... and now, for something completely different.

I teach high school English, so of course, I teach poetry. Students respond to poetry in essentially one of three ways:

1. "Yay! I love poetry.  We can do whatever we want!"
2. "Crap. I freaking hate poetry. There are so many forms and rules!"
3. "Meh."

I like poetry.  It's fun and flexible and can be taken to so many levels. To understand and write poetry well (no one is going to insist that poetry must be good here) takes a little work though. There must be a basic understanding of literary techniques - similes, metaphors, alliteration, onomatopoeia, etc. - and the purpose of poetry. This is not the Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D. of Dead Poet's Society fame rating scale of perfection and importance, nor is it multiple choice questions such as, "In line 7, the author's use of the word "verbose" suggests..." but some idea of what poetry is how it functions must be in place. In dutiful recognition of this, the class spends some time becoming acquainted with figurative language and necessary terms. Time - and effort - is also spent exposing the class to the basics of poetry with rhythm, rhyme, iambic pentameter and a slew of other concise terms.  We look at excellent, famous poems and analyze the hell out of them, because that's what we do.  Then, we come to fun of writing.

Silence.

"Mr. Parker, I don't know what to write about."
"Write about anything. Your dog, moldy leftover spaghetti, how much you hate this class. Anything can be poetry."  At this point, I will sometimes drag out my collection of free-verse written on the scintillating topic of marshmallow Peeps. "See, anything works."
"OK. I'll write a haiku." Moment of silence. "How does that work again?" Three minutes later, after the re-explanation of what a "syllable" is, "How many poems do we have to write, 'cause this one is done..."

Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, crazed writing is going on as the poem fueled beast within has been unleashed in other students. "Mr. Parker, I've got 29 great poems. Can I share them with the class? Now?"

Nothing is as divisive in an ELA classroom as poetry. In an attempt to bridge the gap between the heretics and true believers, I stumbled upon the sonnet.  I can hear you now, "The sonnet is a highly regulated form wielded with knife like precision by artists such as Shakespeare and Donne! How dare you expose the young philistine mind to such esoteric verbage, much less let them write one? Blasphemer!"

I hear you.  The sonnet is rather dry. Fourteen lines, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG form in (mostly) iambic pentameter. There's some good stuff there though.  When I tell the students that many of Shakespeare's sonnets were pick up lines, they sit up in their seats.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held:
Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;
To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

Spend some time reading that over. I know you've probably seen it before. Let it seep in. Find the similes and metaphors, analyze the word choice, soak up the consonance and read to the punctuation. Glory in the magnificent perfection of Shakespeare's sonnet #2.
"So, what's going on here?"
"Uhm, is he really saying that hey, someday, you're going to get old and not be so good looking so maybe we should go back to my place and make a baby so that you can prove that you were beautiful too?"
"Yup.  Looks like it."
"Damn! Shakespeare was a player!"

The students generally become more interested in sonnets and Shakespeare at that point. Sure, sonnets are - were - elegant and generally focused on themes of love, adoration and desire. Then - and this is the part I love, because I am dark and twisted - we talk about how times have changed.  Sonnets don't have to be nice and flowery and complimentary.  Sonnets could be used for a more devious purpose - as long as it's not about anyone in the room - and we could have fun with them. What if, instead of a sonnet being used as a pickup line, it was a buzz-off-and-leave-me-alone line? Hook, line and sinker. The anti-sonnet. Usually based, sometimes not exactly, on the first one or two lines of a Shakespearean sonnet and then twisted:

II.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field...

Shakespeare said that way back when, but now

Wait ‘til the plastic surgery scars are healed

You paid a lot for only the best

The collagen to fill your lips

A couple of thousand in your silicone chest

The fat suctioned from your hips

Botox treatments to erase your creases

Color in your hair to cover the gray

Remaking your body in bits and pieces

You could almost pass for twenty-five today

Modern cosmetic surgery sure is great

Too bad you can’t change your birth date

XVIII.

Shall I compare thee to an overcast day?

