D & Z Reading 4: Textbook Hatred

D & Z Reading 4: Textbook Hatred



What textbooks can feel like. Source: http://xkcd.com/971/ .



 

So, evidently, Daniels and Zemelman don't like textbooks. I think a lot of students aren't very fond of textbooks, either. They're bulky, the information is cluttered, and most of all, they're boring. And while perhaps the teachers today aren't fond of them for their price and supposed authority over information, it seems to me that my teachers were perfectly fine with using them.

To me, textbooks are useful tools for teachers to use and draw from, but not to just hand out to students and assign large portions for reading. There are passages from textbooks (as well as passages from other texts) that can be very useful, and I think D & Z are a bit too harsh on them. However, I think that we need to be extremely critical of textbook authority. This Newsweek article has some good points about some really bad textbooks. http://www.newsweek.com/2014/10/03/textbook-case-bad-textbooking-texas-272351.html

I think it's too easy to just say that textbooks are all bad or mostly bad. For the most part, I think they are generally pretty inefficient, outdated, and occasionally just wrong. But I think it's more useful to look towards what we could be doing with textbooks. Textbooks are, in their purest form, just an organization of a broad range of materials on a few topics that some people decided were important for students to know. This is exactly like what a curriculum is! The problem is that the agenda of a textbook and the agenda of a classroom don't always match up. So we need to be careful not to rely on textbooks, and we have to always be aware that they can be wrong. But they also have a broad range of materials, and this can be beneficial for teachers to increase the repertoire of materials that they are comfortable with and can draw from.

The other major problem I have with textbooks, though, is the fact that they present a version of history, and this version tends to ignore certain people or viewpoints. We have to always remember that textbook does not equal pure and equal truth, and that they tend to revise history in a way that propels only certain viewpoints. I think that educators in History and Social Studies are generally pretty aware of this, but English teachers are not necessarily as aware of this. The texts that editors of textbooks choose to put forth, as well as the commentary they choose to use for these texts, is a version of history, and it may very well be one that is racist, or denies the history of another people.

We need to be cautious with textbooks, but they can be valuable resources.


Backward Design and Understanding by Design

UbD and Backward Design

I found the chapter on UbD to be pretty useful: it fits in perfectly with the way I want to teach, and it also fits in with everything else we've learned so far in our SED courses. Backward design is interesting in that it is both useful for teachers, and also useful for those pesky tests that our society loves so much. If you start with an objective in mind, an ending point, and then work out how to get there, you'll always stay on track, and everything in a lesson will point toward your objective. If you don't, you may end up falling back on bad teaching strategies with no way to catch back up.



Pictured: What happens if you have no plan (Source: xkcd.com/1106)

To me, though, this chapter felt somewhat like review. I don't know if this is because we have already been inadvertently taught backward design, or if this just seems to be an intuitive idea. I have to imagine it's the first one; our lesson plan templates are already set up to work like this. With so much focus in SED 406 on sticking to a clear objective, backward design seems like something we've already learned.

The UbD modules are very useful when it comes to a definition of a seemingly simple word: understanding. At first, "understanding" feels like an easy word to define, but try it yourself: we know the word more through context than we do through actual knowledge of the concept. We know that understanding is different than just knowledge, but it's difficult to fully define such an broad concept. I think that when it comes down to it, "understanding" something is knowing it well enough that you could explain it to someone else, or knowing it well enough that you could do it. And I think this is one of the things we don't expect students to do: actually perform their knowledge. We certainly expect them to perform on a test, but we never actually ask them to do anything with their knowledge except regurgitate it back to us on tests.

Cooking as a Literacy

Cooking as a Literacy

            When we talk about “literacy”, we typically refer to a student’s ability to read and write. However, a literacy simply refers to competence or knowledge in a specific area. Over the last few years, partially through necessity, I’ve picked up a cooking “literacy”. Because my mother is so sick with Lyme disease, and has had it for so long, I have had to take on some of her responsibility. One of the ways I’ve had to do so is in cooking. I cook on a regular basis for my family, and I like to believe that I’m getting pretty good at it. I have been doing so for at least the past 5 years, and I am increasingly more satisfied and proud of my results. My influence is, of course, my mother’s cooking: she was essentially my teacher, through her cooking and through her instruction.

