Wichita Sudbury School Reflective

It’s time.

It’s time to take a look back at what happened with Wichita Sudbury School. I have a lot of trauma around it, so maybe I can process a bit and try to heal through writing.

Why trauma? Well, WSS was my baby. It was an idea I conceived and tried to make happen. No. DID. Did make happen. For a year and a half. I can’t forget that we actually opened and ran a school and HELPED children. These students LEARNED from their experience at the school I co-created. Then why does it hurt every time I think about it?

Because I’m focusing on how we couldn’t survive. With our rotating cast of, at most, six concurrent students, all paying only what their families could afford, we literally couldn’t keep the doors open.

And more than that, I was second guessing myself the whole time.

Sudbury stands for freedom. Not just freedom to learn what you want to learn. Not just freedom from taking particular classes. Literal freedom. Inside the confines of rules of the Handbook, students are free to do anything they want, including nothing. As a human, this speaks to me, but as a Millennial, watching students spend the entirety of their school time playing Minecraft and Roblox was… upsetting somehow. I knew that at larger Sudbury schools, the students often get new ideas from watching others, but our tiny school didn’t have the variety of types of people and interests. The teacher in me longed to assign them portfolios and essays on what they were learning, an idea completely antithetical to the Sudbury name. So instead, I made my tea and read in the other room, pretending I was okay. For a year and a half. All while fundraising and talking with parents and trying to convince everyone that I believed in the process.

So that’s a large portion of where my trauma comes from then, is it? Being a teacher at a Sudbury school, trying to convince myself that I’m doing the right thing by allowing the students to play on the computer?

You know, what if we didn’t even have computers? This is my first time thinking of it. What if we weren’t donated computers? What if we only had one? What would the students have done? I can only speculate, as I’ll have no way of ever actually knowing. The issue can’t just be the computers. As Americans in 2017, we did everything on computers. Khan Academy, Codewars, YouTube, Google.. we wouldn’t be able to access any of it without computers. But what if.

We DID have plenty of things in person, though, like our weekly School Meeting, Judicial Committee any time there was a complaint filed, and classes like our martial arts and yoga, as well as Decorating Committee, which was regularly busy decorating the school. Yes, it hurt my Millennial soul that the students weren’t continually trying to better themselves, and there were days I didn’t see anyone for hours, but that’s not the end of it.

As long as we’re playing with hypotheticals here, what would have happened if you dropped my students into an existing school, like Hudson Valley or Clearwater? Somewhere where there was support for them. My guess is that they would have thrived. Sure, they still probably would have spent a lot of time playing their games, but perhaps not as much as they did here. Sudbury is a good model. Just maybe not for me, as a staff member.

So where, again, is my trauma coming from?

1. Trying to push with my whole self a model I didn’t 100% believe in

2. Watching something I created fail

Is there a 3? No, at the moment, I don’t believe there is. I’m not sure if I’m operating purely on logic brain at the moment or if writing this short piece really has helped me process through some of the hurt. But regardless, I don’t feel like crying when thinking about WSS for once. I’m tired of saying hiding all my pain. I want to acknowledge and say yes.

Yes, we made something. It was a school that operated for a year and a half.

Yes, I experienced burnout with trying to cheerlead for it.

Yes, it hurt when we had to close due to financial struggle.

Yes, I know for a fact (via their parents) that at least some of the students had an extremely positive experience at the school.

As for the future? I still want to remain in education, making the best decisions I can in a tortured career. I feel stronger as a teacher, however painful it is to me. I feel like I’m making a difference and that I’m where I need to be. So, as soon as I can, I’d like to get my teaching license renewed. I’m sure there’s somewhere that will welcome me, crazy radical ideas and all.

Edit, later that evening:

Okay. Point 3. Mourning what could have been. It could have been awesome. It could have been the best thing for Wichita and for me and for hundreds of students yet to come. But it wasn’t. And sometimes I forget that I’m still mourning that.

The Job of Sudbury Staff: Being an Authentic Human

Five months into working at a Sudbury school, I'm still learning how to authentically BE. I still find myself wondering, "What should I be doing right now?" with the back of my mind assuming I'm skirting some significant teacher duty.

The truth is, I never am. As a staff member at a Sudbury school, I don't actually have any duties. In fact, Hanna Greenberg once wrote that working at Sudbury Valley School, she does "nothing." The question of what a Sudbury staff member does has explored by Michael Sappir of Sudbury Jerusalem, the Hudson Valley Sudbury School blog, and nearly every staff member since the founding of SVS, according to Starting a Sudbury School (1998), so much so that it can be determined that each staff member may create their own job description.

Thus, the chief assignments I have given myself include:
-Being the legally required adult presence
-Solving any literal emergency in which anyone is in danger
-Making sure the bills get paid
-Being available for any questions the students have and offering advice when asked
-Modeling being a human

Not imparting specific knowledge. Not solving quarrels. Not making sure that the students are productive or accountable to anything. Not even cleaning the building, as was hotly contested in the early years of SVS (Starting a Sudbury School, 1998).

And not, as my brain keeps trying to tell me, supervising anyone. The students and I are "fundamentally equal," as the HVSS blog above noted. "I have no authority over anyone I'm hanging out with (or any other person at the school for that matter), anyone may leave for another part of the campus at any time, and I have no obligation to entertain, feed, supervise, etc. anyone at school." That's a line I remind myself of when I start to feel the public-school-teacher pull of supervising coming on. I think that's the bit of unlearning that's coming the hardest for me--the learning to trust that students are getting what they need on their own, that my supervision actually inhibits the lessons they need to teach themselves. I first tell myself, "My job is not to keep you out of trouble," and then I remind myself to trust. If the kids are in the other room, and something that they don't like happens, they know that they can talk about it. If it still continues, they know how to write the other student up for JC and even propose a new rule for the Student Handbook. There is a system for everything already in place, and if we come upon something that needs a system to be written, it will be brought up in conversation, and one will be created. (We're still in the process of writing the Open Campus Policy, for example.)

When in doubt, I try to treat the students as I would treat a good friend. I try to speak to them on the same level, with the same amount of respect, and give the same type of advice I would give a friend in the same context. That is, I treat them as humans.

Thus, what may be the most important of my self-imposed job activities, I try to model being human with equals.

Around the beginning of November, I had a bout of depression. I didn't try to hide it. I didn't put on a good face for the kids. I told them I was having a rough time and that to cope with it, I wanted to write in my journal. We talked openly about depression and anxiety, facing difficult topics head on. One day, I curled up into a ball on one of the couches and didn't get up all day. The students asked if there was anything they could do, and I thanked them but replied that I just wanted to be by myself for a while. They knew I had a therapist appointment later that week. This is part of who I am, part of being human, and I model my handling of it.

