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

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.

Text Set: Spanking

I have taught many a unit on punishment or juvenile justice. While the topic is certainly interesting, I find that I am increasingly drawn to stories around punishment that impacts my students more directly, namely spanking.

Full disclosure, as a parent, I do not spank my children. I was, however, spanked or at least threatened with spanking as a child. What makes this a powerful topic to explore as a reader and writer is how decidedly ambivalent I feel.

Digression: for me, the most interesting argument work I do with students is around topics about which I feel ambivalent. In thinking about this, I think, perhaps, it's because argument is best where there is a level of ambiguity, nuance or doubt. Arguing about facts is useless. But arguing about what facts indicate is always way more interesting.

Five Thirty Eight ran a piece on spanking in light of the arrest of Adrian Paterson found here. What they highlight are the changes in trends of people who support spanking. The tables provide an opportunity for students to look at how the support has changed and who has stronger preferences. For a stats nerd, they also provide a link to a regression analysis to see the connection between the various characteristics, which could allow for a quick discussion of causation vs. correlation.

These trends, though, need to be viewed with some more analysis. This Po Bronson article from Time Magazine adds some context. It's an excerpt to the excellent book that he and Ashley Merriman wrote called NurtureShock. This piece is trying to examine if outcomes are better for children who have never been spanked. I think he makes some assertions around progressive parenting that are worth probing.

When I read the chapter from NurtureShock with students, we discussed the question of whether or not children should be spanked. I was fascinated at my students' responses. I think I assumed that they would be anti-spanking, but many made compelling claims that it was necessary to teach children right from wrong. I think when I teach this again, I may try to find one more text (two texts feels like a too flimsy set), perhaps a short story, or an excerpt from Huck Finn that deals with spanking.

Panopticon and Elf on the Shelf

Since I was a high school student, I have loved Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It spoke to me a in a way that was more real, more possible and more terrifying then George Orwell ever was. When I became an AP Lit teacher, it was one of the novels I was moved to teach.

One of the companion pieces I like to excerpt and teach is Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. I have given the whole text before, but what is most compelling is from letter V when Bentham states:

You will please to observe, that though perhaps it is the most important point, that the persons to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so...

. In other words, for the panopticon to work, a person need not always be watched, but the person should have a sense that they might always be watched.

There are many fascinating aspects of panopticon, but the most important, to me personally is that society is, in many ways, a giant version of one. What keeps most of us in check is not actually being observed, but the idea that we might be observed. (E. Lockheart uses this idea to great effect in her YA novel The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks).

Imagine my pleasure, then, to discover a fantastic article about how Elf on the Shelf is a twisted holiday/kid version of the panopticon at WaPo. Peter Holley examines Laura Pinto's paper on how Elf on the Shelf prepares kids for a surveillance state.

There is much to disagree with here. This may not be an obvious stretch if you are not a dystopian literature scholar or a reader of Jeremy Bentham. But it is provocative.

My friends with whom I've shared this point out that this is not the first weirdness of surveillance state apparatus in the Santa Industrial Complex..."He knows when you've been sleeping/He knows when you're awake/He knows when you've been bad or good/So be good for goodness sake." (And yes, I just wanted to write Santa Industrial Complex).

Sports and Education

I think I may have inadvertently crushed some kids' dreams this week.

The text set we worked with focused on sports and education. It started with the NYT Room for Debate set on Taking Sports Out of High School. (If you've never heard of Room for Debate, it's part of the Op-Ed section where various writers weigh in on a question). This text set turns on the question "Should high schools eliminate sports program?" Without even beginning the reading, students were inflamed by this question.

My students worked with a chart that asked that they record the writer's particular argument, the type of evidence presented with examples of the evidence. Once they had read all eight pieces, they also ranked them in order from the most enthusiastic supporter of sports in schools to the most skeptical. For the most part students were in general agreement about where writers landed on that spectrum. What I also loved about this set is how wide-ranging the reasoning for a writers' support or ambivalence was. One author focused on the positive benefits of Title IX while another author did not deride the importance of sports, but instead of focused on how sports have become overly central to school life.

