ENGL344 Young Adult Literature MONDAY UPDATES
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 [email protected] www.leetorda.com |
Spring 2020 Office Hours:
I am officially on sabbatical for the Spring 2020 semester. I am not available for face-to-face meetings. On line office hours are available to exclusively to students in my ENGL 344-W01. If you need immediate help, please contact the English Department @ 508.531.1258 ONLINE office hours for ENGL 344-W01: Monday 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM Wednesday 7:00-8:30 PM Sunday 11:00 to Noon (when major assignments are due ONLY) |
MONDAY UPDATE for 27 APRIL 2020
It’s a grey Monday. It’s the start of the second to last day of what may well be the strangest semester of your college career--at least let’s hope so.
Some Valuable Observations about teaching Dread Nation in any setting.
Pay Attention to the actual history. This produced some of the best discussion this week, particularly because these discussions worked in two directions: understanding the history helps students understand the text and the text helps students think in fresh ways about our shared US history, particularly as it relates to black and brown citizens--both in the past and currently.
Jailyn Tavares started us off this week by talking about familiarizing students with the lived history of this period of time--The Battle of Gettysburg, chief among them, but, also, the period directly following the civil war, Reconstruction.
Gabby Sleeper wrote, importantly, “One project that I think I would want students to do is take one of those real-life events and compare what actually happened to how things went down in the books. How do things change because of the appearance of the shamblers? I might actually narrow this project down even further to have students talk specifically about the thirteenth amendment and how recently emancipated individuals found themselves once more enslaved by the prison system. I would ask students to watch part of the documentary 13th, to give them context of how this went down. “
As I wrote in last week’s Monday Update (that it is clear most folks did not read in its entirety) , if I was pitching Dread Nation as a movie, I’d say it is a cross between The Walking Dead (or any of the literally zillions of zombie-apocalypse movies/comics/TV shows out there in the past 8 to 10 years) and an Ava DuVernay movie (Selma, When The See Us, A Wrinkle In Time, Queen Sugar), including the one that Gabby S. mentions here, 13th which is about the passing of the 13th Amendment and everything white America did to essentially gut the freedoms and rights that the 13th Amendment promised and still continues to fail to deliver to our black and brown citizens.
Gabby S. did some very impressive work thinking about how this novel serves as commentary on how the history of the US is deeply connected to--still to this day--to the history of the diabolical institution of slavery. Really, seriously. You should all go read what she had to say.
Ethan Child, in both his response to Gabby and in his own post, made two very excellent points related to Dread Nation and history. One of those ideas was an interdisciplinary unit with the history teacher; that would be really excellent. If I’m not mistaken, 11th grade is US history in most high school curricula. I love this idea because by connecting with another colleague we help our students see how these often siloed ideas actually connect quite importantly. Also, from a very practical perspective, it gives you more time--with the history and the novel. I’ll leave my second point about Ethan’s post for a bit later.
Caroline Keenan talked about exploring how indigenous folks and the US history of cultural and actual genocide feature in the novel. The author, in her acknowledgements talks about how she used the history of Indian schools to model the schools that our main characters attend in the novel (Red Cloud, the school that I work at with Joyce Rain Anderson in South Dakota, was one such school). This is another historical aspect worth exploration and could go under-identified. Nicole Costa recommended a documentary on the Carlisle Indian School that could be useful in a way similar to Gabby’s idea about watching DuVernay’s 13th.
Connecting to the Covid Pandemic. Next to the historical and social justice themes of the novel, connecting the Covid was the other major teaching theme. Shauna Ridley started us out thinking about how we might connect reading this text to the current Pandemic. I’m not sure “fun” is the word I would use (Shauna did), but I can certainly see how it could be an excellent way to get our students to not only process what is happening to them but, and this was Shauna’s point, also, process economic disparity and how deeply that affects a person’s life (who can get tested, who gets ventilators, who lives, who dies, who loses a job, who doesn’t). And, of course, because we know that black and brown citizens have the highest rate of death from the disease, how race intersects with the above feels very relevant and important.
Here again we see how fiction can help us have valuable conversations about real life that can be challenging to talk about. As Shauna wrote, “It’s important students know that they affect the world and they have a say in what’s going on.” A sentiment expressed by Laura Melchionda as well in both her response to Shauna and in her longer post.
As I mentioned earlier, Ethan made two very excellent points, and one of them is related to Shauna’s idea of connecting to Covid. Ethan writes: “I wonder if you can extend this idea so that students would not only connect the novel to historical information but also contemporary politics. For example, you might ask students to consider what groups of people are exploited and dehumanized in contemporary America. This would help students recognize Ireland's symbolism and would also make the novel feel more relevant to students' lives outside the classroom.”
Using the novel to teach genre. Not as much talked about as the other two, but still very generative. Jess Rinker brought up this excellent point: “By 11th grade, students have a lot of experience reading different genres, but they don’t necessarily have a lot of practice understanding how important genre is in literary analysis.” It’s true: reading a genre is not the same as understanding what genre actually means and how it functions in texts to help readers make meaning. She reminds us, as well, that Dread Nation is not just YA or just horror. It’s also a particular kind of historical fiction.
Unrelated but related to this point: I think of Dread Nation as something called “speculative fiction” which re-imagines actual historical events. The most recent example I can think of is Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which supposes that instead of electing FDR for a third term the country elected Charles Lindbergh (yes, that Charles Lindbergh), who was, in real life, pro-Nazi. If you’ve got HBO you can watch the TV adaptation of it--which is largely faithful to the book. It feels weirdly prescient to our current political climtae. Much like Dread Nation, the novel makes you understand actual history differently and more deeply than reading the actual history sometimes does.
Also, an interesting article on The Plot as well as on other speculative fiction (a genre I enjoy reading) in The Times last week.
Lighten Up Francis. It’s a book about Zombies. It’s so sad that you probably don’t get that reference, a staple of my childhood conversations with my sister. And you call yourself a Bill Murray fan. Anyway, Ethan pointed out that the genre horror/fantasy has a lot of general appeal. It fulfills the first rule of literacy instruction: don’t make them hate to read. Savannah Resendes talked about keeping conversation about the book light in an online platform--and you could totally (not that I’d entirely recommend it) keep conversation about this book on the zombie side of things.
I pitched the book to my 13 year old godson as “ a video game, but in book form.” He read the whole book and that could well be the first book he’s ever read in its entirety. Our ensuing conversation about the book inspired a possible assignment. He was telling me all the ways you could turn the novel into a video game. He schooled me on the particulars of that genre. I could totally see a lighthearted exploration of that. But what is true about video games, much like this novel, the narratives often explore pretty heavy themes. So you could do the video game fun stuff and then circle back to the social justice angle. I wish I had some 11th graders to try this out on. Nicole Costa played around with Walking Dead re-writing scenarios that I think play on this connection to what these students know, a point Molly Drain made as well.
I thought a fun low-stakes writing assignment (Gabby S, Becky Tynan, pointed out that online learning needs a lot of low-stakes writing opportunities so that students stay connected to the course) could be to take another historical moment and add zombies--sort of like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or, I guess, more like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer. Both novels are written by the same author, Seth Grahame-Smith. On a serious note, students could also then write an analysis of their stories explaining how zombies make the reader think about the actual historical events.
Other things I noticed that don’t quite fit in the above. Caroline Keenan and Natasha Cardin had an interesting exchange about “idioms.” I think my version of this would be about “dialect.” Many of the idioms in the novel are entirely made up for the fantastical world where the Civil War marked the appearance of zombies in the western hemisphere. But thinking about how those idioms explain things thematically in the novel would be quite interesting as would seeing which of the phrases they use are the result of the intersection of actual historical events and the fantasy/horror genre. And, as you all should know by now, I love any assignment that focuses a student’s attention on what the text actually says--like, what the words on the page actually look like.
In the end, it’s still the YA we’ve been talking about all semester. Gabby Boutin, late in the discussion, brought us back to the Young Adult part of this discussion. As she writes, “I think what this book boils down to, is Jane trying to find her path. The world is being thrust into chaos and she is constantly being told that she is wrong.” And you don’t get more Young Adult than that. If you think back to our discussion from last week, this is a novel about a young person and her friend trying to figure themselves out, their relationship out, this crazy world they are a part of out. Zombies might not be a regular part of our students’s world, but all that other stuff certainly is.
I liked Becky’s idea about pairing this text with Monday’s Not Coming. When you think about it, they are both different kinds of horror stories that allow us to have different conversations about gender, race, and power.
And about teaching all this online. . .
Laura Melchionda said what I think we are all feeling--this novel would be good to teach online, but not as good as if you were face-to-face. And that’s probably true for most content. She also pointed out that, however true that might be, teachers and students alike are soldiering on in this new Covid/online world, which is why teachers are a kind of unsung first responder that I have the greatest admiration for.
Olivia Leonard gave us a real life example of how teaching online can be complicated in ways that are invisible to us--will students have enough computers? Enough bandwidth? A decent camera? A space in their house where they can do it? During my last office hour, poor Maddie Butkus had to witness me in my Covid Mask because I was walking while office houring--because my husband was teaching a virtual drum lesson at the same time. What about teachers who are parents as well as teachers?
Gabby Sleeper best summarized how I feel about the move to use face-to-face/ Zoom/Teams/etc to meet with students:
“In thinking about how I would want to structure an online classroom, my instinct is to utilize Zoom or some other similar app that would allow for face to face instruction. However, while there are definitely benefits to this, I think that there are enough drawbacks that I would be hesitant to do this. If every teacher did this, we would have students sitting in front of a computer for roughly six hours a day, five days a week, in a home that might very well be full of distraction, with the possibility of all sorts of technical issues to arise, and it just feels like a recipe for disaster. For one, sitting on a computer for several hours at a time is very different than being in a classroom and seems unfair to ask of any student, especially those who may be watching younger siblings, are hard of hearing, or having difficulties focusing for long periods of time. Additionally, technology fails us. Electronics malfunction, apps glitch, and the power-outages happen. We can’t fault students for that, but there will be some who take advantage of it.”
All I have to say to that is yes. Even when all the technology works, having 35 young people in a zoom classroom is utter chaos and not productive--no meaningful conversation happens in that setting unless there is some careful written work ahead of time and a careful system of speaking and responding is worked out, with lots of ground rules about what you can do while you are in a meeting online, what you can’t do, when you have to have your audio muted, when you have to have your video on, what you should be doing in the chat section,etc. Ethan and Lauren both echoed some of these ideas.
I thought Ethan’s thought about offering an interdisciplinary assignment in order to make the best use of a student’s time online was both humane and very wise. Super smart. Also, I think we miss our work husbands and wives (man I know I do), and this would be a way to feel like we are working less in isolation from one another.
In fact, I think it would actually be easier to do an interdisciplinary assignment in an online setting--and, as you’ll see, I think it is important to think about what is good about the technology rather than bad.Now, teaching online--when everyone who is in the class has agreed to participate in an online class is different than the crisis teaching that most folks are doing right now. The mistake I find most faculty make when trying to teach online is to recreate the face-to-face classroom. But that is simply impossible and the effort to do so simply wastes the technology. I am most interested in what can you do in an online class that is harder to do face-to-face.
I liked the idea that Jess Rinker and Molly Drain had about giving students a suggested reading schedule--because, yeah, getting students to do the work in an online setting can be the hardest part (not for your guys, but I hear tell). I also liked the idea of using online time to actually read the book to each other. It made me think about how I might read some parts of the book out loud to students via video. Everybody likes to be read to. Gabby Boutin pointed out that “open discussion” doesn’t really work for unmotivated learners and this is particularly true in an online setting. So, as she pointed out, asking students to write to a prompt makes good sense.
In truth, I don’t think open discussion works very well in face-to-face classrooms. There is a lot of fake open discussion that amounts to students parroting back whatever they think the teacher wants you to say--or you get those, “Oh I totally agree” statements. And in a totally open discussion, there is a good chance you won’t hit the major ideas you want to have students talk about. That’s a total teaching digression on my part. Take it for what it is worth.
Most of you had some version of small group discussions. And, in watching colleagues try to teach synchronously, I think that this is a good plan. I’m thinking about my summer online class that was never supposed to be on line. We can’t be on screens for the six hours twice a week that we are scheduled, but, in small groups, for 30-45 minutes, we can probably have really good discussions if we lay out some ground rules for turning on and off mics. I’m going to try that instead of google.doc book clubs for summer.
One last thing before I wrap up this Teaching Discussion overview.
I started this by talking about being interested in what you can do in an online setting that is difficult in face-to-face classes. And that is where I want to end. Here’s what I’ve learned about online education: it’s not the best way to deliver instruction. Period. It’s always an experience born of necessity. I’m doing this online because I was on sabbatical. Some of you are doing this because it was the only section of a required course you could take. Some of you are taking this because your home life dictates you do so. In all scenarios, we aren’t doing this because it’s the best way to do it.
And, for that very reason, it’s really important to figure out how to be good at this, how to be innovative, how to, as I opened this section with, do things you can’t do face-to-face.
OK. This is enough. This is our last reading week. Our last novel. It won the Stonewall award last year. It will be interesting to see how you read this novel after a semester of considering the genre.
Be well.
LT
It’s a grey Monday. It’s the start of the second to last day of what may well be the strangest semester of your college career--at least let’s hope so.
Some Valuable Observations about teaching Dread Nation in any setting.
Pay Attention to the actual history. This produced some of the best discussion this week, particularly because these discussions worked in two directions: understanding the history helps students understand the text and the text helps students think in fresh ways about our shared US history, particularly as it relates to black and brown citizens--both in the past and currently.
Jailyn Tavares started us off this week by talking about familiarizing students with the lived history of this period of time--The Battle of Gettysburg, chief among them, but, also, the period directly following the civil war, Reconstruction.
Gabby Sleeper wrote, importantly, “One project that I think I would want students to do is take one of those real-life events and compare what actually happened to how things went down in the books. How do things change because of the appearance of the shamblers? I might actually narrow this project down even further to have students talk specifically about the thirteenth amendment and how recently emancipated individuals found themselves once more enslaved by the prison system. I would ask students to watch part of the documentary 13th, to give them context of how this went down. “
As I wrote in last week’s Monday Update (that it is clear most folks did not read in its entirety) , if I was pitching Dread Nation as a movie, I’d say it is a cross between The Walking Dead (or any of the literally zillions of zombie-apocalypse movies/comics/TV shows out there in the past 8 to 10 years) and an Ava DuVernay movie (Selma, When The See Us, A Wrinkle In Time, Queen Sugar), including the one that Gabby S. mentions here, 13th which is about the passing of the 13th Amendment and everything white America did to essentially gut the freedoms and rights that the 13th Amendment promised and still continues to fail to deliver to our black and brown citizens.
Gabby S. did some very impressive work thinking about how this novel serves as commentary on how the history of the US is deeply connected to--still to this day--to the history of the diabolical institution of slavery. Really, seriously. You should all go read what she had to say.
Ethan Child, in both his response to Gabby and in his own post, made two very excellent points related to Dread Nation and history. One of those ideas was an interdisciplinary unit with the history teacher; that would be really excellent. If I’m not mistaken, 11th grade is US history in most high school curricula. I love this idea because by connecting with another colleague we help our students see how these often siloed ideas actually connect quite importantly. Also, from a very practical perspective, it gives you more time--with the history and the novel. I’ll leave my second point about Ethan’s post for a bit later.
Caroline Keenan talked about exploring how indigenous folks and the US history of cultural and actual genocide feature in the novel. The author, in her acknowledgements talks about how she used the history of Indian schools to model the schools that our main characters attend in the novel (Red Cloud, the school that I work at with Joyce Rain Anderson in South Dakota, was one such school). This is another historical aspect worth exploration and could go under-identified. Nicole Costa recommended a documentary on the Carlisle Indian School that could be useful in a way similar to Gabby’s idea about watching DuVernay’s 13th.
Connecting to the Covid Pandemic. Next to the historical and social justice themes of the novel, connecting the Covid was the other major teaching theme. Shauna Ridley started us out thinking about how we might connect reading this text to the current Pandemic. I’m not sure “fun” is the word I would use (Shauna did), but I can certainly see how it could be an excellent way to get our students to not only process what is happening to them but, and this was Shauna’s point, also, process economic disparity and how deeply that affects a person’s life (who can get tested, who gets ventilators, who lives, who dies, who loses a job, who doesn’t). And, of course, because we know that black and brown citizens have the highest rate of death from the disease, how race intersects with the above feels very relevant and important.
Here again we see how fiction can help us have valuable conversations about real life that can be challenging to talk about. As Shauna wrote, “It’s important students know that they affect the world and they have a say in what’s going on.” A sentiment expressed by Laura Melchionda as well in both her response to Shauna and in her longer post.
As I mentioned earlier, Ethan made two very excellent points, and one of them is related to Shauna’s idea of connecting to Covid. Ethan writes: “I wonder if you can extend this idea so that students would not only connect the novel to historical information but also contemporary politics. For example, you might ask students to consider what groups of people are exploited and dehumanized in contemporary America. This would help students recognize Ireland's symbolism and would also make the novel feel more relevant to students' lives outside the classroom.”
Using the novel to teach genre. Not as much talked about as the other two, but still very generative. Jess Rinker brought up this excellent point: “By 11th grade, students have a lot of experience reading different genres, but they don’t necessarily have a lot of practice understanding how important genre is in literary analysis.” It’s true: reading a genre is not the same as understanding what genre actually means and how it functions in texts to help readers make meaning. She reminds us, as well, that Dread Nation is not just YA or just horror. It’s also a particular kind of historical fiction.
Unrelated but related to this point: I think of Dread Nation as something called “speculative fiction” which re-imagines actual historical events. The most recent example I can think of is Phillip Roth’s The Plot Against America, which supposes that instead of electing FDR for a third term the country elected Charles Lindbergh (yes, that Charles Lindbergh), who was, in real life, pro-Nazi. If you’ve got HBO you can watch the TV adaptation of it--which is largely faithful to the book. It feels weirdly prescient to our current political climtae. Much like Dread Nation, the novel makes you understand actual history differently and more deeply than reading the actual history sometimes does.
Also, an interesting article on The Plot as well as on other speculative fiction (a genre I enjoy reading) in The Times last week.
Lighten Up Francis. It’s a book about Zombies. It’s so sad that you probably don’t get that reference, a staple of my childhood conversations with my sister. And you call yourself a Bill Murray fan. Anyway, Ethan pointed out that the genre horror/fantasy has a lot of general appeal. It fulfills the first rule of literacy instruction: don’t make them hate to read. Savannah Resendes talked about keeping conversation about the book light in an online platform--and you could totally (not that I’d entirely recommend it) keep conversation about this book on the zombie side of things.
I pitched the book to my 13 year old godson as “ a video game, but in book form.” He read the whole book and that could well be the first book he’s ever read in its entirety. Our ensuing conversation about the book inspired a possible assignment. He was telling me all the ways you could turn the novel into a video game. He schooled me on the particulars of that genre. I could totally see a lighthearted exploration of that. But what is true about video games, much like this novel, the narratives often explore pretty heavy themes. So you could do the video game fun stuff and then circle back to the social justice angle. I wish I had some 11th graders to try this out on. Nicole Costa played around with Walking Dead re-writing scenarios that I think play on this connection to what these students know, a point Molly Drain made as well.
I thought a fun low-stakes writing assignment (Gabby S, Becky Tynan, pointed out that online learning needs a lot of low-stakes writing opportunities so that students stay connected to the course) could be to take another historical moment and add zombies--sort of like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or, I guess, more like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer. Both novels are written by the same author, Seth Grahame-Smith. On a serious note, students could also then write an analysis of their stories explaining how zombies make the reader think about the actual historical events.
Other things I noticed that don’t quite fit in the above. Caroline Keenan and Natasha Cardin had an interesting exchange about “idioms.” I think my version of this would be about “dialect.” Many of the idioms in the novel are entirely made up for the fantastical world where the Civil War marked the appearance of zombies in the western hemisphere. But thinking about how those idioms explain things thematically in the novel would be quite interesting as would seeing which of the phrases they use are the result of the intersection of actual historical events and the fantasy/horror genre. And, as you all should know by now, I love any assignment that focuses a student’s attention on what the text actually says--like, what the words on the page actually look like.
In the end, it’s still the YA we’ve been talking about all semester. Gabby Boutin, late in the discussion, brought us back to the Young Adult part of this discussion. As she writes, “I think what this book boils down to, is Jane trying to find her path. The world is being thrust into chaos and she is constantly being told that she is wrong.” And you don’t get more Young Adult than that. If you think back to our discussion from last week, this is a novel about a young person and her friend trying to figure themselves out, their relationship out, this crazy world they are a part of out. Zombies might not be a regular part of our students’s world, but all that other stuff certainly is.
I liked Becky’s idea about pairing this text with Monday’s Not Coming. When you think about it, they are both different kinds of horror stories that allow us to have different conversations about gender, race, and power.
And about teaching all this online. . .
Laura Melchionda said what I think we are all feeling--this novel would be good to teach online, but not as good as if you were face-to-face. And that’s probably true for most content. She also pointed out that, however true that might be, teachers and students alike are soldiering on in this new Covid/online world, which is why teachers are a kind of unsung first responder that I have the greatest admiration for.
Olivia Leonard gave us a real life example of how teaching online can be complicated in ways that are invisible to us--will students have enough computers? Enough bandwidth? A decent camera? A space in their house where they can do it? During my last office hour, poor Maddie Butkus had to witness me in my Covid Mask because I was walking while office houring--because my husband was teaching a virtual drum lesson at the same time. What about teachers who are parents as well as teachers?
Gabby Sleeper best summarized how I feel about the move to use face-to-face/ Zoom/Teams/etc to meet with students:
“In thinking about how I would want to structure an online classroom, my instinct is to utilize Zoom or some other similar app that would allow for face to face instruction. However, while there are definitely benefits to this, I think that there are enough drawbacks that I would be hesitant to do this. If every teacher did this, we would have students sitting in front of a computer for roughly six hours a day, five days a week, in a home that might very well be full of distraction, with the possibility of all sorts of technical issues to arise, and it just feels like a recipe for disaster. For one, sitting on a computer for several hours at a time is very different than being in a classroom and seems unfair to ask of any student, especially those who may be watching younger siblings, are hard of hearing, or having difficulties focusing for long periods of time. Additionally, technology fails us. Electronics malfunction, apps glitch, and the power-outages happen. We can’t fault students for that, but there will be some who take advantage of it.”