            The impact that this literacy has had on my life is huge. On the most basic level, it’s a skill that will help me when I am on my own. It is a skill that will help me to survive, and also one that helps me to enjoy and understand food. I also like to think of it as a skill that saves money: not having to buy processed or prepared foods and making them yourself is always cheaper. However, I think that cooking has a much larger impact on my life and future than just simply the ability to cook. Cooking is a bridge between cultures and people; whether we realize it or not, the things that we choose to eat say something about who we are and what we value. Cooking leads our present to a long traditional past. Italian food is not just food, it is a community of shared values.

Of course, in our current world, we can sample any kind of food we wish, separate from the context that it came from. I could head to Providence and try Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and Lebanese food all in the same day without any knowledge about Ethiopia, or Vietnam, or Lebanon. I think as we look at what we cook and eat, we can start to understand our pasts as well as our present. I think cooking in particular lends itself to a greater understanding of food. Eating is certainly an aspect of understanding food, but actually preparing it gives you a greater understanding and appreciation of all of the aspects of a dish. Cooking itself is just a useful task, too. I’ve never been very good at multitasking, and cooking is one of the things that I’ve gotten good enough at that I can multitask without much trouble. Cooking is at times inexact, at other times precise and scientific. It forces you to pay attention to too many things at the same time. At times, you must make sure everything happens perfectly, and at times you just have to sit back and let things happen. It’s a skill that forces you to be patient, yet forces you to pay close attention.

            I really think having any non-educational literacy is very important and can be very useful as a teacher. On the most basic level, it allows you to form a human bond with students who may have the same interests or literacies as you. A shared literacy creates an instant community around an understanding of how to do a task. I’m not trying to say that I expect many (or any) of my students to be able to cook, but food is an extremely important part of all of our lives. We spend so much time enjoying food, or perhaps just simply going through the motions, but food is what allows us to do what we do. I don’t think cooking necessarily has any kind of direct effect on my teaching, but I think that the experience as a whole has helped to make me who I am, and so it has had an effect on everything. When we begin to look at the literacies that our students may have, too, we can better understand and help them learn in an educational setting. All students can and do learn: when we can tap into the power of their literacies, we can use their knowledge to help them build new knowledge.

RITELL Conference 2014

RITELL Conference 2014: Strengths, Weaknesses

I attended the RITELL (Rhode Island Teachers of English Language Learners) Conference this year at RIC, and I'm ambivalent about what I found there.

Firstly, it must be said that it was more difficult for me to find anything that might relate to my classroom because it appears as though RITELL is more oriented towards elementary school. The highest grade level that anything was advertised to be for was 6th grade. And I can appreciate this; I'm the first one to say that we need to be targeting ELL's sooner rather than later, and that we need to be looking at kids who are behind in reading levels before it really starts to be problematic. Still, it seems a waste to have an entire ELL conference and not include anything that might relate to middle or high school.

But the real problem I had with this conference was not this; the presenters, to me, were far more problematic. While an excellent speaker, D.H. Figueredo spent as much time explaining the process of writing a book as he did saying anything that an educator could use. His book is very good, and he's a good speaker (and he seems like a pretty nice guy) but it seemed to me like his speech would be very good for informing people on how to get into publishing their own book. And I'm not saying that he should get up in front of us and tell teachers what they should be doing; we can draw our own conclusions from evidence. But there was argument to be made, there was nothing to be gleaned from his speech that might even apply to teaching. Sure, if you're an elementary educator, you can use his book and that's lovely, but you didn't need to listen to him for an hour to figure out that he has a pretty great book.

Still, my frustration with the conference has more to do with the other presentation that I went to. There were 3 going on at the same time; some others in my class and I split up between two of them so that we could explain what happened to each other and gain as much knowledge as possible. From what they told me, it appears that their presentation was essentially along the same lines as the one I attended.

