Squishy Not Slick

This has something to do with teaching.

lukescommonplacebook — Wed, 08 May 2013 14:47:28 -0400

This has something to do with teaching.

"Consider how your museum could be ‘a bowl’, rather than ‘a box’. A tumble of objects rather than a..."

lukescommonplacebook — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 09:25:45 -0400

“Consider how your museum could be ‘a bowl’, rather than ‘a box’. A tumble of objects rather than a grid.”

- Seb Chan on “institutional wabi-sabi,” via Rob.

Just swap “museum” for “classroom,” and you should be set.

So this (“students’ deficiencies in written and oral...

lukescommonplacebook — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 02:02:18 -0400

So this (“students’ deficiencies in written and oral English”) is at least a 100-year old problem, eh?

[source]

this has something to do with teaching

lukescommonplacebook — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 09:50:15 -0500

What this reveals more than anything is that Yahoo management doesn’t have a clue as to who’s actually productive and who’s not. In their blindness they’re reaching for the lowest form of control a manager can assert: Ensuring butts in seats for eight hours between 9-5+. Though while they can make people come to the office under the threat of termination, they most certainly cannot make those same people motivated to do great work.

– David at 37 Signals about remote work ending for Yahoo!

Dan Meyer, way back in the day, on writing’s superiority...

lukescommonplacebook — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 16:07:17 -0500

Dan Meyer, way back in the day, on writing’s superiority over math.

ateachersdesk: this is a teacher’s desktop - @lukeneff I...

lukescommonplacebook — Sun, 21 Oct 2012 19:32:00 -0400

ateachersdesk:

this is a teacher’s desktop - @lukeneff

I have a link to a bigger version over here.

a list of poems I use for the poem of the day in class

lukescommonplacebook — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 18:39:00 -0400

There should be 180, but there’s something like 191. So I need to cut eleven. But then again, I probably forgot some really important ones, so please let me know which ones. And then I can figure out how many more I need to cut. So really, I need your help. Which to keep? Which to cut? Which to add? Please email or tweet and let me know. Or tin-can-with-string. Whatever works. Most of these are from Billy Collins’s Poetry 180 and 180 More and from Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems.