All I have to say to that is yes. Even when all the technology works, having 35 young people in a zoom classroom is utter chaos and not productive--no meaningful conversation happens in that setting unless there is some careful written work ahead of time and a careful system of speaking and responding is worked out, with lots of ground rules about what you can do while you are in a meeting online, what you can’t do, when you have to have your audio muted, when you have to have your video on, what you should be doing in the chat section,etc. Ethan and Lauren both echoed some of these ideas.
I thought Ethan’s thought about offering an interdisciplinary assignment in order to make the best use of a student’s time online was both humane and very wise. Super smart. Also, I think we miss our work husbands and wives (man I know I do), and this would be a way to feel like we are working less in isolation from one another.
In fact, I think it would actually be easier to do an interdisciplinary assignment in an online setting--and, as you’ll see, I think it is important to think about what is good about the technology rather than bad.Now, teaching online--when everyone who is in the class has agreed to participate in an online class is different than the crisis teaching that most folks are doing right now. The mistake I find most faculty make when trying to teach online is to recreate the face-to-face classroom. But that is simply impossible and the effort to do so simply wastes the technology. I am most interested in what can you do in an online class that is harder to do face-to-face.
I liked the idea that Jess Rinker and Molly Drain had about giving students a suggested reading schedule--because, yeah, getting students to do the work in an online setting can be the hardest part (not for your guys, but I hear tell). I also liked the idea of using online time to actually read the book to each other. It made me think about how I might read some parts of the book out loud to students via video. Everybody likes to be read to. Gabby Boutin pointed out that “open discussion” doesn’t really work for unmotivated learners and this is particularly true in an online setting. So, as she pointed out, asking students to write to a prompt makes good sense.
In truth, I don’t think open discussion works very well in face-to-face classrooms. There is a lot of fake open discussion that amounts to students parroting back whatever they think the teacher wants you to say--or you get those, “Oh I totally agree” statements. And in a totally open discussion, there is a good chance you won’t hit the major ideas you want to have students talk about. That’s a total teaching digression on my part. Take it for what it is worth.
Most of you had some version of small group discussions. And, in watching colleagues try to teach synchronously, I think that this is a good plan. I’m thinking about my summer online class that was never supposed to be on line. We can’t be on screens for the six hours twice a week that we are scheduled, but, in small groups, for 30-45 minutes, we can probably have really good discussions if we lay out some ground rules for turning on and off mics. I’m going to try that instead of google.doc book clubs for summer.
One last thing before I wrap up this Teaching Discussion overview.
I started this by talking about being interested in what you can do in an online setting that is difficult in face-to-face classes. And that is where I want to end. Here’s what I’ve learned about online education: it’s not the best way to deliver instruction. Period. It’s always an experience born of necessity. I’m doing this online because I was on sabbatical. Some of you are doing this because it was the only section of a required course you could take. Some of you are taking this because your home life dictates you do so. In all scenarios, we aren’t doing this because it’s the best way to do it.
And, for that very reason, it’s really important to figure out how to be good at this, how to be innovative, how to, as I opened this section with, do things you can’t do face-to-face.
- The biggest thing I notice is that students do a better job of giving their classmates feedback on their writing in an online setting. And I’ve done synchronous workshopping where I’m on the same google.doc with students and that works well too. It’s like a sort of lovely, silent conference. This is a big plus of the online class--the teacher isn’t just the teacher. We are all teaching and learning from each other.
- It privileges the kinds of writing students will do as citizens of the world. The essay is a weird genre that exists only, literally only, in academia. If you don’t go into academia, you will never write an essay that looks anything like a school essay ever again. It’s not that the things you need to know from writing an essay aren’t applicable. They most definitely are. But in school we are just so struck in some version of the 5 paragraph essay--notice how many of you are super creative in your assignment designs and then plop some sort of essay assignment as the summative assessment of your unit. In an online setting, essays don’t really translate.
The one real loss of the semester was the Pecha Kucha assignment which is a great way to teach students thesis, evidence, organization in an online setting--and also how to do a presentation that doesn’t suck. Students can design websites, keep blogs, explore visual rhetoric, participate in wikis. You can do all that in a face-to-face class too--and I do--but I think the online setting sort of requires that kind of engagement. - You can showcase student work very nicely. I’ve tried to do that in our class. I haven’t been as good at it as I’ve wanted to be--because, and this is just true about online teaching, it takes so much time to do it right. But I am really interested in the possibility of having students featured publicly (as writing is meant to be read by an audience that is not just a teacher). I intend to do more of that regardless of whether or not I’m teaching online or not.
OK. This is enough. This is our last reading week. Our last novel. It won the Stonewall award last year. It will be interesting to see how you read this novel after a semester of considering the genre.
Be well.
LT
Update for the week of 20 March 2020
STUFF THAT’S NOT REALLY ABOUT CLASS, BUT I WOULD TELL YOU IF WE WERE MEETING FACE-TO-FACE
How strange is it that it is Patriot’s Day and there is no Boston Marathon? I am not a native New Englander, and so sometimes things that matter to other New Englanders do not matter to me (like, for instance, the Patriots). But the marathon has always marked a moment in the year for me. It’s the moment in spring semester that I’m so grateful to have a Monday off. So grateful to have a minute’s rest from advising. A moment to grade, to finish taxes, to clean my house. And it’s a moment to be a Bostonian--something I rarely actually feel like. To root for the runners as they take their last mile on Boylston.
I of course remember precisely the day of the bombing. This was when I was the director of Undergraduate Research, and I knew we had a class of students who were live tweeting from the finish line. I fielded a series of hysterical phone calls from friends and family worried I was at the finish line. The only reason I wasn’t was, actually, taxes. My heart was in my throat as I frantically tried to reach the faculty member who brought the students to the race. They were all OK, though as we all know that was not the case for everyone. I am grateful to have the support of the Richard’s family for moving the cause of social justice forward, but I would much rather have Martin back, growing up in anonymity. I know you all would as well.
And I remember that the following Friday, I couldn’t leave my house to teach because the city was on lockdown--sort of like it is now. The T was not running, my only way to campus. The on and off ramps out of the city were blocked. Come to think of it, I think that was my first experience of “online teaching.”
We are in the fourth week of quarantine at this point, and, I don’t know about you, but it is getting to me a little bit--and I am an epic homebody. So I hope you are all well, and those you love are well, and that you are remembering to take care of yourself, heart and soul. As you know, summer I has been moved online, and, though I do not know one way or the other, I fear summer II will as well. I don’t even want to think about this extending into fall.
I’m thinking today, as I try to manage just a 5 mile loop in a mask, that we all run all sorts of races, big and small, public and private, fast and epically slow (as is always the case for me--a trotter more than an actual runner). We are in the home stretch of the semester if not Corona. But, in either case, our goal now is only to finish, to get to the line in one piece ready to face whatever next race there is to run.
Run well.
OTHER STUFF I’D TELL YOU ABOUT IF WE WERE IN-CLASS TOGETHER
TEACHING DISCUSSION ROUND UP
I’ve divided up comments today to cover Monday Isn’t Coming separately from Darius the Great is Not Okay (hopefully) ease of reading. Easier organization of the Monday updates was one of the suggestions. I’m trying! It’s a lot to say--though less so this week than other weeks. I think after I told everybody there were a few free weeks built into the syllabus folks decided to take advantage of them. Fair enough!
What's clear across both novels is that there are textual elements to teach in both (Persian culture, language in Darius; narrative structure in Monday) and big, heavy issues that would enter our classrooms like depression, race, gender, and family relationships.
TEACHING MONDAY
Shauna Ridley started us off this week talking about Monday Isn’t Coming. She pointed out that the particular way the narrative is structured makes it both interesting and challenging to reach and read. I agree. One of the reasons I think this book is a strong candidate for inclusion in a classroom is the way it fulfills the “teach a student to read more challenging texts” mission of school-based reading. She made some nice connections with some of the other novels we’ve read this semester in terms of connecting the details of the reading with the theme and purpose of the text.
Natasha Cardin, Becky Tynan and to some extent Lauren Melchionda spent a lot of important time thinking about how you might teach the structure of the novel to show students both that authors make these decisions for a reason and as a reader our job is to try to figure that out. I would do a lot with thinking about how to read this novel if I taught it as well.
Nicole Costa did a nice job of thinking about how to use the fact that this is essentially a mystery as a way to teach students to follow the trail of details (breadcrumbs as she calls it) to arrive at a theme--a great way to teach close reading and the connection between the details of the text and the overall meaning.
And, of course, this is the skill--the skill of literacy--that we are really engaged in teaching our students. Any text, seriously, any text we read has details (evidence) that proves a particular point (thesis) in a particular way (positionality). We can take this all the way back to Aristotle if we wanted to. Seeing how these things work together to make meaning in any text is the whole pont. As Megan Shaugnessy pointed out in her response to Shauna: “Every author makes decisions stylistically that affect the narrative, and if the reader does not pick up on it, they will miss such crucial points.”
The other major talking point for this novel also first appeared in Shauna’s post, and in nearly everyone who talked about Monday, was the social and psychological issues that the book forces a reader to delve in to: what happens to black and brown young people, bullying, sexuality, She began our conversation about the complexity of talking about these kinds of deeply personal and potentially triggering things with our students. I’ve said this about a million times: this is why we create an atmosphere of trust and rigorous honesty in a classroom.
Case in point: Megan talked about a teacher who found out that her students come from food deprived homes and started keeping snacks in her desk. The more we know about our students the more we can help them. To quote Megan (again), Monday gives us the opportunity to discuss “gender, cultural difference, and mental disorders with students who are living all three of these realities.”
Olivia Sweeney brought in the interesting idea to connect with a health/gym teacher to talk about mental health with students in Monday. She, as did others, talked about bringing in outside speakers because, as Natasha Cardin pointed out elsewhere, it is powerful to hear others speak about something you think you are the only one who struggles with (actually outside resources could be a theme of this week’s discussion). That point--as a reason to read and discuss either of these novels, came up again and again in this week’s discussion. Nicole Costa suggested bringing in guidance into the classroom prior to teaching this novel. Always a great idea (as long as your guidance people don’t suck).
Nicole also suggested bringing the author, Tiffany Jackson. Bringing authors is always a great idea and, as Nicole pointed out, Monday is based on the true story of the disappearance of two young black girls--and so there is also an issue of social justice here too. Would this novel read the same in an all white community? Jackson would be a great speaker for that conversation.
Megan talked, admirably, about a classroom of respect. Here, here. Remember this though: as a teacher you are a mandated reporter. And so when we invite our students to share with us, and we should, they should also know that if they report abuse to us--past or present--we are obligated to report that information. I always announce this at the start of any writing assignment that might produce this kind of disclosure.
Caroline Keenan and Hannah Brodeur talked about how, as teachers, we most want our students to know that we are there to help them. Of course readers of Darius knew, and talked about how not all teachers are that for their students (read Maddie’s post about it. And it is hard work. It’s the part of teaching that will wear you down the most). Justin Carpender, talking about Darius, had this to say, and it’s worth thinking about in light of the above: “While the story of Darius and Stephen ended happily, it would be wrong to encourage students to try and follow suit, so I would let them know that they can receive help if they reach out to me or other staff at the school, we are there to support them.”
TEACHING DARIUS
Gabby Sleeper (clearly slipping since she was not the first to post this week--though the first to post about Darius) wrestled with representation, and helping students to understood a widely misunderstood population and region of the world. Molly Drain, later in the thread, designed an assignment around understanding Persian culture as well. Hannah Brodeur wrote very specifically about how representation, in both Darius and Monday, of populations that often go unmentioned is an important reason for why we should teach these books.
Savannah Resendes also designed assignments about cultural representation. I’m also interested in Savannah’s idea about a research project about depression (so was Justin Carpender). It’s easy to say “I’m depressed” but what does it mean to be clinically depressed. A research project around this idea has the benefit of distancing students from the raw emotions of that struggle, just for a time, to be able to perhaps better understand their own situation or of someone close to them. The end goal is always to get our students the help they need, and this, to me, sounds like one way to do it.
Jess Rinker summed up one big difference between Monday and Darius: Darius is not a particularly complicated reading experience, but, at the same time, it’s got equally complex issues that require careful teaching in a classroom built on respect in order to do right by both the text and the students.
As with the Monday group, Gabby opened up the conversation about the heavy topics that would be a part of a classroom if we were teaching this text, namely Gabby mentioned clinical depression and racism. Maddie Butkus was pretty fired up about the way Darius’s mental disorder is dismissed by his teachers in the novel. As I said last week, it’s impossible to teach these days and not consider the mental health of our students. Maddie further made the point that we really aren’t trained to manage this--and we’ve got a lot of other stuff to teach too. Jess included a link to a TED talk whose title “There’s no shame in taking care of your mental health” by Sangu Delle (it is live here). Natasha Cardin pointed out that it is useful to students to see others who struggle with mental disorders. This particular novel was identified as one of the most important reads by a lot of you responding to the midterm letters. This is one of the reasons why.
Maddie included some links to online resources to support curriculum around mental health; I’m including them again here as live links:
https://classroommentalhealth.org/in-class/classroom-climate/communication/
http://canwetalk.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/COOR-79l-2016-03-CWT-lesson-plans.pdf
https://walkinourshoes.org/content/Classroom_Lesson_Plans.pdf
Jess also talked about the particular aspect of toxic masculinity and father/son relationships and the value of this novel for speaking to that. Gabby Boutin talked about how our students will read this text differently than we will as adults, and that it is important to understand the story of mental health in the context of the various and complicated experiences that young people are going through at the same time. As Savannah Resendes identified, “While the story of Darius and Stephen ended happily, it would be wrong to encourage students to try and follow suit, so I would let them know that they can receive help if they reach out to me or other staff at the school, we are there to support them.
***I want to give a shout out to my former student now colleague in teaching Meg Keefe. Meg did her ATP and honors thesis on using YA fiction to bring in conversations about mental health into the classrooms. I served as her mentor. Among the many facets of her argument, she identified how we create actual empathy by allowing our students to experience narrative empathy as readers. Thus, we de-stigmatize mental disorders in the classroom, allowing those students who need help to reach out to those who can help with some measure of hope that they actually will.
Jailyn Tavares suggested that the Farsi words would be a problem for students. I don’t know how many of you are fluent in Farsi (if you are, good for you), but I don’t know many readers--including me--who wouldn’t have to look them up. This is also not the first time we’ve encountered this. The Poet X had whole poems in Spanish. The chances some of us speak Spanish well enough to translate is higher, but, still. I want to go back to Gabby S’s point about teaching students about this other culture--a culture that is, often, very “othered” in our current political climate. I think it’s not just appropriate but vital to let students see that we all live in a home language. You don’t need to know Farsi to understand what the book is about. You have to understand that the characters understand what it means--or don’t--and that that is the point.
THINGS I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT FOR THIS COMING WEEK
First and foremost, how genuinely fantastic are your Write Your Own YA ideas? I mean it. So much creativity and imagination on display. So, guys, remember this when you become teachers. Not every writing assignment has to be a five paragraph essay. This assignment got you to show what you knew about genre as much as any other assignment. Also: very hard to plagiarize.
Did I mean to assign a novel about a strange and deadly pandemic that changed the way society worked? No, no I did not. But this week we are reading Dread Nation. It’s like if Ava DuVernay made The Walking Dead. I don’t read a lot of horror or fantasy, but I get the sense that a lot of you do. I’ll be interested in hearing what you have to say about it.
Suggestion for how to keep your book club google doc manageable: Something that came up in the midterm reflections was that the google docs were getting unwieldy. Two things to possibly help, first, you can delete old posts. I would suggest saving your own responses someplace just until the end of the semester, but you seriously don’t need the whole post. I get how it can feel good to see how much you’ve done, but still . But if you don’t want to do that, you can just start at the TOP of the page instead of scrolling down to the bottom--frankly, it’s a pain for both of us. I write the Monday Updates in one google doc. When the semester is over, it will be in descending order--newest on top.
Also inspired by midterm reflections, suggestions for book club not to suck: a number of folks said some version of “I wish all of my group mates took the time to really write and respond to each other instead of saying ‘I totally agree.’ “ Yeah. I totally agree. One suggestion? Rather than responding with a block of text, why not use the comment feature in google docs the way I do--focus on the parts you really do agree with, challenge your classmates on ideas you don’t. Ask for evidence. Demand more than just review. C’mon guys. It’s the last three weeks of class! You all know each other. Dig in to this. Show us what literary might you are made of.
And also speaking of midterm reflections, thanks to those who have sent back their midterm reflection email. It’s been very helpful to read those, particularly given that I’m not teaching a summer class online that I did not ever intend to teach online. So it has been helpful to hear back about what is working and what is not. More on this when this email isn’t so long.
Wednesday office hours: I’ll send out a google hangouts link right around 7:00. Folks are welcome to join me for questions. Also, it’s advising season. I’m a great advisor and do not have to do advising because, technically, sabbatical. But I’m happy to dispense some hard-won advising knowledge earned over 20 years of being in the English department at BSU.
Update for the week of 13 March 2020
Themes you guys spent a lot of time talking about last week: Melodrama.
Folks did a nice job of using the assigned supplementary material to talk through ideas about melodrama more formally than I’ve seen you do before. Perennial first poster, Gabby Sleeper talked about Darius’s excessive emotional moments--which actually become an important part of the plot at the intersection of gender and mental disorders, other important elements in the text. Shauna Ridley did a careful job of highlighting the ways you could read Monday as melodrama. Later in the discussion, Jess Rinker did nice work with the Kapurch article in relationship to Darius.
One thing that could get lost in our excellent discussion is how Monday Isn’t Coming is an example of yet another genre, as Becky Tynan pointed out, the mystery. Ethan Child wrote that “manipulates time by restructuring the chronology of the plot. Jackson’s sequencing of plot events fulfills an obvious purpose—concealing the fact that Monday is dead and, thereby, creating mystery.” Natasha Cardin called it a “page turner,” and I would agree, as all great mysteries should be. I point that out because it might be interesting to think and write about this novel as an example of a genre within a genre--Mystery for the YA reader.
Shared elements across the two novels.
It’s not so much a big deal that there are shared elements. I’ve asked a version of this in various ways all semester, and you’ve always been good at making those connections across texts (recall the great Gossip Girl/Little Women comparison of pre-corona 2020). But what is a big deal is that, I would hope you would see, how specific elements seem to play significant roles in how the theme and plot of a text are developed. In other words, yes, these are, as all the novels we’ve been reading are, “coming of age” novels, as Gabby B and Caroline Keenan hashed out, but it’s time to think about how those “coming of age” narratives are developed.
A parent/child relationship is challenged. Well, one clear way is through a relationship with a parent or parent figure. There isn’t a single text we’ve read where this isn’t a thing. Ethan Child did a good job of parsing out the parent roles in these two texts and he hit upon another significant commonality across texts--conflict and reconciliation. A Reconfiguring of the protagonist’s relationship to authority, typically a parent, is I think we can argue, a significant shared element in many if not most YA plots. A number of you talked about the relationship between Darius and his father (Molly Drain, Hannah Brodeur, etc).
And other authorities as well. Most notably, as Meghan Shaughnessy wrote about, Claudia is always seeking out authorities that she sees as the key to understanding what happened to her friend. That it turns out not to be the thing that solves it for her, a failure of authority, seems important.
There is a best friend. Natasha Cardin, Olivia Sweeney, and Nicole Costa identified Monday as the way Claudia created a sense of herself. In Darius, Savannah Resendes saw how the relationship with Sohrab was essential to Darius’s sense of becoming--becoming himself, becoming Persian, etc. The role of peer characters are essential to these plots.
Nobody seems to fit in at home. Identity formation is central to a coming of age novel and typically we’ve never encountered a character who didn’t change from the start of the novel to the end. Neither character in these two texts feel comfortable in their skins. They have vastly different reasons in some ways, but they often express this “otherness” (Colby Nilsen called it “The Adolescent struggle as ‘The Other’”-- I smell final project!) in similar terms and plot elements--which led to a superb exchange about “other” in Monday with Becky (for more on this see the social justice impetus in YA below).
Nobody seems to fit in at school. This is another riff on “authority.” Nicole Costa did a nice examination of Claudia’s dyslexia and how the school does and doesn’t support her. Maddie Butkus did a good job of talking about the fake “zero tolerance policy towards bullying” that was a source of real anxiety for Darius.
Is it Angst or something else? It’s easy, I think, to read Darius’s behavior as typical teenage angst (Gabby S). Olivia Leonard brought in the Kapurch and talked about “coming-of-age anxiety.” That really fits a great deal of Darius’s story--in some ways.
Justin Carpender it does always seem like you work Catcher into the conversation, but it’s usually spot on. And it is here. One difference between the texts is that Darius seems to have, by and large, pretty typical teenage problems. His depression is, from the novel it read to me, as a chemical imbalance and hereditary and not situational depression--which I think is something that is valuable to consider. But Claudia’s experience is very different. Her break is caused by a traumatic event, much like Holden’s break after his brother dies. Colby Nilsen made this point very carefully and identified how it motivated the action in the two novels.
But here again, how interesting would it be to pair Claudia (who has some other qualities that link her to Holden) and Holden in a classroom?
Lauren M and Becky T: important to normalize healthy emotional reactions among students, particularly young men students. Yep. Though I gotta admit. Most of my male students seem to get this, which makes me happy for the next generation--and the one after that, etc. Shaun Ramsay talks about how Darius both highlights the complexity of clinical depression, the stigma around it and, also, how it normalizes taking medication to combat the illness. For me as a reader that particular aspect felt important and fresh in a discussion of depression.
And we can all relate. Maddie Butkus’s analysis does a good job of talking about how while Darius’s experiences are not exactly like every reader, we get it. That “relatability”, which is something you guys talk a lot about, is a key element in how YA imagines an audience.
