Some quick research

Just some links to research that supports text sets.

• Elementary and vocab development
• Layering effects on memory of content
• Building knowledge bases

Rising out of dormancy

I've gone quiet for quite a bit. Still reading and thinking and creating text sets like you wouldn't believe.

I thought I'd jump start this again because I have encountered some texts that I want to address. The first is a recent Atlantic article titled, "My Family's Slave." It was gripping and awful and uncomfortable and moving (but not in the way you might think). The piece tracks a Filipino family's slave moving from the Philippines to the US. What is challenging is that the author is complicit in this woman's slavery and does little to assist her or work to ensure her freedom. That he is a pulitzer prize winning writer who wrote about indigenous rights makes it all the worse.

The second piece is a shocking repudiation of an Obit that the writer of the original article has coerced (maybe to strong a word?) from The Seattle Times. In some ways this offers a second perspective of someone who felt manipulated, lied to, and upset about perpetuating a myth about Eudocia Tomas Pulido's experiences.

A final article at MIC is a direct repudiation of the first narrative

My students are reading the first two as I type this, so I can't wait to discuss it with them. It's all so big and overwhelming and awful. I wonder what they will say.

The Compelling Factor

Yesterday, I read NYT's piece on swapped identical twins The Mixed Up Brothers of Bogota. It was a compelling and fascinating read, as the comments on the article attest, and there are so many aspects to consider but I keep coming back to why?

What makes something compelling?

Yes, this article has the dream telenovela-ness to it. The story of identical twins who are switched at birth, in this case creating two sets of fraternal twins, is so good that even Shakespeare embraced it as a plot device in Comedy of Errors. Who doesn't love a good mistaken identity story?

But there is something more. Susan Dominus spends a fair amount of the article talking about the science of twins, or the research related to twins. She brings up ideas of nature and nurture along with current thinking around epigenetics. That ability to connect this personal story to larger ideas of science becomes critical in building an understanding of why this story matters. What are the larger implications, which is the fundamental "so what?" question we often draw on. She does this artfully in the organizational structure of the piece. She starts with discovery, encounter, revelation then moves to science. Then back to the narrative of consequences of those revelations and more narrative. It's a similar structure to what Atul Gawande does in his writing, one that I find appealing. A little bit of narrative makes the informational writing go down.

For me, also, this story is so riveting because there are implications about where the root of our personal successes may lie. As a country built on the post-Enlightenment ideals of rugged individualism, we believe that personal success is related to our own individual resilience and work ethic (which is the same idea that makes it so hard to understand what privilege is). We might believe that there is a genetic component, but we rarely acknowledge the environmental.

Here, then, is a story about four men who are encountering the direct effect of fate, as a Classicist may say, in their lives. Would William be different if he had been raised with his "true" mother (and let's let that sit there for a while, that difficulty in understanding what "true" parenthood and family are) in the city as opposed to the crushing grind of poverty in the country. Doors closed because of his environment while for Carlos they opened.

I can't begin to understand the emotions that this news must have brought. What happens when you are faced with the fact that you've been screwed by "fate"? Does it explain things or make you feel rage or both?

To me, that wondering, the sense of what this all means is precisely what makes for a compelling read.I prefer work that brings up questions, about our place in the world or how things work and what implications might be for further thinking. This article definitely brings all of those wonderings to the fore.

I am now thinking about how I might pair this up with other pieces in order to teach. Obviously the Comedy of Errors connection is ripe. But what else might I use? I wonder if it would be good for something on family? And if so what? I definitely will think about teaching it this year.

Violence and Games

A few summers ago someone at the UCLA Writing Project handed me a Lucy Calkins book about accessing and teaching the Common Core. Calkins is known for working with lower grades and for working with teachers, but the book was interesting enough. She talked about handing out articles to read with teachers, not about teaching, but just good solid nonfiction. One she recommended was a piece called "Shoot Out" about a high school assassin game. Calkins walked readers of the book through a way to talk about the article and helped me frame some ideas about Close Reading.

I love to use this article both with students and in leading professional development. I think it is nuanced enough that the first read gives a misleading understanding. To have readers revisit the piece, multiple times, especially around the diction used to describe the game itself and then the students' skills really forces students to use a text to make sense of more ambiguous and nuanced reading.

This piece is especially great with an article by Steven Johnson that was in the LA Times. This piece is an ironic yet fact filled open letter to then-Senator Clinton about violence in videogames. Johnson is known for his book Everything Bad Is Good for You which my friend David and I used with a study group around pop culture in the classroom. In the op ed piece, readers are asked to deal with sarcasm, which is often tricky for them to do in writing and it serves as an interesting companion for the "Shoot Out".

