When good books make bad movies

Emma Watson posing for a "Read" poster?

So they’re making a movie out of Perks of Being a Wallflower. This is news to me, recently garnered when I stumbled on an item about a recent twitpic from the set of Emma Watson, one of the film’s stars and a veteran of a different, slightly successful book to silver screen adaptation called Harry Potter. The good news is that Steven Chbosky is intimately involved in this adaptation, and they look to be giving it an edgy treatment. The bad news is that two other similar books that I enjoyed, Lemonade Mouth and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, did not translate well to film for me. The former got the Disney treatment and went from being a somewhat authentic, quirky Breakfast Club forms a band book to a saccharine-sweet, unwatchable nightmare. The latter lost its edge in an attempt to manufacture a current edge for it.

So my track record isn’t good so far. Hopefully this movie will turn out for the better. The excellent Game of Thrones adaptation on HBO gives me hope that books actually can translate to film without losing their soul.

Wii U(niversity).

I know the new Wii U is a gaming console. I know the name is a play on “we”, “me”, and “you” that Nintendo uses for their naming convention on this game console. That being said, my mind immediately skipped to education when I watched the unveiling. Specifically, the idea of hand held devices (the new touchscreen controller) being able to push content to a central monitor as detailed in the pictures below from dvice.com:

The individual device is viewing a video of a bird. Then with a swipe it...

.... moves the picture of the bird onto the central monitor.

Now imagine this use of hand held devices that can seamlessly push their information back and forth between the individual user and the classroom’s main board. My brain is going into overdrive thinking of the possibilities. While I don’t think that the Wii U will be the device that takes us there, I can see the next generation of interactive whiteboards utilizing this technology.

Skin in the Game

We’ve received our students scores from the State Literacy Examination. In the past, we’ve just mailed individual student’s results out to them over the summer. This year, for a variety of reasons, I actually delivered some of my students’ results by hand. What a mixed experience! Clapping a student on the back and saying, “Congratulations. You passed!” felt like a million bucks. Faces lit, fists pumped, mouths whooped. Unfortunately, I also had to tell some students they hadn’t passed. Seeing them deflate before my eyes as they received the news was heartbreaking. Some tried to joke about it and make light of it. Others got angry. Some took it in silence.

Regardless, the experience transformed my outlook on this test (at least partially). I actually saw how these kids feel when they pass or fail. The cushion of the US Postal Service and a summer vacation take the emotion out of the experience. When I delivered it by hand and experienced the news with them made the experience visceral. Students may pretend indifference all year and complain viciously when we prepare for the test, but they still care when the results come. A passing student feels like a success; a failing student feels like a failure. This, for me, is what matters now. I can argue against standardized testing and how its unethical, ineffective, and bad for education. In the end, though, my students care whether they pass or fail, and that makes it meaningful. Now I have skin in the game.

Recent Assignments and Projects

We’re just finishing up our end of year projects, and I’ve been pleased with the progress my students have made with their exploration of theme. We started several months back with Socratic Circles as a lead-in to our reading of Lord of the Flies. Students were given short poems, quotes, and ideas to discuss that related to the themes we’d be exploring in the novel. Probably the most surprising aspect of this was how adept the students already were with Socratic Circles. Most of them had done them before in previous years, and many had done them this school year in other classes. Students benefit from school-wide adoption of learning tools and techniques, and it helps to create ties between their courses and years. The power of vertical and horizontal alignment is awesome to behold when it’s done correctly.

We then went through the novel in about three weeks. My awesome intern created the novel unit, and she incorporated weekly Socratic Circles on the novel to encourage deep reading and use of textual evidence. She actually implemented many of the ideas from the Broz article I posted about recently.

We then entered into book clubs. I offered a selection of books that had thematic tie-ins with Lord of the Flies. Students were asked to treat each book club as a Socratic Circle. Amazingly, the students were now capable of directing their own discussion without any audience or much supervision. They were discussing books like true readers and without any of the superficial “roles” that we often use to direct book club (discussion director, passage master, researcher, etc…). While these roles can be beneficial scaffolding for students, they also detract from the authenticity of discussion and give the book club a contrived feel.

