Sherman Alexie reads aloud from The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

Check out my new video on YouTube about how to tell a hyperbole from an understatement. You never know when you might have to identify one in a line-up.

The link for our video project entitled, “Treadmill=Party?” by Carol Huntington and Roxane day.  Enjoy!

If you haven’t heard, Matt Nagy is Kennesaw State University’s very own entry into the U.S. Open that finished up last week. He has a pretty amazing story!

Matt has no idea who I am, but I have followed him for awhile because he and I graduated from the same high school (albeit a few decades apart), and when you go to a school as small as Taylor County High, you sorta know everyone and their families, aunts, uncles, cousins, and even a few dogs’ names. When someone makes news, the whole town cheers him on!

Take a look at what Matt was up to in the past few weeks. Really? They give you a Lexus when you play in the US Open? Sweet!

The most helpful thing I see at first on the Georgia Standards website are all of the videos that you can watch directly there. There are English videos, one in particular on 9th grade Narrative Writing, which includes an interview with a teacher at Campbell High School in GA. This could be immensely helpful  for first year teachers.

There is info for grades K-12, but I focused on what was available for just ELA teachers in 9-12. That alone was pretty full of information!

The “Frameworks” area offers the following helpful descriptions:

• EOCT Content
• American Lit & Comp
• 9th Grade Lit and Composition
• GA High School Graduation Test
• GA Writing Assessment
• CRCT Content

Wonderful glossaries for Reading, Writing, and Middle Grades appear under the heading “Vertically Aligned Matrices.” This section would be a great reference for teachers.

Lesson plans and sample syllabuses (or is it syllabi?) are on the ELA pages. This information helps not only first year teachers, but can be useful for us MAT’ers in our education classes as well as in our internships. The lesson plans are pretty specific, down to units on poetry, the power of persuasion, and classical tragedy. The best part about those on this site are that they would naturally be tied to the Georgia standards for each of the subjects. It also includes unit planning in ELA tied to Georgia standards. All of this is in addition to the actual standards that we have to meet in our teaching. Way more info than I thought would be there…and very practical!

Thanks, Dr. C, for showing us this!

Well,  I was right proud of myself for getting this assignment done until Carol aptly pointed out that I had read the wrong article (thanks for catching me on that one!). I didn’t follow the link in the homework, so I wound up reading a nice article, but the wrong one.  So now, for some thoughts on the correct one.

In “Literacy for the 21st Century,” I found much information on how this organization approaches media literacy that was useful, but a good bit of it was like a commercial (were they testing us?).  The article  mentions that “we must learn “how to ‘read’ the multiple layers of image-based communication.” I wonder, however, if advertisers and some news organizations use these layers on purpose to obfuscate their real motives and message. Actually, I’m sure that they do. Our job is to peel back the onion layers and get at the real message by analyzing what we experience in media.

Len Masterman points out that ”in a global media culture, people need two skills in order to be engaged citizens of a democracy: critical thinking and self-expression.”  I would add to that that they need to form a set of bedrock values. Thinking and expressing without having a well-defined, albeit morphing, set of values leaves us little better than the apes. Values are incredibly important if those in a democracy would be informed participants and not simply reactors to the sensational ads that are all too common during political campaigns.

The five key questions are simple but the answers can yield quite an  in depth understanding of what is actually going on with any type of media, from an advertisement to a sitcom. I appreciate that the article points out that you must question those lifestyles, values, and points of view that are OMITTED from the message. Sometimes the main message they don’t want us to hear/see is in the omissions, like in this video ad.

Finally, I believe the summary of the entire piece is in this phrase:  “Media literacy…is about helping students…control the interpretation of what they see or hear rather than letting the interpretation control them.” This is the best expression I have seen yet as to the goal of media literacy. As Len Masterman points out, we want to teach students to have “critical autonomy,” or put in layman’s terms, “the ability to think for oneself.”  Well said.

On Saturday, just as I was putting the finishing touches on my EDUC 6100 observation, my computer crashed. These are the days I long for my Smith-Corona, when the only annoying thing I had to worry about was changing the correct-tape and putting in a fresh sheet of paper. Yes, we have some wonderful things from the Computer Age, but dang if this ain’t one of them.

In reading “Literacy for the 21^st Century: The Hope and the Promise,” I found myself yelling, “Yes!” and “Amen!”.  Thinking critically is at the heart of what I believe real education is all about. As the article notes, “no longer do we need to accumulate all the information we may need for a lifetime.” The computer age has about fixed that problem for us. The problem now is that the information thrown at us is at the rate of water from a fire hose. What we really need are the skills to be able to find information useful to us, evaluate it (and the source), and then put it to use.

My entire educational philosophy, particularly when I was homeschooling my children, centered around this William Butler Yeats quote. I’m sure that it has been overused in many circles, however, the truth of it is quite profound. When a child’s “fire is lit,” that child will learn because he/she wants to know more. The teacher then becomes the encourager, the facilitator, the “helper-to-find-resources.”  Teachers do not have to act as bankers, depositing facts into children’s heads (I love the word picture here); as the article points out, “teachers no longer have to know all the answers.” Why? Because the information is as accessible as the click of a mouse. What isn’t as accessible is the ability to use critical thinking.

I have used products by and worked with sales reps from Critical Thinking Skills, a  company dedicated to the ideal that “If we teach children everything we know, their knowledge is limited to ours. If we teach children to think, their knowledge is limitless.”  This article echoes this theme. Teaching children to think about and evaluate the messages bombarding them is vital to literacy in the 21st century. I would go so far as to say that without being able to critically evaluate the messages flooding into their minds, children will be as illiterate in the media age as those who could not read print in the last century.

The question I am left with is not  how can it be done in a classroom, but how are we doing in actually putting this into practice? With teachers being forced to teach to the test,  won’t drilling facts  still be a part of every school’s curriculum? Won’t we need a major paradigm shift in order for this to become the focus in schools today?

We chose Sonja Henie, the figure-skater, as our subject.  Starting with the book version of Encyclopedia Brittanica, we found a measly one paragraph listing of the facts of her life: She was born in 1912 and died in 1969 and a few other facts in between about her figure skating accomplishments and the fact that she became an actress. No pictures, no real narrative or personal information were used. Stiff, stilted, dry encyclopedic language.

Wikipedia, by contrast, gives her picture and uses colorful language which is alive and interesting to read. This entry gives information on how she died (on a flight to Norway) and an entire section on her professional film career. Many links are included for those who want to know more. One of the weaknesses with the Wikipedia article is that there was only one source used for the entire page. Not being familiar with the source leaves me wondering if that is a strength or weakness. More sources would seem to be a better thing, but if it is a strong, reliable source, that could be acceptable.

Brittanica.com was the most frustrating of the three sources of information on Ms. Henie. While it listed more information than Encyclopedia Brittanica, it was lighter on information than the Wikipedia entry. The most significant weakness was the difficulty of navigation of the site. Flashing advertisements made it difficult to get to the narrative portion that we wanted to read.

One discrepancy was noted between the three sources. Brittanica.com and Encyclopedia Brittanica listed Ms. Henie’s age as ten when she won her first national championship, but Marsha, our resident expert on figure skating history, said that she was nine. So did Wikipedia. We all agreed that Wikipedia had the most accurate information and the best overall site to obtain information about Sonja Henie.