YA is interested in issues of representation and social justice. Well, not all YA, but a lot of it, and the stuff that is really excellent does. This is a part of that “edification” aspect of the genre. YA cares about introducing big ideas to students. We’ve talked at length about representation accross the texts we’ve read. These novels are the first that very specifically include, as Ethan C said, “neurodiverse” characters. And we have represented in Darius a very vulnerable part of the US population: folks of middle eastern descent. Colby Nilsen did an excellent reading of this aspect of the novel. Becky Tynan focused her analysis of Monday on issues of race and gender. Interestingly, Darius, too, is a novel about race (think about how Darius compares himself in terms of hair, eye, and skin color to his white father). Some of these ideas were echoed in Caroline K’s and Shaun R’s posts as well.
And I can’t resist saying it: even if you don’t see it entirely, Little Women was a feminist novel. My point is, social justice is not new to the genre.
The novel seems to end with some measure of acceptance/resolution (sort of). One thing I credit both of these novels with is that while they have resolution (Gabby B dissected what acceptance looked like in Darius and connected it to Lauren’s discussion of Claudia’s acceptance of Monday’s death; Shauna Ridley made a similar connection). But I don’t know, particularly in the case of Monday, that you’d say that these novels have “happy” endings. Darius and his father still have a complicated relationship--and their shared inherited depression isn’t going away. And Claudia will live with the profound trauma of the violent death of her friend for the rest of her life. Shaun Ramsay challenges us to think about whether or not this is a true happy ending: “When I think of Melodrama, I think of heroes and villains typically and sometimes happy endings. This novel certainly ends hopeful for Claudia, but is it really a happy ending when her best friend is gone forever.” Could it be that these novels are NOT the site of melodrama but the site of tragedy? Discuss.
I want to thank Olivia Sweeney and Gabrielle Boutin for their openness in sharing stories from their own lives. This is why we read--to understand. And it’s why we ask our students to read.
Update to the last week’s Update. I forgot to mention something yesterday in my very and obviously hastily written email of yesterday--I can’t believe I sent that out with all those mistakes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t do work that late, but I just. needed. To. send. It.
Anyway, I mean to address a point our resident librarian-minded colleague Shaun Ramsay’s point about how many parents don’t support students reading graphic novels because they aren’t “real reading.” By now, any reading theorist you’ve ever read has convinced all of you that any reading is good reading. And current research shows that the best way to create a lifelong reader is to let them read whatever they want.
But as I write that, I’m aware that I’m still making it sound like graphic novels are somehow still not as complex a reading experience as any other text. And that is not Shaun’s point.
Last spring semester I taught the Booker Prize long list nominee Sabrina, a graphic novel--and the first ever to be nominated for what is one of the most prestigious awards for contemporary writing. It was a very excellent student in the class--a geography major/english minor--who did this amazing reading about how space between the characters represented the ways modern life distances us from genuine felt emotions and allows us to be less human. It was, to say the least, enlightening.
Monday Update for 6 March 2020
Hello Everyone--
I thought last week’s Teaching Discussion was really excellent, one of the best I’ve read. People seemed to take to heart my admonishment to not write the “I totally agree” statement. I appreciate when you engage very directly with each other, and I’m particularly impressed with the folks who seem to be reading widely before responding rather than just posting a response to the last person who posts before they post.
One thing I’ve learned about online teaching is that it requires not just perfunctory effort on the part of teacher and student, but real and committed engagement. No amount of teaching finesse can overcome students who are just box checking or a teacher who doesn’t care. And so I am very grateful to those of you who are bringing your best self to our class.
Last week’s discussion revolved around a few themes: 1) first and foremost what does it mean to “teach” a graphic novel or, more generally, teaching students how to read the visual; 2) thematically, a kind of essential question, what makes a family a family; 3) another essential question, no single event need define our path in life if we do not want it to.
I want to start with an anecdote that I think captures a lot of what you guys said. When my sister and I were young we fought, as do most siblings, but one thing we did together was read the comic pages of our local paper together, both of us leaning over the long pages. Sometimes she would laugh at a comic and I would say “I don’t get it.” Or I would laugh at something and she would say “I don’t get it. What was happening was that I was almost exclusively reading the text of the comics and not looking at the picture and she was doing the opposite (no surprise I guess that I became a writing teacher and she became a graphic designer). Most of the time it was possible to stick to what we did best, but every once in a while one or the other failed us. And, of course, the lesson is that to fully find meaning in the text, we needed to pay attention to both at the same time.
TEACHING HOW TO READ THE VISUAL
And that is largely what all of you saw. Several of your thoughtfully quoted the Rice article that tells us, as teachers and readers, that reading a graphic text takes time. Jailyn Tavares started us off with her own reflection on reading the text before and after Rice’s advice. She was not alone in that.
Shauna Ridley talked about how reading such a text is, in fact, not faster but rather takes more time. This was echoed in what Savannah Resendes did when she directed our attention to a few pages in the text--an excellent assignment that a number of you included in your discussion. Late in the discussion board, Olivia Leonard talked about an assignment where she asked students why a particular picture accompanied a particular part of the text. I think this is a vital question to ask students as a low-stakes kind of writing to get them to really dig into the particular demands of reading a graphic novel.
Olivia L. also spent a lot of time talking about how students spend a lot of time on social media--a largely visual medium--but don’t really spend much time analyzing it. Which leads me to my next point: Megan Shaugnessy, Gabby Sleeper, and Nicole Costa, in their own separate ways, talked bout how we teach a text like this--and the necessity of having to teach this new way of reading as explained in Rice. They, like Olivia, point out how students actually live in a world surrounded by the visual and yet are not really taught how to interrogate those images. Nicole’s particular unit objective--to slow down--is quite powerful.
I’m interested in how students always say to me that they are bad readers because they are slow readers. Slowness is not the problem so much as not paying careful attention to the text--and not have the skills to be able to pay careful attention. It’s worthwhile to consider that a graphic novel could help students learn the skills they need to engage with and analyze and make decisions about in their actual life outside of school and with texts in they encounter in the classroom.
Colby Nilsen made a very enthusiastic argument for how a graphic novel, not because it is easier, but because it demands a different way of reading, because it demands a slowing down, could train readers to be a good reader in any situation, including the class--a point I agree with.
I can always count on Ethan Child to dig into genre, and he did here, with a series of questions he might think about as a teacher, questions that would inform how you would teach this different narrative form. Ethan and Justin Carpender also talked about “teaching it as a memoir.” And, yes, of course, we should and can do that. Their are a number of graphic novel memoirs (Blankets and the widely known Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic).
WHAT MAKES A FAMILY
The second really major theme of your discussion was “what makes a family.” Jess Rinker introduced the idea. This is a vital question to ask, and one that, as Justin Carpender made such an eloquent point of saying, could make a real difference in the lives of our students. I liked the idea of Glass Castle--though, and I really don’t know because I haven’t read it, if it works for 8th graders. He reminds us that this is why, in the end, we read books and why we want our students to read them as well. Caroline Keenan saw this as a valuable story for young folks going into high school where they will encounter all manner of family lives in high school.
I have something to add to this. In my ENGL 301 Writing and the Teaching of Writing class, I ask students to do a research project on under-resourced populations and about three years ago one group wanted to do it on students who lived in households with addiction. At the time, it was difficult to find much on it. This was at the start of our real understanding of what we know as the Opioid epidemic. This last fall, students again decided to research this population. They found an abundance of studies. A sad truth is that many students come from homes where addiction crowds out what we think of a childhood. Imagine how this text might help a young student who might imagine he or she was the only one living with this.
WE ARE NOT ONLY ANY ONE THING FROM OUR LIVES
Related to this, Jailyn Tavares, Savannah Resendes, and Caroline Keenan brought up that a central and important theme of the novel is that no singular experience need to define us. Megan Shaughnessy rather poetically said that the novel allows us to read about a life of “love and complexities. Again, a true thing in the lives of us all.
Molly Drain asked us to think about how parents might feel about this book with 8th graders. Always a concern of course, but I do think it is appropriate for the grade--both in terms of difficult and in terms of content. Hannah Brodeur made a good argument for using the text in 8th grade--and much of the action takes place in middle school.
I do want to caution about a few things I read: steer clear of thinking that pictures make reading easier. I think the Rice makes this clear, but I know how tempting it is to say. And while I do agree that this text might engage some nonreaders (though I know a lot of nonreaders who still see more novel than graphic), I am not sure we can say that it would be easier for students on IEPs. Maybe, but we are making a lot of assumptions about what those IEPs are for. This isn’t a big point I want to dwell on, but I think that
OTHER ASSIGNMENT IDEAS AND GOOD POINTS
STUFF THAT’S NOT REALLY ABOUT CLASS, BUT I WOULD TELL YOU IF WE WERE MEETING FACE-TO-FACE
How strange is it that it is Patriot’s Day and there is no Boston Marathon? I am not a native New Englander, and so sometimes things that matter to other New Englanders do not matter to me (like, for instance, the Patriots). But the marathon has always marked a moment in the year for me. It’s the moment in spring semester that I’m so grateful to have a Monday off. So grateful to have a minute’s rest from advising. A moment to grade, to finish taxes, to clean my house. And it’s a moment to be a Bostonian--something I rarely actually feel like. To root for the runners as they take their last mile on Boylston.
I of course remember precisely the day of the bombing. This was when I was the director of Undergraduate Research, and I knew we had a class of students who were live tweeting from the finish line. I fielded a series of hysterical phone calls from friends and family worried I was at the finish line. The only reason I wasn’t was, actually, taxes. My heart was in my throat as I frantically tried to reach the faculty member who brought the students to the race. They were all OK, though as we all know that was not the case for everyone. I am grateful to have the support of the Richard’s family for moving the cause of social justice forward, but I would much rather have Martin back, growing up in anonymity. I know you all would as well.
And I remember that the following Friday, I couldn’t leave my house to teach because the city was on lockdown--sort of like it is now. The T was not running, my only way to campus. The on and off ramps out of the city were blocked. Come to think of it, I think that was my first experience of “online teaching.”
We are in the fourth week of quarantine at this point, and, I don’t know about you, but it is getting to me a little bit--and I am an epic homebody. So I hope you are all well, and those you love are well, and that you are remembering to take care of yourself, heart and soul. As you know, summer I has been moved online, and, though I do not know one way or the other, I fear summer II will as well. I don’t even want to think about this extending into fall.
I’m thinking today, as I try to manage just a 5 mile loop in a mask, that we all run all sorts of races, big and small, public and private, fast and epically slow (as is always the case for me--a trotter more than an actual runner). We are in the home stretch of the semester if not Corona. But, in either case, our goal now is only to finish, to get to the line in one piece ready to face whatever next race there is to run.
Run well.
OTHER STUFF I’D TELL YOU ABOUT IF WE WERE IN-CLASS TOGETHER
- An article that brought me some measure of peace, and why I wanted to write to you today about it: By Paul Ollinger “Your Only Goal Is to Arrive”
- Sort of a delightful part of my childhood that I hope was a part of yours, but, even if it wasn’t, it’s still pretty great: Reading Rainbow’s LeVar Burton is doing his part during quarantine to support life-long literacy by streaming live-readings of children’s books every Friday.
- It’s still National Poetry Month and we are still online! Thus, 30 ways to celebrate national poetry month in the virtual classroom, seems like a great thing to know about. There is also 30 ways to celebrate national poetry month at home or online for all my crisis homeschooling folks--oh, I know you are out there.
- And this news in YA Lit: You’ve got these books to look forward to during 2020, as recommended by the Young Adult Library Services Association, a section of the Library Association of America.
TEACHING DISCUSSION ROUND UP
I’ve divided up comments today to cover Monday Isn’t Coming separately from Darius the Great is Not Okay (hopefully) ease of reading. Easier organization of the Monday updates was one of the suggestions. I’m trying! It’s a lot to say--though less so this week than other weeks. I think after I told everybody there were a few free weeks built into the syllabus folks decided to take advantage of them. Fair enough!
What's clear across both novels is that there are textual elements to teach in both (Persian culture, language in Darius; narrative structure in Monday) and big, heavy issues that would enter our classrooms like depression, race, gender, and family relationships.
TEACHING MONDAY
Shauna Ridley started us off this week talking about Monday Isn’t Coming. She pointed out that the particular way the narrative is structured makes it both interesting and challenging to reach and read. I agree. One of the reasons I think this book is a strong candidate for inclusion in a classroom is the way it fulfills the “teach a student to read more challenging texts” mission of school-based reading. She made some nice connections with some of the other novels we’ve read this semester in terms of connecting the details of the reading with the theme and purpose of the text.
Natasha Cardin, Becky Tynan and to some extent Lauren Melchionda spent a lot of important time thinking about how you might teach the structure of the novel to show students both that authors make these decisions for a reason and as a reader our job is to try to figure that out. I would do a lot with thinking about how to read this novel if I taught it as well.
Nicole Costa did a nice job of thinking about how to use the fact that this is essentially a mystery as a way to teach students to follow the trail of details (breadcrumbs as she calls it) to arrive at a theme--a great way to teach close reading and the connection between the details of the text and the overall meaning.
And, of course, this is the skill--the skill of literacy--that we are really engaged in teaching our students. Any text, seriously, any text we read has details (evidence) that proves a particular point (thesis) in a particular way (positionality). We can take this all the way back to Aristotle if we wanted to. Seeing how these things work together to make meaning in any text is the whole pont. As Megan Shaugnessy pointed out in her response to Shauna: “Every author makes decisions stylistically that affect the narrative, and if the reader does not pick up on it, they will miss such crucial points.”
The other major talking point for this novel also first appeared in Shauna’s post, and in nearly everyone who talked about Monday, was the social and psychological issues that the book forces a reader to delve in to: what happens to black and brown young people, bullying, sexuality, She began our conversation about the complexity of talking about these kinds of deeply personal and potentially triggering things with our students. I’ve said this about a million times: this is why we create an atmosphere of trust and rigorous honesty in a classroom.
Case in point: Megan talked about a teacher who found out that her students come from food deprived homes and started keeping snacks in her desk. The more we know about our students the more we can help them. To quote Megan (again), Monday gives us the opportunity to discuss “gender, cultural difference, and mental disorders with students who are living all three of these realities.”
Olivia Sweeney brought in the interesting idea to connect with a health/gym teacher to talk about mental health with students in Monday. She, as did others, talked about bringing in outside speakers because, as Natasha Cardin pointed out elsewhere, it is powerful to hear others speak about something you think you are the only one who struggles with (actually outside resources could be a theme of this week’s discussion). That point--as a reason to read and discuss either of these novels, came up again and again in this week’s discussion. Nicole Costa suggested bringing in guidance into the classroom prior to teaching this novel. Always a great idea (as long as your guidance people don’t suck).
Nicole also suggested bringing the author, Tiffany Jackson. Bringing authors is always a great idea and, as Nicole pointed out, Monday is based on the true story of the disappearance of two young black girls--and so there is also an issue of social justice here too. Would this novel read the same in an all white community? Jackson would be a great speaker for that conversation.
Megan talked, admirably, about a classroom of respect. Here, here. Remember this though: as a teacher you are a mandated reporter. And so when we invite our students to share with us, and we should, they should also know that if they report abuse to us--past or present--we are obligated to report that information. I always announce this at the start of any writing assignment that might produce this kind of disclosure.
Caroline Keenan and Hannah Brodeur talked about how, as teachers, we most want our students to know that we are there to help them. Of course readers of Darius knew, and talked about how not all teachers are that for their students (read Maddie’s post about it. And it is hard work. It’s the part of teaching that will wear you down the most). Justin Carpender, talking about Darius, had this to say, and it’s worth thinking about in light of the above: “While the story of Darius and Stephen ended happily, it would be wrong to encourage students to try and follow suit, so I would let them know that they can receive help if they reach out to me or other staff at the school, we are there to support them.”
TEACHING DARIUS
Gabby Sleeper (clearly slipping since she was not the first to post this week--though the first to post about Darius) wrestled with representation, and helping students to understood a widely misunderstood population and region of the world. Molly Drain, later in the thread, designed an assignment around understanding Persian culture as well. Hannah Brodeur wrote very specifically about how representation, in both Darius and Monday, of populations that often go unmentioned is an important reason for why we should teach these books.
Savannah Resendes also designed assignments about cultural representation. I’m also interested in Savannah’s idea about a research project about depression (so was Justin Carpender). It’s easy to say “I’m depressed” but what does it mean to be clinically depressed. A research project around this idea has the benefit of distancing students from the raw emotions of that struggle, just for a time, to be able to perhaps better understand their own situation or of someone close to them. The end goal is always to get our students the help they need, and this, to me, sounds like one way to do it.
Jess Rinker summed up one big difference between Monday and Darius: Darius is not a particularly complicated reading experience, but, at the same time, it’s got equally complex issues that require careful teaching in a classroom built on respect in order to do right by both the text and the students.
As with the Monday group, Gabby opened up the conversation about the heavy topics that would be a part of a classroom if we were teaching this text, namely Gabby mentioned clinical depression and racism. Maddie Butkus was pretty fired up about the way Darius’s mental disorder is dismissed by his teachers in the novel. As I said last week, it’s impossible to teach these days and not consider the mental health of our students. Maddie further made the point that we really aren’t trained to manage this--and we’ve got a lot of other stuff to teach too. Jess included a link to a TED talk whose title “There’s no shame in taking care of your mental health” by Sangu Delle (it is live here). Natasha Cardin pointed out that it is useful to students to see others who struggle with mental disorders. This particular novel was identified as one of the most important reads by a lot of you responding to the midterm letters. This is one of the reasons why.
Maddie included some links to online resources to support curriculum around mental health; I’m including them again here as live links:
https://classroommentalhealth.org/in-class/classroom-climate/communication/
http://canwetalk.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/COOR-79l-2016-03-CWT-lesson-plans.pdf
https://walkinourshoes.org/content/Classroom_Lesson_Plans.pdf
Jess also talked about the particular aspect of toxic masculinity and father/son relationships and the value of this novel for speaking to that. Gabby Boutin talked about how our students will read this text differently than we will as adults, and that it is important to understand the story of mental health in the context of the various and complicated experiences that young people are going through at the same time. As Savannah Resendes identified, “While the story of Darius and Stephen ended happily, it would be wrong to encourage students to try and follow suit, so I would let them know that they can receive help if they reach out to me or other staff at the school, we are there to support them.
***I want to give a shout out to my former student now colleague in teaching Meg Keefe. Meg did her ATP and honors thesis on using YA fiction to bring in conversations about mental health into the classrooms. I served as her mentor. Among the many facets of her argument, she identified how we create actual empathy by allowing our students to experience narrative empathy as readers. Thus, we de-stigmatize mental disorders in the classroom, allowing those students who need help to reach out to those who can help with some measure of hope that they actually will.
Jailyn Tavares suggested that the Farsi words would be a problem for students. I don’t know how many of you are fluent in Farsi (if you are, good for you), but I don’t know many readers--including me--who wouldn’t have to look them up. This is also not the first time we’ve encountered this. The Poet X had whole poems in Spanish. The chances some of us speak Spanish well enough to translate is higher, but, still. I want to go back to Gabby S’s point about teaching students about this other culture--a culture that is, often, very “othered” in our current political climate. I think it’s not just appropriate but vital to let students see that we all live in a home language. You don’t need to know Farsi to understand what the book is about. You have to understand that the characters understand what it means--or don’t--and that that is the point.
THINGS I WANT TO TELL YOU ABOUT FOR THIS COMING WEEK
First and foremost, how genuinely fantastic are your Write Your Own YA ideas? I mean it. So much creativity and imagination on display. So, guys, remember this when you become teachers. Not every writing assignment has to be a five paragraph essay. This assignment got you to show what you knew about genre as much as any other assignment. Also: very hard to plagiarize.
Did I mean to assign a novel about a strange and deadly pandemic that changed the way society worked? No, no I did not. But this week we are reading Dread Nation. It’s like if Ava DuVernay made The Walking Dead. I don’t read a lot of horror or fantasy, but I get the sense that a lot of you do. I’ll be interested in hearing what you have to say about it.
Suggestion for how to keep your book club google doc manageable: Something that came up in the midterm reflections was that the google docs were getting unwieldy. Two things to possibly help, first, you can delete old posts. I would suggest saving your own responses someplace just until the end of the semester, but you seriously don’t need the whole post. I get how it can feel good to see how much you’ve done, but still . But if you don’t want to do that, you can just start at the TOP of the page instead of scrolling down to the bottom--frankly, it’s a pain for both of us. I write the Monday Updates in one google doc. When the semester is over, it will be in descending order--newest on top.
Also inspired by midterm reflections, suggestions for book club not to suck: a number of folks said some version of “I wish all of my group mates took the time to really write and respond to each other instead of saying ‘I totally agree.’ “ Yeah. I totally agree. One suggestion? Rather than responding with a block of text, why not use the comment feature in google docs the way I do--focus on the parts you really do agree with, challenge your classmates on ideas you don’t. Ask for evidence. Demand more than just review. C’mon guys. It’s the last three weeks of class! You all know each other. Dig in to this. Show us what literary might you are made of.
And also speaking of midterm reflections, thanks to those who have sent back their midterm reflection email. It’s been very helpful to read those, particularly given that I’m not teaching a summer class online that I did not ever intend to teach online. So it has been helpful to hear back about what is working and what is not. More on this when this email isn’t so long.
Wednesday office hours: I’ll send out a google hangouts link right around 7:00. Folks are welcome to join me for questions. Also, it’s advising season. I’m a great advisor and do not have to do advising because, technically, sabbatical. But I’m happy to dispense some hard-won advising knowledge earned over 20 years of being in the English department at BSU.
Update for the week of 13 March 2020
Themes you guys spent a lot of time talking about last week: Melodrama.
Folks did a nice job of using the assigned supplementary material to talk through ideas about melodrama more formally than I’ve seen you do before. Perennial first poster, Gabby Sleeper talked about Darius’s excessive emotional moments--which actually become an important part of the plot at the intersection of gender and mental disorders, other important elements in the text. Shauna Ridley did a careful job of highlighting the ways you could read Monday as melodrama. Later in the discussion, Jess Rinker did nice work with the Kapurch article in relationship to Darius.