As ever, text sets are so much more interesting and exciting to deal with because they offer students multiple ways to think about a topic. These two articles work together, but they are also strong pieces to examine individually. Morevoer, they avoid the pitfalls of thinking about violence and games solely in the context of videogames nor are they simplistic Violent-Games=Bad articles. If you want to see what sorts of writing, along with the other pieces (a satire that Lucy Calkins mentioned called "The Great Office War" along with a Mother Jones article and a PBS piece) then please feel free to see the handouts from a presentation I gave at the With Different Eyes conference.

Icarus

I have often taught a text set of art pieces and poems related to Icarus. These include the Brueghel painting, a Dali piece and a Matisse along with poems by Auden, Williams, Anne Sexton, and Edward Field.

What might be an interesting and diversionary nonfiction piece to include might be this piece on two BASE jumpers who died in Yosemite this spring. The writing isn't particularly moving, though there is something to be said for the unvarnished way it is written, with terse syntax almost detracting from the spectacle of the article, an interesting mirror to the idea that the NPS is also trying to keep the spectacle out of the parks.

There is, though, I think, an echoing overlap between the themes of the Icarus story in its various guises and the desire of these men to fly. I am not sure what a good prompt would be, perhaps a found poem of the article moving to a poetic retelling of the events?

While in the car with Cathy on our way to professional development today, we had this very involved conversation about the pain of learning and what is necessary to learn. We ended up thinking about two intersecting continua, one that would be a scale of intellectual generosity to intellectual rigidity and the other would be engagement to rejection. I would love to do tons of interviews with teachers and code what teachers think provide successful students. I'm not sure what we might find, but I wonder if it falls along those two continua.

On my way home, then, I began to think more about Maria Popova and her work at Brain Pickings. By reading around her blog, I came to a post on the difference between wisdom and knowledge. In some ways, she describes a "ladder of knowing" similar to Bloom's Taxonomy, but then she gives this lovely explanation

Information is having a library of books on shipbuilding. Knowledge applies that to building a ship. Access to the information — to the books — is a prerequisite for the knowledge, but not a guarantee of it.

Once you’ve built your ship, wisdom is what allows you to sail it without sinking, to protect it from the storm that creeps up from the horizon in the dead of the night, to point it just so that the wind breathes life into its sails.

She goes on to say that the stories offer the opportunity to explain why given knowledge (and experiences) matter, to see the bigger picture.

I wonder if I can find something of hers for my students to begin the school year with?

Literature and the Internet

I have been attempting to clear out the backlog of un-listened to podcasts. Last week, I decided to work through On Being, which I love 50% of the time. Krista Tippet had interviewed Maria Popova, the woman behind Brain Pickings, which is a blog that I need to read more often because it challenges my thinking whenever I do read it. There are so many ideas worth discussing that Popova brings up, but the one that really blew my mind was around literature.

MS. TIPPETT: I mean, I wonder — someplace you said, “Literature is the original Internet.” And I wonder if that image of your grandfather is precisely what you're describing.

MS. POPOVA: Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. And I mean, in this — I guess, seeing these books of his added a different layer of understanding to this thing which I've been saying for a while. And originally, I meant it in the sense of — you know, you look at a book and then, in it, every footnote and allusion and reference is essentially a hyperlink to another work. Except it only works backwards. It only goes back in time, you know? And marginalia or this sort of — it goes back and forth because it is the present mind conversing with a past mind. So it's a different kind of hypertext, I guess.

I have struggled at times to explain why allusions expand a text. In one way, they are ideas building on previous ideas from, what Popova calls, the common record. Perhaps one of the greatest difficulty that inexperienced readers have is that they don't have enough experience with the common record to see how the ideas are building. The corollary is that students also have difficulty building their own ideas within their writing.

This idea of allusion as hyperlink and literature as the internet is one that has been intriguing me all week. In fact I was so excited to share it with co-worker. She also pointed out that "allusions were what you HAD to do as author -- it was about how you established your credibility to even write your work." Oh my! (Did I mention that my coworkers are amazingly smart?). Allusion then becomes a part of rhetoric, which is forcing me to reconsider some what I know about ethos.

The podcast is definitely worth an hour of listening. Another intriguing part:

POPOVA: I think a lot about this relationship between cynicism and hope. And critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there because finding fault and feeling hopeless about improving our situation produces resignation of which cynicism is a symptom and against which it is the sort of futile self-protection mechanism. But on the other hand, believing blindly that everything will work out just fine also produces a kind of resignation because we have no motive to apply ourselves toward making things better. And I think in order to survive, both as individuals and as a civilization, but especially in order to thrive, we need to bridge critical thinking with hope.

Yes. This is giving me food for thought because I've been reading Peter Elbow's work on Believing and Questioning and I'm in the middle of pondering an article around doubt for a Writing Project piece.