In early December, to help myself overcome that bout of depression, I realized there were two things I could do every day to help keep my brain chemicals balanced--a simple exercise of either yoga or pilates and at least 10 minutes of writing. I told the students I really wanted to do these two things but that I had to mentally fight the pushback my brain gave me about it. I wanted to find a way to keep myself accountable, and I wanted to do so transparently. After a short meditation on it, I created what may be considered a sticker chart. I know, I know. Sticker charts are a gross form of extrinsic motivation, but what if I'm the only one "making" myself keep it? Thus began a conversation about perseverance and pushing oneself to do things for the long-term benefits even if you "don't feel like it."

After morning tasks (turning on the heater/fan, putting away clean dishes from the drying rack, etc.) and chatting with the students, I do have quite a bit of time to myself every day. I try to use this time to demonstrating being an authentic human, that is, one with faults and flaws but also curiosity, love, and a continual striving to being the best version of oneself possible.

DIY Notebooks and My 2016 Take on PBL--Individual Study

Sometime right before winter break in my second year of teaching high school English, I got this idea for a do-it-yourself notebook. You see, I have this specific something instilled in me that's part environmentally-friendly, part OCD, where I don't like things to be wasted. I've been saving paper that's only been used on one side since high school (and, boy, did I get teased because of it!), and I've amassed quite a stack of it. I encouraged the third-graders I taught to draw and color on the blank sides, but the practice never quite caught on with teenagers. I'd been taking notes and doing daily writing on them, but the stack was growing ever taller, regardless.

It was around this time I started thinking that I should just carry some of this scrap paper around with me. Like a notebook.

But... more like a 3-ring binder because, as much as I like having the pages in a notebook securely attached, I enjoy the flexibility of being able to reorganize, add, and remove pages as necessary.

But... full-sized sheets are so large and cumbersome. I'd definitely need to cut them in half to be a good size.

But... one thing that's awesome about 8.5x11 pieces of paper is that.. well, they're a standard size. So when you put them in the hole punch, one of my favorite toys, all the holes are in the same place. There's not a standard hole punch for 8.5x5.5 papers.

Wait! What an excellent critical thinking opportunity with real world application! I offered my students some extra credit and gave them 20 minutes to come up with the best solution.

I finally settled for one offered by two of my juniors--If you align the papers at the bottom of the hole punch, like usual, the holes are awkwardly positioned. Same for if you align them at the top of the hole punch. It's not so awkward if you turn the hole punch to the right side, flip the pages to the back so that the used side is showing up, align at the top, and then punch! It took some getting used to, but it totally works! I was so happy to offer that opportunity to my students, and even more so to let them see me use a design they helped come up with on a daily basis.

A few months later, I decided that size wasn't right for my needs. I needed an even smaller size, a quarter size, to fit inside my purse. That was a bit of a struggle to design, as well! Eventually we decided that this one wouldn't work if aligned at the top or bottom; we just needed to center it between two of the holes. The pages weren't exactly the same size, which is what I was afraid of, because I cut several pages at the same time in an inexact method, but it really didn't matter. All that mattered, after all, was that the holes were a standard distance from each other. Neat!

Alright, switching topics, just a little. I knew I wasn't coming back to work the following year about half way through third quarter. That being said, I really wanted to go out with a bang. I wanted to give my students something they would really learn from and remember, something important.

At that time, I had a sophomore who was teaching herself Russian in her spare time, which I was immensely proud of. It reminded me of teaching myself Japanese when I was younger, and that spurred an idea I had been considering after reading Summerhill School.

It had a basis of Project Based Learning, and that's how I sold it to administration, but in reality, I just wanted my students to realize that they live in the digital age. Literally ANYTHING they want to learn is at their fingertips. Mostly, I wanted them to have more control over their learning, to have more ownership of their own learning.

Thus, it manifested like this: Individual Study. Once again, I threw the entire curriculum out the window for the final month of school, telling my students that we were going to be doing something more important--focusing on whatever they wanted to learn. I stressed how important it was to follow your passions, not let anything come between you and what you want to learn, and turn hobbies and interests into viable options for study and bettering yourself. I reminded them that this is what it means to be a 21st century learner.

But being a public school teacher, I still had to enter grades into the computer, unfortunately, so.. Remember those journals I had the students help me on? We made more, and they became logbooks.

This is what I told students I was grading on:

This hastily-hand-written-and-then-photo-copied sheet became "conference sheets," and students were to keep them to use as a reference every day. We discussed the entire sheet at length together, but also during conferences. I'll go through each bullet here like I did then.

1. Logbook
I. Participation - Are you filling out your log book every day?
II. Legibility and neatness/organization - Can someone else pick up your logbook and understand what you're doing without context?
III. Completion - Does each entry have everything it needs? Include the following:
i. Date
ii. Pre-planning with signature of approval
iii. Reflection - What do we mean by that? Here are some examples:
a. Self-exploration / meta-cognition - Thinking about your thinking. What are you learning about yourself during this time?
b. In depth explanation of process and findings - What path did your thinking take? What problems did you come across, and how did you solve them? What were the answers?
c. Analysis of findings - What do you make of what you found? What can you generalize or apply to other areas? What does it all mean?

2. Presentation of findings
I. Communication of ideas - Can you explain what you did in a way that everyone else understands and learns from, too?
II. Advocating for self - Are you enthusiastic about what you're learning? If someone is critical of you, do you stick up for yourself and what you're doing?

3. Weekly conferences

As you can see, the logbooks were the backbone of the project. It was a difficult line for me to address because I wanted to demonstrate to other teachers, parents, and administrators that this plan could work. I wanted them to be a physical representation of students learning on their own with minimal guidance, but to do that, I had to set a secure infrastructure. I wanted to leave enough room for the students to explore and be able to come up with their own, innovative ideas, and I knew that involves being able to fail. It's so much to learn in just a month. I knew it wasn't reasonable, so I built myself a safety net. I started a spreadsheet of what I noticed the students doing each day.

The truth is, I hated keeping this. I felt like I was judging my students on something they shouldn't be judged on. Isn't that all grading in a nutshell? Yet this felt worse, somehow.. Like I was giving them false freedom. Like I was keeping secrets from them. It felt like judgement, but it never entered into how I graded. It's just what I had to do to ascertain that I was still doing my job as a public school teacher, and I still hated it all the while.

It did, however, free me from keeping unnecessarily close tabs on the logbooks. Once they were created, I let the students conduct their business in whatever way they wanted and only asked them about their process during conferences. Thus, they knew what the expectations were and could choose to act on them or not, hence the pages being kept for reference and being revisited during conferences. They knew that the expectation was they kept their entries dated, for example, and could decide how much not doing that counted off of their own grade.

Here's an example of what one looked like. Again, the sophomore teaching herself Russian. (She chose to use the backs of scrap paper, as I did in my own journals. Other students used lined paper.)

