Booktube

Why didn't anyone ever tell me about this? I was just reading this article on Booktube in the New York Times. I didn't know this was a thing. Maybe it could be used for book reports or for recommending books to students.

Some Interesting Looking Ted-Ed Collections

Next year my school is going to a "1-to-1" initiative. Basically, every student in the grades 6, 7, and 8 will be getting an iPad. I am looking forward to it. So, as I am on summer "break" (teaching summer school is a break, right?) I am cruising around the internet to look for cool things that I can use in class.

One of these things are collections of videos by Ted-Ed. While I wouldn't use all the videos in any one collection, having them grouped around like ideas seems to make sense to me. Here are links to a few of them that I especially like.

The Writer's Workshop

Reading Between the Lines

The Way We Think

If you give any of these a try, I'd love to know which ones you especially like--or don't like for that matter.

Your Brain On Fiction

I love to read. I love to encourage my students to read. I have always intuitively felt that readsing enlarged me, made me a more well-rounded person. Here is a link to an article that shows how brain scientists are discovering that fiction reading really does improve how we think and interact with others.

Your Brain on Fiction
By ANNIE MURPHY PAUL
Published: March 17, 2012

Ah, Memories...

Back in 2003, a few months after my daughter was born, I went to San Francisco for NCTE and NWP national conferences. It was the one time at a convention I got to talk to really famous people. I talked a little with Naomi Shihab Nye--and she IS wonderful as a person as well as a poet. I got a book autographed by Gary Paulsen. The highlight for me, though, was to get to meet and talk to Paula Danziger.



When I was in high school I read many of her books. I started with The Cat Ate My Gymsuit, and went on to read most of her other young adult novels. I think my favorite may have been Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? As my own parents had divorced when I was in seventh grade, I felt a connection to this.

Her young adult books deal with real issues. Her characters are realistic. And she almost always managed to inject some quirky humor into her writing.

She autographed one of her Amber Brown books to my daughter, Molly. And Molly is just now getting old enough to read the book on her own. I am very excited about this. I ran across the photo above in one of my thumb-nail drives, and it brought this rush of memories.

Thanks, Paula! You really helped me a lot when I was an adolescent.

Metaphor Collages

I am trying to help my students understand the concept of metaphors. As they are tenth graders, I am relatively sure I could ask them to define the word and have more of them able to do it than not. I am also relatively sure that parroting back the age-old definition does almost nothing to help deepen their understanding—or even to see if there is any understanding of it there to begin with. So when I read about an idea called metaphor collages in Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, I decided that might be something to help my students. At the very least, it could be—dum-dum-DUM—fun.

They would work to create collages of visual metaphors for a word of their own choosing. It took a while to remind them of the idea that metaphors are comparisons between two completely different things. To help remind them I showed them Eve Merriam’s “Metaphor” and Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry.” I also showed them Merriam’s “Simile: Willow and Ginkgo” as a refresher on similes.

We talked about what the metaphors meant. With “Introduction to Poetry” we even got to the point where we decided getting complete understanding of every metaphor in the poem was not necessary to understand the poem as a whole. The initial images of fun and unexpected images contrasted with the torture image at the end were obvious enough to make an impression with even a partial understanding.

Then I took us into the idea by Pink. I had each of my students pick a word and then cut out images from magazines that were metaphors for the word they chose. I found out for myself that using an abstract word worked better than using a concrete word. When I tried to make one for coffee, I got stuck after about three images. When I switched to freedom it went much better.



I did mine on a PowerPoint so I could project it on the screen at the front of the room. I pointed out how each picture was a metaphor for freedom. Then I set them loose.

Note to self: never set them loose without written instructions for how to proceed.

Additional note to self: Especially when it is the first time you are trying a lesson to see how well it works.

The students were into cutting pictures out of the magazines. Well, most of them. Some were busily looking in the magazines for words to cut out. Why were they trying to cut out words? I dunno. They must have somehow thought that was the assignment. Some of them were looking through the magazines to find a word to make metaphors from. Why? I dunno. I guess they thought that was the assignment. Some were just into chatting with their neighbors, doing nothing, and reducing their number of daily participation points. I corrected the misperceptions as I went around and checked on their progress.

