Comix!

I love comics – don’t know if I’ve made that clear here. I love them for myself, I dig them as an emerging form (still emerging after 100 years), and I really like them for reluctant readers. They exist somewhere between novels and movies, or maybe just books and movies, and they can keep kids reading who otherwise might find a million better things to do, because the actual technical reading is only part of the flow of enjoying the narrative.

This year I incorporated comics into my 8 english class – the Beth Cooper rebels – as an independent study that allowed them to choose between about 8 books and then respond to the book in a few ways including a presentation. It was a success – I had an avowed non-reader go through and enjoy Persepolis, which isn’t an easy book, and kids reading each other’s choices and debating their merits. Very good classes. The books were as follows, fyi: Persepolis, Spiral Bound, Pride of Baghdad, Astronauts of the Future, Tales from the Farm, Superman: Red Son, and American Born Chinese. More on them later.

I mentioned this project in an end-of-year staff meeting, and to my surprise, some pretty conservative teachers were very keen on doing similar things. They’d seen the grades 5/6 kids devour Scholastic choices like Bone as well as older comics (Archie) and strips (Garfield and Calvin), and wanted to harness this in classes, and wanted help! So this summer I’m prepping a schwack of units on various comics: reading a bunch, trying to figure out approaches at different levels, etc.

Shortly after that I found out that a high school (my school teaches all grades) English teacher was going to use Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in a unit on Immigration. That got conversation flying, and it looks like I’ve convinced the grade 9 teacher to teach the Essex County trilogy by Jeff Lemire.

Which all led to my being green-lighted to build a comics section in the school library. Which is wicked. I am excited and having fun.

I’ll continue to share what I come up with here – lessons and units etc, since I’m doing it already. More soon.

Year One, Done.

I’ve finished my first year back at teaching, and boy are my arms tired. (I suppose it’s year 2.0 or something – I was a teacher before as well, and took a break to reassess whether I wanted the gig for life. I do.) As I’ve mentioned before, I’m also involved now in the school’s administration – the higher level all-school planning, communication, direction stuff, and that’s been brilliant. I’ve had quite an interesting, successful, heavy-on-the-learning year.

Unfortunately, anyone who might have been following the posts leading up to my return to teaching is likely long-gone now, despite the two or three updates during the year. Because I found it impossible to write about what was going on while it was going on. Even when I was able to zoom out a little and look at how things were going, I was too tired to write about it. I had gone into it with the intention of keeping a journal and maintaining A Different Fish, and wound up doing neither. Perhaps the second year will be different; first year is always too huge for words, and now that I’m back into the flow of the school year, maybe I’ll find/make the time.

Is it possible to sum up the things learned this year? I’ll give it a shot. In no particular order, some of what I learned.

1. Schools are a hotbed for illness-trading. First year teachers, and anyone who’s been away for a while: prepare to get ill. Wash your hands all fucking day long, and still be ready to be, at times, nearly deaf, nearly mute, and nearly dead while teaching. Take the days off that you can. Arrange to be sick on your lightest-load days, and don’t wait until you can’t get out of bed to stay in it. Oh, and know that it gets better. By second semester I was fine. Sick five times between Sept and February, and none after. Teachers are like immune-system superheroes.

2. You can never prepare enough. Take that both ways.

3. The Ontario Literacy Test is a soul-killing joke – all bureaucratic, unrealistic, punitive, flawed Mike-Harris-voting asshole-written garbage. I hate it. Standardized testing is only worthwhile if you have standardized people living standardized lives. Boo. Boo!

4. Getting to know a whole school is really fun. Previously, I knew my class intimately, and my area very well, and that was about it. Being an adminny, VPish person, you can get to know and like the whole school and all the teachers, and it’s, well, really fun. I dig it.

5. Everybody’s got their good points. Looking for them is worthwhile and treating people as if their best points are their most evident points kind of really works.

6. Copy Obama. Communicating openly works. Being candid but political works. Copping to reality works. Transparency works. Keeping ideals high in all conversations works. Shutting up once in a while works. Having a laugh works. The occasional cigarette works.