Introduction to Poetry - Billy Collins
I Have News for You - Tony Hoagland
A Mown Lawn - Lydia Davis
Selecting a Reader - Ted Kooser
Did I Miss Anything - Tom Wayman
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening - Robert Frost
from SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 - W.H. Auden
Notice - Steve Kowit
Fight - Laurel Blossom
Sunday Morning Early - David Romveldt
To help the monkey cross the river - Thomas Lux
To You by Kenneth Koch
Love Poem With Toast - Miller Williams
Only One of My Deaths - Dean Young
Cartoon Physics, Part I - Nick Flynn
The Kitchen Shears Speak – Christianne Balk
The Planet on the Table - Wallace Stevens
Shorth Is Better than Length - Dr. Seuss
A Martian Sends A Postcard Home - Craig Raine
In The Station of the Metro - Ezra Pound
Of Being – Denise Levertov
Sailing to Byzantium - W.B. Yeats
When we two parted - Lord Byron
Trying to Figure Out if You’re Beautiful - Brian Abbott
Listen - W.S. Merwin
Numbers - Mary Cornish
Dreams - Langston Hughes
Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet - Tony Hoagland
Summer Morning - Charles Simic
Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal - Naomi Shihab Nye
The Journey - Mary Oliver
The World is a Beautiful Place – Lawrence Ferlengetti
Block City - Robert Louis Stevenson
Reasons to Survive November - Tony Hoagland
The Vacation - Wendell Berry
Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain - Richard Brautigan
Fourteen Final Lines - J. Allyn Rosser
The Grammar Lesson - Steve Kowit
It’s Raining In Love - Richard Brautigan
Forgetfulness - Billy Collins
A Poetry Reading at West Point - William Matthews
The Man Into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball - Thomas Lux
Tour - Carol Snow
After Us - Connie Wanek
Poetry - Don Paterson
The Improvement – John Ashberry
The Fathers - Elizabeth Holmes
Dearborn North Apartments Chicago, Illinois - Lola Haskins
Mother In Law – Adrienne Rich
Having by T.R. Hummer
Snow - David Berman
A Romance for the Wild Turkey - Paul Zimmer
Where You Go When She Sleeps - T.R. Hummer
Grammar - Tony Hoagland
Starlight - Philip Levine
Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden
Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls Into Besieged City - Thomas Lux
The Panic Bird - Robert Phillips
Otherwise - Jane Kenyon
Fat Is Not a Fairy Tale - Jane Yolen
June 11 - David Lehman
My Life - Joe Wenderoth
Message: Bottle #32 - J. Allyn Rosser
The Poem of Chalk - Philip Levine
A Wreath to the Fish - Nancy Willard
The Quest - Sharon Olds
In Praise of Bic Pens - David Hilton
Fast Break - Edward Hirsch
Saturday at the Canal - Gary Soto
Doing Without - David Ray
The Death of Santa Claus - Charles Webb
Thanksgiving - Mac Hammond
A Metaphor Crosses the Road - Martha McFerren
Animals - Miller Williams
I Wish in the City of Your Heart - Robley Wilson
The Student Theme - Ronald Wallace
Smell and Envy - Douglas Goetsch
For My Niece Sidney, Age Six by Amy Gerstler
Tuesday 9:00 AM - Denver Butson
Ordinance on Arrival - Naomi Lazard
1-800-HOT-RIBS - Catherine Bowman
I Need To Be More French. Or Japanese. - Beth Ann Fennelly
To Stammering - Kenneth Koch
Bedecked - Victoria Redel
Dinner Out - Christopher Howell
Slow Children at Play - Cecilia Woloch
“Even Ornaments of Speech Are Forms of Deceit.” - Ron Koertge
Acceptance Speech - Lynn Powell
Understudy - Daniel Lusk
Hate Poem - Julie Sheehan
Do You Love Me? - Robert Wrigley
An Apology - F.J. Bergmann
Why It Often Rains In Movies - Lawrence Raab
Slowly - Donna Masini
Valentine - Carol Ann Dufy
Onions - William Matthews
Reading Hemingway - James Cummins
Olive Oil - Paul Suntup
Buddha’s Dogs - Susan Browne
Amnesty - Carl Dennis
Lives of the Poets - Louis Simpson
Shakespearean Sonnet - R.S. Gwynn
The Booksigning - James Tate
Anagrammer - Peter Pereira
Chapter One - Mark Aiello
The Poet - Tom Wayman
I Said Yes But I Meant No - Dean Young
To Roanoke With Johnny Cash - Bob Hicok
Air Larry - Joseph Harrison
Nothing in That Drawer - Ron Padgett
Takeoff - Timothy Steele
If You Don’t - Diane Thiel
Where Did I Leave Off? - Virginia Hamilton Adair
Reading the Obituary Page - Linda Pastan
The First Photograph of Hitler - Wislawa Syzmborska
The End and the Beginning - Wislawa Syzmborska
Grading English 101 Essays - Sam Pierstorff
At Least - Raymond Carver
Otherwise - Jane Keynon
Poem About Morning - William Meredith
Living - Denise Levertov
Routine - Arthur Guiterman
The Life of a Day - Tom Hennen
For My Son, Noah, Ten Years Old - Robert Bly
Dilemma - David Budbill
from Song of Myself (“Who goes there? hankering, gross,mystical” … “I can wait”) - Walt Whitman
New Yorkers - Edward Field
Nightclub - Billy Collins
The Swimming Pool - Thomas Lux
Summer Storm - Dana Gioia
wrist-wrestling father - Orval Lund
Animals - Frank O’Hara
Lending Out Books - Hal Sirowitz
The Changed Man - Robert Phillips
This Is Just to Say - William Carlos Williams
This Is Just to Say - Erica-Lynn Gambino
The Orange - Wendy Cope
After Forty Years of Marriage, She Tries a New Recipe for Hamburger Hot Dish - Leo Dangel
For C.W.B. - Elizabeth Bishop
What I Learned from My Mother - Julia Kasdorf
To be of use - Marge Piercy
No Tool or Rope or Pail - Bob Arnold
Soybeans - Thomas Alan Orr
Landing Pattern - Philip Appleman
A Little Tooth - Thomas Lux
Egg - C.G. Hanzlicek
Rolls-Royce Dreams - Ginger Andrews
My Life Before I Knew It - Lawrence Raab
Sweater Weather - A Love Song to the Language - Sharon Bryan
Courage - Anne Sexton
Leisure - W.H. Davies
Wild Geese - Mary Oliver
The Three Goals - David Budbill
Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out - Jimmie Cox
Living in the Body - Joyce Sutphen
The Iceberg Theory - Gerald Locklin
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front - Wendell Berry
from Moby Dick - Herman Melville (“Call me Ishmael” to “to get to sea as soon as I can.”)
where we are - Gerald Locklin
Passengers - Billy Collins
Postscript - Seamus Heaney
in celebration of Surviving - Chuck Miller
Her Long Illness - Donald Hall
Lester Tells of Wanda and the Big Snow - Paul Zimmer
Song to Onions - Roy Blount Jr.
Sunt Leones - Stevie Smith
Titanic - David R. Slavitt
Let Evening Come - Jane Kenyon
A Blessing - James Wright
The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry
From Blossoms - Li Young Li
The Lives of the Heart - James Hirshfield
Fishing in the Keep of Silence - Linda Gregg
Rue for A. E. Housman - Marly Youmans
The Last Bestiary - Daniel Bourne
Shine, Perishing Republic - Robinson Jeffers
Song (Is It Dirty) - Frank O’Hara
Elsa is Not a Girl She is a Girl - Angela Veronica Wong
Desks - Don Bogen
Furious Versions - Li-Young Lee
Snowglobe - Tony Hoagland
Some Like Poetry - Wislawa Szymborska
When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer - Walt Whitman
Ode to My Socks - Pablo Neruda
The Road Not Taken - Robert Frost
If I Should Have a Daughter - Sarah Kay
Under One Small Star - Wislawa Szymborska
from Hiawatha - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Eating Poetry - Mark Strand
In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself - Wislawa Szymborska
Night Hunting - John Casteen