The presentations were a little difficult to get started, my students all being hesitant to talk about themselves and having been instilled with a fear of the word "Presentation." My Juniors, however, were extremely grateful to realize that they didn't have to be formal presentations and arranged themselves into a big circle on the floor on presentation days. They went around the circle describing what they were learning and answering questions from the others. It was informal and pleasant, and it went so well that the biggest struggle we had was the time limit because of the bell system.

My favorite part of the entire project were the weekly conferences. I met with each student in their own space, joining them on the floor or in the desks, and let them flow through the Conference Sheet at their own pace, expounding on whatever they felt most important. I got to hear their genuine voices during these times, how they thought and what interested them. I asked them questions about their work and process, and then asked them what they would grade themselves, which was an incredibly interesting undertaking. Some students were hypercritical of themselves while others weren't as much, but, regardless, I always asked them how they would improve during the following week. It was an honest, authentic conversation, and one in which I felt like I was doing my best work as a teacher. This speaking quietly with students in a relaxed environment, listening as they explain what interests them and how they can and are growing as humans, while the other students work and play conversate and live around us.. This is what teaching is about for me. <3

I know this was a unique experience for my students, and I hope that they got something out of it. My biggest hope is that they will remember these four weeks at some later time in their lives and that it sparks some sort of renewed flame in pursuing passions. Teaching is sewing seeds of inspiration that won't grow into anything noticeable for years. I have faith that in 10 or 15 years, this one month will make a difference in the lives of some of my students.

And as for now.. I may have found another transformation for those logbooks in a new project of my own... more on that later!

Ownership of Learning in a High School English Classroom

The most difficult thing about being a public school teacher in 2016 is that the students have given up all autonomy in their learning. Especially when they get to high school, they're completely accustomed to being fed lectures, work, problems, solutions, and techniques for every part of their day. By that point, they're even accustomed to being beat back down, and quickly!, every time they try to rebel against the system.

During my second year of teaching high school English, I wanted to give my students just a small taste of actual control.

I had designed my curriculum schedule for second semester very quickly. I probably only spent about 20 minutes on it at most. It looked like this:

My four grades each still had seven unite left, and it worked easier for me to teach the same unit with all four classes, just using different materials. My OCD found it much more manageable that way. However, for the sake of my students, for the sake of something I knew they would benefit from, I relinquished control. I gave them the opportunity to redesign the curriculum schedule.

Now, at this point, I knew giving them complete control would be too much. They wouldn't be able to handle that sort of shift suddenly, so I'd have to decide what was on the table. I gave them each the list of seven units, and they decided how long each should take and how to order them. It was extremely interesting watching how the problem solving discussion evolved differently among each class!

Here's what they came up with:

 Freshmen

Sophomores 

Juniors 

Seniors

After our discussions, I transferred all the calendars to separate sheets of paper. At first I thought we could hang them on the insides of different cabinets and open them during the appropriate class, but with the flexible classroom, I had students sitting against the cabinets every hour. Thus, change of plans, I moved them to a pillar at the front of the room. It was a rather inconvenient spot when I lectured, but I tried not to lecture so much, anyway. Plus, I think it was more convenient for the students to be able to see their schedule at the front of the room.

And the results?

First, yes, I was a little bit crazier not having everyone on the same schedule, but it was definitely worth it. When my students have more autonomy, I can deal with a little OCD-related anxiety. I own that, and it's mine to deal with.

It was also very important to me to listen to my students likes and dislikes. I gave them all a suggested time frame of how long I thought each unit should take, but then we discussed and compromised. My freshmen collectively hated poetry. They had taken 8 units of poetry in their school career thus far, and they knew their preferences. Even though I had planned to spend two weeks on that unit, we realized together that one week would suffice. This was helpful to them because they got to avoid more time with something they already knew wasn't their favorite, but also helpful to me because I learned that they had a very limited attention span for that unit. I would need to pare it down to just the most important highlights because if I included anything remotely boring, I'd lose them.

Some students admitted to me a few weeks or a month into the second semester that they were really surprised I followed through with the curriculum schedules they came up with. When I asked why, they told me that they thought it was a gimmick I was trying to sell them to get them interested in class but would eventually go back on. I was sad that they had that impression, but even more glad that I had made the decision to go forward with this idea. A month or two into the new schedule, as everyone realized I actually was serious, my juniors even came to me with the idea to replace their Shakespeare play for that year with Beowulf! They convinced me that it was a piece of fiction with arguably more historical significance, and I agreed. The unit was changed.

Some students listed designing the curriculum schedule as their favorite part of being in my class that year in their evaluation survey, and that makes my heart sing. <3

Daily Writing Journals

I'll be the first one to admit that I don't rely much on routine as a teacher. I'm fully aware that humans, especially young children, thrive on routine, but it's just not who I genuinely am as a person. I find it far more important to be an authentic person to students than to drive myself insane trying to be someone I'm not. (Though I'm sure they get SOMETHING out of the novelty I embrace instead, right?) There aren't many routines that I commit wholeheartedly to. Most of the time, I test something out, see how it goes, and then scrap it. The intent is, of course, to iterate on what went wrong and make it better, but my anxiety usually gets the better of me. Thus, the whole thing usually goes out the window, and we try something completely new. (This is something I'm working on.)

There was, however, ONE routine I did carry from start to finish during my second year of teaching high school English, and that was daily writing.

I think it started with inspiration from Corbett Harrison's extensive discussion of writer's notebooks, most of which I latched onto immediately, right down to his "Sacred Writing Time," which I incorporated into our daily schedule.

One of my sophomores didn't like the use of the word Sacred and took it upon himself to change the acronym shortly after I hung this poster at the beginning of the year.

In essence, it was this: Ten minutes of silent free writing first thing at the beginning of every class. 

In practicality, it was much more nuanced than I realized until now! Let's break it down.

What to write about?

This was the hardest part for a number of my students, children who grew up in the system and were used to always being assigned topics on which to write. I occasionally offered prompts if anything interesting had come up the night before, but students were free to ignore them if they had something else in mind. And for the most part, I actively encouraged them to just write about whatever was on their minds.

We had a few brainstorming sessions on the board at the beginning of the year. Eventually I turned it into a permanent fixture to help a couple with consistent writer's block.

What Can I Write?
1. Things I'm looking forward to. Things I'm excited about!
2. Fears. Things I'm worried about.
3. Vent. Something I'm angry about and need to get off my chest.
4. Something I've been sad about.
5. Exploring my feelings and emotions to see if I can find out more about them or where they came from.
6. A secret I can't tell anyone. (Remember to fold this page over and staple it!)
7. Reflection. When I go over something that happened, I can learn more about it.
8. Stream of Consciousness. Just write whatever comes to mind with no judgements. Sometimes I think thoughts I didn't even know I had!

For some reason I didn't get stories of various genres, poems, etc. down. This poster didn't go up until after Christmas, and I think at the time we had already discussed a lot of fiction. This poster must have been specifically for non-fiction "journal" type writing. (Note to self: Make one for fiction writing, as well!)

