"It's like a box whose instructions on how to open the box are inside the box."

There's an iPod ebook on how to use your iPod.

A great summary of my position on pejorative epithets

Of course we don't allow students to use pejorative epithets in school.  (The original title of this post was "The real problem with epithets."  Then I remembered that epithets are a literary device commonly found in epic poetry.)  I fancy myself an intellectual, so until recently, when a student said, "What's wrong with calling someone 'gay'?", I would tell them in excruciating detail.  For the student, it probably sounded like: "Because when you zzzzz...."

Then I tried overcompensating the other way.  "Because I said not to.  It's my classroom, and I don't want to hear that kind of language.  When you have your own classroom, you can use whatever language your morals and your lawyers decide is acceptable."  "But..." "We can talk about it further in detention tomorrow evening, if you'd like.  But I'm done talking about it now."

But Ta-Nehisi Coates, an actual intellectual, one who writes quite intelligibly about the complicated state of race relations in the US, and in the meantime has a lot to say about language and how it's shaped by (and shapes) our thinking, has the perfect sentence.  It encapsulates both the ethics of my lecture, and the brevity of my discipline-based approach.  (It's even better, because it's shorter.)

"[...I]t's always wrong to treat individuals as a 'collection of others.'"

I think I'll get it on a T-shirt.

NEA blogs!

That's the National Education Association, not the National Endowment for the Arts.

True story: My artist wife and her artist friends and I spent years casually dropping the NEA acronym in conversation, never realizing that one of us was talking about a completely different institution.

Anyway, as a faithful pawn of the Teachers' Union Uprising, I thought I should pass the word on.

Big ideas/little ideas

Big ideas:

• Teamwork
• Literature circles
• Effective research
• Cross-curricular writing portfolios (which also include spoken or visual presentations)
• Communication as a tool for self-fulfillment, self-expression, self-reflection, and self-improvement
• Communication as a tool for connecting and creating individuals and communities

Little ideas:

• Non-academic vocabulary (50-cent words)
• Grammar lessons
• Responding to teacher-generated questions
• Right and wrong answers in literature

I'm not saying that what I've labeled as "little ideas" are unimportant.  But I think they should build towards the big ideas.  The problem is that I spend all of my time thinking big ideas and acting little ideas.

How to teach English

I tried embedding this into the blog itself, but it's not fitting. So instead, you get a link. My entire job, summarized in 7 panels.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2112

h/t Jamie

Useful videos

Now that Delicious is going the way of the dodo (everybody tells me so, that's how I know) there are two things I should really start doing here, in my own little space on the interWebs.  First, I should start cataloging serious alternatives: lots of people have them.  I followed someone's directions and imported all of my Delicious links into Google Bookmarks.  It seems a poor alternative thus far, largely because I can now not find my Google Bookmarks page.  Nor can I add bookmarks without going to Google Bookmarks.  For Delicious, I just pressed Command + D.  Viola, permanent record of link forever.  (I'm still doing it, and will up until the day they officially pull the plug.)  (Which, evidently, they might not.) 

Second, I should start using the space to keep track of links I want to keep track of.  Well, I've kind of been doing that already.  But I should probably, I don't know, do it better or have a better tagging system or something.  (An analysis of tags as the most insanely useful, or not, way of organizing information is forthcoming.  Some year.) 

For example, Nova has a bunch of videos online, like this about Machu Picchu.  There are others, I'm sure.

Finland, Finland, Finland...

Linda Darling-Hammond has taken to various publications to talk about Finland's educational model.  She did so again in the fall in NEA Today.   While the article presents a great many ideas that US policy makers should take note of, and while many aspects bear further investigation (doctorate, here I come), one particular point jumped out at me, grabbed me by the ears, and started pounding me in the middle of the forehead.

     All students receive a free meal daily[...] (Darling-Hammond, 2010, par. 19.)

Imagine if we suggested something like that here.  No, really.  Think about it for a second.  Envision it.  Every student gets a meal.  You walk into school, you get lunch.  The ramifications are kind of staggering.

Start with the un-shaming of the free-and-reduced-lunch program.  You don't have to be ashamed of not paying for your food.  Nobody does.

Move on to lower-middle-class income families.  Parents who skimp on school lunch because they can't really afford it stop trying.  Their students eat a decent meal.

The upper-middle class families continue to send their students to school with lunches from home.  Sometimes, though, the students eat the school lunches, because for whatever reason they don't bring one.

Some parents talk about "charity," and how they won't accept it.  School officials and policy makers simply state that it is now the policy of X state to provide every student with a good, nutritious meal at no front-end cost.  Besides, the parents are still paying for it, just like they're paying for physical improvements to the school and teacher salaries.

Initially, a great deal of food is wasted as students who have never eaten school lunches before try them.  The issue of taste comes up at school board meetings.  At the same time, health-conscious parents take a closer look at the contents of school lunches.  This brings about a push for school lunch reform.  As a result, school lunch improves in nutritional value and tastiness.  This reform applies financial pressure to the companies that currently produce large amounts of, let's say, pre-packaged cinnamon rice.  This, of course, doesn't happen everywhere at the same time, and it happens last in urban districts with high levels of poverty, where most students are already receiving free and reduced lunch.

I once had a student from Finland in one of my Spanish classes. I told her there was a song about Finland.  She didn't think it was funny.





Also, no mention of school lunches.