"To this day, almost all educational personnel decisions are based on judgments which, according to..."

lukescommonplacebook — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 15:23:29 -0400

“To this day, almost all educational personnel decisions are based on judgments which, according to the research, are only slightly more accurate than they would be if they were based on pure chance.”

- Medley and Coker (1987, p. 243)

"Do We Know a Successful Teacher When We See One? Experiments in the Identification of Effective..."

lukescommonplacebook — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:34:00 -0400

“Do We Know a Successful Teacher When We See One? Experiments in the Identification of Effective Teachers
Abstract:
The authors report on three experiments designed to (a) test under increasingly more favorable conditions whether judges can correctly rate teachers of known ability to raise student achievement, (b) inquire about what criteria judges use when making their evaluations, and (c) determine which criteria are most predictive of a teacher’s effectiveness. All three experiments resulted in high agreement among judges but low ability to identify effective teachers. Certain items on the established measure that are related to instructional behavior did reliably predict teacher effectiveness. The authors conclude that (a) judges, no matter how experienced, are unable to identify successful teachers; (b) certain cognitive operations may be contributing to this outcome; (c) it is desirable and possible to develop a new measure that does produce accurate predictions of a teacher’s ability to raise student achievement test scores.”

- source, emphases mine

"Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the..."

lukescommonplacebook — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:09:31 -0400

“Decades of studies, many of them by Diana Baumrind, a clinical and developmental psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, have found that the optimal parent is one who is involved and responsive, who sets high expectations but respects her child’s autonomy.”

- Madeline Levine

"As Lave (1996) argued, research on teaching for the most part ‘reduces teaching to curriculum,..."

lukescommonplacebook — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:47:57 -0400

“As Lave (1996) argued, research on teaching for the most part ‘reduces teaching to curriculum, to strategies or recipes for organizing students to know some target knowledge’”

- Beyond Knowledge: Exploring Why Some Teachers Are More Thoughtfully Adaptive Than Others Colleen M. Fairbanks, Gerald G. Duffy, Beverly S. Faircloth, Ye He, Barbara Levin, Jean Rohr and Catherine Stein (Journal of Teacher Education 2010 61: 161)

"After some 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching … is perhaps..."

lukescommonplacebook — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 18:27:36 -0400

“After some 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching … is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced and frightening activity that our species ever invented.”

- Shulman, L. (2004). Professional development: Leaning from experience. In S. Wilson (Ed.), The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach (pp. 503-522). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

keys

lukescommonplacebook — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:37:28 -0400

