain composure between teetering bouts with psychological breaks, my shoulders are chapped and my back is weary. I skimmed through the edTPA's "Making Good Choices" document, a full 40 pages of tips and tricks for the discerning heavy-lidded eye, and decided that maybe it's worth weeding through with a comb of finer teeth so as to perhaps glean some extra burden-lifting advice for completing my edTPA.

I'm the kind of guy who doesn't study for a test and still gets a solid 85-90 percent. I wade ankle-deep into my textbooks and pull out with 4.0 GPAs consistently. But the edTPA? The edTPA scares me. In these waters there be monsters, and to defeat them, I must wade further.

When it comes to my lesson planning, I find that what I need the most help on is the use of academic language, and figuring out how to use formative assessments in practice. Writing down theses assessments is all well and good, but to put them to use in the classroom is a whole separate bag of cats, especially considering the other task-juggling required. I know firsthand that teachers in the classroom don't put together lesson plans for each day of instruction, and I imagine that helps once the monster has been vanquished, but before then, I cannot reliably fall back on shortcuts to get me through the edTPA. I've got to buckle down and strike true.

Social Justice - Not Just for the Cool Kids

"What is Social Justice?"

I think it's fair to assume that we live in a society, and within that society we expect each other to follow certain rules. Not necessarily laws, because laws are not necessarily just simply for being laws. It's more like an unspoken shared morality based on the society and its interactions with the individual. In many cases it exerts itself through laws, chief example being the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which abolished segregation, banned employment discrimination on the basis of personal, uncontrollable traits such as race, gender, nationality, et cetera. So when we talk about Social Justice, we're talking about the defense of those who are not being adequately given the equity or equality they deserve in our collective communities. Social Justice isn't a recent notion - The Black Panthers of the Nixon era, the women's suffrage movement, and plenty of others. These days it shows up as Black Lives Matter and as opposition to the white supremacists who were emboldened after the inauguration of President Donald Trump.

Now as to why it is important to our classrooms, how a child is educated is indicative of how they will engage with and think about the world around them. If education's goal is to shape the methods in which students think, then it stands to reason that certain conclusions can be arrived at when valid models of thought are entertained. For example, if in a classroom (now or elsewhen if that's a word) a teacher doesn't build up a student's ability to empathize with their neighbor and reinforces that with an idea that some people are inherently "superior" to others, then it's not a far jump to arrive at the notion that this student may have some morally flawed ideas about the people around them.
The easiest way to combat this sort of wayward breach of cognition is to stress equality, equity, and empathy, and that someone shouldn't be forced into unpleasant situations because of their race, economic class, religion, nationality, first language, gender identity, sexual preference, and so on. We owe our students the ability to live full lives, and that comes from education.


EDIT AFTER THE FACT: The initial blog post I'm responding to didn't mention finding sources. I thought this was about personal opinion on the matter.

Shakespeare - An Urban Rap

In chapter "Critical Pedagogy in an Urban High School English Classroom," Duncan and Morrell place high importance upon pop culture as a source of education for urban students. I find myself thinking back to my EDUC 413 class, where it was driven into the heads of myself and my other wet-eared educational counterparts that any source of media is considered a "text." Duncan and Morrell push this idea even moreso, postulating that a text doesn't have to be explicitly created for the sake of education to be considered "educational." What they insist is that classroom instruction should avoid being the iconic Ferris Bueller's Day Off scene in which a monotonous Ben Stein lectures about the Holly-Smoot Tariff Act while his students stare blankly into the middle-distance. Well, they don't say that explicitly, but that's more or less the idea. What they think we ought to do as educators is make our instruction engaging and relevant to the interests of our students.

My personal philosophy on pedagogy is that students who are having fun in the classroom are succeeding. What I mean by that is that games should be woven into instruction as much as possible so as to maximize the rate of retention while simultaneously making sure that appropriate standards are met. With the added information from Duncan and Morrell, I can expand my idea of what "fun" is, by bringing in pop culture and the immediate interests of my students into the fold. It goes without saying that such a practice will require being more in touch with youthful perspectives so as to create an environment that isn't "trying too hard," and instead creates a classroom culture that is savvy and relatable. By bringing in appropriate popular music (the tastes of which will vary from class to class), movies, television shows, youtube channels, and the like, I can help construct this ideal classroom culture.