The students’ final project was to decide on a common theme between their book club book and Lord of the Flies. They were also asked to include a section on why the audience should care about this theme. How does it relate to the human experience and tell us about ourselves? They used a variety of tools to create these projects, and then they presented and explained their projects to the rest of the class. See a few of the selections below, and I’ll likely be linking to some of the products in the next few days as students get them published online. I’ve paraphrased from memory most of their themes and relevance sections, but this is the general gist of it.

Book	Theme	Relevance for Us
The Book Thief	There is light even in darkness.	We need to reach out a helping hand to others during disasters like theJoplintornado.
Little Brother	Some forms of power should be resisted.	Repressive and restrictive governments should be fought against by their people.
The Wave	Group think and peer pressure are dangerous and should be guarded against.	Even in high school, peer pressure can make us do things we normally would not.
City of Thieves	The human will to survive in the face of overwhelming odds is powerful.	We’re stronger than we realize and able to survive situations we can’t imagine.
They Cage the Animals at Night	Humans can survive horrible situations.	We need to understand and sympathize with the plight of those around us.
The Kite Runner	The loss of innocence can drive us toward evil or redemption.	When we face horrible situations, we can find redemption or give in to the evil.

Leveraging Social Media

I almost cringed as I typed that title because it sounds almost dated or old-fashioned at this point to be writing about the power of social media. The fact is, though, that the students seem to get it more readily than the adults (and I’m not generally one of those people who accuses the adults of being Luddites while the students are all a bunch of techno-savvy whiz kid cyber ninjas who will lead us to the promised land through their l33t skillz).

Our school needed to send out a technology survey. We’re at the point where no one wants to take class time to do the survey, and it’s not really something that the entire student body need to be required to do. The idea was to offer a raffle-type reward for completing the survey. The next was spreading the word about the survey. At this point, a student service club was asked to help. Their immediate reaction? “Give us the link. We’ll take care of it.”

The adult reaction? “Are you sure? Don’t you need to make flyers or something?”

Students: “No. Facebook, twitter, texting. We’ll get the word out.”

Of course, we adults are still concerned about equity issues and those students who don’t have technology being left out of the opportunity for the raffle. We’re putting in place some measures to ensure that everyone is informed about the survey and has the opportunity to complete it. I still think it’s telling that the students’ immediate reaction when getting the word out was to turn to social media.

For me, this represents something of a paradigm shift for my students. In past years, I’ve been preaching social media to them, but they’ve wanted to keep it separate from school and did not grok the way it could merge with more than just our social lives. In the last year, though, our school has actively used a Facebook page and a twitter account to disseminate information. Students have provided feedback (especially when they didn’t like the school’s decision to not cancel school for a snow storm) on the Facebook page and participated in discussion there. We’ve done a lib dub that was posted on youtube and went, at least locally, viral. All of these steps seem to have changed the way students viewed social media. In all of them, the adults and teachers jumped into the social media and began providing opportunity for the students to use it for more than their social lives. We led by example. As a result, it’s no longer weird or dorky for students to interact with their school lives via social media, and that is a good thing. Who knows… if we keep going at this rate, maybe they will lead us to the promised land?

Teaching Aesthetics?

Hopefully this is not the work of one of my students

As my students and I move toward digital literacy and produce more digital projects, I’m finding that aesthetics have become increasingly important. Most of us have been subjected to ugly Powerpoint Presentations by students and colleagues. Heck, we might have even inflicted one or two on others. That being said, as we move toward projects that use Animoto, Glogster, Prezi, and others the problem compounds as we start to swim in a sea of ugly.

One of the refrains I’ve heard from secondary ELA teachers over the past few years is that they didn’t sign up to teach reading (I think most of us signed up because we love literature) , but that they’re finding themselves having to teach basic reading skills more and more to the detriment of teaching literature. Whether this is the result of a failing of our education system, a raising of the standards for a wider population, new media, or widespread cultural illiteracy is beside the point.  It’s a fact. The recent answer to this refrain seems to be that teaching literature isn’t really the job of the ELA teacher anymore, at least it’s only a small part of the job. We’re also to teach practical texts, non-fiction texts, digital literacies, new literacies, buzzwords, buzzword, buzzword…

So is it now going to be our job to teach aesthetics as well? Maybe the answer here is more interdisciplinary projects. Let the art teacher handle the aesthetics and the medium, and I’ll deal with the analysis and delivery of the message. When each of our classes works as an island unto itself, it’s hard to connect the pieces of learning students are receiving. If it’s difficult for me, then it’s likely doubly difficult for the students and weakens the learning taking place. If I were sure what they were being taught and able to draw on what they’ve learned and hold them accountable for it, then the whole dang educational experience might be transformed.

