Squishy Not Slick

I've been trying to capture a thought for the last few days. While I'm not quite there yet, I'll share what I have so far, and perhaps someone can get me the rest of the way there.

The thought began when I re-read one of my favorite children's books: The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. I love this book. It's incredibly clever, and I especially love Oliver Jeffers's illustration style. I could write a whole post about Jeffers and how much I like his work (it's definitely squishy, not slick), but for now I'm more interested in the book's content and what it got me thinking about.

The book's premise is smart: the crayons in a kid's crayon box are upset with him for all kinds of perceived poor treatment: the way that he neglects, overuses, or otherwise mishandles them. Spoiler warning / a favorite example: the orange and yellow crayons write him impassioned letters arguing that they should be the one that he uses to draw the sun, not their counterpart. That's a great premise, and it reminded me of what I love about my favorite writing prompts, something I've been trying to figure out how to put into words, maybe even a formula ...

I think the formula is something like this:

embedded perspective + emotion

Explanation? Ok. Yeah, that's probably necessary.

I remember an illustration I saw once that might help.

Quite a few of the subjects that I studied in school felt like the spreadsheet columns. They were organized nicely into rows, and you could see the logic and how everything related to everything else. This was nice for me because I really like organization and things fitting together logically. The only problem with this was that it was entirely forgettable. I had very little capacity for remembering or understanding content that was presented in this way. You could explain the categories, the rows and columns, and I'd understand it completely. But then I'd walk away and forget it. It didn't stick.

"Narrative is the scaffolding of our experience." - James K. A. Smith

What The Day the Crayons Quit reminded me of was the narrative trick for understanding the grid. I need a narrative to make it make sense. I need stories from inside the grid to understand how the pieces work together. I think that quite a few students feel this way too. Not everyone can absorb the spreadsheet and retain it. Some can. Most (most?) can't.

This is what stories do. They take one of the data points in the spreadsheet and allow us to see the world from that one perspective. Suddenly the data point that rests at the intersection of column H, row 4 is no longer so forgettable. This data point has emotions, opinions, perspectives, and a story. We can see what the data points around it are like from that perspective.

An example? Yeah, that's probably necessary: Is it as simple as this? Instead of having students fill out a worksheet giving the definition of chlorophyll and listing its properties, why not have them write an ode to chlorophyll from the perspective of an emotional tree? Would this work? I think so.

With this switch to the embedded perspective + emotion method, dull content get a lot easier for most of us to understand and retain. It's a bit of a stretch to give a tree emotions, but maybe if you're trying the trick, you should pull out a list of emotions and pick a random one.

So, here's the formula that I think works for understanding and making dull content more interesting: pick a perspective (should be an object or person involved in whatever it is) and give them an emotion from which to explain their thoughts on the topic.

So, I guess the formula then is really:

perspective + emotion + explanation to make dull content more interesting and memorable

Thoughts?

We don’t live in such a world, and perhaps not even poets alive today wish we did. My ideal elementary-school curriculum would instead require all children to learn: (1) the times tables up to, say, 25; (2) a foreign language, preferably obscure; (3) the geography of a foreign land, like New Jersey; (4) how to use basic hand tools and cook a cassoulet; (5) how to raise a bird or lizard (if the child is vegetarian, then a potato); (6) poems by heart, say one per week; (7) how to find the way home from a town at least 10 miles away; (8) singing; (9) somersaults. With all that out of the way by age 12, there’s no telling what children might do. I have thieved a couple of items from W. H. Auden’s dreamcurriculum for a College of Bards. If my elementary school students are not completely disgusted by poetry, off they could go one day to that college, well prepared.

lots of rumblings lately, lots of connections

[most of this will just serve as placeholders until I have more time to fill in the missing pieces]

Is the future of educational technology going to look like a call center?

Rob led me to Gardner Campbell's talk [who I just realized is a colleague of some of my favorite people on the internet, @jonbecker and @twoodwar who are working on the #thoughtvectors thing at VCU], in which he explains the point of all this as "networked transcontextualism," which is the way to escape "the double bind," a term from Gregory Bateson.

In the same vein, Audrey Watters says all the right things [and thanks to Rob for storifying it]

Seymour Papert keeps coming up [Campbell and Watters mention him]

Campbell's "networked transcontextualism" especially reminded me of what Richard Elmore had to say about all this, that we're moving from "nested hierarchy" to "networked relationships."

Then Dan Meyer joined in, saying it with a Neil Diamond analogy.