This idea, and many of the keys, came from a colleague of mine. Here’s how it worked: I got enough keys for all my students, and then made a tag for each key with a single, made-up line from a story. I threw the keys in a jar, and each student got to pick out a key. The assignment was simple: tell a story that makes that line make sense. The story lines:
* She gave me the key, then walked away, dragging the terrified child behind her.
* He looked behind him then whispered, “This key fits the third door.” He handed it to me then walked away, disappearing into the crowd.
* There on the rock, waves crashing around it, waited the key. The oars creaked as I rowed towards it.
* When the thunderstorm had finally passed, I saw a bit of metal by the road. It was a key.
* Why was there a key in the ice cream cone?
* I knew it was old, but which of these musty boxes, here in this spider’s nest of an attic, would the key fit?
* I hate this key and all the trouble it has caused.
* The key’s ridges were cutting my fingers, but I wouldn’t let go.
* The key fit locker #365 at the airport. What had they left me?
* He looked me in the eyes and whispered, “I got a key too, and it’s just like this one.”
* As the key sunk through the waves, I knew I’d be getting wet very soon.
* The key spun through the air. Four hands reached for it. Who would catch it?
* There was a 50/50 chance that this was the right key. I put it in the lock and hoped I’d picked the right one.
* A key was taped to the bottom of his top desk drawer. And there was a note.
* “It was an inside job! This key proves it!”
* She sighed and handed over the key, knowing that months of work had just been lost.
* She collapsed in the meadow, exhausted. She rolled to her side and something sharp poked her in the ribs… a key!
* Through the decades of dust, a clear set of footprints was visible. leading deeper into the tunnel. I held the key tight and followed the footprints.
* She shoved aside cartons of spoiled milk and packages of moldy cheese. There it was in the back of the fridge, just like he said: the key.
* When he woke that morning, he never imagined that he would have to deal with both magical keys and hungry zombies.
* The package, postmarked thirty years in the future, was tiny. She opened the box to find a key.
* He couldn’t disagree. When he held the key, he too felt like a numbing cold creep through his body. * They found the frozen corpse at the bottom of the cliffs, a single key still clutched tightly in his left hand.
* A carrier pigeon was pecking at the window, a single key tied to its foot.
* They found the key at the bottom of the well, just like the treasure map showed.
* Like a shiny promise, the key taunted me, sparkling inside the glass case.
* I could see the key in her hand. And she saw that I saw.
* How in the world had this key followed me from Iowa to Oregon?
* I’d had the key in my pocket since Tuesday, but I didn’t know it.

I still feel like some of those lines are pretty lame, but overall, the students seemed to like and some fantastic stories were created.

"Basically, here’s how it works: Students are given a weekly grid and must select at least three..."

lukescommonplacebook — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 01:16:00 -0500

“Basically, here’s how it works: Students are given a weekly grid and must select at least three daily activities from a “menu” of 10 categories. Those include pleasurable reading (such as books, magazines, recipes, newspapers); physical activities (walking, biking, skating, swimming, playing sports); hobbies (sewing, gardening, photography, caring for pets); art projects (painting, drawing, collage, dioramas); and community service (mowing a neighbor’s lawn, playing a game with an older person, picking up trash).”

- the kind of homework that should be assigned

This has something to do with teaching (pt.11)

lukescommonplacebook — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:30:00 -0500

“Soon it became clear to me that quietly and en masse, French parents were achieving outcomes that created a whole different atmosphere for family life. When American families visited our home, the parents usually spent much of the visit refereeing their kids’ spats, helping their toddlers do laps around the kitchen island, or getting down on the floor to build Lego villages. When French friends visited, by contrast, the grownups had coffee and the children played happily by themselves… One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. … Delphine said that she never set out specifically to teach her kids patience. But her family’s daily rituals are an ongoing apprenticeship in how to delay gratification.”
– Pamela Druckerman, Why French Parents Are Superior

this has something to do with teaching (pt. 10)

lukescommonplacebook — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 19:47:00 -0500

“What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsible, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

playing with blocks (or how to teach the writing process for a five-paragraph essay to a 1.5 year old)

lukescommonplacebook — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 16:10:00 -0500

The hard lessons learned by KIPP, and what we can do next

lukescommonplacebook — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 14:54:49 -0400

The hard lessons learned by KIPP, and what we can do next

did a professor plagiarize a professor who was plagiarizing an already professor-plagiarized sentence?

lukescommonplacebook — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:39:11 -0400

This has next to absolutely nothing to do with the theme or thesis of this little tumblr, but, well, I needed somewhere to put it. So, here it is.

Let’s call this a plagiarism activity.

Let’s lead with this question: did a professor plagiarize an already plagiarized sentence? Did something more complicated than that happen?

I was just doing some reading and noticed how a few people (ok, not just people, professors, tenured professors even) have remarkably similar sentence structure when writing about the same idea.