Yes, I think that will do

Your complexion is a sickly gray

And your eyes a faded blue

A smile has never graced your lips

Nor laughter from your mouth

You eat constantly, adding to your hips

Like storms clouds piling from the south

Your nasty farts echo around the place

Drowning out the thunder from the sky

The smell is a terrible disgrace

It’s so bad, I wish I would die

No one will believe should I even write this down

So do us a favor; get up and move out of town

XVII.

Who will believe my verse in time to come

When you have long lain in the grave?

Your questionable morals, the guzzling of rum

The grotesque acts that were simply depraved?

To call you unbalanced is not nearly enough

To describe your twisted views

To call your personality simply “rough”

Well, even your shrink was confused

Your ideas of fun were crazy; bizarre

Stuff that was criminally insane

Like throwing rattlesnakes at moving cars

Or shouting ‘BOMB!’ on a crowded plane

Enjoy your straightjacket, in your room painted gray

I’m sure they’ll let you out, maybe, sometime, someday

XVII.2

“Who will believe my verse in time to come

If it were filled with your most high desserts”

Because they would be lies and best I stay mum

Else I be accused of being a sick pervert

There are no words that exist to describe

Your vile appearance or noxious smell

It seems a waste of time to try and scribe

A demonic creature that crawled from Hell

Yet if you were to find an unsuspecting mate

His senses impaired by too much beer

He might make a dreadful mistake

And take you home, sadly blinded to fear

And were that spawn still alive in future time

It would terrify men in life and in my rhyme

Irreverent. Yes. Edgy? Guilty. Fun? Absolutely.

Sand Art with Hands – Narrative through Art

The short video clip this morning made me think about so many things as a person and educator:

the power of creativity,

the power of simplicity,

the power of non-print text,

 the power of music and how not having it present changes everything,

 how fleeting life and our man-made constructs truly are,

 and how a single grain of sand is lost when it touches others …

…kind of how a child is often viewed. Alone, we can more easily recognize an individual’s talents, strengths, and weaknesses, but placed in a crowd or a classroom, often one’s uniqueness melts and becomes  lost. How do we foster building upon strengths and interests so that they become passions? How do we promote learning in different ways through different media during a time of educational reform in which a number is extrapolated from a single test of reading and writing and may change not only the trajectory of the individual student learner,  but also that of his or her teacher’s professional career?

Sand Art with Hands also made me reflect on current and former Iraqi, Afghani, Bosnian and Kosovar refugee families over the years and how the same narrative is retold decade after decade, century after century.  Do people and the governments that represent them ever learn from the past? What is our world going to look like with billions more people and scarcer resources available? How could this story become many of our stories in the future? And, how do we place value on the single grain of sand when realistically, it is all of us collectively that will shape our future narrative picture?

J. Wheeler-Ballestas

A Poem in Homage to "Black Box" by Nikki Grimes

            At GVWP, we often discuss identity--as writers, learners, readers, teachers, etc...  These conversations lead me to question my own identity, not the one that I know to be true, but the identity created for me, as a woman, and teacher, in modern society. One of my favorite poems to teach junior high students, who often struggle with the creating an authentic self, is "Black Box," a poem written within the book Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes.  This poem shows students that although society may try to label us and force us to conform to accepted standards, we do not have to assume the limited constraints imposed.

      In honor of this poem, I have written my own poem, "Pink Box" (below "Black Box"), which attempts to address the narrow confines of womanhood within our society.

“Black Box” by Devon Hope

(an excerpt from Bronx Masquerade by Nikki Grimes)

 

In case I forgot to tell you,

I’m allergic to boxes:

Black boxes, shoe boxes,

New boxes, You boxes—

Even cereal boxes

Boasting champions.

(It’s all a lie.

I’ve peeked inside

And what I found

Were flakes.)

Make no mistake,

I make no exceptions

For Cracker Jack

Or Christmas glitter.

Haven’t you noticed?

I’m made of skeleton,

Muscle and skin.

My body is the only box

I belong in.

But you like your boxes

So keep them.

Mark them geek, wimp, bully.

Mark them china doll, brainiac,

Or plan dumb jock.