It's been about five years since I last taught The Great Gatsby, and OH MY GOODNESS THE INTERNET HAS COME ALONG AND CHANGED EVERYTHING AND NOW THIS ALL SO FUN AND EASY AND AMAZING.

Ready for a Gastby reference? Here it is: I, for one, am very glad I'm not repeating the past. 

I hate doing blog posts of top whatever lists, but this deserves it. So, without further excessive use of caps locks: a list of reasons why teaching The Great Gatsby is so much better now than it was five years ago.

• Reflector + iAnnotate - I put the text of Gatsby into a PDF with some huge margins and dropped it into iAnnotate. With the Reflector Airplay Receiver, I can mirror my iPad to my computer and get it on the wall with the projector. That means I can have the text on the screen with big margins, and I can be annotating the book using iAnnotate as we go through it. I guess I could have done that a few years ago with an overhead and a ridiculous number of transparencies... but this, at least to me, seems like a new thing that is available widely only in the last few years. And I think it makes teaching Gatsby ridiculously fun. But, then again, I'm really into this kind of thing. I also like sweater vests, so take all this enthusiasm with a heaping spoonful of salt.

[iAnnotate in action]

• Crash Course - Not only do they have the perfect video to set up the Jazz Age (slightly not safe for some classrooms, btw), they also made two episodes just about the novel, perfect for viewing afterwards. 

• RapGenius - ok, I'm having a hard time deciding if this is my favorite thing or if iAnnotate + Reflector is, because, wow, this is so, so good. Some kind people on the internet have given Gatsby the RapGenius treatment and annotated it thoroughly with helpful explanations. It's not perfect. Typical user-generated-content caveats apply, but even still, it is so useful.

• Bingo Card Generator - I had this idea while eating breakfast this morning: what if I put together a BINGO game for Gatsby? Then I thought, nah, too complicated. I decided to google it anyway, and I found that Mr. Gravell put together a Bingo Card Generator. This was perfect. While eating my morning omelette, I typed some recurring themes and symbols and ideas from Gatsby into the generator and had a class set of Bingo cards ready to go by first period. It's been a fun way to guide us in paying attention to what might be important in the novel.

• Splashtop Streamer / Whiteboard - with Splashtop I can roam the classroom, iPad in hand, but still control my computer that is attached to the projector. This allows me to start and stop the audiobook while roaming the room, switch between Keynote for some slides and Google Chrome for videos and their timer (just Google "set timer for 5 minutes" and see what happens). 

• Socrative - Socrative allows me to collect quick feedback from my students using whatever fancy devices they happen to walk in with, as long as it has a browser. I can have them do short answer responses to interesting prompts (shameless self promotion, I think these Gatsby prompts are pretty great) or have them take polls or quick quizzes to check for understanding. Socrative is one of my favorite weapons in my teaching arsenal.

*Please note that the new, Baz Luhrmann version of Gatsby is not one of my reasons. No, I don't want to elaborate.*

[This list will likely update as I think of / encounter more reasons]

It wouldn't be the holiday break if I didn't decide to scrap my original plans and try something different when we come back together in a few days. 

Here's what I'm thinking.... any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I really like a lot about Sugata Mitra's SOLE idea. You can watch his TED Talk (does that need a TM after it yet?) about it, or you can read the supporting documents that have been put together about it (if you do, are you horrified by the police role that they have students fill?). Here's the basic formula for SOLE: students are given a question and the internet and then form groups to answer it. That's about it. It's pretty brilliant in its simplicity, and we're going to give it a try.

I'll have to tweak it a bit for our purposes in a few ways...

Our pattern will be one day of research (eighty minutes) and then one day of prep and presentations (twenty minutes to get set and then an hour to present, discuss, reflect, and write about it). We'll see how this format works and what needs to change. I'm assuming that the length of time needed depends a lot on the question, and I'm sure some of the questions will need quite a bit more time.

I'll assign groups. I know that one of the big pieces of the SOLE system is the whole "self-organized" thing, but, sadly, my students are fifteen and have spent a decade learning bad habits around motivation for education. Maybe they'd do fine. Maybe the question and the freedom to answer it together as they choose will help them to overcome those just-give-me-what-I-need-for-the-quiz mindsets, but I'm not that hopeful they're there yet. I have lots of other reasons for this, but I am hopeful that after they get the process down (a few rounds of it), they will be able to make good choices around who they work with. So, hopefully we'll get to the point of being actually self-organized in the near future.

I have put together a form to structure some of it and help with the grading part of it. I think that ideally there would be no grades, and it would be all about the love of learning together. But that's just not the reality of what we're working with here.