One thing that could get lost in our excellent discussion is how Monday Isn’t Coming is an example of yet another genre, as Becky Tynan pointed out, the mystery. Ethan Child wrote that “manipulates time by restructuring the chronology of the plot. Jackson’s sequencing of plot events fulfills an obvious purpose—concealing the fact that Monday is dead and, thereby, creating mystery.” Natasha Cardin called it a “page turner,” and I would agree, as all great mysteries should be. I point that out because it might be interesting to think and write about this novel as an example of a genre within a genre--Mystery for the YA reader.
Shared elements across the two novels.
It’s not so much a big deal that there are shared elements. I’ve asked a version of this in various ways all semester, and you’ve always been good at making those connections across texts (recall the great Gossip Girl/Little Women comparison of pre-corona 2020). But what is a big deal is that, I would hope you would see, how specific elements seem to play significant roles in how the theme and plot of a text are developed. In other words, yes, these are, as all the novels we’ve been reading are, “coming of age” novels, as Gabby B and Caroline Keenan hashed out, but it’s time to think about how those “coming of age” narratives are developed.
A parent/child relationship is challenged. Well, one clear way is through a relationship with a parent or parent figure. There isn’t a single text we’ve read where this isn’t a thing. Ethan Child did a good job of parsing out the parent roles in these two texts and he hit upon another significant commonality across texts--conflict and reconciliation. A Reconfiguring of the protagonist’s relationship to authority, typically a parent, is I think we can argue, a significant shared element in many if not most YA plots. A number of you talked about the relationship between Darius and his father (Molly Drain, Hannah Brodeur, etc).
And other authorities as well. Most notably, as Meghan Shaughnessy wrote about, Claudia is always seeking out authorities that she sees as the key to understanding what happened to her friend. That it turns out not to be the thing that solves it for her, a failure of authority, seems important.
There is a best friend. Natasha Cardin, Olivia Sweeney, and Nicole Costa identified Monday as the way Claudia created a sense of herself. In Darius, Savannah Resendes saw how the relationship with Sohrab was essential to Darius’s sense of becoming--becoming himself, becoming Persian, etc. The role of peer characters are essential to these plots.
Nobody seems to fit in at home. Identity formation is central to a coming of age novel and typically we’ve never encountered a character who didn’t change from the start of the novel to the end. Neither character in these two texts feel comfortable in their skins. They have vastly different reasons in some ways, but they often express this “otherness” (Colby Nilsen called it “The Adolescent struggle as ‘The Other’”-- I smell final project!) in similar terms and plot elements--which led to a superb exchange about “other” in Monday with Becky (for more on this see the social justice impetus in YA below).
Nobody seems to fit in at school. This is another riff on “authority.” Nicole Costa did a nice examination of Claudia’s dyslexia and how the school does and doesn’t support her. Maddie Butkus did a good job of talking about the fake “zero tolerance policy towards bullying” that was a source of real anxiety for Darius.
Is it Angst or something else? It’s easy, I think, to read Darius’s behavior as typical teenage angst (Gabby S). Olivia Leonard brought in the Kapurch and talked about “coming-of-age anxiety.” That really fits a great deal of Darius’s story--in some ways.
Justin Carpender it does always seem like you work Catcher into the conversation, but it’s usually spot on. And it is here. One difference between the texts is that Darius seems to have, by and large, pretty typical teenage problems. His depression is, from the novel it read to me, as a chemical imbalance and hereditary and not situational depression--which I think is something that is valuable to consider. But Claudia’s experience is very different. Her break is caused by a traumatic event, much like Holden’s break after his brother dies. Colby Nilsen made this point very carefully and identified how it motivated the action in the two novels.
But here again, how interesting would it be to pair Claudia (who has some other qualities that link her to Holden) and Holden in a classroom?
Lauren M and Becky T: important to normalize healthy emotional reactions among students, particularly young men students. Yep. Though I gotta admit. Most of my male students seem to get this, which makes me happy for the next generation--and the one after that, etc. Shaun Ramsay talks about how Darius both highlights the complexity of clinical depression, the stigma around it and, also, how it normalizes taking medication to combat the illness. For me as a reader that particular aspect felt important and fresh in a discussion of depression.
And we can all relate. Maddie Butkus’s analysis does a good job of talking about how while Darius’s experiences are not exactly like every reader, we get it. That “relatability”, which is something you guys talk a lot about, is a key element in how YA imagines an audience.
YA is interested in issues of representation and social justice. Well, not all YA, but a lot of it, and the stuff that is really excellent does. This is a part of that “edification” aspect of the genre. YA cares about introducing big ideas to students. We’ve talked at length about representation accross the texts we’ve read. These novels are the first that very specifically include, as Ethan C said, “neurodiverse” characters. And we have represented in Darius a very vulnerable part of the US population: folks of middle eastern descent. Colby Nilsen did an excellent reading of this aspect of the novel. Becky Tynan focused her analysis of Monday on issues of race and gender. Interestingly, Darius, too, is a novel about race (think about how Darius compares himself in terms of hair, eye, and skin color to his white father). Some of these ideas were echoed in Caroline K’s and Shaun R’s posts as well.
And I can’t resist saying it: even if you don’t see it entirely, Little Women was a feminist novel. My point is, social justice is not new to the genre.
The novel seems to end with some measure of acceptance/resolution (sort of). One thing I credit both of these novels with is that while they have resolution (Gabby B dissected what acceptance looked like in Darius and connected it to Lauren’s discussion of Claudia’s acceptance of Monday’s death; Shauna Ridley made a similar connection). But I don’t know, particularly in the case of Monday, that you’d say that these novels have “happy” endings. Darius and his father still have a complicated relationship--and their shared inherited depression isn’t going away. And Claudia will live with the profound trauma of the violent death of her friend for the rest of her life. Shaun Ramsay challenges us to think about whether or not this is a true happy ending: “When I think of Melodrama, I think of heroes and villains typically and sometimes happy endings. This novel certainly ends hopeful for Claudia, but is it really a happy ending when her best friend is gone forever.” Could it be that these novels are NOT the site of melodrama but the site of tragedy? Discuss.
I want to thank Olivia Sweeney and Gabrielle Boutin for their openness in sharing stories from their own lives. This is why we read--to understand. And it’s why we ask our students to read.
Update to the last week’s Update. I forgot to mention something yesterday in my very and obviously hastily written email of yesterday--I can’t believe I sent that out with all those mistakes. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t do work that late, but I just. needed. To. send. It.
Anyway, I mean to address a point our resident librarian-minded colleague Shaun Ramsay’s point about how many parents don’t support students reading graphic novels because they aren’t “real reading.” By now, any reading theorist you’ve ever read has convinced all of you that any reading is good reading. And current research shows that the best way to create a lifelong reader is to let them read whatever they want.
But as I write that, I’m aware that I’m still making it sound like graphic novels are somehow still not as complex a reading experience as any other text. And that is not Shaun’s point.
Last spring semester I taught the Booker Prize long list nominee Sabrina, a graphic novel--and the first ever to be nominated for what is one of the most prestigious awards for contemporary writing. It was a very excellent student in the class--a geography major/english minor--who did this amazing reading about how space between the characters represented the ways modern life distances us from genuine felt emotions and allows us to be less human. It was, to say the least, enlightening.
Monday Update for 6 March 2020
Hello Everyone--
I thought last week’s Teaching Discussion was really excellent, one of the best I’ve read. People seemed to take to heart my admonishment to not write the “I totally agree” statement. I appreciate when you engage very directly with each other, and I’m particularly impressed with the folks who seem to be reading widely before responding rather than just posting a response to the last person who posts before they post.
One thing I’ve learned about online teaching is that it requires not just perfunctory effort on the part of teacher and student, but real and committed engagement. No amount of teaching finesse can overcome students who are just box checking or a teacher who doesn’t care. And so I am very grateful to those of you who are bringing your best self to our class.
Last week’s discussion revolved around a few themes: 1) first and foremost what does it mean to “teach” a graphic novel or, more generally, teaching students how to read the visual; 2) thematically, a kind of essential question, what makes a family a family; 3) another essential question, no single event need define our path in life if we do not want it to.
I want to start with an anecdote that I think captures a lot of what you guys said. When my sister and I were young we fought, as do most siblings, but one thing we did together was read the comic pages of our local paper together, both of us leaning over the long pages. Sometimes she would laugh at a comic and I would say “I don’t get it.” Or I would laugh at something and she would say “I don’t get it. What was happening was that I was almost exclusively reading the text of the comics and not looking at the picture and she was doing the opposite (no surprise I guess that I became a writing teacher and she became a graphic designer). Most of the time it was possible to stick to what we did best, but every once in a while one or the other failed us. And, of course, the lesson is that to fully find meaning in the text, we needed to pay attention to both at the same time.
TEACHING HOW TO READ THE VISUAL
And that is largely what all of you saw. Several of your thoughtfully quoted the Rice article that tells us, as teachers and readers, that reading a graphic text takes time. Jailyn Tavares started us off with her own reflection on reading the text before and after Rice’s advice. She was not alone in that.
Shauna Ridley talked about how reading such a text is, in fact, not faster but rather takes more time. This was echoed in what Savannah Resendes did when she directed our attention to a few pages in the text--an excellent assignment that a number of you included in your discussion. Late in the discussion board, Olivia Leonard talked about an assignment where she asked students why a particular picture accompanied a particular part of the text. I think this is a vital question to ask students as a low-stakes kind of writing to get them to really dig into the particular demands of reading a graphic novel.
Olivia L. also spent a lot of time talking about how students spend a lot of time on social media--a largely visual medium--but don’t really spend much time analyzing it. Which leads me to my next point: Megan Shaugnessy, Gabby Sleeper, and Nicole Costa, in their own separate ways, talked bout how we teach a text like this--and the necessity of having to teach this new way of reading as explained in Rice. They, like Olivia, point out how students actually live in a world surrounded by the visual and yet are not really taught how to interrogate those images. Nicole’s particular unit objective--to slow down--is quite powerful.
I’m interested in how students always say to me that they are bad readers because they are slow readers. Slowness is not the problem so much as not paying careful attention to the text--and not have the skills to be able to pay careful attention. It’s worthwhile to consider that a graphic novel could help students learn the skills they need to engage with and analyze and make decisions about in their actual life outside of school and with texts in they encounter in the classroom.
Colby Nilsen made a very enthusiastic argument for how a graphic novel, not because it is easier, but because it demands a different way of reading, because it demands a slowing down, could train readers to be a good reader in any situation, including the class--a point I agree with.
I can always count on Ethan Child to dig into genre, and he did here, with a series of questions he might think about as a teacher, questions that would inform how you would teach this different narrative form. Ethan and Justin Carpender also talked about “teaching it as a memoir.” And, yes, of course, we should and can do that. Their are a number of graphic novel memoirs (Blankets and the widely known Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic).
WHAT MAKES A FAMILY
The second really major theme of your discussion was “what makes a family.” Jess Rinker introduced the idea. This is a vital question to ask, and one that, as Justin Carpender made such an eloquent point of saying, could make a real difference in the lives of our students. I liked the idea of Glass Castle--though, and I really don’t know because I haven’t read it, if it works for 8th graders. He reminds us that this is why, in the end, we read books and why we want our students to read them as well. Caroline Keenan saw this as a valuable story for young folks going into high school where they will encounter all manner of family lives in high school.
I have something to add to this. In my ENGL 301 Writing and the Teaching of Writing class, I ask students to do a research project on under-resourced populations and about three years ago one group wanted to do it on students who lived in households with addiction. At the time, it was difficult to find much on it. This was at the start of our real understanding of what we know as the Opioid epidemic. This last fall, students again decided to research this population. They found an abundance of studies. A sad truth is that many students come from homes where addiction crowds out what we think of a childhood. Imagine how this text might help a young student who might imagine he or she was the only one living with this.
WE ARE NOT ONLY ANY ONE THING FROM OUR LIVES
Related to this, Jailyn Tavares, Savannah Resendes, and Caroline Keenan brought up that a central and important theme of the novel is that no singular experience need to define us. Megan Shaughnessy rather poetically said that the novel allows us to read about a life of “love and complexities. Again, a true thing in the lives of us all.
Molly Drain asked us to think about how parents might feel about this book with 8th graders. Always a concern of course, but I do think it is appropriate for the grade--both in terms of difficult and in terms of content. Hannah Brodeur made a good argument for using the text in 8th grade--and much of the action takes place in middle school.
I do want to caution about a few things I read: steer clear of thinking that pictures make reading easier. I think the Rice makes this clear, but I know how tempting it is to say. And while I do agree that this text might engage some nonreaders (though I know a lot of nonreaders who still see more novel than graphic), I am not sure we can say that it would be easier for students on IEPs. Maybe, but we are making a lot of assumptions about what those IEPs are for. This isn’t a big point I want to dwell on, but I think that
OTHER ASSIGNMENT IDEAS AND GOOD POINTS
- Olivia Sweeney had students working on vocab words by putting them into a comic.
- I loved the pack and forth between Maddie Butkus and Olivia about Maddie’s assignment about how text-based Maddie’s assignments were, and that, with Olivia’s help she saw that.
- Megan Shaughnessy talked about American Born Chinese, an excellent middle grade novel I’ve used with 7th and 8th graders.
- I would have never thought of using a digital version of a graphic novel or how one might use the technology that this classroom has the way Maddie Butkus did.
- Gabby Boutin talked about asking students to write about the front cover of any novel as a way to demonstrate the connection between the visual and the textual. I do assignments like this with my students a lot. It’s a lesson in prediction and in using the available information as a reader--as any good reader does--to make meaning out of a text.
- Nicole Costa’s “Blog our Journey” assignment (This really inspired me. My young nephew has an assignment in his new online first grade class where he has to draw a picture about his day and then write three sentences about it. I could see a version of this for a low stakes writing assignment for my students--it would have to be a drawing. As some of you pointed out, it could be a photo, a collage, etc).
- Jailyn Tavares watched and highly recommended the Author’s TED talk (which he actually talks about in the notes). You can watch that here. He opens with the line that “imagination saved my life.” I find that incredibly powerful. And I believe it.
- Graphic novels are not something I know a ton about, but the Library Association of America has a great and evolving list you can read about here.
Addendum to the 30 March 2020 Monday update
(overview of Write Your Own YA, updates to syllabus, discussion board, etc)
Hi Everyone. I've recorded and tried to post a video directly to this page three times now to no avail. So I recorded it and posted it to YouTube. You can access it by clicking here.
(overview of Write Your Own YA, updates to syllabus, discussion board, etc)
Hi Everyone. I've recorded and tried to post a video directly to this page three times now to no avail. So I recorded it and posted it to YouTube. You can access it by clicking here.
MONDAY UPDATE 30 MARCH 2020
(links won't work in the video below. But they are live in the powerpoint and the transcript)
(links won't work in the video below. But they are live in the powerpoint and the transcript)
| monday.update.30.march_2020.pptx |
Hello Everyone--
I’m divving up the update for ease of use like I did last week. I’m going to talk about this week’s robust teaching discussion.
First up, I was very impressed with those folks who took seriously the mission of the international baccalaureate. Not that many people know about it. Sometimes I joke that it’s like AP on crack. It actually is quite an impressive program that lands students into top tier colleges and universities.
Jess Rinker talked extensively about the focus of IB on the “global and the personal.” Nicole Costa stressed the goal of IB to develop “open minded, inquisitive, reflective, and caring” students and global citizens. They both picked up on why I paired Acevedo with an IB class. It’s difficult to locate spaces in a high school ELA curriculum for global texts, but IB insists on it, which opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of what literature you can bring into a student’s life. Shauna Ridley also picked up on the cultural component of the IB curriculum.
Responding thoughtfully to Jess, Ethan Child thought about how one might construct a unit on global poetry--he rightfully pointed out how we often have students write Haikus but don’t talk at all about the history of them or why the 5-7-5 form is essential to how the poem means what it means. An IB curriculum would allow you to explore, for instance, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.Here is a sample
Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
How interesting would it be to show students sonnets not written by Shakespeare? I think it would be very interesting.
Not unrelated to this, Jess posted a link, repeated here to a video that UNESCO posted on World Poetry Day (which would have been the week we returned from our originally scheduled sping break) 21 March 2020. April, the cruelest month according to Chaucer and, certainly, a befitting modifier for this particular April, is also National Poetry Month. It’s a great month to feature poets and poetry of all kinds with students of all ages. The link above to Poets.org has 30 ways to celebrate the month--all of which I highly recommend, particularly if you are homeschooling any young ones this month.
Picking up on a point I made last week: YA should both delight end edify, and, the teaching counterpart to this is engagement and erudition. In other words, we need to develop inquisitiveness and curiosity in students, but we must also educate them, teach them things and teach them how to learn things. Ethan and Megan Shaughnessy certainly outlined assignments on the erudition ends of the spectrum. They talked about using Acevedo to teach students how to read poetry--they were talking about teaching prosody. I think this is very, very important--both to treat Acevedo as a poet the way we treat Browning and Dickenson and, yes, Shakespeare as poets, and also to teach student to not fear poetry. Teaching students how to read poetry will help them be better readers, period. Period. I mean it. Period.
Also on the erudition side of things, Becky Tynan emphasized and expanded Ethan’s point about teaching speaking skills in the ELA classroom. Speaking skills are in the frameworks (as are listening skills). It’s totally understandable why they might get lost in the myriad things teachers are asked to do in a year, but I like to think of these speaking and listening learning objectives as working in support of the reading and writing
To that end, many of you, more than I think I can list here (Gabby Sleeper--our own original first responder, Jess, Nicole Costa, Savannah Resendes, etc) were taken with the idea of hosting a Poetry Slam. I appreciated Nicole’s posting of her own work (RETREAT. RETREAT.) talking about what it feels like to present work--any kind of work--in front of an audience. It is my experience that students will avoid sharing their work at all costs unless you make them. And, as you are all perhaps painfully aware, that is why I don’t make it optional. Savannah can always be counted on to think about whether students would want to share. I hear that. That’s why it is our job to create a classroom where students feel safe enough to share and/or that there are ways for students to participate without having to share something they aren’t ready to share.
This brings me to the “engagement” part of my above formula. That is the other end of the spectrum and it works in two ways here. You could literally never say the word poetry and have things to talk about (Molly Drain, among others, was right to say that this is a book about a lot of issues). Maddie Butkus and I are both big fans of Gabby S’s post-it idea. I like it because it straddles the engagement/erudition divide--it teaches close reading, and encourages active reading, but it allows students to choose what parts most affected them.
I gotta say that though I am not Dominican, I was raised by a first generation Italian mom, and the poem about how her mom would never be her best friend really hit home for me.
I was not prepared to read, as I did time after time, about how people had bad experiences with poetry in high school. First off, never tell Ann Brunjes this. You will very likely kill her dead. Sam Colon said that she had a “love/hate” relationship to poetry. And I guess I thought that was more how things were. Because, like, what teenager isn’t secretly writing (pretty terrible) poetry someplace at some point in their life? But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s a Gen X, Dead Poet’s Society, Say Anything sort of a thing.
Secondly, I think that what Megan and Ethan are talking about teaches students to engage with poetry and learn to not fear it. And I think that some of the deep reading and writing experiences some of you wrote about would help students see that meaning can be made with some effort of any text. Colby Nilsen’s five questions to help students analyze the text. A fair number of you talked about using journals and prompts and small groups--Hannah Brodeur, Gabby, Jess, etc). Several of you talked about this as a bridge text to other poets, including those in the Canon (Becky Tynan had a tidy list). I was super into Nicole Costa’s idea about featuring other women poets. Did you all catch the Emily Dickenson reference near the end of the novel? Justin Carpender did.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
How fun would it be to have students try to figure out why Xiomara would elect to title one of her own poems the same? I particularly liked how Nicole connected Acevedo to a tradition of women poets becuase this is a feminist novel. Both Nicole and Justin did a nice job of talking about how one might teach the novel thematically: gender, religion, etc.
And, in keeping with the discussion we’ve been having all semester long, we see how this novel is a coming of age novel, how we have a character trying to figure out who she is in the face of an oppressive authority (her parents, her religion, even her peers in some respects).
One cool thing about this novel is the character of Aman as a role model as a cool, pretty mature, kind model of the kind of young man we want all our young men to grow up to be.
So what I’m trying to say here is that the way we make poetry vivid and real for our students is to not be afraid of it and not avoid it, but to embrace it on both the erudition and the engagement end. To involve our students as readers of poetry, but, also, to engage them as writers of poetry.
https://youtu.be/ury9eoLnb-0
A few other points:
I’m divving up the update for ease of use like I did last week. I’m going to talk about this week’s robust teaching discussion.
First up, I was very impressed with those folks who took seriously the mission of the international baccalaureate. Not that many people know about it. Sometimes I joke that it’s like AP on crack. It actually is quite an impressive program that lands students into top tier colleges and universities.
Jess Rinker talked extensively about the focus of IB on the “global and the personal.” Nicole Costa stressed the goal of IB to develop “open minded, inquisitive, reflective, and caring” students and global citizens. They both picked up on why I paired Acevedo with an IB class. It’s difficult to locate spaces in a high school ELA curriculum for global texts, but IB insists on it, which opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of what literature you can bring into a student’s life. Shauna Ridley also picked up on the cultural component of the IB curriculum.
Responding thoughtfully to Jess, Ethan Child thought about how one might construct a unit on global poetry--he rightfully pointed out how we often have students write Haikus but don’t talk at all about the history of them or why the 5-7-5 form is essential to how the poem means what it means. An IB curriculum would allow you to explore, for instance, the great Chilean poet Pablo Neruda.Here is a sample
Love Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda
I do not love you as if you were a salt rose, or topaz
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
So I love you because I know no other way
than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.
How interesting would it be to show students sonnets not written by Shakespeare? I think it would be very interesting.