Choose whatever

Box you like, Mike.

Just don’t put me

In one, son.

Believe me,

I won’t fit.

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pink Box

M.Pollet-Swidorski

I may be made of muscle and skin

wrapped around skeleton,

but you have

forced me

into a box,

one that is too tiny,

too prim,

for the larger-sized package

within.

You paint me pink,

Tie my hands

In silk ribbons

Laced with barb,

You take my shoes,

my mouth,

    my womb

(in my best interest)

You mark me lady,

Bitch, whore,

Depending on whether

I open.



I won’t conform

I won’t be contained

I won’t be that frame

You packaged me to be.

Because I,

I am a circle,

Whole, powerful,

     Ever-changing,

Your greatest fear.

I may be made of muscle and skin,

Wrapped around skeleton,

But I am more,

    So much more,

Than what You

Made me for.

 

Initial blog of the GVWP…I feel like my students: “I don’t know what to write. How will I be judged? And boy, I hope I don’t make any major mistakes!” 

I am happy to know that I am among friends when I hear the recurrent statements about too much testing, prescriptive lesson planning and the big bad publishing companies who seem to be the ones truly running the show in education. In many ways this past school year proved very disempowering to teachers and school districts, in general, as any local power was ripped away and little to no guidance was provided ~ except that everyone will be reduced to a number and you better provide “evidence” according to whichever rubric your school district bought into.

Anxiety swept across local districts as well as our state this year and I have yet to receive my end of year “score” because my state exams have not yet been normed, (as they are done annually by the NYSED). So as all of my colleagues were able to bring the school year to an official close 2 weeks ago and received their “grades” as effective or highly effective, I have to wait until the end of July or August – or whenever the New York State Education Department has decided it has tinkered with its psychometrics enough to release the NYSESLAT (New York State English as a Second Language Achievement Test) scores. Each of my immigrant or refugee students will be scored on reading, writing, listening and speaking proficiencies, but his/her American-born peers  were  only  tested on reading and writing. I think if we are to truly assess students on language, it stands to reason that all parts of language should be taught and assessed. If the Common Core Learning Standards, higher education and the private sector require higher level 21^st century skills, then why are speaking and listening disregarded  when they are the initial modalities of language that are acquired? If people do not possess these first basic communication skills, we all know what the results are- as history books are chock full of the end results.

There are too many paradoxes in education right now… we are tested to prove that we have learned, yet there are innumerable things that we learn that can never be tested. How can the desire to read or to know more be measured? How can a number be assigned to a painting, symphony or piece of architecture? We can know and admire greatness, but can we reduce this to a number? Should anyone ever be reduced to a number? How can one think and create outside of the box if a successful score is  based only on getting the right answer in the same way that everyone else arrived at it?

I am reminded time and again of this when I see my students who represent every part of the globe complete math problems. There are so many ways to arrive at the “right” answer, but because English Language Learners did not learn their initial math skills in the United States, they are continuously penalized for arriving at their answers in a different way. I also think of past student writers over the years and how the art of circumlocution and poetic responses to very matter of fact English Language Arts questions were not “acceptable” or devalued and disregarded because the student didn’t think or write in the American linear fashion of a five paragraph response. I think of those students often and although they learned to master the equations of math and writing by American standards, what was lost in the process? They fit into our nicely shaped boxes of “Do it this way” at a cost of doing it differently -their way , and perhaps even more thoroughly or through an innovation that would help everyone ~ and that is a tragedy for all of us.

Harvests and factory output are reduced in terms of data, but I am not so sure that human beings should do this to children, educators, or their own species in general.

J. Wheeler-Ballestas

7/8/13

What defines a good teacher?