7. People lie. Trying to figure out who’s really doing their job is really hard! Trying to find out “what really happened” is really hard! Because people lie – to themselves, to each other, to kids, to parents, to teachers. Which is weird and hard to admit: that no matter how open and clear you are, everything you do goes out into a world where lying is going to muddy things up. Me too: I lie too. Openness is not always workable.

8. It’s hard not to get fat as a teacher. Instant gratification is attractive when your free time comes in 3 minute bursts. If somebody puts some timbits on the table, you’re going to eat one. If you’re working late, chocolate bars become attractive. At certain points during the year, I actually started drinking Coke.

9. School is awesome. I love it. I’m so glad to be back in one, and I am most glad to be able to affect the big picture and help make it better. I’m very glad to be back where I belong.

Alright. Gotta go. Nice talking.

Free to teach!

I am in the really fortunate position where I have a couple of periods a week in which I can teach whatever I want: I have a Skills class which has a mandate of addressing skills: interpersonal, personal, academic, organizational, etc. And I have another class which doesn’t even have a name, in which I can teach anything under the sun. I use it often for teaching current events, politics, and foundational things like Argument and Point of View.

Initially I thought I’d have to find some way to “mark” kids for these, but it turns out I don’t have to, and it is the most refreshing thing in the world. The kids look forward to the class and participate very well in activities and discussions, and I get to program it based very closely on topicality and their own interests.

I also get to do these tiny micro-units – two classes long, even one – which is a wonderful way to teach. One of the least relevant things we do as teachers is the overkill of ideas. A fair analogy: you meet a man at a party who does something interesting, and he tells you about it. Say he’s a musician, or a mathematician. Most people are going to enjoy finding out how either of these guys makes a living, or some interesting details about the job. But if the dude goes on and on about it – if he holds forth long after your interest has waned, or bogarts the conversation and makes it clear that your perspective and opinions are uninteresting to him – well, we have a word for it. He’s called a Bore. Worse, imagine you’re stuck in one of these awkward and boring conversations, finding it impossible to make a break for freedom, and the guy gives you a test that you have to do! This is where kids find themselves a lot in class.

Teachers will instantly, generally, point out that Kids Have to Learn to Do Things They Don’t Like, that it builds character, etc etc. And this is true: not many people would volunteer to learn all of the varied things we need kids to learn, and it is through trying things that kids do discover what they’d like to focus on. But this coercive style is not the only way to teach or be taught. The process of flipping channels or browsing magazines, of circulating at an interesting party or conference, is a great learning process. Wine tasting is educational, and no one would ever demand that the tasters drink a whole bottle, or purchase everything they have a sip of. Nobody would ever GO to a wine tasting that offered one type of wine.

This open class started off as an introduction to politics, culminating in the two elections last fall in Canada and the States; from there we talked and thought about advertising for a couple of weeks. And then one morning I was listening to a great story on This American Life, and thought the kids would dig it, so I just took it in and played it for them (and had them try to take notes on it); they still remember the details of this story, and they all took good notes, and I never marked anything or evaluated their participation. I showed them an episode of Freaks and Geeks, which they loved, and there was lots to talk about, and they did talk. It left them with lots to think about, and several of them indicated they’d seek out the rest of the series on their own.

Two weeks ago, a couple of kids complained that they never got to hear about World War 1 – on TV, in school – and they wanted to learn about it. So we’re studying WW1, at their request, and they’re really keen. How many of the old-school one-way teachers would have predicted that? Kids go home after these lessons and look things up on Youtube and Wikipedia and come in and tell me what they found out. Isn’t that amazing?

If this period was filled with a Curriculum, if there was some government agency making sure that X was taught, if I had to ruin every lesson with a test or report, or run each topic into the ground, I really don’t believe the kids would request lessons about World War 1. Several of them would resist the whole class, each time, by sleeping or going to the bathroom a lot, or tuning me out (the only ways to resist an unbeatable force are passive). But they’re not: Every student in these classes is at least mildly interested in what we’re talking about. Which is something remarkable.