Here’s Allington:

Stotsky (1984) synthesized the research on writing-reading relationships. She found better writers read more than poorer writers, better writers tended to be better readers, and better readers produced more syntactically mature compositions than did poorer readers.

Here’s Goen-Salter:

There is a demonstrated connection between learning to write and learning to read. Better writers do end [sic] to be better readers, better writers tend to read more than poorer writers and better readers tend to produce more mature prose than poorer readers (Stotsky).

Here are Homstad and Thorson:

… better writers tend to be better readers, better writers read more than poorer writers, and better readers produce more syntactically mature writing than poorer readers.

So, now that those are on the table, let’s look at Stotsky’s actual words:

To summarize briefly, the correlational studies show almost consistently that better writers tend to be better readers (of their own writing as well as that of other reading material), that better writers tend to read more than poorer writers, and that better readers tend to produce more syntactically mature writing than poorer readers.

So, the question that I ask is: did plagiarism occur, and if so, who plagiarized whom and what kind of plagiarism was it? And, best question yet, did someone plagiarize someone who plagiarized someone else? Also, will I make my students figure it out? Probably, yes.

Teaching the Boston Celtics Way

lukescommonplacebook — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 22:19:23 -0400

I live outside of Portland, so I like the Blazers. And I really like them. It’s easy to be a Blazers fan, despite their struggles. But, if I had to pick a different team, not the local team, I’d have to go with the Boston Celtics. I like the Celtics, their creativity and grit and chemistry (some of this could be a confirmation bias with The Association providing the details that I can only see through my lens of Celtics love). I also like teaching, and I like to think about teaching. So, it’s pretty easy for the food processor of my head to mix together some Celtics love and a few teaching ideas. I think I need to start writing a book called Teaching the Boston Celtics Way. If I did, the first chapter would probably be about triggers and options…

Most teams have a primary “trigger.” A go-to play with a go-to playmaker. The sweet spot where they generate a significant chunk of their offense. For most of this season for the Blazers this should have been LaMarcus Aldridge getting an entry pass to the lower block. When they couldn’t make this happen for big stretches of the season, things fell apart and terrible things happened like Andre Miller shooting three pointers. For the Celtics, well, they have a lot of potential triggers. Rondo penetration. Garnett pick and roll or pick and pop. Ray Allen off a sequence of screens. Paul Pierce in a pick and roll situation. Even without their premier big man (really Danny Ainge? why?), they still have a lot to work with. But, right, in reality, these aren’t all triggers. Some of these things are options. Once your trigger fails, you go to your second, third and fourth options. As Kevin Arnovitz writes, great teams can convert on more than just their trigger (something that set the Mavs apart from their Blazers once Brandon Roy realized he was a human with weak knees again). And what really sets the Celtics apart (when things are going well for them, see 2010, 2008), is that they get into their offense quickly and have, ” a knack for creating and capitalizing on multiple options and triggers.” They get into their offense quickly, and then rattle through their options very quickly. This, this thought right here – getting into your offense, trigger and then multiple options – this is a metaphor for teaching.

Getting into your offense quickly: this is about transitions, not wasting class time, no dilly dallying on periphery stuff. Sit down and get to business like Rondo running the ball up the court. For a teacher, this means clear expectations for specific student action steps at the start of class. Students should know a routine or where to look for their instructions. Then… the trigger. What is the best way to get each individual student to demonstrate proficiency at the learning target. Do this thing. If it’s something different for each student, do it that way. If it doesn’t work (the ball doesn’t find the net) – and formative assessment shows you this, then you quickly cycle through your options. The key here is to be prepared with a lot of good options. Options in this metaphor are ways of reteaching or looking at a problem in a different way or finding a different way to allow a student to demonstrate proficiency.

For me, a favorite option is sticky note formative assessment: give each student a sticky note, have them respond to a statement related to the objective, have them put the sticky note on a continuum on the board showing where they fall between strongly agree and strongly disagree with the statement, then have the class discuss the range of acceptable answers. To quote a sometimes poet, “It is not the only or the easiest way to come to the truth. It is one way.”

This metaphor, Boston’s triggers and options, is really about maximizing class time and differentiating instruction. It takes a lot of work to have a range of options available, but it’s worth it. You don’t want to end up like Scott Brooks, deep in the playoffs, unable to write or call plays on the fly, and your main trigger going cold (Kevin Durant) and your other one fouling out (James Harden). For a good teacher, like a point guard or coach, it’s not just about having great initial lesson or play, it’s about having a sequence of options to fall back on when the initial trigger doesn’t convert.