Teachers of Significance

Trying something new in AP English with FLIPPING the class. Instead of doing the "think aloud" of key passages of the book during class, I am asking students to listen after/while reading; then, in class we are doing more interactive workshopping and troubleshooting on the chapter contents. I was driven to do this because the text is really challenging for some of my students, The Scarlet Letter and because I wanted to free up time in class at least once or twice a week to coach students on their reading, which was hard to do in a large-group discussion or talk-through of key passages. Here is a link to the Soundcloud recording that is related. I wanted to feature key passages that were actually read and experienced by the student with support. Here is what is included: https://soundcloud.com/drpappag/ch-9-leech-and-patient 1.) Reading! I did a dramatic reading of 3-4 key passages in the chapter. 2.) Vocab support. As I read, I add realtime paraphrasing, inclu

TRANSCENDENTALISTS UNITE!   Goal:  To foster inquiry and connections across various prompts that we have read (including Krakauer's article from Outside Magazine, "Into the Wild"; essays and letters from Thoreau to Emerson and Whitman; poems from Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson; two texts below, Whitman's "Song of Myself, #52" and Abrahman Lincoln's "The Gettysburg Address." Perspectives: You will draw one of these perspectives to represent in the fishbowl discussion, and you will need to prepare your perspective to represent her or him accurately!   - Margaret Fuller - Frederick Douglass - Henry David Thoreau - Walt Whitman - Ralph Waldo Emerson - Emily Dickinson - Chris McCandless Questions: What do you think is most important in life? Why are people unhappy? What type of quest do you think is meaningful? What would you say if you were being wiretapped without your knowledge, as wi

Non-Fiction Book -- Final Research Installment in your Conceptual Inquiry Project What’s this?   During the second part of this quarter, you will select and read a full non-fiction book of your choice.  Again, like the audio blogs, this book choice may explore the topic directly, obliquely or in some tangential way that we do not anticipate.  We can recall from the history of the Syntopicon project that they had already spent $1M (in 1952!) and did not see a way through to completing the project and were tempted to sell the printing plates as junk!  According to the history of the project: “Adler persevered, however, having spent the previous eight years of his life on the project. He single-handedly raised funds by selling more expensive `Founders Editions’ of the sets, and disobeyed the order to fire his entire staff. There were times, during the process when he admitted: `the question was could we sell the plates for junk! Could we dispose of the plates as old metal?’”  Lik

Politics and Literature In her landmark essay, Literacy in Three Metaphors , Sylvia Scribner directs our attention a three-fold purpose in appropriating literacy skill and insight: adaptation, power, and grace.  Adaptation, she allows, features the work skills that students need in order to be able to adapt and survive; as with organisms within the metaphor of natural selection, literacy in this metaphor focuses on being able to survive in the "real world" and "work skills."  This metaphor dominates public discourse on literacy education at the present time because we have anxiety about the  shape that our knowledge economy is taking and where the jobs will be in 5-10 or more years.  This metaphor has swollen itself and has pushed aside two the metaphors which have constituted the fibre of our  culture and democracy.  We need again, to think about how language enshrines political power within the context of political rights, and we need to attend to the personal cu

A post about the significance of response writing: http://tomakeaprairie.wordpress.com/2014/11/13/writing-meaningfully-about-meaningful-reading-part-1-a-look-at-low-stakes-writing/

Read 4000 Read 4000 is an attempt to capture the simple idea that in order to grow in reading achievement, starting at 4 th grade, children need to read about 800,000 words per year. That’s just to keep up with the 50 th %ile of reading achievement. Students in the top 10% of reading achievement are reading on average 2.3 million words per year. For a point of reference the complete series of 7 Harry Potter books contains about 1 million words. A Simple Number Trying to communicate reading volume in terms of words per year doesn’t go well. Most people have resorted to setting goals based on a number of books per year. The Southern Regional Education Board, Making Middle Grades Work, and High Schools that Work recommend setting a goal of 25 books per year. Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer and Reading in the Wild , recommends 40 books per year. In all cases they recommend finding a way to allow/account for longer books, short boo

Art and Controversy (in AP English Language).   Students learn best when constructive controversy is engaged (Johnson and Johnson, 2009), and the art of Barbara Kruger gets us to rethink assumptions by introducing controversy. Here, a floating hand holds up an ID-card sized sign that offers a disturbing message, and  Kruger gets viewers to stand outside of their typical understandings.  In formulating these ideas and in making these juxtapositions, Kruger destabilizes accepted connotations of certain words such as "friend" or "belong," or in this case, a philosophical phrase.  Literacy researcher Rebecca Trites calls this "critical literacy" ( Disturbing the Universe, 2004), and it is the type of read-think-write move that causes us to question and push back against ideologies and patterns that form our assumptions.   It's important to incorporate texts, images, ideas that set the stage for students to question in a substantial way. Enjoy th