Thanks for the goodbye comments. I truly appreciate them, and for your willingness to continue following a blog which hasn’t been updated in months.

Anyway, I figured it was time for a reinvention as a teacher. I see in myself a different person than I was when I became a teacher, and therefore have moved things over to another place. What’s here will be erased but not forgotten. This place is invaluable to me, but I must let it go.

The kids always call me “Mister,” and when they address me, it’s as “hey, mister.” Therefore, you’ll find me at heymister.

Hope to see you again.

Cheers.

Thanks for reading. Thanks for your participation and your help. You’ve made me a better teacher through your input and direction — I’d have failed and flailed without it. I hope those few words will underscore my gratitude.

Make sure you keep in touch with Kevin and the renewed energy of “Your Day in a Sentence.”

As for me, it’s time to disappear. Time for renewal.

Cheers.

Good buddy Kevin was overly kind and offered to host the weekly Boil Your Day Down into One Sentence edu-meme.

Head on over to his blog, Kevin’s Meandering Mind and start submittin’. (You can also check out the myriad technology-related educational materials he finds and uses in his classroom.)

Thanks Kevin!

Hi there.

Next week begins with a new class, taking away my prep hour, and leaving me to work from home. I’m honestly not sure how much time I will be able to devote to this blog from this point on, as I’m building lessons for that new class and preparing that work for a research/grant project. In addition I’ll be out of town for half of week next week, and the moment I return things really swing into motion.

Cheers, (for now)

thereflectiveteacherguy.

Here’s the thirty-fourth installment of the Boil Your Day Down into One Sentence fun-tacular! (Last Week, Kevin took the reins. Each week I’ll ask for these sentences and each week I’ll post them along with links to the authors’ blogs.

Day in a Sentence can’t exist without you and your reflections on teaching. Please consider submitting your day in one sentence, and see what others have to say. Also, please take the time to visit these authors’ blogs.

Here’s what this week’s teachers said:

Jennie writes:

My and my students’ worlds are on fire this week; school is suspended, but I can’t help but think this is a time when many of us most need that community; fellow teachers have been fantastic about keeping in touch; thank god for the internet and everyone’s determination to make it through this okay.

graycie writes:

Today, two kids in a morning freshman class spontaneously said that they thought our grammar lessons were fun, while this afternoon a senior class groaned when class was over. Hooray!

katiesue sings:

Hakuna Matata… Yes, preschool presentations will be over on Saturday. And then I’ll never have to listen to any of the Lion King songs ever again!

Bonnie writes:

Kevin and I had our K12 Online workshop open to the web world yesterday and I wonder who participated…I can’t tell…I feel great about being a pioneer in all of this…thanks to my virtual collaboration with Kevin, he will be keynoting our writing project’s site old fashioned, reality based conference… ya gotta ove this web 2.0, no?

Kevin adds:

“What if you created a virtual workshop and no one came?” is the question running through my mind as our VoiceThread storyboard sits on the K12 Online site pretty much vacant of stories.

Kevin also adds: And our presentation for the K12 Online Conference is right here

Another newcomer, Mathew, writes:

It’s hard, but not impossible, to be at the top of your educational technology game when your computer dies…here lies my G5; he was good while he lasted.

So there we go! Another Your Day in a Sentence down and yet another week coming up. Expect another call for entries in a few days.

Thanks again to everyone who participated — you get me out reading your blogs when I otherwise don’t have the time, or when I forget.

So, that carrot I was talking about…it’s this: If you finish that essay by the end of the day, or if you bring it in, complete, at the beginning of class on Monday, I will let you erase one grade from my gradebook.

For many of my students, this is a great opportunity — they get the chance to eradicate something that’s already missing; they can make it as though it never happened. If they choose the correct assignment, they can raise their grade two letters, and even if they have a pretty good grade, anything they take out lowers the mean (a little mathematics there) and brings up the overall grade.

I’ve never done anything like this, and I’m honestly excited to see just how many students take advantage of this. Let’s hope it works because we’re treating this essay as though it were the State Writing Assignment — something they’ve done each year, and which usually assesses one specific type of writing they’ve learned that year. The problem here is that we haven’t really talked about Literary Elements. We haven’t talked about how an author purposely builds a story. We haven’t taken the time to think about a story as a machine the author has built to work smoothly and effectively; we haven’t thought about stories as an artwork; we haven’t thought about the author as a construction worker.