And for the record, I let the students know that I WAS serious when I told them they could write anything they wanted. We talked a bit about how to use writing to get things out that one is holding in and what a great stress reliever it can be. If they didn't want anyone (including me) to read an entry, all they had to do was fold it over and staple it shut. (See #6 on the poster above.) Some students did this when they wrote about drama, others did it when they wrote about inappropriate-for-school topics. I'm glad to report that there were typically a couple of folded over pages each day--that means that students were working through and processing something they found stressful or otherwise important, always a sign of good mental health! (Also see the section on Grading, below.)

And, yes, to return to one of my favorite points, I DID have a few students who frequently felt they had nothing to write about. That's one of the successes of this program! I'm glad I gave my students something different to constantly struggle with. It was a known struggle, something 99% of them continually overcame, despite difficulties, and what might be considered the public school version of "being bored," the necessity to rely only on themselves for ten minutes.

Grading

At the beginning of the year, I thought I would just keep a chart of participation. If someone wasn't writing, they were docked points. I quickly realized that wasn't something I wanted to spend ten minutes doing. Thus, an iteration! Here's what we ended up with:

Journals were collected at the end of every month for participation points, two points per entry plus an additional two points for reading through their entries again, identifying which one was their best work, and writing a short explanation for why on a sticky note on that page. (It usually worked out to be about 40 points per month, or roughly 20% of their overall grade.) If students were absent from class, they just had to make up the writing time at a later date, either during homeroom or as homework, as long as all entries were accounted for.

I had one student working on a story of her own, especially during NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), so I allowed her to work on that during writing time. I knew that if she wrote "Worked on novel" under a dated heading, I could trust that she did so for that day. Shortly before term papers were due in History, I had a handful of students do the same, "worked on history paper," as well as shortly before college applications were due, "worked on college essay."

I didn't read every entry, but made a point to at least read the "best" entry, as well as a few more, time allowing, and leave a little feedback, all of which was about content, not structure. The intent was to hear the students' voices and to make a positive connection along with a little encouragement.

I didn't speak much on how much writing was expected, since this was a new concept for them, so for the most part, if it was more than a few sentences, and it was ABOUT something, I counted it. Some frequently lost points for writing, "I didn't do anything. I don't have anything to say." These were students that were already on my radar, and I conferenced with them, but probably not as much as I should have, considering it was still occurring at the end of the year. Definitely one of my biggest mistakes of the project.

Grading typically happened during self-led activities in class or during homeroom, so the students knew that I didn't open folded pages but did hold them up to the light to ascertain that there were, indeed, paragraphs of words. I felt transparency on that issue was worth taking a class period to do while they studied for tests or did other projects on their own, and it was never a problem.

What did it look like in practice?

We used the timer from Online Stopwatch on the SmartBoard to make it visible to everyone. I started the timer soon after the bell rang each English period, and there was to be no talking while the timer was going. If students wanted to share with someone, they were to save it until after the timer. If they had a question, I encouraged them to write it down and see if they could figure the answer out for themselves.

I used a flexible seating arrangement in my class, so students came in, sat in a desk or found a cushion, got out their notebook and pencils, then chatted with friends, waiting for the bell to ring. There were occasions when I had to make a quick announcement before writing time, but I tried to start the timer when the first bell rang as often as possible so as to maintain the routine and not distract them from what they were planning to write.

My seniors got in the habit of listening to music on the SmartBoard while writing. They would give me suggestions of what to play (which ranged from hard rock and metal to dance-y pop to literal classic music), and I would queue it up on YouTube. My juniors selected one student to play DJ (the same person every day. They must have all appreciated her taste in music), and she played mostly Disney songs and pop-ish country music from her phone. My sophomores and freshmen preferred to listen to their own music on headphones or write in silence.

Once music was set and the timer was going, I gathered my notebook and found a spot on the floor among the students, modeling expectations. I tried my best to write with my students every day. That was my intention, anyway, but I had four main English classes. Forty minutes of writing every day is wonderful for me because writing is what I do, but to have it segmented in quarters was a test in patience and developing new skills. Just as my students were learning how they could write EVERY. SINGLE. DAY. for ten whole minutes(!), I was learning how to chunk my writing. The buzzer frequently went off right as I was getting into the flow of my work.

And then there were the occasion or two where I just needed to get some paperwork done quickly, and the ten minutes at the beginning of class felt like the right time. That's not a good excuse, and I was always disappointed in myself whenever I did so, but the students were rather forgiving because they knew I wrote with other classes.

After the timer went off, there were a couple of minutes during preparation for grammar in which students could share their writing if they wanted to. At the beginning, I frequently read what I wrote aloud. It was mostly silly little stories back then, but my students loved hearing my writing voice, and I loved being able to model it for them. I encouraged them to share aloud, as well, but they rarely did. Instead, I started giving them two or three minutes to share with a friend before moving on. To encourage feedback (which we also discussed) I handed out sticky notes to anyone who was sharing, on which their partner wrote one reaction they had to the writing and one question. This was an interesting idea, but it didn't seem to work well. Only a couple students gave feedback. Others just read and handed the journals back, perhaps to discuss privately later.

Student feedback

My other greatest failing was not scaling the project up properly. I started with expectations right where I wanted them to end up--ten minutes of writing every day. I didn't even realize that I should start slow. My juniors and seniors adapted pretty well, but after winter break, my freshmen and sophomores were burnt out. We held class meetings about how to make it better, and they decided (separately) that they would like to write every other day for the rest of the year. After that, they were satisfied.

This would have been a good way to begin the project, only writing every other day. Or perhaps only for five minutes per day, as my sophomores were contemplating. Especially for younger students, starting with a lower time frame and slowly increasing would have been preferable. Another idea I had after the fact that would have been especially good for younger students is workshopping a different type of writing every day at the beginning of the year. It would probably work well in an elementary classroom to workshop different genres and styles for the first semester, then free write after winter break. Alas. Live and learn!

Regardless, my juniors took immediately well to journal writing. They actively looked forward to it, scowled at any distraction while the timer was running, and thanked me numerous times for assigning it. The seniors generally disliked it but didn't complain.

Final thoughts

I'm thoroughly pleased with how this program turned out. We may not have written many formal papers this year, but we DID write. Every. Day. (Okay, Monday through Thursday. Fridays were blocked for another activity. I guess I forgot to mention that.) I'm so pleased to have shown my students that writing isn't a scary thing--it's just something we do, and it's a useful tool for a myriad of instances. I'm glad to have given my students an outlet for some of their difficult teenage emotions, and we talked at the end of the year, especially my juniors, about how they could continue this project on their own, even when it wasn't an assignment. A couple eagerly agreed that they would. <3

"Flexible Seating" Classroom

When I arrived in my high school English classroom in August 2014, I left much of it as I found it. As I've written about before, I was nervous, low on confidence, and trying to do things "the right way," so I left the desks in the forward-facing rows as they had been.