Not unrelated to this, Jess posted a link, repeated here to a video that UNESCO posted on World Poetry Day (which would have been the week we returned from our originally scheduled sping break) 21 March 2020. April, the cruelest month according to Chaucer and, certainly, a befitting modifier for this particular April, is also National Poetry Month. It’s a great month to feature poets and poetry of all kinds with students of all ages. The link above to Poets.org has 30 ways to celebrate the month--all of which I highly recommend, particularly if you are homeschooling any young ones this month.
Picking up on a point I made last week: YA should both delight end edify, and, the teaching counterpart to this is engagement and erudition. In other words, we need to develop inquisitiveness and curiosity in students, but we must also educate them, teach them things and teach them how to learn things. Ethan and Megan Shaughnessy certainly outlined assignments on the erudition ends of the spectrum. They talked about using Acevedo to teach students how to read poetry--they were talking about teaching prosody. I think this is very, very important--both to treat Acevedo as a poet the way we treat Browning and Dickenson and, yes, Shakespeare as poets, and also to teach student to not fear poetry. Teaching students how to read poetry will help them be better readers, period. Period. I mean it. Period.
Also on the erudition side of things, Becky Tynan emphasized and expanded Ethan’s point about teaching speaking skills in the ELA classroom. Speaking skills are in the frameworks (as are listening skills). It’s totally understandable why they might get lost in the myriad things teachers are asked to do in a year, but I like to think of these speaking and listening learning objectives as working in support of the reading and writing
To that end, many of you, more than I think I can list here (Gabby Sleeper--our own original first responder, Jess, Nicole Costa, Savannah Resendes, etc) were taken with the idea of hosting a Poetry Slam. I appreciated Nicole’s posting of her own work (RETREAT. RETREAT.) talking about what it feels like to present work--any kind of work--in front of an audience. It is my experience that students will avoid sharing their work at all costs unless you make them. And, as you are all perhaps painfully aware, that is why I don’t make it optional. Savannah can always be counted on to think about whether students would want to share. I hear that. That’s why it is our job to create a classroom where students feel safe enough to share and/or that there are ways for students to participate without having to share something they aren’t ready to share.
This brings me to the “engagement” part of my above formula. That is the other end of the spectrum and it works in two ways here. You could literally never say the word poetry and have things to talk about (Molly Drain, among others, was right to say that this is a book about a lot of issues). Maddie Butkus and I are both big fans of Gabby S’s post-it idea. I like it because it straddles the engagement/erudition divide--it teaches close reading, and encourages active reading, but it allows students to choose what parts most affected them.
I gotta say that though I am not Dominican, I was raised by a first generation Italian mom, and the poem about how her mom would never be her best friend really hit home for me.
I was not prepared to read, as I did time after time, about how people had bad experiences with poetry in high school. First off, never tell Ann Brunjes this. You will very likely kill her dead. Sam Colon said that she had a “love/hate” relationship to poetry. And I guess I thought that was more how things were. Because, like, what teenager isn’t secretly writing (pretty terrible) poetry someplace at some point in their life? But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s a Gen X, Dead Poet’s Society, Say Anything sort of a thing.
Secondly, I think that what Megan and Ethan are talking about teaches students to engage with poetry and learn to not fear it. And I think that some of the deep reading and writing experiences some of you wrote about would help students see that meaning can be made with some effort of any text. Colby Nilsen’s five questions to help students analyze the text. A fair number of you talked about using journals and prompts and small groups--Hannah Brodeur, Gabby, Jess, etc). Several of you talked about this as a bridge text to other poets, including those in the Canon (Becky Tynan had a tidy list). I was super into Nicole Costa’s idea about featuring other women poets. Did you all catch the Emily Dickenson reference near the end of the novel? Justin Carpender did.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -
And sore must be the storm -
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -
And on the strangest Sea -
Yet - never - in Extremity,
It asked a crumb - of me.
How fun would it be to have students try to figure out why Xiomara would elect to title one of her own poems the same? I particularly liked how Nicole connected Acevedo to a tradition of women poets becuase this is a feminist novel. Both Nicole and Justin did a nice job of talking about how one might teach the novel thematically: gender, religion, etc.
And, in keeping with the discussion we’ve been having all semester long, we see how this novel is a coming of age novel, how we have a character trying to figure out who she is in the face of an oppressive authority (her parents, her religion, even her peers in some respects).
One cool thing about this novel is the character of Aman as a role model as a cool, pretty mature, kind model of the kind of young man we want all our young men to grow up to be.
So what I’m trying to say here is that the way we make poetry vivid and real for our students is to not be afraid of it and not avoid it, but to embrace it on both the erudition and the engagement end. To involve our students as readers of poetry, but, also, to engage them as writers of poetry.
https://youtu.be/ury9eoLnb-0
A few other points:
- Savannah Resendes idea about using Ms. Galiano’s assignments is interesting. I like the idea of students doing the “rough draft” and the “final draft” like Xiomara does.
- Shauna Ridley and Nicole brought up bringing in music to the class. Music is such a big part of the texts. And, lest we forget, Kendrick Lamar won a Pulitzer Prize last year for Damn.
- The idea of representation came up again this week. And I want to add the same caveat that I’ve been adding all semester long: diversity isn’t just visible diversity. This novel is chock full of universal themes (see my list above: coming of age, discovering who you are, fighting against an authority figure). Yes, it is certainly true that a young Latinx woman reading this novel might find it particularly powerful to read a book about a character who looks like her, and, perhaps even more importantly, by an author that looks like her, but lets not imagine, as I said about Long Way Down, that this novel wouldn’t “fit” in a classroom in Bridgewater/Rayham. We must not reserve black and brown writers for classrooms with majority black and brown students in them.
- I moved between reading The Poet X and listening to it on audible. It’s read by Acevedo herself, and it’s a powerful experience to hear her reading the English and the Spanish. As I think Ethan, Becky, Nicole, Jess and others were trying to get at is that poetry, like drama, is meant to be spoken. Thus, if I were teaching the class, I would include some of Acevedo reading her work, as she does in this clip.
- Finally, a number of you commented on the fact that Acevedo (like Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down) is written in free verse and that that can feel “easier.” But another way to look at poetic form (beyond the haiku) is to look at one of the last poems in the novel “A the New York Citywide Slam.” That poem is a contrapuntal poem. In essence a contrapuntal poem can be read either across or down (columns). They make sense either way, and they make sense differently. If I was teaching this novel, as much of a challenge it would be, I would ask my students to draft a contrapuntal poem.
- If you have the audio book, Acevedo explains what her goal is and reads the poem two different ways. I couldn’t find a clip of it online, but I did find this review article in Ears on the Odyssey that highlights the contrapuntal poem and its role in the novel.
25 March 2020 Wednesday Update (this post has also been emailed to all of you)
Teaching Discussion Round Up
Good Conversation on the discussion board about Long Way Down, can’t say enough about you genuinely engaging with your colleagues in our class (and I mean the ones who really engage and not the ones who sort of fake it--oh, I can totally tell). It was also a complicated discussion that needs parsing out.
Teaching the actual text of LWD
Before I get into the complicated parts, let me hit a few other highlights. One thing that is true about Long Way Down is that there is a lot you can do with it in an ELA classroom in terms of teaching students how to read a literary text.
The class was split on how students would react to the fact that the novel is written in “verse.” I put that term in air quotes because it’s not like this is like reading The Canterbury Tales or anything. It’s definitely free-verse. Some folks thought students might struggle with it. But I agree with those of you who felt that students would be more than fine with it--after all, it was fast reading. Three hundred pages in like two hours? I actually think students would be excited and proud that they were reading a book of this length.
The fact that is it in verse presents some interesting writing opportunities in class:
And you all realized this on some level. It would be possible to spend the equivalent of a whole unit on this novel and have students engage deeply and thoughtfully with the text, think about it thematically, think about it structurally, figuratively, and never once talk about race and privilege.
And wouldn’t that be more comfortable? To not have to carefully construct a class where you do not talk about race and privilege and violence and poverty? And yet, and this is my point, teaching is not apolitical. It’s just not. And so to not engage with the actual story of this text would be antithetical to why we become teachers. So please read on for some cautions.
How I might take on this challenge
Finally, I want to connect back to two things, Gossip Girl and my sample Pecha Kucha. We are no longer doing the Pecha Kucha project so, chances are, you didn’t watch my sample Pecha Kucha, which you will find in the transcript of this talk on our Monday Update page.
Essentially, what I argue in the Pecha Kucha is that one quality of the genre that is unique to the genre, of YA, is edification. Edification means, essentially, that you are somehow improved by your experience with something. I think great YA texts are great because they edify the reader in two ways: they encourage young readers to know things about their own world and experiences and the world and experiences of others and they help young readers improve as readers so they one day encourage readers to move on to other more complicated texts, namely we hope they will become life long readers.
So, as I pointed out in a number of google.doc book clubs, I pointed out that Gossip Girls was listed as a good read by the American Library Association.. Their argument was that in encouraged young people who were not readers to read.
I believe in the argument that any reading is good reading. One hundred percent. With my whole heart.
But I don’t believe that I should teach every book, because not every book edifies. And for young readers (not college age readers), for young readers, I see my job as a literacy advocate to build strong readers and thoughtful humans. Thus, I want to teach books like Little Women and Long Way Down and not Gossip Girl. Because, on both points, I don’t think GG offers us much. It’s luxury porn--watching rich people make crazy bad choices. And, it’s not exactly a challenging read--unless by challenging you mean trying to figure out where in New York some restaurant they mention actually is.
I started with Little Women and Gossip Girl so folks could see two things: 1) the legacy of Little Women in the genre of YA, how so many of the texts we read today follow the general outline of that novel; and 2) giving us a way to gauge the significance of a YA text, what makes it literature and not just pulp. From here on out, I hope you will see the texts we encounter as closer to LWD than to Gossip Girl on that vague spectrum.
So endeth this long update.
Teaching Discussion Round Up
Good Conversation on the discussion board about Long Way Down, can’t say enough about you genuinely engaging with your colleagues in our class (and I mean the ones who really engage and not the ones who sort of fake it--oh, I can totally tell). It was also a complicated discussion that needs parsing out.
Teaching the actual text of LWD
Before I get into the complicated parts, let me hit a few other highlights. One thing that is true about Long Way Down is that there is a lot you can do with it in an ELA classroom in terms of teaching students how to read a literary text.
The class was split on how students would react to the fact that the novel is written in “verse.” I put that term in air quotes because it’s not like this is like reading The Canterbury Tales or anything. It’s definitely free-verse. Some folks thought students might struggle with it. But I agree with those of you who felt that students would be more than fine with it--after all, it was fast reading. Three hundred pages in like two hours? I actually think students would be excited and proud that they were reading a book of this length.
The fact that is it in verse presents some interesting writing opportunities in class:
- You could have students write a story--perhaps one of the many rules-based (Nicole Costa) or moral dilemma (Megan Shaughnessy) based prompts many of you came up with--and then write the story in “verse.” Follow up by asking them to reflect on what happened to their story once they moved from one genre to the next--what changes of language, form meaning happened. An excellent exercise in genre analysis.
- You could explore concrete poetry, sometimes called shape poetry, and then ask them to compose their own concrete poems (for samples click the link above).
- Connecting back to our work of a few weeks ago, Justin Carpender suggested pairing this text with Catcher in the Rye (smart, smart, smart). He was quick enough to see that the main characters are both 15. There is a lot you could do here with privilege (more on that in a minute). Colby Nilsen and Ethan Child and others I might be forgetting argued for (this week and previously) more diverse reading in the ELA classroom. Pairing LWD with a text taught over and over again (and, I would argue is probably even less accessible to students today than LWD) like Catcher would be an important step toward building an equitable, socially just classroom. All of you recognized that this text might present challenges to teaching, but you all also saw the value of teaching it. As we’ve said repeatedly: representation matters.
- Another possible text connection: I thought about pairing it with Huck Finn. Huck is faced with the moral dilemma of helping Jim at the end even though that was against “the rules.” There is also stuff you could do with dialect as both texts are written in dialect.
- I liked the idea some folks (like Gabbie Boutin) had about the role research could play--bringing in media that might help give some context to the story. Of course you need to be careful here. As Savannah Resendes pointed out, most of what many students know about the lives of black and brown people come from the limited version they see on TV and movies. You don’t want to bring in stuff that just reinforce stereotypes the students already have of “ghetto” life.
- Also, no one mentioned this in the discussion board (though at least one person mentioned it in the book club google.docs), but you could do stuff with the anagrams. What are anagrams and how is Will using them to express himself? And Why anagrams? And then, of course, I would have students have some fun anagraming how they feel at that moment--about class, about home, about this assignment, etc. Of course the conceit of the novel--8 chapters for 8 floors, each floor introduces us to an important “ghost” character. You could do something pretty cool with that format with students. This is still percolating for me, but that conceit suggests a possible writing assignment to me.
And you all realized this on some level. It would be possible to spend the equivalent of a whole unit on this novel and have students engage deeply and thoughtfully with the text, think about it thematically, think about it structurally, figuratively, and never once talk about race and privilege.
And wouldn’t that be more comfortable? To not have to carefully construct a class where you do not talk about race and privilege and violence and poverty? And yet, and this is my point, teaching is not apolitical. It’s just not. And so to not engage with the actual story of this text would be antithetical to why we become teachers. So please read on for some cautions.
- There is gun violence and then there is gun violence. A number of folks talked about this novel as a story about “gun violence.” And I’m not going to argue, but I do want to be specific here. This isn’t the same kind of gun violence we are talking about when a deeply troubled (almost always white and almost always male) student with access to guns walks into a school and shoots it up. This is the particular kind of gun violence that is the scourge of many black and brown communities. It is as equally as desperate and important to talk about as the kind of gun violence responsible for the Parkland murders, but it is different, and we, as educators, must be responsible about it and be clear with our students and not conflate the issues.
- The one sentence nobody wanted to write was “this is a novel about race.” Let’s get to the heart of the matter:
- Will is black. Most of you seemed to know this, though it seemed to be a question for at least one reader.
- Everyone knew that race was the issue about teaching it in West Bridgewater (nice work Gabby Sleeper for looking up poverty statistics for WB)--one student suggested it would be easier to teach in a school where that was majority black or brown. When, in fact, we should consider that it would be just as complicated, perhaps even more difficult where students have actually experienced these things. And we should all also be considering what it would mean to be a white teacher in a majority white classroom or a white teacher in a majority black classroom.
- We have a very singular idea of what teaching diversity means. I’m not saying you, I’m saying us, and I’m saying most institutions, including BSU. Diversity too often means visible diversity: i.e. black and brown students are diversity; white students need diversity. But we all know that’s not how it should work.
- Be cautious about needing students to “relate” to a book--though we are being naive if we don’t realize that our students know about the violence in this world. They can’t format in MSWord but they know a lot more than we think--a lot more than their parents think (more on that in a minute too).
How I might take on this challenge
- Systemic racism is a thing, and it is a part of the education system, and it’s persistence is what makes it so difficult to talk about race and racism in the classroom. In a class like the one we were discussing for this text, I think we could and should have a discussion about privilege. It has to be handled delicately because students will push back at the idea that they might follow the rules Will feels determined to follow if they too found themselves in the same position--most of us want to believe we would behave better in dire situations. We wouldn’t get shot by a cop. We wouldn’t sell drugs. We wouldn’t drop out of school. We wouldn’t revenge our brother's death.
- Talking about privilege directly: I’ve used a quiz similar to this buzzfeed quiz in classes when I wanted to talk about privilege and wanted to ground it in actual information and not just a random and potentially alienating conversation (take it--it can feel pretty rough). And then I would invite a guided conversation, perhaps using the fishbowl exercise to guarantee some deep listening). I would do this before the students read the book.
- Possibilities for Media. Folks talked about bringing in media to help students think about what it would be like to experience Will’s life. I think this could be useful, but also fraught. There is a ton of stereotypes in media of black and brown life. Here are a few sources I’ve used in the past about students in other classrooms: From This American Life, a two part podcast on the lives of high school students in Chicago, Harper High School Part I and Part II. Very recently, I listened to this powerful story on Snap Judgement, a radio program also on NPR, this story, “Senior Year Mixtape,” that followed the lives of three teenagers in their final year of high school in California.
- Several students talked about the potential pushback of parents. Yes. That’s absolutely a possibility, particularly in this cultural moment and particularly, no judgement just truth, in West Bridgewater. I would also potentially expect pushback from fellow teachers in your department--for various reasons. They might object to the “controversial” nature of the text. And I’ll be honest, in your earliest years of teaching, you will have to be careful and strategic to get books like this into the curriculum. But it’s your job to keep pushing and keep trying and not just give in to teaching To Kill a Mockingbird as “the diversity book” for the millionth time.
Finally, I want to connect back to two things, Gossip Girl and my sample Pecha Kucha. We are no longer doing the Pecha Kucha project so, chances are, you didn’t watch my sample Pecha Kucha, which you will find in the transcript of this talk on our Monday Update page.
Essentially, what I argue in the Pecha Kucha is that one quality of the genre that is unique to the genre, of YA, is edification. Edification means, essentially, that you are somehow improved by your experience with something. I think great YA texts are great because they edify the reader in two ways: they encourage young readers to know things about their own world and experiences and the world and experiences of others and they help young readers improve as readers so they one day encourage readers to move on to other more complicated texts, namely we hope they will become life long readers.
So, as I pointed out in a number of google.doc book clubs, I pointed out that Gossip Girls was listed as a good read by the American Library Association.. Their argument was that in encouraged young people who were not readers to read.
I believe in the argument that any reading is good reading. One hundred percent. With my whole heart.
But I don’t believe that I should teach every book, because not every book edifies. And for young readers (not college age readers), for young readers, I see my job as a literacy advocate to build strong readers and thoughtful humans. Thus, I want to teach books like Little Women and Long Way Down and not Gossip Girl. Because, on both points, I don’t think GG offers us much. It’s luxury porn--watching rich people make crazy bad choices. And, it’s not exactly a challenging read--unless by challenging you mean trying to figure out where in New York some restaurant they mention actually is.
I started with Little Women and Gossip Girl so folks could see two things: 1) the legacy of Little Women in the genre of YA, how so many of the texts we read today follow the general outline of that novel; and 2) giving us a way to gauge the significance of a YA text, what makes it literature and not just pulp. From here on out, I hope you will see the texts we encounter as closer to LWD than to Gossip Girl on that vague spectrum.
So endeth this long update.
| pecha.kucha.sample.torda..pptx |
25 March 2020 Wednesday Update (this post has also been emailed to all of you)
Teaching Discussion Round Up
Good Conversation on the discussion board about Long Way Down, can’t say enough about you genuinely engaging with your colleagues in our class (and I mean the ones who really engage and not the ones who sort of fake it--oh, I can totally tell). It was also a complicated discussion that needs parsing out.
Teaching the actual text of LWD.
Before I get into the complicated parts, let me hit a few other highlights. One thing that is true about Long Way Down is that there is a lot you can do with it in an ELA classroom in terms of teaching students how to read a literary text.
The class was split on how students would react to the fact that the novel is written in “verse.” I put that term in air quotes because it’s not like this is like reading The Canterbury Tales or anything. It’s definitely free-verse. Some folks thought students might struggle with it. But I agree with those of you who felt that students would be more than fine with it--after all, it was fast reading. Three hundred pages in like two hours? I actually think students would be excited and proud that they were reading a book of this length.
The fact that is it in verse presents some interesting writing opportunities in class:
And you all realized this on some level. It would be possible to spend the equivalent of a whole unit on this novel and have students engage deeply and thoughtfully with the text, think about it thematically, think about it structurally, figuratively, and never once talk about race and privilege.
And wouldn’t that be more comfortable? To not have to carefully construct a class where you do not talk about race and privilege and violence and poverty? And yet, and this is my point, teaching is not apolitical. It’s just not. And so to not engage with the actual story of this text would be antithetical to why we become teachers. So please read on for some cautions
How I might take on this challenge
Finally, I want to connect back to two things, Gossip Girl and my sample Pecha Kucha. We are no longer doing the Pecha Kucha project so, chances are, you didn’t watch my sample Pecha Kucha, which you will find in the transcript of this talk on our Monday Update page.
Essentially, what I argue in the Pecha Kucha is that one quality of the genre that is unique to the genre, of YA, is edification. Edification means, essentially, that you are somehow improved by your experience with something. I think great YA texts are great because they edify the reader in two ways: they encourage young readers to know things about their own world and experiences and the world and experiences of others and they help young readers improve as readers so they one day encourage readers to move on to other more complicated texts, namely we hope they will become life long readers.
So, as I pointed out in a number of google.doc book clubs, I pointed out that Gossip Girls was listed as a good read by the American Library Association.. Their argument was that in encouraged young people who were not readers to read.
I believe in the argument that any reading is good reading. One hundred percent. With my whole heart.
But I don’t believe that I should teach every book, because not every book edifies. And for young readers (not college age readers), for young readers, I see my job as a literacy advocate to build strong readers and thoughtful humans. Thus, I want to teach books like Little Women and Long Way Down and not Gossip Girl. Because, on both points, I don’t think GG offers us much. It’s luxury porn--watching rich people make crazy bad choices. And, it’s not exactly a challenging read--unless by challenging you mean trying to figure out where in New York some restaurant they mention actually is.
I started with Little Women and Gossip Girl so folks could see two things: 1) the legacy of Little Women in the genre of YA, how so many of the texts we read today follow the general outline of that novel; and 2) giving us a way to gauge the significance of a YA text, what makes it literature and not just pulp. From here on out, I hope you will see the texts we encounter as closer to LWD than to Gossip Girl on that vague spectrum.
So endeth this long update.
24 March 2020 Tuesday Update (this post has also been emailed to all of you)
Rather than one Monday update, I’m parsing out information over the next few days using a variety of formats. For this first update, I’m simply writing to you via email to re-introduce you to the course post extended spring break (and, of course this message is available on our class website under Monday Updates).