And just writing this now leaves me thinking about the number of ways I could have taught this essay, and could have led the kids into the story.

The truth is that I was ignorant of our timeline and allowed the kids to get into another assignment, leaving us little time to do this more difficult work (and in less time).

We’ll assess the kids again later in the year, but that time the prompt will be different. Right now I’m thinking of all the ways I failed my students, and am thinking more about what I’ve done as a teacher as well as in my free time that’s led them astray.

This is one of those times I regret being a teacher — that I cannot go in and fix things before the kids come back. That I cannot give them a panacea to right all the wrongs I’ve borne.

As it stands, here is the information I’ve given them (but keep in mind, the list of literary elements below was supplied with definitions, as well as specific examples culled from the story and from class discussion.) Let’s hope they pull it off, because I’m feeling I failed them.

DUE MONDAY — OCTOBER 29!

The short story “Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes, is about a mentally disabled man who undergoes an experimental operation to make him “smart.” Underlying this story are a number of themes about human life and personal interactions. Write an essay about one of the major themes you found in this story; explain how the author uses that theme to create a realistic character and a realistic story. Using at least three items from the list below, explain how the author weaves literary elements into his story to further strengthen the overall theme you discuss.

Literary Elements List
• Characterization
• Mood
• Style
• Setting
• Structure
• Tone

Each of those elements makes this story stronger, but they also help teach the major theme of the story. Daniel Keyes wanted us to learn something from Flowers for Algernon, and we came up with a list of some of those themes:

• Mentally challenged people should be treated equally.
• You shouldn’t take advantage of people.
• Choose your friends carefully.
• Quick fixes might not be worth it.
• People aren’t who they appear to be on the surface.
• Be careful of who you become.
• Don’t pretend to be someone/something you’re not.
• Don’t further disable the disabled.

Your job is to pick one of those themes and teach it through three of those literary elements. Therefore, your paper should look like this:

Introduction Paragraph:Name the story, the author and give a brief description of what the story is about. Explain the major theme or themes Daniel Keyes taught us through his story. Make a list of at least three literary elements Keyes used to help us understand his story.

Body Paragraph #1: This paragraph should be about the first literary element from your list; explain how the author uses the writing skill to show us the theme. Explain what the element means, and give as many examples as you can think of to back it up.

Body Paragraph #2: Repeat, but with the second element from your list.

Body Paragraph #3: Repeat, but with the third element from your list.

Conclusion: In this last paragraph you need to remind me about the overall topic of your paper, and you need to revisit each of those three elements. Explain how Keyes’ use of these elements made it a better story — explain that he used those elements to better understand that theme. Explain what you’ve learned through the story.

Good luck!

It happens every once in a while — that monster you spring on the classroom is more frightening than you expected it to be. You planned on turning that monster into a cute, cuddly stuffed animal, and instead you accidentally added another set of fangs, a tail made of glass shards, and chainsaws for eyeballs.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in my classroom, and I don’t expect it will be the last, but I hope I’ll always stay aware enough to recognize it when it happens. But today I may have fallen a little short — I didn’t catch this until my third class of the day.

Here’s the problem. We’re writing an essay about Flowers for Algernon, and my plan is to get the students to choose a major theme in the story and use that theme to examine exactly how the author (Daniel Keyes) built the story to teach us that theme.

My plan was to have the students write one paragraph a day on a specific topic, mainly due to time constraints — they just finished a very long paper and project assignment, and here we are jumping into the next one — but also so that we can focus on one literary element at a time (teaching new material), and so that we can go through that writing process as a process (that we’ll have to revise as we write).

This essay is due Monday, and this means we’re really cramming it in. It’s not my choice it’s due Monday, and again it’s my fault for scheduling this within a week of the last project.

Anyhow, Bonnie left me a comment saying:

I’ve been thinking hard about your question, RT and I always think before I respond on these essay questions, how to unpack them. I would imagine that you are spending lots of time writing with your students, building their writing muscle. I think the best thing is to unpack this question in a way that they are excited and challenged. It’s the tone that you create and the excitement about all writing that you bring to the table. This is just yet another opportunity to develop their writing voice and sense of audience.
I think the worst thing is to make this seem formulaic.
I hope this helps. I love seeing how you are sharing your challenges on this blog.
Bonnie

She’s got it right — unpacking this whole question is difficult, and I want to do it in a way that keeps their writing authentic and personal; I have to grade these essays, as will a number of other educators, and none of us want to read the same essay over and over. We don’t want rehearsed, repetetive work. We understand that if we teach a specific type of writing on a specific topic that we’ll get back a collection of rote work, but that’s not the objective (for me).