The presentation I went to was called "Engaging ELL's with Culturally Diverse Authors and Themes", which seems good enough to me. There's no problem with the title; I was interested going in. However, the presentation ended up being about an hour of 3 speakers essentially giving book reviews of about 12 books they had in front of them, organized into 3 groups based on ethnicity. On one level, this was useful, because at least I know now that there are, indeed, Cambodian-American texts that I can use in a classroom. My problem is that I could have learned as much from a handout with a list of resources.

I have to trust in these people that these texts do, in fact, engage ELL's, because there wasn't any evidence saying that they would. I'm willing to believe that they will, especially if the books are about their own culture, but this wasn't even brought up. There was no, "So, therefore, use literature that pertains to the culture of your students, because it's out there." Even that would have made me feel better. It was just one book after another, telling the plot of each of them, giving us character synopses...I found it painful, and not all that useful. It is especially troubling that I spent, what, $35 dollars to listen to book reviews?

I was just disappointed. I didn't really gain very much from the experience; I knew going into it that using texts that match the culture of the students can be useful in getting them engaged and excited about reading. It can also give them a world of texts they didn't know existed. If I didn't know this going in, then hey, maybe I'd have learned something.

Microteaching I

Just did my first microteaching! How did I do?

Proving Itself: The Story of Central Falls High School

My View of Central Falls

I walked into Central Falls High School with a lot of misconceptions, a lot of hearsay, and a lot of bias.

Who could blame me? This was a school with an international record of not doing its job right. Nobody fires its entire staff for no reason, right? Right?

Let's consider the record, then. Central Falls is a place that is 1.2 square miles, and houses nearly 20,000 people. It's one of the most densely populated places in the U.S., it recently filed for bankruptcy, and it has a track record of corruption and mismanagement (mostly stemming from the kickback schemes of previous mayor Charles Moreau). More specifically, its school district is heralded to be the worst in the state, with around a 50% graduation rate and consistently low NECAP test scores.

This is the lens through which I saw Central Falls High School: a place of mismanagement, a failed school district, and a crowded place of violence. Let's not forget that only a few years ago, gang violence between Central Falls and Pawtucket gangs escalated to the point that armed policemen with assault rifles formed a ring around the high school. All of this contributed to my view of Central Falls as a crowded, impoverished, violent place.

Changing Course

Whatever it may have been once, it is not now.

I am yet to interact with any students, as our first day working at CFHS was a professional development day, and the students were off for the primary elections. Regardless, what I found in that school was an environment conducive to learning, an environment that welcomed us in. As we stood in the hallway, discussing standard procedure for when we come there, we were greeted by multiple teachers passing by, and one stopped to talk to us about the school, giving his honest opinion about its progress and where it is headed.

He was one of the teachers who was fired from the school, and was later rehired. He told us that it was a difficult time for the school at that point, referencing the gang violence and difficulty in teaching students who did not want to be taught. After asking him multiple questions, he welcomed us to the school and told us where to find him for an honest opinion.

Above all, the person who truly challenged my assumptions about Central Falls High School was its principal. He shared his plan for the future with us, such as certifying all teachers working there in ESL or having to let them go. This is incredibly useful for a community that is nearly 50% Hispanic or Latino. He was clearly very committed to making Central Falls High School a different place than the one we hear about on the news.

The Real Central Falls

I do wonder, however, if the school we heard about just a few years ago was really as bad as the media hyped it up to be. I tend to believe that even if there is violence, poverty, and corruption, the vast majority of people are good people. I imagine that even if we had visited that school a few years ago, we would have still found a welcoming school, filled with students who do care and want to learn.

We also have to remember to keep information in context. The administration of CFHS didn't fire all of its teachers because they weren't doing their jobs, they fired them because there was a disagreement between the unions and the laws at the time for No Child Left Behind. All you heard about on the news, though, was that all of the teachers were fired.

I hope that I can continue to use this experience to question the ideas we have about other places, and the kinds of people we think live there. Even if all we hear about is violence, oppression, and corruption (think Iraq), we have to remember that we are only hearing the worst news. We only have a single story of what these places are like, and as such we have a skewed concept of how they really are.