Beth Cooper, The End

Just in case you were wondering, the students accepted the fact of the situation with great maturity. They got what I was saying, and surprisingly didn’t push back too hard. My boss got what I was saying, didn’t press too hard into why I didn’t use more foresight, which was nice, and not one parent said boo (which means at least they weren’t angry). We moved on to Miyazaki’s brilliant Spirited Away, and that swept them up good. It really is a brilliant movie.

I have yet to choose an alternate novel – I bought myself some time with this unit, and the kids are really keen to try and make their own movies, a la this class, so I think we’ll do that.

And that’s that. Coulda been better, coulda been way worse.

Teaching Beth Cooper, Question Mark, Exclamation Point

Wow: this has been an intense experience, this teaching of Beth Cooper. I am not sure how it will play out, but here’s what has gone on since I posted about starting it:

Nothing.

Everything going on is in my head. Between starting the unit and now, we’ve had exams, and the prep for the exams. I haven’t read a chapter in weeks. Nobody’s called me on the issue, nobody’s found the book and exclaimed, “Holy Lord, there are a lot of swear words in here!”

But I’ve been thinking about it, in bursts, at length. And I’m in a quandary. The quick skinny on what has happened in my class is this: I had a novel study planned for my grade eights of a fine enough book – Freak the Mighty -and when it came time to start it, the class rebelled.

I liked it that they rebelled: it showed a lot of growth for them as a class and as young teenagers. They were articulate about not wanting to read Freak, and although I did challenge them clearly and frequently not to judge a book unread, I could see roughly where they were coming from. Most of them did not care: most of them would have read it and been mildly bored at best. But a few of them reacted to the shortness of the book, and its large font size, and probably its odd protagonists. It really reads like a grade 6 book – a fine grade 6 book.

But I like group processes, and like helping healthy dynamics flourish. So when the group came together (as a whole, to a student: there are only 8 kids in the class, so this kind of consensus is possible) my inclination was to respect it. And they suggested this book of Ethan’s, called I Love You, Beth Cooper. Mostly because it was around, but also because it is slightly racy, and has a great comics style cover, and concerns teens and their drive to date.

The main character’s a geek who, during his valedictorian graduation speech, declares his love for the head cheerleader, to whom he has never spoken. The whole book takes place in one night, the night of graduation – like similar stories of high school. The geek is beaten up by the cheerleader’s boyfriend, gets to know the cheerleader, has some adventures, and learns a bit about himself. It’s a simple book, a funny book, in the same ballpark as American Pie, the movie. (Apparently it was originally intended to be a movie, and was published as a book when the author couldn’t sell the script.) It works as a book, in a strange way, largely because the author’s a good writer.

But. The book is also extremely racy. It has a lot of swearing in it:  a lot. It has sexual content – light, teen movie sexual content. And the violence in it is so clearly the violence of television – today’s television. Family Guy television. It’s cartoonish, slapstick, but gross and vaguely menacing.

Initially I saw this as a cool challenge: a good opportunity to teach time-and-place lessons about how to use expletive language, a good chance to discuss swearing, and certainly a good chance to hook these students, who do not read for fun (not the majority of them, anyway), on books, the same way Breakfast of Champions had hooked me when I was 16. (My students are 14, but that is much more like 16 now.)

I talked to the class about the responsibilities they’d have if we were to read the book. I talked about the difference between finding something funny and laughing, and going crazy. I asked them to rise to the occasion, and to a kid, they did. We have a good relationship, this class and I, and have good boundaries and good talks about boundaries. You have to as a grade eight teacher: you need them to be able to talk to you, and at the same time, you need to be able to teach them how to fit into society, so you’re always navigating and correcting their experiments with language and … I hesitate to say it, but I guess the word is civility.