I want to know what these kids think about the story. I want to know what they gleaned from it.

I also want them to choose what they write about, and that’s why they have a bank of topics for writing. And I’m hoping that this small amount of freedom will produce some interesting work.

Anyway, here’s thr problem Iran into today — once I introduced the idea of writing about the Theme of the story and discussing it through those elements of literature, many students got confused. My first class actually took to this pretty well, while my second class just scrambled. It was like they’d never been to class before. They didn’t know the story, didn’t know what we were talking about, didn’t know what the hell was going on. They were absolutely lost, and so I changed my methods.

Instead of having the kids write a paragraph on Theme today (keeping in mind they already have a “gimme” paragraph from yesterday), I decided to have each class chose a specific theme from our small list we’ve come up with as we read the story.

Themes in Flowers for Algernon

• Mentally challenged people should be treated equally.
• People shouldn’t take advantage of others.
• Friendship is a hard-won honor

There are a number of other themes lurking around in Flowers, but we haven’t discussed them yet. In our discussion today, most classes chose the first theme — it’s the most evident in the story — as what they’d like to discuss.

And so we did, in place of writing, so we could practice that discussion on one topic while seeing it through other topics. We wrote a possible introduction on the board:

“Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes is a story about…

I gave them that much and asked them to fill in the remainder of the sentence with a short summary of the story.

With this story, Keyes is trying to tell us that…

Here they are to pick one of the themes from our list, and write it word-for-word.

This lesson becomes clearer when we analyze the literary elements Keyes used in creating the story. He teaches the message of … through the use of …, …, and ….

Here they outline their thesis statement.

Writing that paragraph is essential and wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t realize that some kids were struggling. And it also couldn’t have happened if I didn’t teach them about Characterization and Structure

We talked about how authors create characters and how they show us about the characters, and we talked about structure and how authors build stories (like people build houses — with a plan in mind) to make us think more about the real meaning behind the story. We talked a lot about how authors respect us and don’t treat us like garbage. We talked about authors and how they care for us. We talked about what we saw Daniel Keyes do for us so that we might recognize that ultimate meaning or message.

Here are a few example conversations about this topic:

So, Jeb, what’s the theme of this story, to you?

“I don’t know.”

Choose one from the list we have. Honestly, I think that an easy paper to write would talk about the first theme: “Mentally challenged people deserve to be treated equally.” I think that theme’s obvious. A harder, and more fun theme would be the second one: “We shouldn’t take advantage of others.” There’s a lot in both of those themes, and you’re welcome to choose a totally different theme. Which one would you like to talk about?

“Uh, the one about we shouldn’t take advantage of people.”

Sweet! How do you know Kayes is trying to tell us this?

“What do you mean?”

How do you know the author is showing us that we should treat people fairly, and that we shouldn’t take advantage of those around us?

“‘Cause Charlie’s retarded.”

Yeah! How many stories have you read where the main character is disabled? How do you know Charlie is mentally challenged?

“‘Cause of the way he writes. He can’t spell. He can’t write. And he always says he wants to be smarter.”

And which of the topics we’ve talked about does this fit under. Is this THEME, CHARACTERIZATION, or STRUCTURE?

“Characterization.”

Perfect. So, in your paper, after you tell me what the story is, who the author is and describe the basic story, you’d also tell me that Daniel Keyes i trying to tell us that we shouldn’t take advantage of people, right?

“Yeah.”

And then you’ll make a list of what topics, what literary tricks he uses to teach us that, right.?

“Yeah.”

That’s your thesis statement. You’ll tell us he teaches this through characterization. Then your next paragraph will be all about characterization. How would you write about how he builds the characters to teach this theme of not taking advantage of others?

“I’d say what you said. I’d say ‘Daniel What’s-his-Face says we shouldn’t take advantage of others by making the main character mental.”

Dude, that’s perfect! That’s exactly what you should say! You should tell me the author did this on purpose. How are you going to SHOW ME that he created a mentally challenged main character?

“I’d talk about his spelling and grammar. And I’d talk about how he always wants to be smart.”

That’s great. You’ve just talked about one character, now what about the others? What is it about the other characters in the story thatmakes you believe we shouldn’t take advantage of others?

