A New Look

I've decided to mix things up here at Mr. B-G's English Blog. After stumbling across what just might be the most helpful Blogger site out there, Blogger Buster, and perusing its beautiful link list of blog templates, I made the decision to make a switch.

A word of warning to any of you newer bloggers considering a switch: Most - if not all - of your widgets will be lost, and chances are the things you liked about your old blog won't necessarily reproduce themselves in your new blog. However, if you keep searching for the right template, it's likely you'll eventually find more things that you DO like with a new look that will make a switch worthwhile.

I suppose I grew tired of my bland background. I wanted something a bit more graphically appealing, yet still visually simple and easy to read. This template, called Zen, seemed to satisfy both of those requirements.

From the Teacher's Desk

A sampling of musings from the mind of a suburban high school English teacher:

School administrators are using adjectives like "bloody," "gloomy," and "bleak" to describe the current financial state of affairs for the rest of this year and next. I am hopeful that Barack Obama will authorize federal legislation to help cities and towns deal with declines in state aid revenue. I find it a bit disconcerting that we can easily lend billions of taxpayer dollars to automakers and finance companies, yet are forced to pause and deliberate when it comes to ensuring all our country's students receive a solid education. Anyone who has ever worked inside a school can tell you, every dollar does make a difference.

Are there any teachers out there with writing centers at their schools? When I was a M.Ed. graduate student at Plymouth State University, I worked in the college's writing center. It was one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. In order to get the hang of it, I underwent training in the non-directive approach to writing consultation. One of the most valuable things I learned was "silent and wait time." For the non-directive approach to be effective, the writing consultant must be patient and give the student time to ruminate on an idea or improvement. This was quite different than my days as a newspaper reporter, when editors would explain everything I did wrong and then fix it for me. I hope to eventually create a student-staffed writing center at my high school, as I've seen how they can be effective. I believe that if implemented with care, they can work at the secondary level. Please contact me if you have experience with high school writing centers.

Launching a high school newspaper advertising initiative in the middle of the year is difficult. For years my high school's newspaper was published in-house on an archaic printing press that only one teacher knew how to use. When he retired last year, so did the press and all that it produced. Left without a means to publish our newspaper, I was relegated to performing evening prayer rituals to Joseph Pulitzer in hopes of securing funding. My calls were eventually answered by my principal, who offered to give us enough money to publish five papers this year. My goal for next year (or perhaps even later this year) is to create an advertising department with a business manager responsible for generating enough ad sales to allow each issue to pay for itself.

We finally got around to hosting our Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest. The original date was a wash due to a snow day. As a result, interest waned, and only two students ended up reciting a poem. We do have a winner though, and she'll represent our school at the Massachusetts semi-final recitation contest this March.

Second quarter grades close this Friday. I should be in decent shape grading wise, as unlike years past, I made sure to not have a major essay due right before the close of the quarter. It took me five years to figure this out, but I am learning, albeit slowly.

I plan to add a new section to my blog called "student work." Recently two students did stellar jobs on their Outside Reading Book presentations. One created a movie trailer for Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," which he published to YouTube. I highly recommend checking it out, as it's professional quality. Another did answering machine messages for five characters from Stephanie Meyer's "Breaking Dawn." She captured the characters' essences to the T.

Felicem Diem Natalem

Mr. B-G's English Blog is officially two years old. Two years isn't a lot of time - it feels like I've been blogging for about five. It's hard to imagine how I taught before this blog, as it's become so entwined in all I do as an educator.

This blog - and the subsequent network it spawned - serves a variety of purposes. This page is a space for me to reflect on my teaching, share the highs and lows of the profession, and network with other tech-savvy educators.

Since its genesis in December of 2006, Mr. B-G's English Blog has been seen by more than 32,500 people from across Massachusetts, the U.S., and the world. A quick look at my sitemeter profile shows recent visits from Osaka, Japan; Gostar, Iran; Rome, Italy; and Schniach, Germany. Closer to home, this site has been viewed by people in Arlington, MA; Princeton, NJ; Jackson, TN; and Los Angeles, CA.

There's been a measurable progression in terms of content and organization over the last two years. Within a few months of this blog's inception, I created a separate page for class handouts and teaching resources, and another dedicated to my journalism class and the newspaper I advise. I then created individual class blog pages where I posted student work.

New for this year was Mr. B-G's Blog Exemplar, a paged designed to help teachers and students create their own blogs. Rather than limiting my students' blogging experiences to individual class blogs that I control, I've taught my kids how to create their own. So far we've used them to post compare/contrast essays and book reviews. In a few weeks, students will publish their own short stories, followed later by an analytical essay on The Old Man and the Sea, original poetry, and Romeo & Juliet editorial columns.

I'll need to take stock at the end of the year to see if my students' writing is, overall, better than that of last year's students. My theory is that publication and greater control over the act of publishing leads to better-written pieces. Certainly the quality of my instruction and the opportunities I provide for peer sharing, editing, and revision have the greatest effect on the caliber of my students' writing, but all things being constant, my hunch is that their writing will be better because they have more ownership and control of its distribution to the masses. The fact that it's really easy to edit and revise the text of a blog post helps too.

