People in the Trees

Just wanted to post this year and a half old picture, which is the photo of the week in The Nation, for the amusement of anyone out there who lives or did live in Ithaca.

The Redbud Woods has been chopped and is now, sadly, a parking lot for Cornell students.

Attendance

One of our biggest problems here, although I don't know that we address it enough, is our abysmal attendance. Out of 26 days this marking period, I have students who have missed 5, 6, 7, 8 or more days. I have an athlete who has missed 11 days: when she's not at a match, she's out sick. I see her, on average, twice a week in my language arts class. One girl misses every other week of class, or so it seems. So far this quarter, she is (and failing as a result). And I have another student who is taken off my roster because she hasn't been in school for so long, and then she comes back, re-registers, is back on my roster, and I see her in the hallway and think, "That girl looks vaguely familiar. Is that M____?"

I have maybe ten students who have perfect attendance this marking period. Most of them are in my advanced reading class and are A students. They're probably some of the few students who have a parent or guardian who really cares about their education. Many of our students wake themselves up and decide on their own that they're going to go to school today.

It'll be interesting to see what attendance is like today, this half day before Thanksgiving.

Journal Methods

Every teacher has a different method. I thought I'd write about the method I've developed and that works:

I have my students write in a journal at least once a week. I give them a topic. Today, I gave them three possible topics. They do not have to stick to the topic. They can ramble. They can write about anything. I tell them that they're being graded purely on word count.

Here's how I break it down:
Less than 40 words = N.C. (no credit)
41-59 words = C
60-79 words = B
81-99 words = A
100 + words = A+

This sounds time consuming, but most of my students fall in the A/A+ range. I can tell when I collect their papers who has an A+ and who probably has a B.

I also noticed that giving more than one topic is useful. Often, they don't want to write about the one topic that I presented, but they don't know what else to write about. Today, I got a lot of A+ journals, and I think that providing more than one topic may have helped. There was much less groaning about not knowing what to write about and a lot more writing.

Now that my Smart Board is working, I also write with them. I had a howl in one class writing: "They're reading my thoughts! They can see inside of my brain! Why are they doing this to me? I can hear their little voices echoing everything I think? I can't even spell anymore. What's going on?" They read aloud as I typed and we all laughed. And then they settled down amazingly well to write their own journal.

Teaching Kids to Read

Has anyone read I Read It But I Don't Get It: Comprehension Strategies for Adolescent Readers by Chris Trovani? Curious as to what teachers think of this book and how it may compare to Kylene Beers's When Kids Can't Read: What Teachers Can Do, which has been a helpful book for me in many ways. Teaching reading is tough, and it's not something a student of secondary English education thinks s/he will have to do. By seventh grade, kids can read, right?

Wrong! I have several eighth graders with such poor recognition, fluency, and automaticity problems that they have trouble sounding out three-letter words. And NONE of my students are labled as special need or "sped" as it's called here in AZ (which was a shock to my NY years). If they are "sped," they're not in my classroom.

So, if anyone has read this book, let me know what you thought of it. I need all the help I can get!

Smart Classroom

My 3M Digital Board (basically the same thing as a Smart Board) is finally, finally, finally up and running! While I don't know all about it as of yet, I know that my students and I had fun today reading about Australia and looking at maps and pictures of possums, kualas, kangaroos, Sydney, and the coast. Hopefully, doing this accomplishes two goals in one: it'll help the students visualize the setting and the story of the novel better, and it will broaden their view and knowledge of the world beyond the rez and Phoenix.

Now the Internet is at our fingertips, and I have so many ideas: project book covers for book talks, maps for placing settings, poems, author photos and biographies, art work, etc. Plus, I want to start journaling with my students and projecting my journals, modeling better than I could before the idea of writing as much as possible in the time given.

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech

Walk Two Moons by Sharon Creech furthered me along the path of Creech-fandom. The characters leap to life; in fact, one character seemed vividly to be someone I know in my life.

Salamanca Tree Hiddle is uprooted from her Kentucky home and dragged to Ohio by her father after their mother left them. In Ohio, Salamanca befriends Phoebe Winterbottom, and together they investigate the potential lunatic, the murderess next door, and the vanishing of Phoebe's mother. Salamanca relates the entire story to her grandparents as they drive her to Idaho, her mother's new home. And she discovers that underneath Phoebe's story is her own.

Have the tissues at hand, and clear your schedule for a few hours. This Newberry winner's a heart-catcher!

Who Will Like This Book: Girls who enjoy realistic fiction with a twist of romance and mystery.

Themes: Love, forgiveness, coping with loss, opening up your eyes and seeing people for who they really are.

Love That Dog: Poetry for kids

Love that Dog: A Novel by Sharon Creech

This book starts out...

Jack
Room 105 -- Miss Stretchberry
September 13

I don't want to
because boys
don't write poetry.

Girls do.

...and it only gets better from there. Jack, who obviously is not a fan of poetry, gradually blossoms into a talented poet and lover of poetry, especially the poem "Love That Boy" by Walter Dean Myers. Written in free verse form, the reader sees Jack wondering, asking questions, and coming to some wonderful conclusions of his own about what poetry is, while also opening up about the death of his dog Sky.