I left my desk alone, too, sectioned off at the side of the room, a little bubble for adults only.

That worked fine for a year. I hardly even thought about it. I had so many other things going on. Occasionally I had the students rearrange their desks in small groups for activities or fish bowl discussions, and a few times we moved them to the side of the room completely to have the entire floor plan at our disposal, but we always moved the desks back into rows before the bell rang.

In August 2015, I stepped into a coworker's room and saw her rearranging her desks in a semi-circle and remembered that I had other options. Yes. Yes, this was what I wanted. I went back to my room and did the same. (The lone desk to the side is for the para I had in my room a couple hours of the day. Oh, and for the record, yes, the light at the far side of the room DID work, the students just decided that it made the room too bright to have both on.)

But the students hated it, especially the juniors and seniors. Accustomed to the status quo, they became nervous at the prospect of all being on the same level, not being able to feel like they're more prominent than the others or hide behind anyone. So I moved back to the rows temporarily (I noted that the other teacher did, as well, only keeping the semi-circle arrangement for a small seminar class) and started thinking about my next move--a deskless classroom.

I did a bit of research on going deskless (links below) and decided that it was too big of a jump to make immediately. Instead, I opted for what I called a "flexible seating" arrangement at the start of the second semester. I was thinking about surprising the students with it, but then I realized that that wasn't helpful behavior on my part.

Instead, I discussed with each class how they felt they learned best and then relayed my plans to them. I let them know that if they felt like they learned best while sitting in a desk, that would still be an option. However, if they felt more comfortable laying on the floor to work, that would also be an option. We discussed what acceptable behavior in the classroom was and how it would be handled if behavior wasn't acceptable. I particularly enjoyed this conversation because it felt authentic, and we revisited it a few times throughout the rest of the year. The students could tell that the flexible seating arrangement was something I enjoyed being able to provide, but that I was nervous about being told off by administration. They reminded each other that, "If another teacher walks in right now, they're gonna think you're sleeping if you're laying like that. They're gonna tell the principal, and he'll make us bring the desks back. So you gotta sit up and look like you're working!"

The day before Winter Break, I had the janitors help me move all the desks but five to storage. My husband and I just so happened to be buying new furniture around this time, so I brought in all the cushions from the old ones. (I considered bringing the couches themselves, but had no good way of transporting them the hour's commute.) There were also five plastic chairs that belonged at the back computer table (which no one ever used. I considered repurposing that table, as well, but never got around to it) in which to sit, but mostly they wound up serving as places to put things.

And the students thoroughly enjoyed it. They spent a couple of days exploring different seats but then settled into their claimed spaces for the rest of the year, as human nature is wont to dictate. Some students still felt more comfortable at familiar desks, and during junior and senior English, all desks were filled every day. Another favorite was under the computer table because even older students like to hide like preschool students do! (The room was such that they were still completely visible while under the table.)

Thus, here is how the room looked between classes (cushions were stacked by the back wall at the end of the day so that the room could be vacuumed):

And a couple of action shots! The timer indicates that these pictures were taken during daily writing time:

The biggest change for me, personally, came one morning when, completely frustrated by something or other, I realized that I was "hiding behind my desk" and "needed to be out on the floor with the students." I had a couple of students help me pick the teacher desk up, turn it around, and shove it against the wall (so that the drawers could still be accessed). I disconnected the desktop computer, connected it to the SmartBoard (quite tricky since all of the wires needed to stretch to where they were going now), and instead, used the laptop as my primary computer because it was able to roam the room with me. The "teacher chair" became available for anyone to use, much to the joy of my freshmen.

Here's a couple of action shots during homeroom from those times:

On the note of the "teacher chair" (which was gone from the above pictures. Maybe I was sitting in it that day?), I was actually surprised that there wasn't any fighting over it, which was unexpected because there was only one. The students must have recognized instinctively that if it became an issue, it would be the first thing to go. Thus, I never had any problems with it. The one, small thing that DID come up was that while a freshman was rolling around in it, he had to be reminded to watch where the wheels of the chair were so that he didn't crush anyone's fingers in the process. He did, after that, and no one was hurt.

So! Takeaways? Hmm..

This is definitely achievable and definitely leads to a more relaxed atmosphere that increases student engagement. For the record, the administration was always open to allowing me to try. Most of my pushback came from other teachers, some of whom actually walked into my classroom and scolded me for it, telling me to change it back. I replied that I had consent from administration and smiled politely until they left. The para and some of the students told me at the end of the year how surprised they were that we had so much success with it. I'm glad they considered it a success, but even more so, I'm glad that we experimented with something new.

Further Reading:
MindShift - To Foster Productivity and Creativity in the Classroom, Ditch the Desks!
EdTech Magazine - Is It Time to Get Rid of Desks in the Classroom?
Daily Press - Classroom with no desks a hit in Newport News
Tim Bedley - My Unusual Elementary Classroom
Milwaukee, Wisconsin Journal Sentinel - Some schools giving desks the boot
Indonesian Teacher Reflections - My Deskless Classroom...
Grant Boulanger - Reflections on teaching without desks
Utah's KSL 5 news at 6 - 4th grade teacher Annette Krueger (Youtube)
Punavision - Punahou School, Honolulu, Hawaii's French Teacher (Youtube)

Creating a Test and the Question Formation Technique

As a final project for their Beowulf unit recently, I had my Juniors design their own test. This was the first time they had thought about the questions on tests as well as my first time assigning students to do so. Thus, it was my favorite kind of activity--a learning experience for everyone involved!

We started off with a discussion about what this assignment was for: a glance at the Bloom's Taxonomy poster quickly let the students know that creating a test required more brain power than merely remembering answers. With a little more investigation, they discovered that they would also need to be analyzing--both questions on other tests to figure out how to ask a good "test question" as well as their own questions in order to word them appropriately. (Okay, I guided them quite a bit to get to this point, but it seems like they understood where we were going with it.)

We didn't do much with analyzing questions from previous tests. As 11th graders, they've taken their fair share of tests and figured they knew by intuition what made a good question. I didn't push much on this as I would have with younger students.

Instead, I just set them out to start the process with question writing. I assigned each student to develop 10 questions for the final. They recognized immediately that they needed to have a good grasp of the material in order to ask a question about it--they had to analyze what points were significant enough to the story to elicit questions PLUS have enough information to know the answer to the question themselves.

When everyone had 10 questions, we broke into partners and shuffled papers. Each team had twenty questions between them, and, armed with different colored highlighters, read through to determine which ones made the best questions and which should be worded differently. They discussed in partners, first, then as a class, offering rationales for why some questions were better than others.

Finally, a volunteer typed up the 10 best questions on a computer connected to the SmartBoard so everyone could follow along, and the whole list was analyzed again. It wasn't until then that they realized they had selected some questions that asked for the same information and had to determine which of THOSE were better!

