Teaching About Poverty

My classes are in the process of working very hard on our economy unit as they try to figure out what the best use of $700 billion would be. It’s been an exciting project, but has also gotten me thinking about how some of the material we study in class might seem less relevant to students.

Enter Blog Action Day 2008.

The theme of this year’s Blog Action Day – a day in which thousands of different blogs write on a culturally relevant and critical topic from their own paradigm – is poverty. This is an issue that has crossed my mind and heart frequently since college. One of the main catalysts of my own personal journey has been the ONE Campaign, a global campaign committed to fighting poverty, hunger, and disease around the world, though I have also been deeply affected by WorldVision and the work they have done around the world.

But since the goal of this project is to examine the issue through my unique lens, the question I pose to myself, and to other educators is simple: how can we educate our students about the reality, the causes, and the conditions of poverty, both locally and globally?

This is a question that I will need to ponder and try to work into my reading and writing assignments. One potential project is the op-ed piece students will write later this year (again borrowed from the ingenious Penny Kittle). Perhaps having students write their op-ed piece on poverty, either local or global, would be a nice assignment.

Our school has been setting up some very nice opportunities for students to learn about this particular topic. To begin with, our school is undergoing a movement, called “Be the Change” (based on a Gandhi quote). The focus of this movement, and the club/team that spawned it, is to create a caring school community. I certainly foresee this club dealing with some of the key issues in local poverty.

Another opportunity our school has opened up is the O Ambassadors club (yes, the O stands for Oprah Winfrey). The focus of this club is to raise awareness and money for poverty-stricken areas around the world. Our club, which met for the first time this past Monday, will focus on western China and the poverty issues in that area.

For the students in my school, I feel like this will be a very difficult topic to teach. Many of our students are middle- to upper-class and live in a very rural area; they have little concept of the sort of poverty that exists even an hour from here, much less what global poverty looks like. Many of the students also seem to lack something that is absolutely essential in understanding and acting on poverty: empathy. I feel like any attempt to teach my students about poverty has to begin and end with empathy. The question then is simply how to encourage students to engage a topic like this with empathy, and this is a question that I certainly haven’t figured out.

 Any Suggestions?

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A Quick Review

Still trying to force myself to make time to post more regularly during my planning period. I think once I get into a routine during plan periods, it will help: update website, respond to parent emails, post, plan. Seems simple enough…

That said, here’s a quick summary of the first couple weeks of the 2008-2009 school year:

1. So far, we’ve read two stories: “The Most Dangerous Game,” by Richard Connell, and “Gaston,” by William Saroyan. The first story we read as a sort of warm-up in marking and annotating a text. “Gaston” we read with the end goal of having our first Shared Inquiry discussion (putting that summer training to use). After about a 20-25 minute discussion in each class, I was moderately pleased with the results. I felt like the discussions were pretty good, even with a couple of my very quiet classes. I really like being able to focus on a good story and draw out some ideas and themes that are applicable to students’ lives. The students generally seemed to like the discussions as well. Was it a life-changing experience? Not really, but it went better than any literature discussions we had last year. Next up: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” and Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education.”

2. Our current writing unit (I’ve been splitting our block periods in half to get more writing instruction into my classes), is borrowed directly from Write Beside Them - we’re using her “snapshot moment” assignment. To get students going quickly, I asked them to write about their scariest moment. Our main focus with this particular assignment is to work on getting a lot of detail and elaboration into the writing – hopefully leading to better elaboration in the narrative essays they’ll write next. So far so good – most students seem to like the assignment (as much as they like writing, anyway). As mentioned in the previous post, however, my biggest challenge is trying to keep students engaged in something purposeful while I’m conferencing with students. Suggestions for this are, as always, most welcome.

3. Our technology teacher leader team has been busy already. Many of us have been helping other teachers with their technology problems and have helped some teachers find new ways to use technology in the classroom. As a building, we are also moving forward, slowly moving away from the old desktop computers and overhead projectors and making sure we’re all using the tools (ELMOs and laptops) the taxpayers blessed us with. Obviously there are always user issues with that sort of change – learning how to use new technology and a fear of change only a couple of examples - but I’ve been impressed with the willingness of our teachers (and administrators) to see this change as a challenge and as an opportunity to continue learning.