Foundational Texts for Cultural Literacy

One of the problems I encounter with teaching allusion is the amount of cultural literacy required for students to pick up on allusions. If you don’t know the Prometheus myth, then you don’t get fire. If you don’t know the story of Eden, then you don’t get apples. This problem is only exacerbated by the increasingly diverse ethnicities of our students (I’ll save the debate over the potential for inherent racism in our ethnocentric canon for another day).

In reflecting on my own childhood, I think that an early exposure to mythology (leading to something of an obsession) and my three-times-a-week church gave me a head start in tackling allusions. My parents required church attendance, but I owe my love of mythology to D’aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths.

That cover image floods my brain with memories of laying on the floor of my bedroom, flipping through the book’s pages, staring at the pictures and living out the lives of the gods and heroes of Greek mythology. I was only in elementary school, and I’d already mastered a significant chunk of the Language Arts curriculum that I’d be subjected to in 7th grade and again in 9th grade. I sometimes seemed to know the myths and pantheons better than my teachers. This wasn’t because I was a genius; it was simply exposure at an early age.

If you want to get your youngster an early start on mythology, then grab a copy of this book. What other books are out there that can help youngsters become culturally literate and give them an advantage in school?

Coolest App EVER! (if you’re a student or academic)

The title might just be an example of hyperbole (aside to students, hyperbole will be on the final), but I’m amazed by Easybib’s new iPhone app. Thanks to Free Technology for Teachers (great blog) for pointing it out. The short of it: use your iPhone to scan the ISBN of a book, and the app generates an MLA, APA, and Chicago Style works cited entry from it. You can then email the entry to yourself.

I’m going to have a hard time not lecturing students on how in my day I wrote works cited entries in blood from paper cuts inflicted while thumbing through the card catalog.

Grab the app here.

Context Clues and Big Kid Books

In a discussion with colleagues this morning, we started talking about reading “big kid” books to our own children. We agree that experiencing works like Little House on the Prairie, religious stories, Hardy Boys, Wind in the Willows (and for today’s kids Harry Potter) before we were actually capable of reading and deciphering the books on our own was a cherished childhood memory. The discussion veered into how this experience probably paved all sorts of neural pathways leading us to be the successful book nerds we are today.

One skill is the ability to tackle vocabulary thought context clues. As we’re listening to stories and truly trying to understand them (as we’re motivated to do when listening to our parents read to us), our brains struggle for comprehension. We have no choice but to assign meaning to words we don’t understand. As this happens time after time, we get better at it. We also learn that not knowing the precise definition of a given word doesn’t always destroy comprehension, but sometimes it does. We learn to tell the difference in the two, and how to respond to each.

All of these are skills that good readers employ, but poor readers lack. I contend that we first start learning these skills when we listen to stories being read and then translate them over to reading when the time comes.

Getting students to read

I dedicated a couple of blog posts recently to an excellent article by William J. Broz in the latest English Journal. Basically, he argues that many students don’t read assigned texts, and we’re going about encouraging them to read them all wrong.

He feels that we need to use social pressures to get students to read. Put them in meaningful discussion groups, let them have meaningful, rewarding discussion, and give them responsibility for creating that discussion. Don’t waste time on low-level comprehension questions (reading quizzes), instead reward those who read and prepared for the discussion by allowing them to engage in authentic discussion. Those who didn’t bother to prepare spend their class time reading so they can get caught up while the others are “rewarded” for their preparation. Don’t spend time “discussing” the reading by summarizing it through low-level, leading questions. Don’t spend time rehashing the chapter for those who didn’t read. Instead, let them read in class (minus the points for not preparing) and let those who did read discuss.

We did something similar in my class this year with Lord of the Flies. We had weekly Socratic Circles on the book. Students were required to create a given number of level questions to prepare. We gave points for preparation. I like Broz’s idea of not allowing people to participate who didn’t prepare, instead giving them reading time to catch up. Peer pressure is a powerful thing, let’s see it used for good. One of the coolest things I saw this year was one student taking another to task for not being prepared for the Socratic Circle.