I wrote to all of their parents, to inform them of the change in reading materials, and to check whether it was kosher to request they buy another book. I let them know that it was similar to American Pie, and I explained my reasons for agreeing to the text. I myself had to order one, and found it online for a good cheap price, and offered to order multiples for anyone who couldn’t get out to a bookstore (or didn’t want to go). I got responses from all the parents except one, and that student assured me his parents were going to take him to get one asap.

We read a couple of chapters. The kids love it. They can’t wait to read more. The book is really funnily written, in a very teenagery way. We analysed the pacing of jokes, and we discussed the huge amount of new vocabulary and what it all meant (I’m not talking curse words: the vocabulary in the book is very precise and challenging; it’s a part of the humour).

Then we stopped for exams, and during that time I posted here about teaching it. You can read that here. Larry Doyle, the author, wrote to offer his thoughts and support, and defended the heavy swear-count by saying he’d demanded it be marketed as an adult book. That was the first thing that made me really worry, incidentally. But in an excited way. Like, “I am so dang daring and up-to-date!”

In a better world – the world I’m pushing to have built – I really COULD read this book with them and it’d be fine. There are parts that would be embarrassing for me, and I likely would have done some censoring of my own: “I’m not reading that out loud to a class of teenagers.” It WOULD have been interesting.

BUT.

Today I had that class for the first time since exams, and I took what I thought were solid precautions. I discussed the issue with them – that the book had way too many swear words for a school book, and that there were community standards we had to fit in with. I suggested we put stickers over one particularly indefensible page, with really grotesque language in large letters, to indicate to anyone who might ask that we were aware of the controversial nature of our experiment. The kids took it well, we had a good discussion about it.

But. I was lying in bed – I have an ear infection – after work today, and I started weighing the arguments, and considering the arguments, for and against reading Beth Cooper. And in a harsh blast of clarity I realized in capital letters: This Will Not Fly. I had about six heart attacks about possibly losing my job, about destroying the momentum of the class, about having to explain to my boss what had happened… I had a two hour talk with the Info Pusher, and then settled into the new reality.

I have to go in tomorrow, gather the books, and let the kids know that we can’t read the book together. I have to have a letter ready to give to their parents explaining the sudden second change of course. I have to let the class fume and rant for a week – maybe I’ll get them to write about why I suck – and then I have to dash right into Spirited Away, a really fun film study. After that I guess we’ll read Freak the Mighty - again, I do not impugn it intentionally,  it’s a great book. And I’ll move on, a little … I want to say wiser, but I don’t know if that’s the word. I don’t think it is.

What a thing. If I’d just stayed the course it’d all have been just fine. Now I could get blasted by anyone with a chip on their shoulder. Live and learn. My apologies to the class, to the book, and to the author.

Twitter… and Larry Doyle pt 2

I’ve just made the move into Twitter, a move I never would have made without the encouragement of the Info Pusher – my special ladyfriend who feeds me all the good links I share here, and really understands and loves the internet.

She keeps on top of the way the internet is used, and recently got into Twitter, for which I made fun of her. Twitter’s a thingamajig where you log your thoughts or whatever all day in installments of 144 letters or so 140 characters. Which sounds silly to me, but I trust her, she’s really smart.

And tonight, while I was planning a course I have to have ready for Monday, and struggling to choose a novel that isn’t an old standby and fits some certain criteria, she quipped that if I were on Twitter and had a bunch of teachers in my “community” or whatever, I could poll them. Which was definitely intriguing and attractive.

Also, a lot of what I think about in terms of Diff Fish and my teaching career is stuff that could fit in 144 words 140 characters and probably never become an article or even a post.

So I’m giving it a shot. I don’t see getting hooked on it, but it might be interesting, and I have been wrong before. I guess there’s an application that allows “tweets” (I swear to god that’s what Twitter posts are called but f— it) to be seen in the sidebar of a blog, which I’ll get because it’s all one thing.

Here’s something I guess I’d tweet: I posted about teaching I Love You Beth Cooper to my grade 8s, and the author Larry Doyle wrote me concerning it, interested. Thank you sir, I will certainly let you know how it’s going, here and on Twitter. They really love your book, btw. They request that we read, and anytime I do they become attentive and quiet, and they’re never quiet. They laugh a lot and then hush to hear the next bit. And they like the challenge of the vocabulary, to boot.

