Bud the Teacher

Time for Twilight?

    I haven't read the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer yet - but the books came up in conversation three different times today - in three very different locations - so I figure I should at least take a peek.  Who couldn't resist this (from the author's description of the origin of the series):

In my dream, two people were having an intense conversation in a meadow in the woods. One of these people was just your average girl. The other person was fantastically beautiful, sparkly, and a vampire. They were discussing the difficulties inherent in the facts that A) they were falling in love with each other while B) the vampire was particularly attracted to the scent of her blood, and was having a difficult time restraining himself from killing her immediately. For what is essentially a transcript of my dream, please see Chapter 13 ("Confessions") of the book.

Perhaps the best part of Twilight showing up repeatedly is that the last reference is an IM I intercepted today between two middle school students - one surreptitiously using the web to pass along a link to the author's website.  Too cool. 

King on Rowling: The kids are alright

    This is a little less timely than I would have liked, but I've been working through quite a hefty "to read" pile.  (You can check out my online "toread" pile, if you'd like - if anything on there's no good, let me know so I can save myself the trouble!)
    I've quite enjoyed reading and re-reading Stephen King's piece "The last word on Harry Potter" from Entertainment Weekly, where he writes a regular column on pop culture.  In the piece, he speaks to the successes of J.K. Rowling's series as well as her strengths as a writer.  (One big one, according to King, is she allowed her characters to get older.)  He also writes about how strong many kids' reading habits actually seem to be, and closes beautifully:

But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire, right now it's probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ''literary novels'' each year. While the bigheads have been predicting (and bemoaning) the postliterate society, the kids have been supplementing their Potter with the narratives of Lemony Snicket, the adventures of teenage mastermind Artemis Fowl, Philip Pullman's challenging His Dark Materials trilogy, the Alex Rider adventures, Peter Abrahams' superb Ingrid Levin-Hill mysteries, the stories of those amazing traveling blue jeans. And of course we must not forget the unsinkable (if sometimes smelly) Captain Underpants. Also, how about a tip of the old tiara to R.L. Stine, Jo Rowling's jovial John the Baptist?

I began by quoting Shakespeare; I'll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they'll kill the damn thing.

Worth your time.

Blast from my Past

    Turns out my first ever scholarly publication, an article on book clubs and preservice teachers that I co-wrote with my friend and teacher Cindy, is available for free online for a short time.  She taught me to write for journals; I'm teaching her to blog.  I think I came out ahead in the deal.

A Quiet Week

    Been quiet lately.  It's one of those weeks that's about introspection. 
    I've been writing a little, though, and I thought I'd point you to the post I just put up at the CSUWP Advanced Institute Mother Blog. Take a peek. 
    If you'd like, you can join us in our Book Club which begins in about a week and will run up until the start of the AI.  The book, Working toward Equity, is available as a free download.  It's a book of and about teacher research.  Feel free to join in on the discussion.  Check out this post for details and a reading schedule.

Promiscuity in Prose & Poetry

    I might need to create a category just for Jonathan Lethem.  He's doing some interesting work.  (And I like his writing.  Especially Motherless Brooklyn.)
    Here's a link to and a description of his Promiscuous Materials Project.   Might be of interest to those of you interested in digging a little deeper into his ideas on appropriation and art leading to more art.   Basically, he's released some of his writing for others to use in different formats.  Here's that description:

I like art that comes from other art, and I like seeing my stories adapted into other forms. My writing has always been strongly sourced in other voices, and I'm a fan of adaptations, apropriations, collage, and sampling.

I recently explored some of these ideas in an essay for Harper's Magazine. As I researched that essay I came more and more to believe that artists should ideally find ways to make material free and available for reuse. This project is a (first) attempt to make my own art practice reflect that belief.

            

I especially like that he's published some of what's been done with his words.  I first caught this on an interview he gave to Fresh Air, and got to hear a chunk of John Linnell's version (at the top of the page)of one of Lethem's songs.  Good TMBG-y stuff.

Friday Night Twilight

    I've had a cold all week that's been slowly taking away my ability to think and to communicate at the same time.  I've been striking back as best as I can, but last night, after the very enjoyable fireside chat session with the K12 Online folks, the cold won the battle. 
    I caved and took some cold medicine.  Now, irony of ironies, I can't sleep, as all of the thinking I was trying to do today was sort of backed up in my brain until now, so I'm learning instead.  So long as there's no talking, I think my brain can keep up with my typing.  Maybe.
    Thanks to Rick, I spent some time this evening at YouTube.  Here's a video that pretty much matches our reaction to finding Cathy's Book on the bookshelf.
    Sean Stewart, one of the authors of Cathy's Book, has an essay on ARG's posted at his website on ARG's.  Since he's been involved with the artform/genre/mindtrip since the beginning of the artform, I think he counts as an expert.  You should definitely read in its entirety, particularly if you think gaming has a place in schools.
This is a little jumbled, I know, between the cold medicine and the excited synapses going off and fighting for control of my intellect.  Forgive me.  There's lots of synthesis to do between Stewart's words and lots of the great conversations going on about how to tell a new story in school.  This might be one of those ways to teach the new story in schools -- or I'm mixing my metaphors.  Either way, I blame the virus. 