What defines a good teacher? What are those special qualities that separate the effective from ineffective, the strong from the mediocre? In the current educational climate, a strong, effective teacher is defined as an individual who can raise standardized test scores, who can produce adequate yearly growth, whose administrator can neatly check boxes on a rubric when observing. This admirable educator would not excuse poverty, disability, or language barriers, but instead would rise above, propelling such disadvantaged populations toward infinite achievement, achievement defined by statistics. According to the above definition, I am not an effective teacher, nor even a mediocre teacher. New York State would label me ineffective, and should this occur two years consecutively, I would be dismissed. Despite my fifteen years of educational experience spanning private, urban, and suburban districts, educating gifted, learning disabled, average, and alternatively placed subgroups, despite hundreds of hours of professional development in which I both participated and facilitated, I am ineffective. The students who I teach will not meet standard on a standardized test because they are not standard students; they are exceptional, exceptional in ways too rich and prolific to share within the space. Given this climate, why would I ever teach? Why would I risk jeopardizing my livelihood for a career currently under insatiable public scrutiny and attack? Like so many educators across the nation, and unlike many careers available in the twenty-first century, I teach for a purpose and fulfillment greater than monetary reimbursement. I teach for the exceptional student, the child lost in battle between effective and ineffective, the child who no one wants or considers. "Patrick" came to my classroom a forlorn seventh grader, who at thirteen years old recognized only a handful of kindergarten and first grade level sight words. He felt dejected, hopeless, and stupid. In an age of information, he could not access the world surrounding him, profoundly affecting his social interactions, classroom affect, and self-concept. Patrick entered seventh grade having been the product of multiple teachers and interventions. Some teachers wholeheartedly attempted to help him read, but were limited by top-down regulations; other teachers, fearful for their jobs, could only see a severely reading disabled boy, consequently focusing instructional efforts elsewhere. Every year interventions for Patrick changed, compounding his confusion of alphabetic principle. Every year he was passed along, never the student on the cusp of passing the annual state assessment, always the student forgotten because there was no glimmer of proficiency. This is the student for whom I teach, for whom so many of us teach. To me, Patrick is not a 4, 3, 2, or 1. He is not chasing the next cut score. He is not meeting, exceeding, or approaching standard on any category or subtest of New York State. He is Patrick, a boy who loves to scooter and joke around, who happens to struggle with reading. Earlier this past November, after fourteen months of working together, Patrick emerged a butterfly. It is a moment forever penned into my mind. With minimal assistance, comprehending every word, Patrick stretched his wings and read an entire page of text, tears in his eyes (and mine), pausing periodically to whisper, "I'm scared... I can't believe it... I'm doing it, myself." And he was doing it himself. In that moment, all those months of hard work collided, and he transformed. In that moment, Patrick, the boy who couldn't read, became a reader. Eight months following Patrick's transformation, we continuing our work together. He can now read chapter books, recognize complex consonants and vowel digraphs, and read with intonation and phrasing; however, as an incoming ninth grader, he reads at only a second grade level independently. To any teacher, this progress is profound; to New York State, this progress is not progress at all. Millions of teachers across this nation are not just good, but exceptional. Millions believe that student progress is not just possible, but inevitable. We know that progress cannot be narrowly defined or neatly charted on a graph or within a formula. We know what good teaching looks like and feels like. Education is a human endeavor, one that requires strong interpersonal, creative, and emotional skills. To remove humanity from teaching and to replace it with data, scripts, and formulas is to strip education of its foundation. In this climate, "highly effective" ceases to have meaning for students, especially the Patricks of our nation. We owe it to our children, our future, to allow humanity back into the equation.

Morning Reflection--Sand Artist, Kseniya Simonova

Winner of the 2009 Ukraine's Got Talent contest

Her web site:  http://simonova.tv/en/news

The video we saw is about her great-grandfather, an officer of the USSR army during WWII, who was  killed fighting the Nazis in 1943.  It is essentially a story of heroism and a love story as well. The words at the end of the video translate to "you are always nearby."

On her web site are more amazing sand animations dealing with issues such as peace and the fight to survive cancer.

Writing reflection on day one

We watched the YouTube video about not letting test scores define us for our first morning reflection. Our discussion focused on a number of points, including a key line about loving education but hating school. Some of us wondered what alternatives there are given the current high stakes attached to testing in the U.S. Now, with APPR, test scores are defining teacher quality. All of us were frustrated with the oppression of standardization and testing. A great discussion was had that started our day off well.