First and foremost, I hope you are all healthy and that those you love are healthy. And I hope you are taking good care--mentally, physically, and emotionally. There are so many reasons anxiety would be through the roof right now. I want you to know that I am thinking about that. I’m thinking about making sure that in my own interaction with you, that I don’t increase that anxiety and stress. It might be too much to ask to hope I could lessen it, but at least I should not be contributing to it. I honestly don’t even know what the right thing to say beyond this right now: I’m thinking about all you, hoping for the best outcome for you and yours, and trying to make our class and workload manageable.
So. . .
13 March 2020 Friday Update (this post has also been emailed to all of you)
As all of you now know, due to the desire to keep the spread of Covid 19 to manageable levels for the medical establishment, spring break has been extended through next week. I received word yesterday that this applies to all classes, including online classes. I will update our syllabus to reflect that today.
While this has not been confirmed, the administration has indicated that the faculty should be preparing to take all classes online starting the week after next. When all of you signed up for this online class, I am quite sure that none of you imaged that you would be taking all of your classes online. This presents new challenges to you and to your faculty. The cognitive load of this shift will be substantial, and I want you to know that I want to support all of you by taking this into account in our class, even though it was always going to be online.
I am not sure what this means at a this moment yet. I need to spend more time with the syllabus. But until I do know, I am PUSHING BACK THE Pecha Kucha ASSIGNMENT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
I don't want to sound all doomsday about everything. Most of you are not in an age group that will affect you, that is unless you are immunocompromised, but I hope you are all being sensible about your health. I read this very persuasive article in Scientific American about why I should be prepared and take precautions (I too am in a category of low risk). It's more about the community we live in. We help everyone when we slow the spread of the virus--the very old, the immunocompromised, those who will not seek health care for economic reasons. And we help those folks who are sick with the virus to get the care they need. So by staying healthy, we help those who are not.
I know this all feels totally nuts. Please be well. I'll do my best to support you during this time.
Teaching Discussion Round Up
Good Conversation on the discussion board about Long Way Down, can’t say enough about you genuinely engaging with your colleagues in our class (and I mean the ones who really engage and not the ones who sort of fake it--oh, I can totally tell). It was also a complicated discussion that needs parsing out.
Teaching the actual text of LWD.
Before I get into the complicated parts, let me hit a few other highlights. One thing that is true about Long Way Down is that there is a lot you can do with it in an ELA classroom in terms of teaching students how to read a literary text.
The class was split on how students would react to the fact that the novel is written in “verse.” I put that term in air quotes because it’s not like this is like reading The Canterbury Tales or anything. It’s definitely free-verse. Some folks thought students might struggle with it. But I agree with those of you who felt that students would be more than fine with it--after all, it was fast reading. Three hundred pages in like two hours? I actually think students would be excited and proud that they were reading a book of this length.
The fact that is it in verse presents some interesting writing opportunities in class:
- You could have students write a story--perhaps one of the many rules-based (Nicole Costa) or moral dilemma (Megan Shaughnessy) based prompts many of you came up with--and then write the story in “verse.” Follow up by asking them to reflect on what happened to their story once they moved from one genre to the next--what changes of language, form meaning happened. An excellent exercise in genre analysis.
- You could explore concrete poetry, sometimes called shape poetry, and then ask them to compose their own concrete poems (for samples click the link above).
- Connecting back to our work of a few weeks ago, Justin Carpender suggested pairing this text with Catcher in the Rye (smart, smart, smart). He was quick enough to see that the main characters are both 15. There is a lot you could do here with privilege (more on that in a minute). Colby Nilsen and Ethan Child and others I might be forgetting argued for (this week and previously) more diverse reading in the ELA classroom. Pairing LWD with a text taught over and over again (and, I would argue is probably even less accessible to students today than LWD) like Catcher would be an important step toward building an equitable, socially just classroom. All of you recognized that this text might present challenges to teaching, but you all also saw the value of teaching it. As we’ve said repeatedly: representation matters.
- Another possible text connection: I thought about pairing it with Huck Finn. Huck is faced with the moral dilemma of helping Jim at the end even though that was against “the rules.” There is also stuff you could do with dialect as both texts are written in dialect.
- I liked the idea some folks (like Gabbie Boutin) had about the role research could play--bringing in media that might help give some context to the story. Of course you need to be careful here. As Savannah Resendes pointed out, most of what many students know about the lives of black and brown people come from the limited version they see on TV and movies. You don’t want to bring in stuff that just reinforce stereotypes the students already have of “ghetto” life.
- Also, no one mentioned this in the discussion board (though at least one person mentioned it in the book club google.docs), but you could do stuff with the anagrams. What are anagrams and how is Will using them to express himself? And Why anagrams? And then, of course, I would have students have some fun anagraming how they feel at that moment--about class, about home, about this assignment, etc. Of course the conceit of the novel--8 chapters for 8 floors, each floor introduces us to an important “ghost” character. You could do something pretty cool with that format with students. This is still percolating for me, but that conceit suggests a possible writing assignment to me.
And you all realized this on some level. It would be possible to spend the equivalent of a whole unit on this novel and have students engage deeply and thoughtfully with the text, think about it thematically, think about it structurally, figuratively, and never once talk about race and privilege.
And wouldn’t that be more comfortable? To not have to carefully construct a class where you do not talk about race and privilege and violence and poverty? And yet, and this is my point, teaching is not apolitical. It’s just not. And so to not engage with the actual story of this text would be antithetical to why we become teachers. So please read on for some cautions
- There is gun violence and then there is gun violence. A number of folks talked about this novel as a story about “gun violence.” And I’m not going to argue, but I do want to be specific here. This isn’t the same kind of gun violence we are talking about when a deeply troubled (almost always white and almost always male) student with access to guns walks into a school and shoots it up. This is the particular kind of gun violence that is the scourge of many black and brown communities. It is as equally as desperate and important to talk about as the kind of gun violence responsible for the Parkland murders, but it is different, and we, as educators, must be responsible about it and be clear with our students and not conflate the issues.
- The one sentence nobody wanted to write was “this is a novel about race.” Let’s get to the heart of the matter:
- Will is black. Most of you seemed to know this, though it seemed to be a question for at least one reader.
- Everyone knew that race was the issue about teaching it in West Bridgewater (nice work Gabby Sleeper for looking up poverty statistics for WB)--one student suggested it would be easier to teach in a school where that was majority black or brown. When, in fact, we should consider that it would be just as complicated, perhaps even more difficult where students have actually experienced these things. And we should all also be considering what it would mean to be a white teacher in a majority white classroom or a white teacher in a majority black classroom.
- We have a very singular idea of what teaching diversity means. I’m not saying you, I’m saying us, and I’m saying most institutions, including BSU. Diversity too often means visible diversity: i.e. black and brown students are diversity; white students need diversity. But we all know that’s not how it should work.
- Be cautious about needing students to “relate” to a book--though we are being naive if we don’t realize that our students know about the violence in this world. They can’t format in MSWord but they know a lot more than we think--a lot more than their parents think (more on that in a minute too).
How I might take on this challenge
- Systemic racism is a thing, and it is a part of the education system, and it’s persistence is what makes it so difficult to talk about race and racism in the classroom. In a class like the one we were discussing for this text, I think we could and should have a discussion about privilege. It has to be handled delicately because students will push back at the idea that they might follow the rules Will feels determined to follow if they too found themselves in the same position--most of us want to believe we would behave better in dire situations. We wouldn’t get shot by a cop. We wouldn’t sell drugs. We wouldn’t drop out of school. We wouldn’t revenge our brother's death.
- Talking about privilege directly: I’ve used a quiz similar to this buzzfeed quiz in classes when I wanted to talk about privilege and wanted to ground it in actual information and not just a random and potentially alienating conversation (take it--it can feel pretty rough). And then I would invite a guided conversation, perhaps using the fishbowl exercise to guarantee some deep listening). I would do this before the students read the book.
- Possibilities for Media. Folks talked about bringing in media to help students think about what it would be like to experience Will’s life. I think this could be useful, but also fraught. There is a ton of stereotypes in media of black and brown life. Here are a few sources I’ve used in the past about students in other classrooms: From This American Life, a two part podcast on the lives of high school students in Chicago, Harper High School Part I and Part II. Very recently, I listened to this powerful story on Snap Judgement, a radio program also on NPR, this story, “Senior Year Mixtape,” that followed the lives of three teenagers in their final year of high school in California.
- Several students talked about the potential pushback of parents. Yes. That’s absolutely a possibility, particularly in this cultural moment and particularly, no judgement just truth, in West Bridgewater. I would also potentially expect pushback from fellow teachers in your department--for various reasons. They might object to the “controversial” nature of the text. And I’ll be honest, in your earliest years of teaching, you will have to be careful and strategic to get books like this into the curriculum. But it’s your job to keep pushing and keep trying and not just give in to teaching To Kill a Mockingbird as “the diversity book” for the millionth time.
Finally, I want to connect back to two things, Gossip Girl and my sample Pecha Kucha. We are no longer doing the Pecha Kucha project so, chances are, you didn’t watch my sample Pecha Kucha, which you will find in the transcript of this talk on our Monday Update page.
Essentially, what I argue in the Pecha Kucha is that one quality of the genre that is unique to the genre, of YA, is edification. Edification means, essentially, that you are somehow improved by your experience with something. I think great YA texts are great because they edify the reader in two ways: they encourage young readers to know things about their own world and experiences and the world and experiences of others and they help young readers improve as readers so they one day encourage readers to move on to other more complicated texts, namely we hope they will become life long readers.
So, as I pointed out in a number of google.doc book clubs, I pointed out that Gossip Girls was listed as a good read by the American Library Association.. Their argument was that in encouraged young people who were not readers to read.
I believe in the argument that any reading is good reading. One hundred percent. With my whole heart.
But I don’t believe that I should teach every book, because not every book edifies. And for young readers (not college age readers), for young readers, I see my job as a literacy advocate to build strong readers and thoughtful humans. Thus, I want to teach books like Little Women and Long Way Down and not Gossip Girl. Because, on both points, I don’t think GG offers us much. It’s luxury porn--watching rich people make crazy bad choices. And, it’s not exactly a challenging read--unless by challenging you mean trying to figure out where in New York some restaurant they mention actually is.
I started with Little Women and Gossip Girl so folks could see two things: 1) the legacy of Little Women in the genre of YA, how so many of the texts we read today follow the general outline of that novel; and 2) giving us a way to gauge the significance of a YA text, what makes it literature and not just pulp. From here on out, I hope you will see the texts we encounter as closer to LWD than to Gossip Girl on that vague spectrum.
So endeth this long update.
24 March 2020 Tuesday Update (this post has also been emailed to all of you)
Rather than one Monday update, I’m parsing out information over the next few days using a variety of formats. For this first update, I’m simply writing to you via email to re-introduce you to the course post extended spring break (and, of course this message is available on our class website under Monday Updates).
First and foremost, I hope you are all healthy and that those you love are healthy. And I hope you are taking good care--mentally, physically, and emotionally. There are so many reasons anxiety would be through the roof right now. I want you to know that I am thinking about that. I’m thinking about making sure that in my own interaction with you, that I don’t increase that anxiety and stress. It might be too much to ask to hope I could lessen it, but at least I should not be contributing to it. I honestly don’t even know what the right thing to say beyond this right now: I’m thinking about all you, hoping for the best outcome for you and yours, and trying to make our class and workload manageable.
So. . .
- I’ve made the decision to entirely cut the Pecha Kucha assignment. I went back and forth on this repeatedly, but, in the end, what I thought about was that none of you signed up for five online classes. And now you are suddenly in a position to negotiate five classes--and, also, I’m not forgetting, five faculty who have potentially never taught online before. I’ve been working with faculty the past week, and they are as worried about this move to all online even more than you are--trust me. So I decided there are other ways for me to deliver the content without asking you to engage with yet more technology.
- The Pecha Kucha was a significant part of your grade and, as such, I needed to reallocate how you earned your total grade. If you look at the revised policies page, you will see how I’ve done that. I’ve increased the values for the assignments you’ve completed the most of already because the majority of you are earning an A for that work already.
- Discussion Board and Reading Journal/Book Club combined are now worth 50% of your grade.
- Additionally, I increased the percentage that your successful Flash Memoir by 5%.
- I made an upcoming assignment, the Write Your Own YA a bigger assignment and, thus, a larger portion of your grade.
- Finally I increased the percentage your Final Project counts towards your grade by 5%.
- I’ve revised and completed the syllabus for the rest of the semester. Nothing has substantially changed in terms of what you need to read and when you need to have it read.
- This week’s discussion board is posted and ready for your input. And you know by now to just dig into your book club with your reading journals.
- If you are not already aware, I am caught up and reading and responding to your flash memoir, all of your book club/ reading journals, and the Teaching Discussions. More information will follow regarding comments that I want to make about your work on A Long Way Down.
- I intended to email you midterm grade letters after we completed the Pecha Kucha. Since that is no longer a part of the class, you will all start receiving midterm letters. Once you do, I’m asking for a specific response from you. The questions I want you to answer are identified in the syllabus and will also be included in the email you will get over the next two weeks.
13 March 2020 Friday Update (this post has also been emailed to all of you)
As all of you now know, due to the desire to keep the spread of Covid 19 to manageable levels for the medical establishment, spring break has been extended through next week. I received word yesterday that this applies to all classes, including online classes. I will update our syllabus to reflect that today.
While this has not been confirmed, the administration has indicated that the faculty should be preparing to take all classes online starting the week after next. When all of you signed up for this online class, I am quite sure that none of you imaged that you would be taking all of your classes online. This presents new challenges to you and to your faculty. The cognitive load of this shift will be substantial, and I want you to know that I want to support all of you by taking this into account in our class, even though it was always going to be online.
I am not sure what this means at a this moment yet. I need to spend more time with the syllabus. But until I do know, I am PUSHING BACK THE Pecha Kucha ASSIGNMENT UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
I don't want to sound all doomsday about everything. Most of you are not in an age group that will affect you, that is unless you are immunocompromised, but I hope you are all being sensible about your health. I read this very persuasive article in Scientific American about why I should be prepared and take precautions (I too am in a category of low risk). It's more about the community we live in. We help everyone when we slow the spread of the virus--the very old, the immunocompromised, those who will not seek health care for economic reasons. And we help those folks who are sick with the virus to get the care they need. So by staying healthy, we help those who are not.
I know this all feels totally nuts. Please be well. I'll do my best to support you during this time.
24 February 2020 Monday Update
Hello Everyone--
What an energetic and interesting Teaching Discussion this week. What I particularly valued about this week’s post is that folks really seemed to be having a conversation with each other--folks made note of good ideas, challenged them occasionally, returned to themes that each other brought up. That was great. A general word of evaluation: Do more of that each week. But sincerely. Not in the fake, on-line class way that it’s easy to fall in to. So good work.
Here is a summary of what I saw going on this week in the teaching discussion:
1. I think everyone or almost everyone opened their post with some commentary on the role technology plays in our lives, particularly the lives of our students. Some folks were pretty enthusiastic about the use of tech in the classroom (Hannah Brodeur, Gabby Sleeper, Jailyn Tavares). Others, including Natasha Cardin and Lauren Melchionda were less sure of its usefulness. As Olivia Leonard said, I’ve got a love/hate relationship with technology in the classroom, particularly with my first year students who are irresponsible users when they enter our classroom. Natasha, Shauna Ridley, Lauren, and Molly Drain had a nice back-and-forth about the potential of technology and the risks. Shauna and Megan Shaughnessy made a really important point: we’ve got to teach our students how to use technology in a classroom and in our lives. Amen to that. I have a lot of conversations with colleagues who talk about students as digital natives, but, in truth, a lot of my students really don’t know how to use technology at all beyond being able to use very specific social media apps. So using technology to teach technology is pretty important.
And I would add that it’s another example of how we ask our students to be accountable for their learning in the classroom--as with anything, it’s not just enough to assign something. We need to teach students how to engage with technology; we need to create assessments and evaluations that encourage their active engagement with the technology in responsible ways--and not solely for entertainment, which was one of my big points last week.
Reading about the good and the bad of technology made me think about the online classroom and this experience. I understand the value of online experiences, though it’s risky and difficult to do well I’m really realizing.
2. Another common theme across postings was the work many of you did looking at these texts as “coming of age” stories and thinking about how they might work with other like stories. I loved Justin Carpender’s idea to connect these stories to Huck Finn. Wow. Yes. That would really help students understand how to read that novel in a way that connects the story to them and gets past the time period, the dialects, etc, that sometimes makes students hate ole Huck. Justin’s post was a really nice example of some of what we talked about last week--helping to make canonical texts accessible to young readers.
And kudos--big, big kudos, seriously--to all of you who were so generous with Gossip Girl. Shauna, Gabrielle Boutin, Colby Nilsen (sorry Colby for consistently spelling your name wrong each week so far), Savannah Resendes reminded me that it is, at its heart, a story about young adults figuring out who they are and how they fit in--even if they are mean, rich, horror shows of human beings.
Jess Rinker surprised all of us, I think, by connecting the Moth stories to the Odyssey. Interesting because, of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey were the original Moth story hours, right? These were oral histories told and retold in their day. And I liked the idea Megan Shaughnessy had of using American Born Chinese, a graphic novel. Other folks had some interesting ideas about text connections. Please don’t feel like if I didn’t list yours specifically that it was a bad choice. These just stood out to me.
3. Clearly the theme of the week was “Coming of Age.” And that makes a lot of sense. As we’ve talked about, the coming of age story, the bildungsroman is central to the genre of Young Adult in the literary sense. And it is also central to the genre as a text for young readers in and out of the classroom. And this is something you talked about more this week than you have in the past.
As many of you noted, a reading experience in 9th grade is about learning to read literature, for sure, but it is also about learning about yourself and your life. Many of you designed assignments that encouraged students to think and write about themselves in meaningful ways and ways connected to the text. Colby, again, did this. Maddie B. wrote a powerful line: “the most important aspect within this unit and these assignments [is] that students will be going through their own coming of age stories during their 9th grade experience.” Molly D. called it “understanding their own story.” Megan S. pointed out that there is real value in knowing our students better--and I can attest to that being most definitely true. Lauren M. wrote “you have to keep in mind larger lessons that they can take away as well, not just educationally.”
A great assignment encourages students to know themselves and their world as well the content of a course. Language Arts classrooms are primed for this work.
4. But is is also a classroom where they have to learn things about literature too. About how to read literature and how to write about literature and about how to write period. And they have to learn how to be an all around competent student and human--by being able to speak, thoughtfully, about a subject, and to listen to others, thoughtfully when they talk. And many of you did a nice job of talking about how this unit was a nice opportunity to build those important skills.
Ethan Child really set the tone here by sketching out an assignment that asked students to read, to write, to talk, to listen. Jess R. pointed out research that shows the important role speaking and listening can play in the literacy classroom. And there are actually frameworks about speaking and listening that you can check out. I also appreciated that she connected her strategies class with our class. Love when that can happen.
Several of you had the idea of asking students to record their stories and to have a class listening event. There is a great deal of research that says that creating audiences for students other than the teacher is a high impact practice that increases a students engagement and success in a project. I was quite interested in how Ethan used the idea of prosody, which I typically think of as connected to poetry (as did Nicole Costa), but I love the idea of having students annotate their stories to reflect things like tone and pacing. I actually do an assignment with my first year students where they have to record a script, and I fully intend to ask them to do this. I will give Ethan the credit--and my students will then have him to blame.
A CAUTION: It can be easy for the personal to overtake the educational in a situation like this. And it’s important as a teacher to know to balance the two. I was impressed with the rigor of your assignments as well as the humanity of them. Those are the best classroom experiences.
5. Finally, I noticed how many of you were very sensitive to the idea that your students might not be comfortable sharing work out loud and gave students options for completing the project. This echoes some of what I noticed last week in your posts--your care for your future student’s well-being.
One way we do that is by designing universally accessible materials. One thing about using things like podcasts in a class is that not all students find listening all that easy--a lot of my first year students say their minds wander, and, obviously, students who are hearing-impaired need an accomodation. So providing a transcript with the material is important. These are lessons I’ve learned slowly over the years.
A FEW NOTES ABOUT WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK
Pecha Kucha Assignment Information
We are approaching the midterm of the semester and spring break. I will be sending out more detailed information about the pecha kucha assignment this week and will be updating that assignment page to reflect the requirements for this class. I’ll make sure to let you know when that’s updated. Additionally, I will be making available the articles you will need to use to produce your pecha kucha presentation. That information will appear both on the syllabus page for our class as well as on the individual book club google.docs. I know this seems confusing. I think it will be clearer once I update that material.
Reading Journal/Book Club: Back at it.
Our novel this week, Long Way Down, has been on a lot of best of lists. You may have noticed that it is written entirely in verse. It will not take you as long as you think it will to read it. When you are ready, feel free to post to your Reading Journal/Book Club. There is no specific prompt this week. Treat this text as you would any piece of recent fiction and talk about thematically, stylistically, etc.
This Week’s Teaching Discussion
Similarly, there is not “gimmick” to this week’s teaching discussion. I’ve given you a class. And you have the text and you have free range to talk about how you would go about teaching it. I ask that you consider both what would be the value of including such a text as well as what would be a struggle. More details on who you are teaching this to is available on the discussion board.
Feedback on Flash Memoirs
So looking forward to reading/listening to these and sharing them with all of you. I will be reading and responding to five memoirs per day, mostly in the order I received them. Everyone should have feedback by Saturday afternoon. That will come in email form.
Other things I saved to share with all of you
Interesting article in the Times this week about about a YA book-length nonfiction piece about Roe v Wade: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/books/review/jane-against-the-world-karen-blumenthal.html
I’m not writing from any political position, but rather to connect back to what many of you were saying this week: that the role of YA literature is not just to teach students about metaphors and character development; it is one of the ways young folks experience the world in all of its complexity. The novel we are reading this week, like the book discussed in the Times article deals with controversial topics. No classroom is impartial. Teaching is a political act no matter how much you don’t want it to be. It’s worth thinking about before you get into the classroom.
Hello Everyone--
What an energetic and interesting Teaching Discussion this week. What I particularly valued about this week’s post is that folks really seemed to be having a conversation with each other--folks made note of good ideas, challenged them occasionally, returned to themes that each other brought up. That was great. A general word of evaluation: Do more of that each week. But sincerely. Not in the fake, on-line class way that it’s easy to fall in to. So good work.