On the idea of ARG's not being a new experience, Stewart writes:

By the way, I do NOT assert that the Beast was the first, or greatest, example of massively multi-player collaborative investigation and problem solving. Science, as a social activity promoted by the Royal Society of Newton's day and persisting to this moment, has a long head start and a damn fine track record. Not to mention more profound investigations and way more scandalous gossip.

We just accidentally re-invented Science as pop culture entertainment.

Can you imagine the classroom power of reinventing our content as pop culture entertainment?  Sure, there's some dangerous ground there -- but plenty of potential in there too.
    Feels like the cold's taking over again -- off to rest.  And read.   Before I go, though, I'm curious -- how many of you actually dialed the number on the cover (650-266-8233)?  What was your reaction?

Have You Seen Cathy's Book?

    I'm teaching a book club class in the afternoons for students who want to take their independent reading a little further.  We meet twice a week, discuss their reading and generally do book clubbish things, such as share ideas, questions, and, occasionally, chocolate.   There are only two students in the class at the moment, and we've been together for nine weeks, so we're starting to get used to each other as readers and thinkers. 
    We pick the books that we're reading together, and so it was a pretty normal day when we arrived at a local book store to pick out our next text, as well as some new books for the library that I had ordered.
    Of course, the book we had selected wasn't in.  But we found something else.
    A student handed me a black, hard cover book, with the words "Cathy's Book: If found call (650) 266-8233" written with what appeared to be silver marker on the cover.  She asked me what I thought.  On a hunch, I asked her if she had her cell phone with her.  She pulled it from her pocket, at which point I instructed her to dial the number. 
    She was nervous about that, so she asked me to instead. 
    I'm going to interrupt this narrative to ask you to dial that number, so long as it's reasonably cost-effective for you to do so.  If you've a Skype account, it's probably a free call for you at the moment -- go ahead and dial.  I'll wait. 
    From the moment we heard that message, we were curious.  Then, we opened the book.  Alongside a pretty standard looking book was a pouch full of documents and other stuff: ripped up photographs, a menu, some old letters, and some other odd items.  We shared the find with the other student in the class, dialed the number for her, she took a listen, and we headed to the register with our new read in hand.
    This is an interesting book. 
    Written by one of the creators of  I Love Bees, an early incarnation of an ARG (alternate reality game), Cathy's Book is a puzzle wrapped inside a book and scattered around lots of voice mail boxes, collections of documents, websites, and .  .  .  well, we're not sure what else yet.  We just know it's addictive and contagious.  At least one other student here at school is waiting to read the book, and we're all reading voraciously; we even met up today during lunch to check in on the progress that we've each made.  (All of us had discovered different clues that allowed us to access various hidden puzzles.  We needed each other to make the picture begin to be complete.  VERY COOL.)
    I like the idea of a novel that uses a narrative that exists in lots of places.  I've written about this before, but I really, really think there's potential in these types of stories, stories where we have to access different types of information and begin to make sense of what's real, what's relevant, and what's important to the story. 
    After only a day of reading Cathy's Book, I'm hooked, as are my students.  The only problem I see with that excitement is that in a week or two, we're going to need another book that engages us in this way. 
    Got any ideas?

Reading and Writing. Every Day.

    We're looking at how we do things at my school right now, for a bunch of reasons.  For one thing, it's always a good thing to be looking at how you operate to make sure that you're doing the best that you can.  For another, we've got some concerns about how our students perform in some situations.  Yes, test scores are one of those areas, but, more importantly, we're concerned about whether or not we're meeting our students' needs and preparing them for the world after high school.
    We're an alternative public high school, which means lots of things to lots of people.  (If you've got a take on what "alternative" means, please share your perspective in the comments.)  But I'm beginning to believe that, too often, we focus on the alternative in our name, and not the "school."  Thankfully, I believe that my colleagues agree and we're making some changed to improve achievement. 

    My personal favorite is that we're going to institute some sort of SSR (sustained silent reading) and SSW (sustained silent writing) into most every morning.  I think such a start will go along way towards creating the kind of academic community that I'd like to see fostered here at my school.

    We're still in the planning stages, though, and I'm curious to get some information from you.  If you have either sustained reading or sustained writing programs, how do you conduct them?  What secrets to success have you found?  What problems should we look out for?

    Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

Literature Carnival

   

Dana's doing a weekly roundup of blog posts pertaining to books and literature.  Check out her fourth edition of the Literature Carnival.  If you're writing about books or lit, there's information there on how to contribute.

A present

    Here's a little Christmas present for any of you into reading, writing, and conversations about either.  Denver's Tattered Cover Bookstore is now podcasting.
    According to New West Network (via Neil Gaiman's blog:

Thanks to a new partnership between the legendary independent and a local firm called BurstMarketing, podcasts are now being prepared with Colorado readings from these and other big-name authors. The collaboration, called Authors On Tour — Live!, will generate free weekly weekly downloads featuring recently published authors reading from and discussing their works while at the Tattered Cover. The first of these 30-45 minute shows, with J.R. Moehringer, author of the acclaimed memoir "The Tender Bar," an introduction by store owner Joyce Meskis, and thoughts by Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, is available now.

In coming weeks, the program will be expanded to include podcasts with (Al) Franken, Didion, Susanna Clarke, Robert Hicks, Neil Gaiman, Lemony Snicket, Clive Barker, Andrew Weil, Monty Roberts, Nicholas Sparks, Dan Savage, Zadie Smith, Michael Connelly, and others.

I'm subscribed.  Sounds exciting.