I highly recommend this book to parents and teachers of young students (ideally grades 5-7, probably). There are allusions to poems by Williams, Frost, and of course Myers, and all of the poems are included at the end of the book.

I think my favorite part is when Jack speculates that maybe Williams and Frost were just trying to create pictures with words, and they didn't realize they were writing a poem, because they were just creating pictures using words, but then their teachers typed up what they'd written and hung it on the bulletin board and all of a sudden, what they had written were poems!

Prayers for Cody

Whether you say rosaries or meditate, if you could all send some good vibes out for Cody, an 8th grader with a terminal lung disease. After being out of school for a few weeks, he's back with his oxygen tank. The doctors told his family that the medicine is no longer doing any good, and the only hope at this point is a lung transplant.

Of course, he's the sweetest kid you could imagine...

Poems to Get Kids Hooked

I stumbled upon another amazing poem to get the class laughing. Especially Apache kids, because as the math teacher said, "You can't beat their sense of humor."

Anyway, include this one in your compilation of poems for teens. It's a gruesome, funny poem with a potent environmental message. So copy and paste this one.

Sun with Issues

by David Colosi

I got a heat wave burning in my heart. I can't keep from
crying, tearing me apart.
--Martha and the Vandalls

This one goes out to you who wrote so many for me:
"Sunshine of Your Love,"; "Ain't No Sunshine When She's Gone,";
"On the Sunny Side of the Street,"; "Good Day Sunshine,";
"You Are the Sunshine of My Life."
I'm your pleasant caress, your warm redress.
It's gonna be a scorcher, time for a little torture
pleasure is pain, pain is pleasure,
come to the beach for a day of leisure.
I'll give you tans, open your glands,
I see you behind your Ray Bans.
I'll melt your radio in the street, burn the flip-flops off your feet.
Rub that SPF 30 on your skin, only then will I begin
to lick it off like bar-b-que sauce, and
bathe you in my rays, saute you three or four more days,
drain you as I multiply, suck 60% of you dry.
My deadly stare won't take you anywhere.
Make you swollen and red, send a migraine to your head,
blister and spasm, dizzy and faint, I'll make you vomit in the sink,
I'll give you cold and clammy flesh, make you pant to catch your breath.
And even though we've just begun, I'll black you out from so much fun.
I'll break through your barriers,
send melanoma carriers
little brown spots
lay you out on hospital cots
I'll dig in like a mole,
grow and blacken,
ooze, bleed,
itch and harden,
turn lumpy and swollen,
tender to the touch,
leave something for you to laser off.
And after physical pain, I'll make you insane,
by turning my heat up,
'til you scream, "Don't touch me, it's hot!"
And I'll keep you from "holdin'
and kissin'
and squeazin'
and lovin'"
by lifting and stinking the piss from your city street
making your armpits reek.
I will germinate you, agitate you, aggravate you, exterminate you.
Turn up your refrigerator, fan, and AC, use up that electricity.
Until you learn to use my power, I will make you suffer.
I'll make your daytime brown, run your energy down,
And instead of vomiting in the sink
this time when I black you out, I'll make everything stink.
Mercury rising to the top, bringing your crime rate up.
I'll pick you fights in Shop-n-Save, stick your aged in their graves
ripping water off the shelf, thinking only about yourself,
knocking down your neighbor's son to steal his ice cream cone and run
straight
to the toilet where you'll drop
the curded cream in your gut,
with diarrhea, Oh, I'll be near you,
in the kitchen keeping it hot, making your food rot.
Open the freezer door for a blast of cold air
and smell what I've made in your Fridgedair.
I"ll drink your reservoir like Nestle Quik, suck it up and then spit
sticky sweet goo on you.
I come on heavy like spaghetti melting your face,
dripping sweat on the plate.
I'll set your swimming pools to boil, shake-n-bake your motor oil,
lock you in your car, but don't go far
from the window so I can begin,
to fry your ass under a magnifying glass,
incubate your lower, middle, and upper class.
Remember:
I'm stuck in place, you're moving at my pace,
You think this is heinous, spend some time on Mercury or Venus.
And at the end of the day, when I go down,
I'll be waiting in your concrete,
in your asphalt seeping heat.
Go ahead, run your air all night, I'll be sure to turn out the light.
And at the stroke of dawn, when I'm coming on strong,
I'll find you in your bathtub where I've left you cool and nice
sunstroked and drowned in a pool of melted ice.
"It's a sunshine day,
Everybody's smiling, (sunshine day),
everybody's laughing, (sunshine day),
..."

Busted!

Yesterday, I told my students that they could draw while I read aloud, but they were not to write notes. One student was writing notes, and so I confiscated her notebook. While perusing it today, I discovered that she did another student's short story assignment. So I gave him a zero for cheating, and of course, I have the proof to back me up.

I don't feel bad about busting the kid for cheating. But (yes, there's a but) I feel bad about taking notes and reading them and using them as evidence. Ugh! Is this ethical? Is this fair? Sometimes I feel like a giant hypocrite; I used to write notes ALL THE TIME in school, and did it really hurt me? But then, I never got caught. Or, I never got caught twice.