Here is a summary of what I saw going on this week in the teaching discussion:
1. I think everyone or almost everyone opened their post with some commentary on the role technology plays in our lives, particularly the lives of our students. Some folks were pretty enthusiastic about the use of tech in the classroom (Hannah Brodeur, Gabby Sleeper, Jailyn Tavares). Others, including Natasha Cardin and Lauren Melchionda were less sure of its usefulness. As Olivia Leonard said, I’ve got a love/hate relationship with technology in the classroom, particularly with my first year students who are irresponsible users when they enter our classroom. Natasha, Shauna Ridley, Lauren, and Molly Drain had a nice back-and-forth about the potential of technology and the risks. Shauna and Megan Shaughnessy made a really important point: we’ve got to teach our students how to use technology in a classroom and in our lives. Amen to that. I have a lot of conversations with colleagues who talk about students as digital natives, but, in truth, a lot of my students really don’t know how to use technology at all beyond being able to use very specific social media apps. So using technology to teach technology is pretty important.
And I would add that it’s another example of how we ask our students to be accountable for their learning in the classroom--as with anything, it’s not just enough to assign something. We need to teach students how to engage with technology; we need to create assessments and evaluations that encourage their active engagement with the technology in responsible ways--and not solely for entertainment, which was one of my big points last week.
Reading about the good and the bad of technology made me think about the online classroom and this experience. I understand the value of online experiences, though it’s risky and difficult to do well I’m really realizing.
2. Another common theme across postings was the work many of you did looking at these texts as “coming of age” stories and thinking about how they might work with other like stories. I loved Justin Carpender’s idea to connect these stories to Huck Finn. Wow. Yes. That would really help students understand how to read that novel in a way that connects the story to them and gets past the time period, the dialects, etc, that sometimes makes students hate ole Huck. Justin’s post was a really nice example of some of what we talked about last week--helping to make canonical texts accessible to young readers.
And kudos--big, big kudos, seriously--to all of you who were so generous with Gossip Girl. Shauna, Gabrielle Boutin, Colby Nilsen (sorry Colby for consistently spelling your name wrong each week so far), Savannah Resendes reminded me that it is, at its heart, a story about young adults figuring out who they are and how they fit in--even if they are mean, rich, horror shows of human beings.
Jess Rinker surprised all of us, I think, by connecting the Moth stories to the Odyssey. Interesting because, of course, the Iliad and the Odyssey were the original Moth story hours, right? These were oral histories told and retold in their day. And I liked the idea Megan Shaughnessy had of using American Born Chinese, a graphic novel. Other folks had some interesting ideas about text connections. Please don’t feel like if I didn’t list yours specifically that it was a bad choice. These just stood out to me.
3. Clearly the theme of the week was “Coming of Age.” And that makes a lot of sense. As we’ve talked about, the coming of age story, the bildungsroman is central to the genre of Young Adult in the literary sense. And it is also central to the genre as a text for young readers in and out of the classroom. And this is something you talked about more this week than you have in the past.
As many of you noted, a reading experience in 9th grade is about learning to read literature, for sure, but it is also about learning about yourself and your life. Many of you designed assignments that encouraged students to think and write about themselves in meaningful ways and ways connected to the text. Colby, again, did this. Maddie B. wrote a powerful line: “the most important aspect within this unit and these assignments [is] that students will be going through their own coming of age stories during their 9th grade experience.” Molly D. called it “understanding their own story.” Megan S. pointed out that there is real value in knowing our students better--and I can attest to that being most definitely true. Lauren M. wrote “you have to keep in mind larger lessons that they can take away as well, not just educationally.”
A great assignment encourages students to know themselves and their world as well the content of a course. Language Arts classrooms are primed for this work.
4. But is is also a classroom where they have to learn things about literature too. About how to read literature and how to write about literature and about how to write period. And they have to learn how to be an all around competent student and human--by being able to speak, thoughtfully, about a subject, and to listen to others, thoughtfully when they talk. And many of you did a nice job of talking about how this unit was a nice opportunity to build those important skills.
Ethan Child really set the tone here by sketching out an assignment that asked students to read, to write, to talk, to listen. Jess R. pointed out research that shows the important role speaking and listening can play in the literacy classroom. And there are actually frameworks about speaking and listening that you can check out. I also appreciated that she connected her strategies class with our class. Love when that can happen.
Several of you had the idea of asking students to record their stories and to have a class listening event. There is a great deal of research that says that creating audiences for students other than the teacher is a high impact practice that increases a students engagement and success in a project. I was quite interested in how Ethan used the idea of prosody, which I typically think of as connected to poetry (as did Nicole Costa), but I love the idea of having students annotate their stories to reflect things like tone and pacing. I actually do an assignment with my first year students where they have to record a script, and I fully intend to ask them to do this. I will give Ethan the credit--and my students will then have him to blame.
A CAUTION: It can be easy for the personal to overtake the educational in a situation like this. And it’s important as a teacher to know to balance the two. I was impressed with the rigor of your assignments as well as the humanity of them. Those are the best classroom experiences.
5. Finally, I noticed how many of you were very sensitive to the idea that your students might not be comfortable sharing work out loud and gave students options for completing the project. This echoes some of what I noticed last week in your posts--your care for your future student’s well-being.
One way we do that is by designing universally accessible materials. One thing about using things like podcasts in a class is that not all students find listening all that easy--a lot of my first year students say their minds wander, and, obviously, students who are hearing-impaired need an accomodation. So providing a transcript with the material is important. These are lessons I’ve learned slowly over the years.
A FEW NOTES ABOUT WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR THIS WEEK
Pecha Kucha Assignment Information
We are approaching the midterm of the semester and spring break. I will be sending out more detailed information about the pecha kucha assignment this week and will be updating that assignment page to reflect the requirements for this class. I’ll make sure to let you know when that’s updated. Additionally, I will be making available the articles you will need to use to produce your pecha kucha presentation. That information will appear both on the syllabus page for our class as well as on the individual book club google.docs. I know this seems confusing. I think it will be clearer once I update that material.
Reading Journal/Book Club: Back at it.
Our novel this week, Long Way Down, has been on a lot of best of lists. You may have noticed that it is written entirely in verse. It will not take you as long as you think it will to read it. When you are ready, feel free to post to your Reading Journal/Book Club. There is no specific prompt this week. Treat this text as you would any piece of recent fiction and talk about thematically, stylistically, etc.
This Week’s Teaching Discussion
Similarly, there is not “gimmick” to this week’s teaching discussion. I’ve given you a class. And you have the text and you have free range to talk about how you would go about teaching it. I ask that you consider both what would be the value of including such a text as well as what would be a struggle. More details on who you are teaching this to is available on the discussion board.
Feedback on Flash Memoirs
So looking forward to reading/listening to these and sharing them with all of you. I will be reading and responding to five memoirs per day, mostly in the order I received them. Everyone should have feedback by Saturday afternoon. That will come in email form.
Other things I saved to share with all of you
Interesting article in the Times this week about about a YA book-length nonfiction piece about Roe v Wade: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/20/books/review/jane-against-the-world-karen-blumenthal.html
I’m not writing from any political position, but rather to connect back to what many of you were saying this week: that the role of YA literature is not just to teach students about metaphors and character development; it is one of the ways young folks experience the world in all of its complexity. The novel we are reading this week, like the book discussed in the Times article deals with controversial topics. No classroom is impartial. Teaching is a political act no matter how much you don’t want it to be. It’s worth thinking about before you get into the classroom.
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This is a snapshot of my nephew’s first grade homework assignments. I wanted to share it with you because of how thoughtful I think it is. Students have to complete three adjacent squares either across or down. Extra squares will earn extra tickets that they can cash in for things like markers and erasers. I do homework with Luke via Facebook on the weekends. What I value about this format is how it allows for choice, but none of the assignments are easier than any other. Choice can often lead to a dumbing down of assignments, and a good teacher must be careful that way. And I like that they have the week to complete the assignments. That gives students (and parents who help) a lot freedom to work with, which, in turn teaches responsibility and independent work habits. I know a lot of you want to work in elementary classrooms and this class is really geared toward secondary.
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18 February 2020 (Late) Monday Update
Hello to you all--
Sorry for the delay. I shouldn’t have waited until everyone posted. I had another deadline and then I got super into this book I’m reading. It’s called The Flight Portfolio. I can’t put it down. You get any free time over the summer, read it. It will make you feel like there is still good in the world.
Anyway. . .
THIS WEEK’S TEACHING DISCUSSION BOARD
I’m sending this short update to let you know that the Teaching Discussion board is posted and available to you (as is a Q&A board for this week). There is detailed information about the prompt on the actual discussion board. It’s wide-ranging: there I talk about a broader idea about literacy than is implied by literature by way of talking about this week’s texts. I also sketch out an assignment I would do. So I hope you will read the entirety of the prompt. But, in a nutshell (taken directly from the discussion board):
The challenge this week gives you two ends of a triangle: you’ve got a class (I’m going back to our 9th grade BR college prep class—not so old that middle school is a distant memory, not so smart that they will be so over it, not so young that we have to pretend nobody has sex or does drugs); you’ve got your media—any and all of the recordings accessible via the syllabus. How might you use this media and what texts would you pair with them—that’s the last leg of the magic triangle?
NO READING JOURNAL/BOOK CLUB THIS WEEK
You might have noticed that there is no book club journal posts due this week. That’s becaue the final version of your flash mentor text memoir: YA edition is due this coming Sunday. You are only obligated to send me, via email, your flash memoir as a .docx or .pdf AND, don’t forget, the following taken from the assignment page directly: Include an image either of the cover of the book, you reading the book, or some other image that resonates with you and will evoke the right sentiment with a viewer. I will post this image with your flash memoir to our class website.
Should you want to earn “extra credit” You can submit your memoir as a recording. Literally record it on your phone and email it to me as a file. I still need the image. Doing the extra credit will move your grade up by a half letter grade.
Hello to you all--
Sorry for the delay. I shouldn’t have waited until everyone posted. I had another deadline and then I got super into this book I’m reading. It’s called The Flight Portfolio. I can’t put it down. You get any free time over the summer, read it. It will make you feel like there is still good in the world.
Anyway. . .
THIS WEEK’S TEACHING DISCUSSION BOARD
I’m sending this short update to let you know that the Teaching Discussion board is posted and available to you (as is a Q&A board for this week). There is detailed information about the prompt on the actual discussion board. It’s wide-ranging: there I talk about a broader idea about literacy than is implied by literature by way of talking about this week’s texts. I also sketch out an assignment I would do. So I hope you will read the entirety of the prompt. But, in a nutshell (taken directly from the discussion board):
The challenge this week gives you two ends of a triangle: you’ve got a class (I’m going back to our 9th grade BR college prep class—not so old that middle school is a distant memory, not so smart that they will be so over it, not so young that we have to pretend nobody has sex or does drugs); you’ve got your media—any and all of the recordings accessible via the syllabus. How might you use this media and what texts would you pair with them—that’s the last leg of the magic triangle?
NO READING JOURNAL/BOOK CLUB THIS WEEK
You might have noticed that there is no book club journal posts due this week. That’s becaue the final version of your flash mentor text memoir: YA edition is due this coming Sunday. You are only obligated to send me, via email, your flash memoir as a .docx or .pdf AND, don’t forget, the following taken from the assignment page directly: Include an image either of the cover of the book, you reading the book, or some other image that resonates with you and will evoke the right sentiment with a viewer. I will post this image with your flash memoir to our class website.
Should you want to earn “extra credit” You can submit your memoir as a recording. Literally record it on your phone and email it to me as a file. I still need the image. Doing the extra credit will move your grade up by a half letter grade.
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UPDATE PART TWO: Teaching Discussion Comments
I read what you all had to say about what texts you might use to help students approach Romeo and Juliet with great interest. Some of what I have to say is about the texts you chose and why--and how folks read and think about Romeo and Juliet. But a lot of what I have to say is about actually teaching in a language arts classroom--about teaching the skills of literacy (a point I spend a lot of time on). 1. Savannah Resendes commented on how she wasn’t sure that students would read at all. And she is, of course, right, that students will not read unless they feel like they will be held accountable for that reading (that’s true in college classrooms as well--you totally know that). |
So you can’t leave that to chance. Becky Tynan, Hannah Brodeur, and Olivia Leonard had some concrete ideas about what to actually do in the class to keep students accountable. Gabbie Boutin talked about ways to help students get the “why” part of reading a text matters. I liked seeing that.
- I had a similar reaction to a comment that Jailyn Tavares and Maddie Butkus made about the potential for diverse viewpoints about the reading. Here again, students will not develop nor will they share diverse viewpoints unless class is structured in a way that requires it of them and makes it possible for them to share it safely. Jess Rinker listed a series of very good questions meant to elicit the kinds of diverse viewpoints that could lead to a strong discussion. And I appreciated what Hannah Brodeur had to say about the use of small groups in order to create smaller, more intimate space for students to share their thinking.
- Language and stories that are “triggering” for students is sometimes a touchy subject--you will find instructors who resist thinking about the trauma a text might inflict on a student. I myself am of two minds: I know that by reading about the experience of trauma I’ve been better able to deal with events in my own life, to understand them better, and to move away from the trauma. But I recognize that it’s important to prepare our students for a potentially difficult reading experience. And reading your responses made me think quite a bit about how mental disorders are rampant among teenagers and that teen suicide is at an all time high--the leading cause of death among young people behind accidents.
I know that Romeo and Juliet ends in suicide, but I must admit that I don’t think about it quite as much as you all seemed to do. Jess Rinker talked about taking the time to discuss mental health and self-care during the lesson. Perhaps that is the age we are living in now. Justin Carpender talked about his concern the one kid who was openly gay in the class and teaching texts where sexuality is central to the discussion. I share his concern about making this one student the voice of entire group of people--the burden that places on that student and on this underrepresented population. Justin recognized, as I did, the particularly apt way Ethan Child identified one valuable aspect of teaching Romeo & Juliet: “the validity of young people’s angst.” In that sense, R&J is YA literature. - I was interested in seeing what themes folks focused in on in Romeo & Juliet. “Young Love” and “Forbidden Love” seemed to be the main focus, less so the role of family in controlling the lives of these two young people (another way R & J feels like YA lit). But folks did highlight how outside forces control these two folks and made interesting parallels to other books--parallels I must admit I was pretty skeptical of and remain so to some extent, but I’m going with it. While I don’t buy Hunger Games as a love story, per say, I do see the point Maddie Butkus made about the controlling government forcing the main characters into specific and difficult choices. Ethan Child talked about how the family is forcing Juliet to marry someone to promote their own wealth and standing. Many, many (many) folks looked at The Fault in our Stars. Here again, I don’t see a direct parallel, but young, complicated love I get--this all encompassing, never come up for air, passionate, blinding love. And the idea that they are fighting this force that is bigger than their love, that I see too.
Justin Carpender looked at the effects of fate versus free will. I think that’s very relevant to a lot of YA literature as it is in R&J. - I didn’t know all of the text choices that folks picked, but I was really interested in Olivia Leonard’s American Royals, Jess Rinker and Gabby Boutin both talked about a book called Beastly. Another really interesting choice because of this focus on the role of hate in the play and deep prejudice. Let’s not forget our Crowley--it’s a play about hate, not love. I was also intrigued at the possibilities of using a novel that is a revisioning of an old fairy tale. I think an update of R&J, much like last week’s assignment with Little Women, could be a great source of classroom energy. Megan Shaughnessy’s idea of using If Beale Street Could Talk is very interesting. I’m not sure students would find Baldwin all that much easier than Shakespeare, but the element of tragedy--different from melodrama, which, as most of you pointed out, is where the texts you all chose firmly lie--would be easier to get at. And we should all read Baldwin more.
- A few folks wrote about genre--how drama is different from novels, and how that might be an important point to make. I could see revisioning R&J as a novel and the novel as a play in a class. Nicole Costa had an idea about comparing the genre differences in her post.
I know I’ll get pushback on this, and I welcome it. But one of my classic lines about the classroom is this: don’t confuse school with six flags. I know everyone is like “let’s make the classroom fun.” Yeah. Great. But school is work. There’s no getting around that. And no amount of school fun is actually fun. You know that when you are watching a movie in class and not asked to do anything with it it’s a stall by the teacher. I am a huge proponent of making every second in a class count. I design assignments for the ADD student in the ADD classroom. You should too. Treat the YA like the literature it is--whether it’s Gossip Girl (which I did not like) or Little Women or Romeo & Juliet. All the research points to this one fact: students become better readers by doing a lot of reading and a lot of writing. So everything in the classroom should be at part of that.
One last point and it is about representation. Colby Nilson made an impassioned plea for better representation. Hear, hear. Check out the rest of the semester on our reading list: with the exception of the graphic novel, all of our authors are from under-repesented populations. All of the novels are written by black or brown writers, including several women. Our poetry comes from, as you will see, a diverse collection. It is possible to create a reading list for a class that upends our colonized mindset--more than possible.
10 February 2020 Fourth Monday Update
Hello Everyone, despite my best efforts, this powerpoint runs 11 minutes long. Please note: this week the transcript is shorter than the Powerpoint. In the Powerpoint, I've included images and commentary on Alcott Bronson (LMA's father) and on the various film adaptations as a way to demonstrate the cultural touchstone that Little Women is. I hope you'll take some time to read some of that detail.
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3 February 2020 Third Monday Update
Hello Everyone, rather than write out this week's Monday update, I've recorded a powerpoint presentation. You can download the file and watch/listen at your convenience. It will take you just over 11 minutes to listen to the entire thing (I tried for 8 but I just couldn't do it).
| monday.update.3feb2020.pptx |
If you want a "transcript" of the powerpoint, that is included here as a .pdf. The transcript is longer than the powerpoint, but if I had recorded it verbatim, it would have been more like a 16 minute powerpoint.
| hi_everyone_and_welcome_to_the_third_monday_update.pdf |
27 January 2020 Second Monday Update
Hello Everyone--
Thanks to everyone who took care of sending me their bio and pic, and to all who read and asked questions about the policies and syllabi. I’ve responded to everyone still in the class. There were some duplicate questions (mostly about grades—more on that below) and some questions were actually answerable in the policies for the class.
NOTE: who is in our class is still a bit in flux. Drop/add ends Wednesday and until then there might be some shifting around of things. This email includes those folks currently enrolled in our class. If for some reason you need to send an email to the entire class, use this email to respond to. The previous emails had students who have dropped and missed some who have added.
THIS WEEK’S WORK
You will notice that this link cannot be seen as a link on our website. I would like your permission before I make it public. If you object for any reason to this being publicly accessible, just say that in your email. There is no need for explanation. If you are fine with this being public (well, public in the sense that it’s not hidden; I know it’s hard to believe, but not all that many people are visiting my site on a regular basis) there is no need to say anything.
About how grades work in this class
The overwhelming focus of questions was about how you would find out your grades. I’m going to do a very meta thing here and explain to you something about evaluation and pedagogy as a way to explain how and why I do things this way.
One thing I’ve learned is that students will be as passive about how they earn their grade as you let them be. They will be willfully clueless about it as a defense mechanism against a bad grade. Now, you are all accomplished English folks and most of you are also Education folks who want to be teachers, so I’m not saying you fit this profile, but you better believe you will enter classrooms where this is the case.
That’s one reason I abandoned Blackboard. Students just wait to see their grade appear and be calculated for them.
Here’s how you’ll know what your grade is:
In the policies for our class under “evaluation” I lay out how I will comment on your material and what percentage of your grade is earned for each assignment. Pay attention to that—you’ll see that 40% of your grade is based on timely posts to your book club or teaching discussion board, for instance.
For each assignment, there is a section that says some version of how I will grade this assignment or how you will earn your grade.” I reiterate how much of your final grade the assignment is worth. And then I tell you what you have to earn the standard B grade. The B grade is always earned by completing a list of tasks. I also explain how you earn an A or a C. The A is more subjective and the C means you have not completed all of the requirements for the B grade.
So once you’ve turned in an assignment, if you’ve done everything you need to do, you’ll know you have at least a B and if you didn’t know you know you have not. And you’ll know how much it counts for in your total grade.
Most students are going to earn an A for both book club/reading journal and teaching discussion posts (informal work): For informal work (book club/reading journal & teaching discussion): Most students earn an “A” for acceptable as long as it’s clear you read and are trying to meet the requirements of the post. If you don’t get an acceptable grade you can revise it as many times as you need to to get an “A.” However, in all honesty, most students don’t have to revise. Most students will earn an “A.”
There is also a very forgiving revision policy: As long as you’ve made some effort to post anything by the deadline, even if you don’t have the reading all done, or just don’t have it in you that week to come up with something smart to say, you can always revise. This makes space for tough weeks and bad days. That means there is literally no reason you can’t earn an “A” for roughly 40% of your final grade in this class—without all that much effort.
Additionally, built in to the system, you can miss at least one posting all together for each assignment, and there are a number of opportunities (like this past week) to turn something in that I’m going to count as an “A” even though it’s not really a reading journal (the scavenger hunt, the post about the syllabus).
If you get a “U,” I’ll make sure you know, but only you. It won’t be some big public thing (what sort of ogre do you imagine me to be?)
For formal work: you’ll know if you have at least a B if you read the assignment. The only question will be if you earned an A or not. I will give you emailed feedback for those assignments that will tell you if you earned the A or not and why.
This kind of grading, as I say in my policies, is called contract grading and spec grading. And they are ways to mitigate the effects of things like race, class, and gender bias in the classroom. If you want to read more about it, because you are going to be teachers in classrooms one day, I refer you to this text: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The complete text is free and available online.
I hope this allays some fears about grades and grading and how you’ll know how you are doing. I will work you hard this semester, but I’m a very easy grader. If you do what you need to do, you’ll probably earn an A.
Hello Everyone--
Thanks to everyone who took care of sending me their bio and pic, and to all who read and asked questions about the policies and syllabi. I’ve responded to everyone still in the class. There were some duplicate questions (mostly about grades—more on that below) and some questions were actually answerable in the policies for the class.