These texts provided some basis for thinking about the role of sports in school and allowed students to see the diversity in thinking on this topic.

The next text, though, blew them away. Students wrote descriptive pieces on The probability of continuing in organized sports after high school. My co-worker taught an excellent lesson on how to write a graph description. She used Julie Groves' work as a basis for understanding how to translate data to text. This provoked some phenomenal thinking because this is the other piece of what we have been teaching around justification. While we spend plenty of time teaching how to attack prose work, we rarely dig in deep to think about how to read data.

What was heartbreaking, though, was how surprised students were about these numbers. For them, working hard at a sport should lead directly to fame and fortune and a professional contract. What we didn't read due to time, but I did summarize for my students was this wonderful piece in the Toronto Star about the shockingly low salaries of minor league players in Major League Baseball. The infographic midway through the page is excellent. Spoiler alert: the 5 month contract for a Class A player is $6250. Not a month, mind you, but for the entire contract. Given that, perhaps even being a professional player is not exactly renumerative either.

But of course, many who want to play at the NCAA level are not thinking about going pro. They talk of leveraging a sport into a college scholarship. This article, which I reformatted when I printed and would be happy to share if you plan on using this, from the Houston Chronicle provides a look at the myth of the college scholarship for athletes. There are many more articles like it, including one from CBS that also talks about the average dollar value of athletic scholarships that are equally accessible.

I think what my personal takeaway from this is not that schools should not have sports, but that sports participation fills a need that is separate from financial considerations. The writing we will do will look at whether the benefits of sports outweigh the limitations and costs of such programs.

As a side note, this text set would be an excellent precursor to Stefan Fatsis's book, which I write about here.

Recommendation: Text Set on Life after Graduation

One of the units I have been teaching has been adapted from the CSU Expository Reading and Writing Course Curriculum. This course was originally intended to help produce students who are able to place into English 101 and to be otherwise ready for the heavy reading and writing demands that college places on matriculating students.

This unit is all about what comes after graduation. I won't talk about everything, but I do want to point out two long-form texts I teach and one short piece, as well as some other places to pull some interesting information.

If you are looking to get juniors and seniors to contemplate what makes college students successful, I'd highly recommend what Karen Lopez, a teacher in the William S. Hart Senior High School in Valencia recommended to us. Karen is a trainer for ERWC. She recommended the wonderful introduction of Jim Burke's School Smarts. Burke is a renowned and award-winning teacher, but in this introduction, he writes about his confusion and bafflement in school, where he grappled with understanding not only the purpose of learning, but the "culture, language, and customs of this strange new country called School." The voice in the piece is wonderful and there are couple of beautiful syntactical moves (including this great conditional sentence that starts with "I'd like to be able to tell you....") and students, or at least mine, immediately identify with it.

This piece is quite wonderful when paired with a New York Times article titled, Who Gets to Graduate? This lengthy but engaging article predominantly focuses on a program at University of Texas that works on retaining and supporting first-generation college students. One reason I find the article and the intro so interesting is that both deal with the idea that there are bigger reasons than just economics that make it difficult for kids from lower income families to graduate. It's not just college tuition, but there are some things that are not taught in the classroom the directly translate into school success in college. Leaning to navigate higher ed, in other words, is daunting and more difficult than learning to navigate kindergarten or middle school or high school. There is an entire culture of school that might look different than anything else you have experienced so far and you are expected to do it alone.

The charts in the New York Times piece are worth spending time on too. I spent several moments discussing what the first chart about SAT score and grad rates by income level really said and then we looked at the shorter text, which is an the October 2013 issue of Postsecondary Opportunities. I'm not sure where I found the original citation to this (perhaps the College Board's "Education Pays?" report?), but the chart on the front is striking. Only 8% of students from families in the lowest income quartile will graduate with a bachelor's degree before age 24, while over 80% of students from the highest income quartile will. Wonder about one of the roots of income inequality. BAM. There it is.

These are not the only articles I teach in this unit, but they are ones that I am interested in, sometimes for the quality of writing or the interesting ideas. I'll post more in the Faculty Lounge with ideas on what I do with all of this.

What do you all read about college that you find interesting?