Here are some ideas for questions we might try to answer... many of these relate to the content we're supposed to be covering:

Which human has saved the most lives on the planet?

What does the rise of the selfie tell us about society?

What will daily life in 2075 be like?

Are you worth your weight in gold? Is any person? Is every person?

What is the situation in South Sudan and what options does the US have there? Which option should they pursue and why? 

Who is Edward Snowden and should he get clemency?

Which place and time on earth has developed the greatest art?

What was the most important invention of the last 200 years? 

Which historical figure should we bring back to be president in 2016. Why this person?

How would your life be different if you lived in a totalitarian state? Are you living in a totalitarian state now? How do you know one way or the other?

What are the keys to a successful revolution?

Standards? I've got lots of those figured out. This hits a bunch of them... 

UPDATE: I've gotten some great responses in this Twitter thread that I have yet to get into this post but will hopefully do someday.

Ok. Let's create some classroom action around the selfies/video discussion that's happening online right now. This is all hypothetical for me, but maybe if it comes together well I'll actually try it out. Also: please help me out. I'd love to hear some better ideas.

Do we start with essential questions, first?:

First, this is really about our relationship to technology, right? Especially technology that helps us to capture an experience? Or is it about narcissism? Maybe the first thing is to actually have students come up with the questions... and I could see this going into a discussion about selfies and culture, or about documenting your life digitally... or it could be about both.

ehsmrsj had her students: "[talk/write] about images (like selfies) vs words and which were better for capturing the mood of the day.  Also watched the funny 'Look at this Instagram' Nickelback parody." (She noted that the video had some language that was NSFW and had to be cut.)

Tom Woodward added this question: "Would a personal journal/diary be a textual selfie?"

This too from Tom Woodard: Is the Rockwell self-portrait a "triple selfie"? He writes: "wondering about painting vs portrait if subject is essentially the same." 

A question prompted by this essay (Are All of Your Photo Memories Actually Making You Forget?) from ehsmrsj: what the relationship between memory and photography/video?

Recommended viewing: Renny Gleeson's Our Antisocial Phone Tricks.

Related: maybe it's about how technology affects our relationships with others also: "The challenge of modern relationships: how to prove more interesting than the other's smartphone." – Alain de Botton

If you're into them, here are some ideas for Common Core standards:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9.1 Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9.6 Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9.7 Analyze various accounts of a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a person’s life story in both print and multimedia), determining which details are emphasized in each account.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9.8 Delineate and evaluate the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence is relevant and sufficient; identify false statements and fallacious reasoning.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.9.1 Write arguments to support claims in an analysis of substantive topics or texts, using valid reasoning and relevant and sufficient evidence.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.1 Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grades 9–10 topics, texts, and issues, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.2 Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively, orally) evaluating the credibility and accuracy of each source.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.3 Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric, identifying any fallacious reasoning or exaggerated or distorted evidence.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.4 Present information, findings, and supporting evidence clearly, concisely, and logically such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and task.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.9-10.6 Adapt speech to a variety of contexts and tasks, demonstrating command of formal English when indicated or appropriate. 

Then we need some readings. I'll go with the ones that came out of this tweet/thread:

Two Ways Of Seeing An iPhone Christmas: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/12/18/255208023/two-ways-of-seeing-an-iphone-christmas

The Documented Life: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/opinion/the-documented-life.html?_r=0

Wendell Berry's "The Vacation": http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/245686

GOOGLE MAKES YOU SMARTER, FACEBOOK MAKES YOU HAPPIER, SELFIES MAKE YOU A BETTER PERSON: http://www.fastcompany.com/3023603/creative-conversations/google-makes-you-smarter-facebook-makes-you-happier-selfies-make-you-

What am I missing?

@ehsmrsj recommended this: As popular as ever, selfies are changing the way we communicate: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/219856941.html

being an English teacher, I'd probably want to do something with the myth of Narcissus. 

Why Our Online Persona Is Needier Than Our Real One

Examples of "strange selfies" from Tom Woodward:

César Moreno

Alexander Porter, "bit.ly-GL27CV"

EGON SCHIELE, SELF-PORTRAIT WITH PHYSALIS

Then we need some discussion/debate scaffolding. I need help here. Anyone have anything? Probably some sort of generating of questions, maybe some writing... 

Apparently this is a blog about teaching, so I’m going to (sort of) blog about teaching.

I took a bunch of pictures this fall and got a few minutes to go back through them and wanted to do something with them so I wouldn’t forget. So I did this. It’s pretty random and not meant to be any kind of coherent. These are just some things that I want to remember and happen to be a bit teacher-related.