It's hard to know what lies in store for Mr. B-G's English Blog in Year 3. While I don't post quite as often as I would like (usually 3 times per month), I do constantly add to my link lists. In addition to a place for writing, these blogs are also online bookmarks accessible to all. While I do use Foxmarks to sync my Firefox bookmarks on any computer I use, it's nice to have many of them saved in a public location for others to check out.

Over time I'd like to provide more opportunities for my students to post writing online. There's no substitute for an authentic audience that's ready and willing to give you feedback on your musings. To me, Web 2.0 tools make the writing process more "real," and give students a unique and powerful forum in which to communicate and learn.

Poetry Out Loud

Our school is once again participating in the Poetry Out Loud National Recitation Contest. Our school-wide event will be held on Dec. 19th, the day before holiday vacation.

Click here to check out the poster I made to advertise the competition.

Last year was our first year of participating. We only had two reciters, but that didn't really matter, as all we needed was one. On a blustery weekend in March, I went with our school's winner to the Massachusetts semi-final recitation event at a local college. There my student competed against a dozen other kids from Western and Central Mass.

While he was competitive, he wasn't among those selected to recite at the state finals in Boston.

This link will take you to videos of past student performances, focusing on the key attributes that make for a good poem recitation. Click here to get in touch with your Poetry Out Loud state contact about setting up a competition in your school.

For more info on my poetry unit and other ways I teach poetry, check out this previous blog post.

What Twilight Character are You?

Writing is Essential

A video on the writing process, produced by students at McKay High School in Portland, Oregon:

Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals

Thank you Andy Samberg. This gets funnier each time I watch it. (And I've watched it a lot.)



Say hi to your mother for me.

Elegance in writing

Props to Bruce Schauble for this post on elegance. I also appreciated the Universal Intellectual Standards he referenced.

This year my school is focusing on (among other things) higher order thinking skills, so the above materials are timely and appropriate.

Thanks, too, for these Reading Response Moves. For those of you who haven't checked it out, Bruce's blog, Throughlines, is a must read.

I snapped the above photo in a state forest in Western Massachusetts with a Canon PowerShot SD750 this October.

30 Ideas for Teaching Writing

Some good suggestions from the National Writing Project. Click here to view in PDF format.
New 30 Ideas That Work

Teaching with easels

Last year I bought four wooden, self-assemble easels from Joann Fabrics to use in my classroom. I had recently gone to a conference of The New England Association of Teachers of English, where one of the presenters - a former Massachusetts Teacher of the Year - used easel posters to engage a group of English teachers during a seminar.

Once the easels came in the mail, I went to my local hardware store and picked up four pieces of plywood. I set a piece of plywood on each easel, clipped easel paper onto the plywood, and voila! - I had four classroom easels for under $60.

The past two days I've used the easels to help structure discussions of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the first two photographs, students initially wrote quotes and drew images before going back to the easels for "round two" to explain the quotes and write down insights gleaned from the images. In a "final round," students used yellow reporters notebooks to write down the main idea they extracted from each easel, along with something they felt wasn't sufficiently explained and needed to be discussed in class.

In the third image, students wrote quotes and questions. They then analyzed their quotes in the reporters notebooks, and answered questions on the easels.

The fourth image contains some of the instructions I wrote on my front blackboard. The students are to be commended for both tolerating and actually reading my handwriting.

QUOTES & IMAGES EASEL 1

Use of the easels allow students to work collaboratively in groups, share their thoughts and insights with each other, and receive immediate feedback on their ideas from peers. It also gets them up and moving around the room. Both yesterday and today, students said "This period goes by so fast." It doesn't always, but when everyone is engaged, time is a rare commodity that I just don't have enough of.

For the easel activity to work, students need to have done the reading, done their homework (in this case, one of four literature circle jobs), understand exactly what they are supposed to do and in what order, and evenly delegate each of the tasks within their groups. My students have been working in literature circle groups of four, so we ended up having five groups in each class. At times a couple of the easels were "busy" when two groups were at the same one, but overall students did a good job working with and around each other.

In the past I've done other activities where there are four groups, so each easel is occupied by only one student mass.

QUOTES & IMAGES EASEL 2

I find if I don't offer students an alternative structure for class discussions, (lit circles, easel activities, Socratic seminar) I can end up dominating the conversation. That's not what I want. I'm not here to tell the kids what I know about To Kill a Mockingbird. I'm here to see what they're coming to know about it as they read it. I want to help shed light on ambiguities and clear up misconceptions. I don't want to recount plot or show them how brilliant I am at literary analysis. I can certainly model these things for them, but if they begin to get the idea that I'm going to tell them about the book and explain what things mean, they won't be inclined to read. Why should they if I'm going to give it to them in class?

QUOTES & QUESTIONS EASEL

I've found that groupwork can be a great motivator. If students in a group are responsible for different tasks or roles, and they know that each task is vital for the group to function cohesively in class, they're more inclined to do the assignment. I always check homework at the start of class on the day it's due, and I usually try to use homework as the basis for some kind of discussion, or to lead into new territory.