“Well, first off, his friends are dicks. They get him drunk and probably beat him up and they’re always making fun of him ’cause he doesn’t realize that’s what they’re doing. And then his bosds takes advantage of him by giving him $25 when he saved the company $10,000. And then there’s the doctors — Dr. Nemur and Dr. Strauss argue over who’s going to get more famous because of Charlie, and that’s not cool either.”

I totally agree. And think about what you just did. You told the whole class how to write a paragraph in an essay — you didn’t worry about the number of sentences we have, and you didn’t worry about how many words were in those sentences — youspoke from the heart. You told us about how Daniel Keyes built the main character and how that relates to the overall theme. And then you told us about all the other characters and how they treat Charlie. Everything you said was about how Keyes built the characters and how that helps us understand your theme. You just wrote a gigantic paragraph and you know there’s more you could put in there, but for now…that’s awesome.

Was that as hard as you thought it would be?

“No, that was easy!”

Ok then, tell me about structure. How did Keyes build this story to show off the theme you chose?

And then the kid went off…

“Well, he had Charlie write it in a diary so that we get to hear what he thinks. And it’s told in first person, which makes me hear Charlie talk about how he feels. And it’s told in chronological order, which makes me think about how Charlie didn’t know people were taking advantage of him until he got smarter, and then he realized it all. It made me think that Daniel Keyes did this so that I would watch Charlie get smarter and smarter and figure out what’s going on.”

Why did he let you do that?

“‘Cause he wanted me to feel bad for Charlie.”

Why?

“‘Cause he wanted to teach me the theme.”

Honestly, the frustration I dealt with today was likely nothing compared to what the students felt when I gave them another paragraph today. I didn’t realize that I’d been doing this whole thing backward. I should have TAUGHT the topics, and then asked how the THEME related, but that didn’t happen until halfway through the day. I wish I would have recognized this sooner, and I’l admit that the change allowed for a deeper discussion and also allowed me to gauge the students’ understanding of the story.

Like Bonnie said: the unpacking of the question is key. Do it incorrectly and everything’s for naught. Do it correctly, and you’ll be flying.

I thin I’ll try to have this same conversation tomorrow with the classes I failed.

We’ve been worried about dumbing down our curriculum for a few years now. At the same time we’ve also ramped up the amount and quality of writing we expect from our students. It’s a conundrum.

Here’s the prompt we’re giving our kids for the fall assessment — and we’re only giving them three in-class days ( 2 hours, 15 minutes) to do so.

As much as I think we’ve dropped or expectations of our students (on the state/national tests), where they focus on recall and memorization, I’d like to think that writing prompts such as this (and the fact that we grade them at the 9th grade level — next year’s expectations), that we’re doing the right thing.

The short story “Flowers for Algernon,” by Daniel Keyes, is about a mentally disabled man who undergoes an experimental operation to make him “smart.” Underlying this story are a number of themes about human life and personal interactions. Write an essay about one of the major themes you found in this story; explain how the author uses that theme to create a realistic character and realistic story. Using at least three items from the list below, explain how the author weaves literary elements into his story to further strengthen the overall theme you discuss.

Literary Elements List
• Characterization
• Mood
• Style
• Setting
• Structure
• Tone
• Figurative Language

Any suggestions? How can we make this prompt better in order to elicit the best thoughts/writing from our students?

First: I had my yearly evaluation the other day, and I thought it went poorly. Actually, I thought it went well, but in my previous evaluation with the same evaluator I found that I was lacking in many areas — especially classroom management. This is nothing new. I’ve had problems with classroom management since I began teaching, and this year I’m doing much better than before in creating a learning environment where I am the person in charge and that power is relinquished to the students every few minutes.

Instead of the I Teach, You Listen method, I try to spend most of my time with I Say Something, WE Discuss. And I think I’m finally getting my methods down to a point where we hold civil discussions in the classroom, while alternately allowing for full chaos when argument happens, or when something truly unnerving happens in our readings. There’s an art to bringing a group together in these circumstances, and that’s something I’ve struggled with since I began.

Anyway, when I went in for the follow-up to the evaluation, my administrator (my principal) told me that I did something he’s “never seen before,” and that I “blew [him] away” with the way I managed the classroom. That felt pretty good, and his explanation felt even better.