An Interesting English Class

I have been teaching English this year to grades 7 and 8 students, and enjoying it. Since I didn’t have much planning time I had to rely on some of my favourite old chestnuts: Star Wars as an intro unit and Fiddler on the Roof and Spirited Away as film studies. For novels, though, I had to teach what the school already bought back from last year’s students (in true school style, I was actually told I could teach whatever novels I wanted, as long as I had the list in within the hour) – so my 8 course’s novel had to be Freak The Mighty, by Rodman Philbrick. It’s a good novel, good story, nice ideas, but if I’d had time I’d have chosen something more suited to 8th grade sensibilities (navel gazey, relationship focussed, funny). Freak’s a better book for grade 7, or maybe 6.

But whatever, you do what you can. The rest of my 8 course was a good plan, and when my class groaned over Freak, I cautioned them to relax, that it was a good book, don’t be resistant for no reason. My class, by the way, is tiny and wonderful. I have 9 guys – no girls, sadly – who are all extremely talkative and excitable and into each other. They’re hard to guide sometimes, as they have a powerful collective will, but their energy is fantastic and I look forward to second period every day.

I was surprised, however, when their groaning about Freak continued consistently; the book was bought already, there was material ready (sheets of questions, project ideas, etc), and most importantly, one doesn’t ditch a novel usually; one usually just tries hard to barrel through and make the unit a positive one. But I was faced with a wall of kids who were all calling me on this – pointing out to me that reading a book they wanted would be more fun, get them more involved, be less rankist.

In the middle of one such conversation – very civil, mind you, and serious – a student pulled out a book from his desk and asked why we couldn’t read it instead. He’d lent it to me to read the previous week, and I had: it is called I Love You, Beth Cooper, and is a  comedy, a novel along the lines of films like American Pie or SuperBad: the story of prom night, concerned with social hierarchies and sex and friendship, and pretty damn dirty for a school book. Swear words are not avoided, sex is not dodged or implied, even the violence is huge and cartoonish. Which is to say, the book resembles the art the kids are consuming on the  weekends.  The rest of the class appauded the idea, and chose collectively to petition for Beth Cooper, eloquently.

Well, I’m up for a challenge, and I think school should be relative, and I work in a school that gives me a lot of leeway, and I have good relationships with the parents of these kids. So I wrote parents and asked them to register objections asap, and otherwise to purchase this book in the interest of empowering the kids and getting them engaged in literature as an art and not a chore. They went for it, and last week we started reading a book out loud in class that  makes me both nervous with the potential for controversy, and excited for a powerful teaching experiment.

I have already had to read the word Fuck out loud to a group of eighth graders. THAT takes some prep, and sounds like this:

Denis turned the corner to see his arch nemesis winding up a punch. Holy - …Now, listen guys. We’ve agreed to read a book that has swearing in it, but you’re going to have to also agree to be mature about it. The words might be funny – they’re meant to be funny – but funny means you can laugh. It doesn’t give you permission to scream and fall out of your seats. If they language is that distracting, we’ll have to skip those words. OR go back to Freak the Mighty. I’m counting on you to be mature about this stuff. Okay? Alright. … turned the corner to see his arch nemesis winding up a punch. Holy Fuck! he exclaimed…

Whoooo! It’s a tightrope to walk, for real. I really do fear the moment somebody comes in to complain. But the kids really dig the book, and they really are rising to the occasion. We have lots of small conversations about the contextual use of language – where’s it okay to swear, where’s it not? Where is it alright to engage in funny conversations about sex? Not on a crowded bus; not around little kids or old people; by the basketball net’s fine. Why do people swear? Why are certain words taboo? What are the rules, and why?

I know very well that many people will consider this double-plus ungood. For god’s sake, there was a program on Goldhawk Live the other night about banning a Margaret ATWOOD book in schools. The Golden Compass got people crazy.