4. Football is a time-consuming sport to coach. Along with daily practices and weekly games, we’ve spent some serious time discussing personnel, watching game film, putting together scouting reports and game plans, and scouting games for the varsity. And that’s just at the 9th grade level. But coaching football has already been an incredibly rewarding experience. I’ve learned a lot, not only about football, but about coaching and teaching in general.

All in all, a nice start to the year. Now if only I could get posting about other stuff more regularly…

Writing Conferences

I’ll try to post a more thorough update this weekend when I have time, but for now, I needed to throw this out there.

I’ve been starting writing workshop conferences with students. It’s really my first time making a very concerted effort to work with students during the writing process, rather than simply grading essays (all spurred, I might add, by Kittles’ Write Beside Them).

I feel the dire need to ask for help as I try this, so I leave you with a simple question and ask for any feedback you might have, and thanks ahead of time for your input.

When you conference with students in class, what are your other students doing? How do you keep them engaged in meaningful learning?

Short Story Mentor Texts

As I’ve been reading Write Beside Them, I’ve been very impressed with Penny Kittle’s use of mentor texts in her classroom. She seems to use great works of literature, both traditional and contemporary, to help demonstrate certain concepts or skills she wants her students to develop. She has even suggested a couple of mentor texts specifically up to the point I am at in the book – notably, Rick Reilly, one of my all-time favorite columnists and sportswriters.

One of our units is a Reader’s Workshop unit in which students select a novel of their choice that they will read and they use that book to compare to other texts and complete assignments on. Popular texts this past year included the Twilight books, Harry Potter, the Maximum Ride series, and other popular YA titles. Our focus in the unit is to help students dig a little deeper into conflict and resolution, as well as develop comparing/contrasting skills on a deeper level (we introduce symbols, motifs, and themes in previous units).

The problem I ran into is that I just didn’t use enough texts to compare their books to. After reading Kittle and listening to her describe how often she uses these texts, I realized I need a better sampling of good mentor texts that will help students better understand the concepts we’re studying. Since I don’t have a lot else to do, and since I feel like this unit can be infinitely better, I’m trying to get some ideas now (we won’t do this until late mid-semester).  A couple of writers that I am already looking into using are Sherman Alexie (my personal favorite), Ray Bradbury, and possibly Jonathan Swift (I’m itching to get “A Modest Proposal” into the class somehow).

Unfortunately, I don’t have a very broad background in short stories (our genre of choice for this particular unit), so I decided to reach out to my “other” professional learning community and ask for your help:

What short stories could I use to help students understand different types of conflict? What stories would provide opportunities for in-depth comparison with the books they choose? What short stories have you used with success in your own classroom? I’m open to any suggestions you might have.

Unpublished Posts

Something I’ve recently been experimenting with is not publishing all of my posts (like this one) right away. Initially, the idea hit me when I wanted to write a Voki post but was having trouble getting Voki to load properly (more of a computer issue than a site issue). In the meantime, I had a couple of ideas for posts and wanted to write them, but for some reason I felt weird about posting more than once in a day.

After writing a couple of posts and saving without publishing, I realized a couple of things. First, the pragmatic side of me realized that if I do this when I have time, I can just save posts and then publish them when I don’t have time to write something that day. This way, I keep my blog updated and receiving hits (insert maniacal laugh here).

However, the teacher side of me also realized (thankfully) that this is kind of like what I’ve been reading about in Penny Kittle’s Write Beside Them. I’m still early in the book, but I really liked her idea of having students free write daily to get them writing more frequently and, conveniently, to enjoy it a little more. I did several free writes last year, and I like to write with my students when we do, but doing it every day seemed a little extreme at first.

The way I’m coming to see it, however, is that these blog posts are no different than other writing pieces. When I write something down here, I can save it for later, but I don’t have to share it with somebody right away. Maybe I publish it for others to read a little later, or maybe I just keep it tucked away forever. In any case, it’s an opportunity for me to write down something that I’m interested and engaged in at that particular moment – exactly what Kittle wants her students to do in free writing each day.

Like I said, I’m not all that far into the book (chapter 3 in my note-taking reading and chapter 6 in my straight-through reading), but it is a “teaching writing” book par excellence thus far. If you want to know a little more about it, I recommend checking out huffenglish and JustRead!, both of whom recommend the book highly (plus they’re just great bloggers, too).

Interestingly, one of my drafts (that Voki one, coincidentally) just didn’t seem ready to be published. Go figure.