He said: You gave a test where everyone had to stay quiet and take a test. All the answers were on the wall on posters [made by the students], and you said: ‘Sit in your seats alone and try to answer all the questions.’ The kids did that, and then when you said: ‘Now it’s time to work together’ they did that, too. That was awesome to see the kids interacting with each other in trying to find out the real answers.

But where you blew me away was that you allowed for so many learning styles. There was a big group in the middle of the room comparing answers, and there were kids working in smaller groups. There were kids working alone, and there were kids who were trying to wait it out by doing nothing. During the test, you checked on the kids, and after the test you let them do what they wanted, but you checked in there, too.

Where I thought: “I’ve never seen this before” was when all these things were going on you managed it all. While you were talking to [the kid] who wasn’t doing anything and got him to find an answer in a book, you heard the big group behind you yelll that the answer to number four was “A,” and you turned around and asked “Why?” and made them explain. That was something I didn’t even hear. And after they explained why you gave them a little lesson and then you turned back around to check on the smaller group and then you got [the kid] who wasn’t working to work with them. The whole time I couldn’t believe that you were hearing every single voice in the room and that you were responding to them all.

You did really well, and I was blown away.

So, that was a nice beginning to my day.

Secondly…
And as much as I enjoy the comments from the admin and am truly honored by the fact that he thought I did well, I myself was surprised and wowed by the students as we march our way through Flowers for Algernon and they are taking to heart the fact that we’re reading this text and appreciating the story, but that they’re also recognizing that we’re also looking at the text as something an author put together so that we could dismantle it.

For example: Yesterday we talked about the term Characterization and what that means. The students know how to read a character in a story — they know whether he/she is smart or stupid; they know whether he/she is the good guy or bad guy; they know when a character is being believable and when the character is lying because they have an outside view of the text.

They learned all that last year. This year, we’re taking the same term: Characterization and talking about how the author does this. We’re talking about the tricks of the trade. We’re examinging the word choice. We’re examining the actions. We’re taking a close look at how this character behaves and trying to find out why the author did this, and why he/she did it for us.

That’s — no shit — tough stuff.

Some adults can’t do this shit, but we’re going to do it, because we know the author has a lot of faith in us.

Due next week is an essay outlining the literary tricks an author uses in building a story, and we’re going through them like wildfire. Yesterday we talked about characterization and today we wrote about it. I asked a number of questions at the beginning of class so that I could cull information from the students while simultaneously going over what we read yesterday.

I asked them:How did Daniel Keyes create a realistic character?

We decided to write a paragraph on Charlie and how Daniel Keyes made him the guy he is.
Most of the classes came up with the same information, and so we all shared this information in a “gimme” paragraph. We wrote:

Daniel Keyes created a realistic character in Charlie Gordon by making him mentally challenged. We don’t know Charlie is mentally challenged until we begin reading the story, but we quickly notice that something is different about him. Charlie can’t spell, his grammar is awful, and he knows nothing about punctuation. Charlie is also writing in a journal so that some scientists can watch his progress. But the fact that Keyes shows us Charlie through the first-person point of view lets us in on Charlie’s thoughts, and lets us know that Charlie is just like anybody else — he has hopes and dreams, and he always wants to better himself. What we also notice is that Charlie is like us. No one has perfect grammar, no one can spell every word correctly, and all of us want to become better people. Whether we like it or not, Charlie is a lot like us because of the way Keyes created him.

It may not be the perfect paragraph, but each sentence was written by the students. I may have put a few writerly flairs in there, but these are the kids’ ideas. The kids kept complaining that we wrote too much in this paragraph, but after I asked them to count the number of sentences in the paragraph, they calmed down — it’s the same number of sentences I require in my essays.

What the kids don’t know is that this paragraph was the model for their future writing. I want them to come up with a topic sentence. I want them to back that up as many ways as possible. This example paragraph is “at college level,” I tell them,” because we call the author by his last name halfway through. The truth is, this is college level writing, because most college kids can’t write this well.

I point out to my kids that they did a wonderful job and that if they continue to write like this, every English course they take in the future will be cake.

We read far into the text after writing that paragraph, and along the way we discussed many things about characterization and about THEME, which is why their next notes in the PocketMod were about THEME.

Tomorrow, when the kids enter the classroom, they’ll answer a handful of questions about THEME and begin building another paragraph in their forthcoming paper.

While I was surprised by my principal’s comments this morning, I am more wowed by the students who truly are capable of more than you’d expect.