I did have the students take the test, mostly at their own urging, but I had seen everything I needed for assessment purposes through the creation process. Considering that this was their first time with such an activity, I was thrilled with the results. I noticed them getting a little bored towards the end of the process, but almost everyone was actively involved and participating cooperatively. I called it a success.

After completing this activity (which we spent about a week on), I did a little more research. This was a good first step, and now it's time to bump it up.

The Right Question Institute has a six-step strategy for developing questions they call the Question Formation Technique. Their website is packed full of amazing resources, and I recommend digging through it. To begin with, here is a guide on facilitating the QFT formatted in such a way that I would put it up on the SmartBoard for students to follow along with each step, and here is a list of tips for teachers to follow while conducting it. There are videos of other classes using the method (which I showed to my students, as well), and a TON of other things.

I'm just starting out with the QFT, but it seems to work well because it encourages students/people to KEEP ASKING. We tend to ask a couple of questions and consider ourselves finished with the activity, but this follows a concept I've been running through my mind recently, which is this: The good stuff comes at the end. At the beginning of any activity--writing, drawing, exercise, discussion, etc.--it is almost NECESSARY to cover the basics first before digging deeper and getting to the all-important details. It's as though we need to ascertain that everyone's on the same page first and foremost. We have to sketch the outline of the picture before we can focus on the fine details. We have to stretch our legs before we can actually push them to their limit. In the same way, we HAVE to ask the basic, mundane questions about a topic before the life-shattering, world-breaking questions come up. The QFT allows that to happen.

Plus there's the discussion about the pros and cons of asking open- versus close-ended questions. It's easy (for teachers as well as students) to assume that open-ended questions are "better" than close-ended, but that's not necessarily true. Both are useful in their own ways and serve different functions. The discussion makes students (and teachers) more aware of what they're doing when they ask one or the other. And being able to ask the same question in different words is awesome.

I did a couple of practice QFTs with my juniors and seniors, and they went well, again, for first-time activities. With more experience, they will be master questioners! I'm excited to do more work with this. According to this blog, it ties well into ownership of learning, unsurprisingly, and here's an article from Mind/Shift that speaks highly of it, as well. The creators at RQI have a book I'd really like to pick up at some point. I have a lot of work to do!

A Further Iteration Idea for Classic Literature Studies

Three weeks in, and I already have to mix it up. My Classic Literature Studies program is already not working out the way I planned. This is why we embrace flexibility as teachers!

I'm not sure if it's just my school, or region, or country, or generation, or what, but my students are not "getting" classic lit.

My mind immediately goes back to the foundation of the project as a whole. The basis of Lit. Research and CLS both were to same question: Why do we teach classic lit in schools? The answer was that these are books every high schooler needs to read so that we, as a society, maintain a level of collective consciousness. That is to say, every person (at least in America) reads these books so that we have a common set of knowledge to draw upon. If we make a reference to Romeo and Juliet or To Kill a Mockingbird, we can be relatively sure that it will be understood.

I had a small class of seniors today, so we talked about it together. We really, actually talked this time. I had been letting a one-sided lecture suffice for this topic, but this time I opened up and welcomed feedback. The consensus they reached was, "Well, that doesn't matter because these books suck. Why are we forced to read these books when so many better books exist?"

And I get it. I completely get that. In fact, I have friends that question my commitment to teaching classics, as well. A common refrain from my husband whenever I mention literature is, "So, when are you going to teach The Name of the Wind?" Another friend always opens his mouth and then just shuts it because he knows he won't get a satisfactory answer from me; he's already tried.

To some extent, I'm still stuck in I-have-to-do-things-the-right-way mode. I'm afraid of being shunned both by my school community and by English teachers as a whole. I'm afraid of being outed as "not a REAL English teacher" if I don't dedicate myself to teaching the "proper" things.

But... isn't that what I do? Isn't that my whole schtick? Isn't the basis of professional career as a whole to question tradition (as Millennials are wont to do) and give my student what really matters? Have I really gotten so confrontation-shy?

At the same time, I still don't feel like I'm ready to drop CLS completely yet. There is still the matter of the collective consciousness that I felt so strongly about. And there is still the matter of my constituents (namely, my students' parents) wanting to keep the classics in the classroom. So it's not out the window yet. I'm just going to mix it up some more.

A story came across my local NPR channel on my drive to work this morning about how a recent study shows Kansans' desire for schools to teach a shocking 70% non-academic skills, "like teamwork, communication and persistence," over the traditional math and reading curriculum. Hearing that was just what my sore little heart needed to hear. I've been so stressed recently trying to force my curriculum to work. It was a relief to hear that others across my state are embracing a more liberal education again. I reached work in a brighter mood, ready to make some changes, ready again to challenge the status quo. I started brainstorming as my students wrote in their notebooks.

First, why do we need the change? What's been going on?

For a little over a year, I've been trying to teach classic literature as such:

-At first, I tried the most traditional route: Assigning one or two chapters of reading homework at a time and giving quizzes the next day. The students hated it, and so did I. They were forced to maintain the speed I set, which slowed many of them down and rushed the others quicker than they could handle. The quizzes seemed like an inauthentic mode of conversation, and most of them felt like I was just trying to "catch them" not reading. But when I tried NOT giving quizzes, most of them didn't read at all. The whole thing seemed inauthentic, in general, because that's not how we read when we read for pleasure, a chapter at a time, then stop and recap. Well, not most of the time, anyway.

-Thus, Lit. Research. I tried making reading optional. They didn't have to read the book, but they did have to know about it. The students had to look up the books on the computer and develop a summary paragraph listing an "elevator speech" of the most important things it encompassed. And they could still read if they wanted to, though I only had a couple of students read a couple of books the entire year. It seemed like such a good idea, but the students were lazy and I wasn't very good at enforcing my expectations. For the most part, they printed a page from Sparknotes and called it good. Thus, they didn't truly comprehend the books or the messages within, and I was again frustrated.

-This year, I've been trying to take the middle road by giving them only short excerpts to read. (Again, the whole book is available, but not mandatory.) It's three weeks in, and I can already tell that it's not going to work. My students still resist reading anything I put in their hands if at all possible. But now I've come across a new problem I didn't realize I had last year--they don't comprehend the text. Even the first excerpt, which I purposefully chose as an introduction to the book, no prior knowledge necessary (though we did, of course, go over some background information beforehand) led to complaints of, "I don't get it." They don't want to read, and when they do read, they don't understand what they're reading.

After realizing that the text wasn't coming alive for them, I started reading the excerpts to my students. I have mixed feels about this process already.

I was going to make a claim of "Everyone likes to be read to" and link it to an article confirming said claim, but then I realized that that's a bigger point that I can actually do a lot of research on. I could write an entire post about using read alouds with high school students.

So, until that point, suffice to say that part of my new plan for CLS includes read alouds. It seems to be the only way that I can get the "boring, old" text to come alive for my students, apart from movie adaptations (which I'm always weary of, personally). More on my mixed feels when I sort them. Until then, I'm reading Classic Lit to my students and discussing as we go along.