I'd be curious to hear of your experiences using easels in the classroom. I'd also be happy to provide more info on how I structure some of the activities.

CHALKBOARD INSTRUCTIONS

Our first paper

In addition to teaching 9th and 12th grade English, I also have a journalism elective. Today the first issue of our newspaper arrived, and it looks pretty spiffy.

We're currently working on adding content to our website, which can be accessed here. As of this posting, there are no photos or articles online. Our student web editor hopes to get things up soon.

What is rhetoric?

I define rhetoric as the art of using words effectively. Watch the video below to see how three college students tackle the meaning of rhetoric. How do you define it?

The dangers of plagiarism

Last week one of my students turned in a plagiarized book review. After consulting my department chair and one of our vice principals, I decided to give the student an opportunity to redo the review for partial credit.

The student had taken phrases verbatim from an online book review site and used them in the review. Our school's student handbook says instances of plagiarism should result in a zero with no opportunity to redo the work. I chose to be a little lighter in my punishment because: 1) the higher-ups gave me the green light to do so, 2) I wanted the student to do the work the right way, and 3) because I believed in making this a "teachable moment."

I hope the student never plagiarizes again, because in addition to it being dishonest, this student's other teachers might not be as accommodating. I also know that once students get to college, plagiarism is taken VERY seriously.

When I was a M.Ed. graduate student at Plymouth State University, I had an opportunity to teach freshmen composition. When I reported to the head of the PSU English Dept that one of my students had plagiarized an essay, the verdict was swift and decisive. After meeting with the university's academic integrity board, the student automatically failed my course and was placed on academic probation. A subsequent violation would likely result in expulsion from the university.

Education is the business of ideas. Academic honesty is paramount. Over the course of the year I will teach my students that plagiarism is more than copying something word-for-word and not providing attribution. It is copying someone's idea and not giving credit where credit is due.

Almost all of my students told me that taking someone else's idea and putting it in their own words is NOT plagiarism. Wrong. It is! Plagiarism is idea theft. If that idea isn't yours, and you don't attribute it, it doesn't matter if you change some words around so it's phrased in your own language. It's still plagiarism!

By the time students leave my classroom, they should know what plagiarism is, and they should know how to avoid it. Those who plagiarize in the future will do so because they're unscrupulous cheaters, not because they're ignorant.

For more info on plagiarism, check out this link from The University of Maine at Farmington.

Image from http://sociology.camden.rutgers.edu/jfm/plagiarism/plagiarism-jfm.htm, accessed 9/27/08

What is written here

I am in the process of teaching my students how to create their own blogs. As I wrote here, students will eventually have their own individual class blogs featuring writing from a variety of genres.

As the blogs pop up, I will begin posting assignments on a new page called Mr. B-G's Blog Exemplar. Here I will provide a simplified blog model for students to imitate, post writing assignments and comment instructions, and, over time, provide my own models of the assignments I would like students to complete.

To date I've been using Mr. B-G's English Blog to muse about my own teaching, take stances on all things education related, and post things I believe other teachers will enjoy reading.

I've also used it to post class assignments. In the future, all assignment instructions will be found on my "exemplar" blog. As usual, Mr. B-G's English Teaching Resources will still be the one-stop source for my handouts and links for the teaching and study of secondary English.

It is my hope that this new page will add an additional level of organization to Mr. B-G's English Blog. Feedback, as always, is appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

Image from http://www.masternewmedia.org/images/create-new-blog-commoncraft-0.jpg, accessed 9/11/08

Summer Reading Essay Blog Comment Criteria

I would like your summer reading essay comments to answer the following five questions:

I - Describe your personal reaction to the story. How do you feel after reading it? What do you remember? What images do you see? What concepts or ideas are in your head? What did the story make you think about?

II - Did the conversation between the two characters seem authentic? What details, specifically, made the characters seem real and natural? If the character's dialogue was not believable, what is one thing the author could have done to make it better?

III. What was your favorite part of the story? Pick a line that you liked, copy and paste it into the comment box, put quotes around it, and explain what it was about it that stood out to you.

IV - Find one thing about the essay that you found distracting or problematic. This could be anything from improper use of dialogue, misused words (your vs. you're, it's vs. its, their vs. there), run-on sentences, sentence fragments, subject/verb agreement, simple word usage, boring verbs, etc.

Everyone's essay can be improved in some way. Help each other become stronger writers by identifying something that could be done better.

V - What is one piece of advice that the author might consider for future writing assignments? This should be phrased constructively (try doing ------- next time, consider --------) or inquisitively (what do you think would happen if you -------------?)

Comments should be five paragraphs (about 25 informative, well-written sentences). Your comments should appear below the story you are responding to. When asked to choose an identity, click "Name/URL," then sign your comment with your first name and last initial in the name field. Leave the URL box blank. Comments not posted according to these instructions will not be eligible for credit, and will be deleted.

I would like you to respond to three essays.

* Please bring a printed copy of your comments to class on Tuesday, Sept. 9th, as I will check them then. Your classmates and I thank you for your valuable feedback.

Three comments = a "check"

Two comments = a "check minus"
One or no comments = zero credit

For general information about posting blog comments, please click here.