NOTE: who is in our class is still a bit in flux. Drop/add ends Wednesday and until then there might be some shifting around of things. This email includes those folks currently enrolled in our class. If for some reason you need to send an email to the entire class, use this email to respond to. The previous emails had students who have dropped and missed some who have added.
THIS WEEK’S WORK
- You may have noticed on the syllabus (link is live) I pushed back our reading Little Women to week after next. I just thought you could use the time, and, really, these first few weeks are really about setting up the class and figuring how things get done—harder to do in an online space. So your writing work this week is related to the two short stories listed on the syllabus.
- I have not finished reading your answers to the prompt related to the articles from last week. When I do I’ll have more to say to you about that. Live right now is the prompt for this week’s Teaching Discussion. You can read in more detail what your responsibilities are in the Teaching Discussion on the class website (the links in blue are live).
- Additionally, you have already received or will shortly receive an email that includes 5 to 6 other people from our class. In that email is a link to an editable google doc for you to participate in your online reading journal/book club. Again, you can read complete details of your responsibilities for reading journal/book club on our class website. (the links in blue are live).
- Finally, one of the real beauties of an online course is no icebreakers! Well, sort of. At least you don’t have to actually talk to a person with your mouth. But I do want us to function like a class and not like each of us alone interacting only with me (thus, the online book club). So one last thing to do this week: the class profile scavenger hunt. Attached to this email is word.docx. There are 25 fill-in-the-blank questions, one for each of your classmates (one classmate who has just joined is not represented; I’ll remedy that as soon as I can). You will need to read through the profiles of our class and fill in the name of the correct classmate. I know it seems like a pain, but it’s worth it. I’ve really enjoyed reading about all of you. And what a handsome bunch you are. Here is the link to our Class Profiles (link is live).
You will notice that this link cannot be seen as a link on our website. I would like your permission before I make it public. If you object for any reason to this being publicly accessible, just say that in your email. There is no need for explanation. If you are fine with this being public (well, public in the sense that it’s not hidden; I know it’s hard to believe, but not all that many people are visiting my site on a regular basis) there is no need to say anything.
About how grades work in this class
The overwhelming focus of questions was about how you would find out your grades. I’m going to do a very meta thing here and explain to you something about evaluation and pedagogy as a way to explain how and why I do things this way.
One thing I’ve learned is that students will be as passive about how they earn their grade as you let them be. They will be willfully clueless about it as a defense mechanism against a bad grade. Now, you are all accomplished English folks and most of you are also Education folks who want to be teachers, so I’m not saying you fit this profile, but you better believe you will enter classrooms where this is the case.
That’s one reason I abandoned Blackboard. Students just wait to see their grade appear and be calculated for them.
Here’s how you’ll know what your grade is:
In the policies for our class under “evaluation” I lay out how I will comment on your material and what percentage of your grade is earned for each assignment. Pay attention to that—you’ll see that 40% of your grade is based on timely posts to your book club or teaching discussion board, for instance.
For each assignment, there is a section that says some version of how I will grade this assignment or how you will earn your grade.” I reiterate how much of your final grade the assignment is worth. And then I tell you what you have to earn the standard B grade. The B grade is always earned by completing a list of tasks. I also explain how you earn an A or a C. The A is more subjective and the C means you have not completed all of the requirements for the B grade.
So once you’ve turned in an assignment, if you’ve done everything you need to do, you’ll know you have at least a B and if you didn’t know you know you have not. And you’ll know how much it counts for in your total grade.
Most students are going to earn an A for both book club/reading journal and teaching discussion posts (informal work): For informal work (book club/reading journal & teaching discussion): Most students earn an “A” for acceptable as long as it’s clear you read and are trying to meet the requirements of the post. If you don’t get an acceptable grade you can revise it as many times as you need to to get an “A.” However, in all honesty, most students don’t have to revise. Most students will earn an “A.”
There is also a very forgiving revision policy: As long as you’ve made some effort to post anything by the deadline, even if you don’t have the reading all done, or just don’t have it in you that week to come up with something smart to say, you can always revise. This makes space for tough weeks and bad days. That means there is literally no reason you can’t earn an “A” for roughly 40% of your final grade in this class—without all that much effort.
Additionally, built in to the system, you can miss at least one posting all together for each assignment, and there are a number of opportunities (like this past week) to turn something in that I’m going to count as an “A” even though it’s not really a reading journal (the scavenger hunt, the post about the syllabus).
If you get a “U,” I’ll make sure you know, but only you. It won’t be some big public thing (what sort of ogre do you imagine me to be?)
For formal work: you’ll know if you have at least a B if you read the assignment. The only question will be if you earned an A or not. I will give you emailed feedback for those assignments that will tell you if you earned the A or not and why.
This kind of grading, as I say in my policies, is called contract grading and spec grading. And they are ways to mitigate the effects of things like race, class, and gender bias in the classroom. If you want to read more about it, because you are going to be teachers in classrooms one day, I refer you to this text: Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. The complete text is free and available online.
I hope this allays some fears about grades and grading and how you’ll know how you are doing. I will work you hard this semester, but I’m a very easy grader. If you do what you need to do, you’ll probably earn an A.
Welcome back to the Spring 2020 semester: the first semester of the new decade. Somehow this feels both exciting and intimidating all at once. But, onward:
HERE’S HOW “CLASS” WILL OPERATE
Every Monday, or, if it’s a holiday, the next class day, I will send out an email just like this one. It will do two things: 1) It will sum up discussion and important ideas from the week previous, highlighting the students and their writing that best does it; and 2) It will preface key ideas that we will be working with that week. Because redundancy helps us be better students, particularly in online classes, you will be able to access this letter three ways as an email sent by noon on Mondays from [email protected], as a live link from the syllabus for this course, and from the drop down menu on my teaching website.
One of the requirements of this course, is that you read the weekly Monday Updates. I make it an actual requirement because experience has taught me that students tend not to read these updates and then end up asking me questions that have been answered there. This is an online class. Content is delivered online. So you have to actually read the material that is available to you online. OK. Enough on that rant.
After you’ve read the Monday update, in consultation with the syllabus for this course, you will have the full week to complete assignments. Any material—reading journals, blog posts, more formal writing assignments, are always due by Sunday at Noon of that week unless otherwise specified in the syllabus and/or Monday update.
A WORD OF CAUTION: I would suggest you treat the work of this class like a T/Th class and give some time during the week to what is required of you. We are reading whole novels—not, you know, James Joyce, but, still, whole books. You can’t read the novel (or whatever it is we are working with), and write reading responses, and work on your independent writing projects all in the wee hours of the morning before things are due, as they will typically be due, at noon on Sunday. The number one reasons students don’t due well in online classes is that they don’t pay attention to what is due when. They have the mistaken idea that an online course is easier because it is online and that all the work is due at the end of the semester. This is not the case in this class, at least. So be aware of what needs to be done and when.
WHERE WILL “CLASS” BE “HELD”? (I will quit with the air-quotes—you get it)
The following is a re-send of an email I send out on 1 January 2020: I won't be using blackboard for our class (I know, crazy). I will be using BSU email and my teaching website. It's not updated, but you can check it our at www.leetorda.com. If there is an email you'd prefer I use for class correspondence, please reply to this email with that information.
All policies, assignments, the syllabus, the Monday Updates and a space for class discussion are housed there.
Besides the Monday Updates, the place you most want to know how to work with is the Class Discussion Board. This link is live, and, once on that site, you’ll find two discussion boards you are responsible for posting to between now and Sunday, 26 January 2020 @ noon.
NOTE: As of me sending out this email, the website is not up to date. It will be up to date no later than Friday, 24 January 2020 by noon. Whenever it is up to date, I will email the entire class.
ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS WEEK
Once the website is updated, the syllabus will repeat this information, but, in the meantime, so that you can get started on this work:
1. By the end of the first week of classes (Friday, 24 January 2020), please send me a 250 word bio via email. It can be funny or serious or clever or whatever, but I need a little bit of info about you AND THIS ONE VERY IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION: WHY ARE YOU TAKING THIS CLASS?
Here's why I want to know: this is a required course for secondary education English double majors. And I've taught the class specifically to that population, but I've had some sections where there was a mix of students, some education some not. I would like to plan a class that serves the entire population so, before I complete a syllabus, I'd like to know who is in the class and why--please know it's perfectly fine to say "I need another 300 level elective".
NOTE: If you’ve already sent me this information, thank you. I’ll respond individually to you, as I will to everyone, when I’ve received your completed bio. SECOND NOTE: Please note that your bio is going to be posted on our class website—which, though not likely, could be read by individuals not in our class. It will constitute one of the first assignments for our class. So please write a bio that you are comfortable with our entire class reading.
2. When you send your bio: a picture file of you. This is all particularly important for a class is that is virtual. We need to be proactive about knowing who we all are and what we care about. Some folks who have sent me a bio have not sent me a photo. I know nobody likes pictures of themselves (or, at least, I don’t, but it’s an online class—it’ll feel weird and sterile if we don’t know what we at least look like).
In the spirit of sharing, I now make available to you what I’m calling “Online Teaching with Noodle.” Noodle, one of my cats, thinks he’s happy I’m teaching an online class, but is really unclear how he figures into it—and, seriously, that’s the most important thing—and he’d like to get that settled.
- First things first, this is a long email. It will take you some time to read through it AND, keep in mind, it requires you to complete several tasks due at different times between now and next week Monday. So read carefully and often. I’m including a .pdf of this email (attached) to make it easy to print out.
- Secondly, I have never taught an exclusively online class. What’s weird to me is, like, how do you know when to start? So if any of you know, you can pass that on. But, since I don’t know, I’m just gonna, you know start.
HERE’S HOW “CLASS” WILL OPERATE
Every Monday, or, if it’s a holiday, the next class day, I will send out an email just like this one. It will do two things: 1) It will sum up discussion and important ideas from the week previous, highlighting the students and their writing that best does it; and 2) It will preface key ideas that we will be working with that week. Because redundancy helps us be better students, particularly in online classes, you will be able to access this letter three ways as an email sent by noon on Mondays from [email protected], as a live link from the syllabus for this course, and from the drop down menu on my teaching website.
One of the requirements of this course, is that you read the weekly Monday Updates. I make it an actual requirement because experience has taught me that students tend not to read these updates and then end up asking me questions that have been answered there. This is an online class. Content is delivered online. So you have to actually read the material that is available to you online. OK. Enough on that rant.
After you’ve read the Monday update, in consultation with the syllabus for this course, you will have the full week to complete assignments. Any material—reading journals, blog posts, more formal writing assignments, are always due by Sunday at Noon of that week unless otherwise specified in the syllabus and/or Monday update.
A WORD OF CAUTION: I would suggest you treat the work of this class like a T/Th class and give some time during the week to what is required of you. We are reading whole novels—not, you know, James Joyce, but, still, whole books. You can’t read the novel (or whatever it is we are working with), and write reading responses, and work on your independent writing projects all in the wee hours of the morning before things are due, as they will typically be due, at noon on Sunday. The number one reasons students don’t due well in online classes is that they don’t pay attention to what is due when. They have the mistaken idea that an online course is easier because it is online and that all the work is due at the end of the semester. This is not the case in this class, at least. So be aware of what needs to be done and when.
WHERE WILL “CLASS” BE “HELD”? (I will quit with the air-quotes—you get it)
The following is a re-send of an email I send out on 1 January 2020: I won't be using blackboard for our class (I know, crazy). I will be using BSU email and my teaching website. It's not updated, but you can check it our at www.leetorda.com. If there is an email you'd prefer I use for class correspondence, please reply to this email with that information.
All policies, assignments, the syllabus, the Monday Updates and a space for class discussion are housed there.
Besides the Monday Updates, the place you most want to know how to work with is the Class Discussion Board. This link is live, and, once on that site, you’ll find two discussion boards you are responsible for posting to between now and Sunday, 26 January 2020 @ noon.
NOTE: As of me sending out this email, the website is not up to date. It will be up to date no later than Friday, 24 January 2020 by noon. Whenever it is up to date, I will email the entire class.
ASSIGNMENTS FOR THIS WEEK
Once the website is updated, the syllabus will repeat this information, but, in the meantime, so that you can get started on this work:
1. By the end of the first week of classes (Friday, 24 January 2020), please send me a 250 word bio via email. It can be funny or serious or clever or whatever, but I need a little bit of info about you AND THIS ONE VERY IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFORMATION: WHY ARE YOU TAKING THIS CLASS?
Here's why I want to know: this is a required course for secondary education English double majors. And I've taught the class specifically to that population, but I've had some sections where there was a mix of students, some education some not. I would like to plan a class that serves the entire population so, before I complete a syllabus, I'd like to know who is in the class and why--please know it's perfectly fine to say "I need another 300 level elective".
NOTE: If you’ve already sent me this information, thank you. I’ll respond individually to you, as I will to everyone, when I’ve received your completed bio. SECOND NOTE: Please note that your bio is going to be posted on our class website—which, though not likely, could be read by individuals not in our class. It will constitute one of the first assignments for our class. So please write a bio that you are comfortable with our entire class reading.
2. When you send your bio: a picture file of you. This is all particularly important for a class is that is virtual. We need to be proactive about knowing who we all are and what we care about. Some folks who have sent me a bio have not sent me a photo. I know nobody likes pictures of themselves (or, at least, I don’t, but it’s an online class—it’ll feel weird and sterile if we don’t know what we at least look like).
In the spirit of sharing, I now make available to you what I’m calling “Online Teaching with Noodle.” Noodle, one of my cats, thinks he’s happy I’m teaching an online class, but is really unclear how he figures into it—and, seriously, that’s the most important thing—and he’d like to get that settled.
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1. Once the syllabus and policies for this class go live, please complete the following assignment:
Congratulations, you’ve read the policies and syllabus for this course. To reward you, you have the opportunity to earn one "A" for Acceptable for a reader's notes grade simply by completing the following assignment by the drop/add deadline (Wednesday, 29 January 2020).
1. Send me an email at [email protected], CC me at [email protected]
2. In the subject line, write "Syllabus Check-in Email". Write it exactly as I've written it here.
3. In the body of the email, include a greeting: "Hello LT," "Hi Professor Torda," "Hey Dr. Torda." Whatever. But have a greeting.
4. Cut and paste this sentence into the email: "I've read through the policies and syllabus for the course, and I understand how to use the website to find out information about assignments, course policies, due dates, and classroom expectations, and to post my own writing to the class website in fulfillment of written assignments."
5. Sign off on your email, "best, so & so" "see you in class, your name here" "sincerely, John Doe." Again, whatever. But sign off on your email.
6. POST ON THE CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD (that link is live). Ask me two questions about any thing on my website for our class: policies, due dates, classroom expectations, assignments. You can't tell me you have no questions. You have to ask me two. BUT, they shouldn’t be questions that could be answered if you read the syllabus and policies for the class.
7. POST ON THE CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD (that link is live). Include with your questions a meme of your choosing or design that sums up how you are feeling about your semester so far.
Make sure I get this email by the end of drop/add (29 January 2020). If you don't send it to me, you lose the freebie “A” for acceptable for a reading journal post.
2) Please read the following (short, popular, not hard to read) articles about current trends in Young Adult Literature: this critic-at-large piece in The New Yorker about the The Hunger Games (from when it was first published), and, this (non-scholarly and totally approachable) article about the history of YA lit, this New York Times article on the perisl of publishing in YA, this one on topics in YA lit, and this one, very recent, about some great new YA reads (some of these books are on our list this year and have been on my list in previous years). NOTE: All links are live.
3) Please post a 300 word response to the following prompt to our Class Discussion Board (this link is live): Given what you have read in the four assigned articles this week, given what you know as a reader of YA (or as someone who is NOT a reader of YA), make a brief argument for what you would say are the defining characteristics of YA as a literary genre.
NOTE: This post will count as one “A” for acceptable reading journal as long as you post no later than noon on Sunday (26 January 2020). I’ll cover the formal requirements for reading journals next week, but you don’t need to worry about that just yet. We just need to get started on conversation. So let’s just dig in, don’t worry, and post. As long as you post by the deadline it will count.
4) We will start in earnest next week talking about Little Women. If you have not started reading it yet, you probably should. I must admit it was such a nostalgia trip for me to re-read it, but, one thing that really struck me was how much easier it was to read than it was when I was in 3rd grade. You’ll be able to read it in a day or two.
And just in-case you missed it in the last email. . .
See below for the book list (all titles are live links)
ENGL 344-W01
Young Adult Literature
Spring 2020
Book List
The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo
Publisher: HarperTeen; 1st Edition edition (March 6, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0062662805
ISBN-13: 978-0062662804
Dread Nation Justina Ireland
Publisher: Balzer + Bray; Reprint edition (June 4, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0062570617
ISBN-13: 978-0062570611
Darius the Great is Not Okay Adib Khorram
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (August 20, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0525552979
ISBN-13: 978-0525552970
Long Way Down Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1481438263
ISBN-13: 978-1481438261
Little & Lion Brandy Colbert
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (July 3, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0316349011
ISBN-13: 978-0316349017
Monday’s Not Coming Tiffany D Jackson
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books; Reprint edition (April 23, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0062422685
ISBN-13: 978-0062422682
Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Publisher: Dover Publications (September 12, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0486828069
ISBN-13: 978-0486828060
Hey Kiddo Jarrett J. Krosoczka
Publisher: Graphix (October 9, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0545902487
ISBN-13: 978-0545902489
Gossip Girl #1: A NovelCecily Von Zeigesar
Publisher: Poppy; 1 edition (April 1, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0316910333
ISBN-13: 978-0316910330
A Light in the Darkness: Janusz Korczak, His Orphans, and the Holocaust Albert Marrin
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (September 10, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1524701203
ISBN-13: 978-1524701208
Congratulations, you’ve read the policies and syllabus for this course. To reward you, you have the opportunity to earn one "A" for Acceptable for a reader's notes grade simply by completing the following assignment by the drop/add deadline (Wednesday, 29 January 2020).
1. Send me an email at [email protected], CC me at [email protected]
2. In the subject line, write "Syllabus Check-in Email". Write it exactly as I've written it here.
3. In the body of the email, include a greeting: "Hello LT," "Hi Professor Torda," "Hey Dr. Torda." Whatever. But have a greeting.
4. Cut and paste this sentence into the email: "I've read through the policies and syllabus for the course, and I understand how to use the website to find out information about assignments, course policies, due dates, and classroom expectations, and to post my own writing to the class website in fulfillment of written assignments."
5. Sign off on your email, "best, so & so" "see you in class, your name here" "sincerely, John Doe." Again, whatever. But sign off on your email.
6. POST ON THE CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD (that link is live). Ask me two questions about any thing on my website for our class: policies, due dates, classroom expectations, assignments. You can't tell me you have no questions. You have to ask me two. BUT, they shouldn’t be questions that could be answered if you read the syllabus and policies for the class.
7. POST ON THE CLASS DISCUSSION BOARD (that link is live). Include with your questions a meme of your choosing or design that sums up how you are feeling about your semester so far.
Make sure I get this email by the end of drop/add (29 January 2020). If you don't send it to me, you lose the freebie “A” for acceptable for a reading journal post.
2) Please read the following (short, popular, not hard to read) articles about current trends in Young Adult Literature: this critic-at-large piece in The New Yorker about the The Hunger Games (from when it was first published), and, this (non-scholarly and totally approachable) article about the history of YA lit, this New York Times article on the perisl of publishing in YA, this one on topics in YA lit, and this one, very recent, about some great new YA reads (some of these books are on our list this year and have been on my list in previous years). NOTE: All links are live.
3) Please post a 300 word response to the following prompt to our Class Discussion Board (this link is live): Given what you have read in the four assigned articles this week, given what you know as a reader of YA (or as someone who is NOT a reader of YA), make a brief argument for what you would say are the defining characteristics of YA as a literary genre.
NOTE: This post will count as one “A” for acceptable reading journal as long as you post no later than noon on Sunday (26 January 2020). I’ll cover the formal requirements for reading journals next week, but you don’t need to worry about that just yet. We just need to get started on conversation. So let’s just dig in, don’t worry, and post. As long as you post by the deadline it will count.
4) We will start in earnest next week talking about Little Women. If you have not started reading it yet, you probably should. I must admit it was such a nostalgia trip for me to re-read it, but, one thing that really struck me was how much easier it was to read than it was when I was in 3rd grade. You’ll be able to read it in a day or two.
And just in-case you missed it in the last email. . .
See below for the book list (all titles are live links)
ENGL 344-W01
Young Adult Literature
Spring 2020
Book List
The Poet X Elizabeth Acevedo
Publisher: HarperTeen; 1st Edition edition (March 6, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0062662805
ISBN-13: 978-0062662804
Dread Nation Justina Ireland
Publisher: Balzer + Bray; Reprint edition (June 4, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0062570617
ISBN-13: 978-0062570611
Darius the Great is Not Okay Adib Khorram
Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (August 20, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0525552979
ISBN-13: 978-0525552970
Long Way Down Jason Reynolds
Publisher: Atheneum/Caitlyn Dlouhy Books; Reprint edition (April 2, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1481438263
ISBN-13: 978-1481438261
Little & Lion Brandy Colbert
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; Reprint edition (July 3, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0316349011
ISBN-13: 978-0316349017
Monday’s Not Coming Tiffany D Jackson
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books; Reprint edition (April 23, 2019)
ISBN-10: 0062422685
ISBN-13: 978-0062422682
Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
Publisher: Dover Publications (September 12, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0486828069
ISBN-13: 978-0486828060
Hey Kiddo Jarrett J. Krosoczka
Publisher: Graphix (October 9, 2018)
ISBN-10: 0545902487
ISBN-13: 978-0545902489
Gossip Girl #1: A NovelCecily Von Zeigesar
Publisher: Poppy; 1 edition (April 1, 2002)
ISBN-10: 0316910333
ISBN-13: 978-0316910330
A Light in the Darkness: Janusz Korczak, His Orphans, and the Holocaust Albert Marrin
Publisher: Knopf Books for Young Readers (September 10, 2019)
ISBN-10: 1524701203
ISBN-13: 978-1524701208