And for the rest of reading? I've been thinking about getting more classroom involvement in self-selected reading, most likely along the lines of a creative project once per quarter. Perhaps a video or a podcast or something? It seems a little daunting, honestly, but we'll start out small. They still have AR point goals and half an hour a week of class time to read. I just want to do more with that.

Preparing for Iteration 2 of Literature Curriculum (From Lit Research to CLS)

The original concept for Literature Research was to teach two distinct things--both Literature and Research, as the name implies. It was to teach Literature, as public perception says an English teacher should do, while concurrently incorporating research skills. The thought was that 21st century students need strong research skills, and thus I planned to have students using them frequently.

The first problem with this last year was that I didn't demonstrate how to research as well as I should have. I often had students printing off or copy/pasting Sparknotes and calling it good. So that's my bad. I didn't actually teach research skills. Noted. Lesson learned. Next year will be better now that I've recognized this.

The second issue I'm faced with now as I develop my curriculum for next year is that my parents and principal want more gathered material to present during lessons. That's fine. I can understand and work with that. It's just that the more material I gather for students, the less they need to find. That's not a bad thing, it's just less "research" they are required to do.

It's when considering this fact that I realized that Literature and Research don't actually go together as well as I previously thought. Trying to put both together, one always sacrifices the other. I can either have a good literature program, full of all the gathered material to distribute during lessons, or I can have a good research program where students need to find the material on their own. I can't have both together in this instance. And I need to teach both literature and research, so it's time to uncouple the two.

Thus ended the concept of Literature Research.

But that's not to say that the whole thing is dead. It's only time for an evolution.

The second pillar of the Lit. Research program was that students need to understand the concepts of classic literature. They need to be able recognize titles and authors and connect them to plot points, characters, and quotes, and that pillar still stands. Without the other, in fact, it becomes the focal point of the program. That point will be what my new literature curriculum is based on.

I referred previously to the "collective consciousness" that Americans (or English speakers?) have surrounding literature--that knowledge that we all have about certain classic texts. It's part of our culture, and it's present everywhere. You can find references to literature in movies, TV, popular music, video games, and everyday conversation. Classic literature is the birthplace of cliches. They hold stories and characters that everyone knows, and if a reference or satire is made of them, it is under the impression that any member of the English-speaking audience will understand it.

This is what I intend to impart to my students. This is the foundation of my literature program. It has less to do with reading classics just for the sake of reading them or because of tradition and more to do with seeing literature as a part of our culture.

I'm not mourning the end of Lit. Research. I'm happy that I attempted something new, learned from it, and can now try a second iteration. And in fact, it's rather liberating recognizing that I needed to uncouple the two in order to make them better. Onwards and upwards! (I wish there was a cool new name I could think of for it. I like those sort of things. It's too bad "Cultural Literacy" is already a thing and that "Literature Literacy" sounds weird. Meh. I'll keep thinking!)

Edit: Okay, I decided on a name--Classic Literature Studies, CLS!

NSFW: A First Attempt at Magnetic Poetry with High Schoolers

Last summer I found a set of Magnetic Poetry at a garage sale that I was excited to share with my students. I set it up on the side of a filing cabinet like so (click to enlarge):

I started off with a poem of my own:

I set small sticky notes near by in case they wanted to create by lines as I had demonstrated, but no one ever did.

I didn't directly address the area of the room or create any rules for it, and it took most students quite a while to realize it was even there. Some students noticed it right away, however, and went over of their own accord to play, and I generally left them to it. Most of them had the sense that it was an "after-I'm-done-with-my-assignment" type of activity without me even mentioning it.

I documented every creation that was left after the students left the classroom. As shouldn't actually be surprising with teenagers, some poems got quite vulgar, so I'll include our adventure after a jump. Be warned, teenagers are very creative! They're exploring their sexuality and can put words together in ways I would never have expected. Most of their creations are Not Safe For Work, and a couple of them made even me blush.

Experience with Assigned Reading in High School

Although I had developed a revolutionary idea about how to teach literature, I still only had the confidence of a second year teacher. Just like last year, when faced with the challenge of forming my own curriculum, I fell back on that which is commonly accepted. When I asked myself, "What does one learn in a high school English class?" the answer came, "Literature." I knew I disliked this truism just by remembering my own high school experience. I remember thinking to myself, "Why are we reading so much in English class? If I wanted to read, I would have taken a literature class! I want to be learning grammar!" (I was a strange child...)

And yet, it is what it is. That's what's expected. I'm to give each student a classic novel, assign pages to read each night, and give quizzes in the morning. In the classroom I inherited, there are shelves full of book sets for me to do just that. That's what parents, administration, and my fellow teachers expect. It's not that I can't stray from this model, it's just that if I do, I'd better be prepared to explain my pedagogical philosophy immediately. And we all know I'm working on building the confidence to do that.

Plus, well.. how can I know for sure that I don't want to teach literature in this way if I don't even try? There's no reason that I can't assign a book and still do Lit. Research at the same time. We'll just try it this way first, I resigned.

So I sorted through what I had available, gave questionnaires to determine what my classes had previously read, considered what I read when I was in high school, and eventually came up with my assigned reading:

* Romeo and Juliet for freshmen because I had heard somewhere that freshmen all over the country are assigned Romeo and Juliet.

* To Kill a Mockingbird for sophomores because I had heard the same thing about it, but the sophomores hadn't read it last year as freshmen.

* A Midsummer Night's Dream for juniors because I arbitrarily felt like they needed some more Shakespeare and I didn't have Hamlet or Macbeth (which was weird). A Midsummer Night's Dream was always my favorite Shakespearean play, anyway, so no hard feelings.

* And Fahrenheit 451 as the dystopian novel for seniors because I think one of the big three (451, Brave New World, and 1984) are typically assigned junior or senior year. And I adore dystopian novels.

With no evidence on which to base my hypothesis, I think most traditional high schools give students a Shakespearean play each year. (When I was in high school, I was assigned Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth, though most of my friends were given Hamlet in place of MSND.) This plan didn't give my students Shakespeare each year, but.. well, I worked with what I had. (More on Shakespeare to come... much more. I've developed some passionate feelings on this topic.)

Well, it seemed like a good place to start! Definitely a plan a good little teacher would come up with. I passed out books and took down the numbers written on the inside cover on a sheet of paper next to their names, like a good little teacher. I assigned the first few pages to read as homework, like a good little teacher.

But that's about where my commendable organization ended.

My first mistake was relying too heavily on having each class do something similar each day. I wanted writing assignments for each class on the same day, to stay at about the same point in each book, and finish up at around the same time. This is an obvious mistake. Not only are the classes at different reading and comprehension levels, but they're reading different materials. Of course it's not going to take as long to read 451 as it is to read To Kill a Mockingbird. Yep. A little more planning would have settled this out, and it's not insurmountable in the future, just a little messy the first time through.