Walking around the classroom is always an interesting experience. The way the bubble of hushed tones seems to follow me is always a little amusing. Then there are the young ladies who just have no volume control whatsoever. They aren’t trying to be loud; it just sort of happens. Ah, the joys of teaching.

The one large problem I noticed were the number of students who were not looking for metaphors, but rather for examples: the person who chose happy searching out nothing but smiling faces; the person who chose sadness and just cut out pictures of sad-looking people. I had to repeat over and over in each of my three blocks—almost to each individual—that they were not looking for examples, but for comparisons—for things their word could BE.

I kept going back to my own example on the board. I kept trying to point out how the pictures were not examples of freedom, but were instead metaphors for freedom. Sigh.

Last night I when I went home I decided I had to write up an instruction sheet that they could refer back to. I did it on Google Docs, so I could access it anywhere I might need it. You can check it out if you want: Metaphor Collage.

So today I give them a little something of a refresher page on similes and metaphors for a bell ringer. Then I went through my cards and gave out extra credit for answering the questions. Have I explained my card system yet? If not, ask about it and I will.

After that back to the collages. For the students who were here. I had students absent, in ISS, at the ALC, on field trips, playing in the state Final Four basketball tournament, excused from school to go to said tournament, were out driving with their driver’s ed instructor, and just plain skipping. That’s normal though. Except that the proportions were higher today. My third block class had literally half the students out. Fourteen out of twenty-eight. Geesh!

Next week we will be delving into the wonderful world of standardized testing. It is again time for the Graduation Exams. I will post a rant on that next week.

And then this afternoon I ran a Google search for metaphor collages and found this one, that is a much better way to do it than mine. Next time maybe I’ll check first and not reinvent the wheel.

Writer's Book of Wisdom--Review

Every summer I go on a reading orgy. I read lots of books that are what I call brain candy. They are quick, fun, and not in any way taxing on my brain. I tend to read of lot of  urban fantasy--fantasy novels set in the contemporary world.  

But, eventually, I start to think that, for some reason, I really ought to read some professional books. I love to read books about writing. I can read books on pedagogy and theory, but I am frankly not as patient with them. I like to get to the nuts and the bolts. So, after reading ten or twelve fantasies (and some graphic novels, too--almost forgot those), I pulled out a book I purchased in May with a birthday book card I received and began to read it.

And a few days ago I finished reading The Writer’s Book of Wisdom: 101 Rules for Mastering Your Craft by Steven Taylor Goldsberry. It is set up as a list of rules. The author himself acknowledges at the end that some of the “rules” contradict each other. That is okay. Different people need different guidance. There is something in here for just about everyone. With each rule lasting only a page or two long, the book reads quickly. That is, if all you do is read it.

It is intended to be more than a quick read. It is intended to be inspirational--get the reader energized to trade reading for writing. As I usually find in these books it tends to slant heavily to narrative fiction. That is somewhat useful to me professionally, as I need to teach narrative writing. It is not as useful to me as a writer. I tend to write poetry and nonfiction. There were some ideas that I found useful for those genres as well.

Some of the rules are gems that I am going to use with my writing classes next year. They will be easy to build mini-lessons around. For instance, in discussion of dialogue, Goldsberry breaks that topic into three of his rules. It reminded me that, as a teacher I need to break down the processes more for my students. It also, by its very structure, exhibits and promotes the idea of strategic writing. Have a plan going in. Know what you want to accomplish. Think of your audience to help figure out the best way to accomplish the goal you set yourself.

I am working on getting a list of nonfiction writing titles together for inclusion in a classroom library. While I would not put this book in the same league as Writing Down the Bones or Writing Toward Home, it is in some ways more accessible to beginning writers, I think. It is informative, interesting, casual in tone, and well worth the time.

©2009-Art Belliveau

For Louise M. Rosenblatt

For Louise M. Rosenblatt

Together in class

We read a story

It is the same story

Printed in every copy
Of every book
In the classroom

Yet—and this is what

I love about reading—

It is a slightly different tale

Inside every head

As the words on the page

Collide and combine
With the life experience
Of each person
Reading the story

©2009-Art Belliveau