Mostly this was difficult having two classes reading Shakespeare and two not. This meant that I definitely couldn't do comprehension and discussion the same way. The constant gear switching was irksome, but eventually there was some semblance of organization. After a little trial and error, it wound up like this:

* A passage by passage analysis of Shakespeare with class notes. Mostly this boiled down to asking what happened in the section we read, prompting if any important details were forgotten in the response, and writing on the board for students to copy. I tried to only write student wording, but occasionally I had to ask for clarity if I could tell not everyone understood. I feel like this was an acceptable way to go about Shakespeare, though surely not the best. Students were responsible for reading and translating the original text, but I could point out any passage that needed further exploration. I assisted in the creation of notes to assure everyone's comprehension, but it was still in their words.

* Discussion circle of 451. 451 lends itself nicely to discussion, and I enjoyed the conversations it brought up, though I could tell the seniors didn't really get into it. Towards the end, they got lazy in their reading and I had to start giving quizzes to ensure they actually made it through the text. That still wasn't quite motivating enough for about half of them, though. They had made up their minds that they greatly disliked this book.

* Daily quizzes and discussion of the responses for To Kill a Mockingbird. My sophomore class is my most trying and challenging group of students, and this was my attempt at being stern with them.  Many saw their grades decline drastically during this time. But still, I think maybe I'm okay with it, as it was an authentic and direct consequence for the action of not reading the assigned reading. Their grades clearly showed which students read and which didn't. I had a few students fail this semester, and though I'm not sure I'm okay with that, those students were the ones that didn't do the work. (Bah, THAT'S definitely a concept I need to revisit at some point. Just typing it gives me an unpleasant feeling.) But regardless, after the quizzes, the responses were discussed, so that even the students that didn't read knew what had happened in the selected chapters. And I DID try to give straightforward questions on the quizzes. I tried my best to avoid any sort of thing that could be seen as a trick question.

Also there was the fact that the last time I read these books (with the exception of 451) was when I was in high school. So I suddenly found myself with four books to read and lessons and quizzes to plan immediately and concurrently. It was a tough month. I got through it, but it definitely could have gone better with planning.

My biggest problem, though, was that the students all hated the books. I had a couple freshmen liked Romeo and Juliet once they got past the language barrier, and one sophomore really enjoyed To Kill a Mockingbird. The rest read begrudgingly, if at all. And that's no way to read. I hate seeing reading as such a chore.

One issue there was with my lack of planning again. I think I took too long getting through the books, and by the end, everyone was tired. But they had hated the books long before that, so it was more of an additional problem than a main one.

Perhaps it could have been a lack of autonomy. I told them what to read. I've spent a small amount of time since then perusing articles about English classes run solely on choice literature. As I've said before, my school does AR, so I'm not as concerned that my students get choice reading, because it's already happening.

But perhaps I could get them to do more response work to their AR books, like book reports or writing that copies the style of the text or reflects deeply on the concepts presented.

Or perhaps I could do small reading groups for self-selected classics from the shelf. That seems doable, but what would I do the first time a student came to me three pages into A Scarlet Letter and said they hated it? Could I allow them to put it back, or would I make them lie in the bed they had made?

Regardless, I think a bigger issue is at hand that I'm ignoring.

One thought that crossed my mind at some point during a comprehension-checking discussion was that some of these students just... really didn't get it. Maybe they weren't ready for it... but no, that's ridiculous. These are high school students we're talking about. They are practically adults, and if they aren't capable now, they never will be. Besides, what about high expectations for my students? Readiness isn't an issue.

But at the same time, I was certainly understanding the assigned reading at a different level on this, my adult read-through, than I did at their age. Was I asking too much for full comprehension from someone with as little life experience as they had? But maybe that's just it. Maybe it's more about providing new experiences. But, if that's the case, couldn't there be a better way? Videos or something? My students seemed so disconnected from the books I placed in their hands.

I certainly think it's asking a lot for a deep connection to a text from an entire class, despite how few students are in my classes, in particular. The more students, the less connection to the lesson, it seems.

Woah, that's quite a statement. The more students involved, the less individual connection to the lesson.

Okay, okay. That may be profound (or maybe it isn't at all), but it's not the issue we're here to discuss today. Focus, Holly. The point of that statement was that reading is a personal thing. I can understand small group, because small groups can dissect and analyze in a way that one person alone can't, but if you add more students that aren't invested, it detracts from the commitment of the others. It removes them from their magical connection with the text. Or, put another way, using another concept I also haven't written about, it takes them out of their flow.

So we've discovered two things: if I'm assigning reading, it must be self-selected, and it must either be solo work or small group work.

And still I'm ignoring it. I keep avoiding a point my mind keeps trying to bring up, and it's this: why are we reading these books in the first place? If my students are disconnected with the text while trying to get through a whole book, why force them? We know students don't learn well when they're being forced. I'm giving them the Lit. Research project to make them aware of the collective consciousness Americans have of literature. My goal is to supplement each material we discuss with an abridged selection of the original text so that they get exposure to different styles of writing, I just haven't collected them all yet. I'm also encouraging reading the full texts on their own. As of yet, only the freshmen have taken me up on that offer, but the offer still remains for everyone.

And as for the experience thing. If my job is to provide experiences and various perspectives to consider, I must find various was to do it, not just from "classic" texts. They just don't hold the same weight for students today as they once did.

The real question is this--is it worth my time to do it again? Honestly, at this point, I have to answer, no. It's not. I really don't think I'm giving my students any positive experiences that they couldn't get on their own, and the negative ones I'm giving weigh much more heavily.

And what of making students do things they don't like to build character? Well, I could argue that in college and the adult world, there will be plenty of things they have to do that they hate, and there's something to be said for developing the skill of persisting in that way, but... well, why does it have to be reading? Yeah, I know that in college and the adult world there will be a ton of dry, boring material to get through. But, on the other other hand, I'm doing that with the articles of the week. So! There's my answer for that, and I'll completely dismiss the entire argument because it makes me uncomfortable. I don't like forcing students to read books that they don't enjoy, because books should be entertaining. Articles and other nonfiction materials are sometimes dry but necessary. If a book is boring, stop reading it.

The other argument I anticipate is, "Reading classics in English class is tradition," and it's hard for me not to just dismiss that, as well. I'm not here for tradition. I'm here for results. Tradition wasn't working for us. It's a new age, and we have new techniques to try. We have new and exciting work ahead of us. (Honestly, is that not a tag line of my entire blog yet? I'm setting it as that right now.)

Well, is that it, then? Do I have my pedagogical philosophy prepared? Am I ready to explain myself to colleagues, parents, and administration? If not quite yet, I should be soon enough.

The only thing left is to decide what I am going to do with our time together, if not this. Eh, there's still five days left before winter vacation is over.