But really, I think somebody’s got to push this boundary. Somebody’s got to bridge the gap between the popular culture that IS – where eighth graders know what fecophilia is (thank you, South Park), where eighth graders have seen a dude make love to a pie (thanks, American Pie), where they come to sex ed classes with questions about what “felching” is (thank you, internet) – and the popular culture teachers are willing to discuss in school.

Adults, in my humble opinion, have a duty to help kids navigate their world. We have a duty to listen to find out what that world contains, how it appears to them. I’m supposing that maybe, in the best case scenario, education might be able to be done in a 360 degree fashion rather than the uni-directional style that keeps classrooms 25 years behind the times.

I’ll update you on how this is going. I doubt it’ll be smooth, but it’s already more interesting than most units.

How do you pick a good teacher?

Thanks to the Info Pusher for this link to Boing Boing, and then to the New Yorker…

Malcolm Gladwell’s article about the problem of evaluating candidate teachers is a great read (although the  parallel-with-football thing meant a fair bit of intermittent eye-glazing on my end). The critique of the teachers on video is more riveting, and the deficits in our current grade-based entrance-to-the-field requirements and with the job interview process are made superclear.

And of course, as any look of any depth into education will reveal, much of the problem lays with our priorities: “What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?”

Go read it. Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker.

Kids these days

Wow, it’s a long time since I posted anything at all here, and even longer since I wrote something myself. Loving being back at teaching, digging learning about the administrative side of a school, but writing nothing because I’m working so much.

Here’s a link shared with me by the Info Pusher to a Boing Boing post about a study about what kids do on the internet. (That sort of sentence can only exist on a blog.) I’ve only read the study’s summary so far, but it seems pretty interesting.

Someday I’ll write things again. Someday.

What are we teaching, when – and why?

The markets are crash-crash-crashing as I type, and who knows whether our civilization will make it, but if it does, here is a piece of advice for future generations: if someone hands you a document to read that is obfuscated but pretending to be clear, kill that person and burn that document. Don’t allow the plague of bureaucraspeak into your new culture! Here’s what happens if you allow people to write and write more and more and say less and less: [link to the 60 minutes clip about the financial crisis]

The document in that clip is hundreds of pages long and written in such a way that not even a lawyer would want to read it, and it contains the secret to what’s gone wrong! If anyone could have read it, that might have allowed people to call a Time Out before this all got so f—ed up. Writing it in an unreadable way allowed a ton of people to cheat and steal and weasel their ways around the guidelines for healthy business – so it did its job, to everyone else’s misfortune.

What does this have to do with teaching? Lots. Bureaucracies can’t write, but it is a massive bureaucracy which comes up with the curricula that dictate what is taught in school: here’s a quick snapshot of how curricula read – this one is Ontario’s explanation of what is to be taught and assessed in Grade 8 Language Arts, Reading.

——

GRADE 8 | READING

OVERALL EXPECTATIONS

By the end of Grade 8, students will:

1. read and demonstrate an understanding of a variety of literary, graphic, and informational texts, using a range of strategies to construct meaning;

2. recognize a variety of text forms, text features, and stylistic elements and demonstrate understanding of how they help communicate meaning;

3. use knowledge of words and cueing systems to read fluently;

4. reflect on and identify their strengths as readers, areas for improvement, and the strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading.

SPECIFIC EXPECTATIONS

1. Reading for Meaning

By the end of Grade 8, students will:

Variety of Texts

1.1 read a wide variety of increasingly complex or difficult texts from diverse cultures, including literary texts (e.g., short stories, novels, poetry, essays, science fiction, memoirs, scripts, satire), graphic texts (e.g., graphs and graphic organizers, charts and tables, surveys, maps, spreadsheets), and informational texts (e.g., essays, Canadian and global print and online sources, electronic texts, textbooks, dictionaries, thesauri, websites, transcripts)

Purpose

1.2 identify a variety of purposes for reading and choose increasingly complex or difficult reading materials appropriate for those purposes (e.g., several online or print articles by the same author to identify consistency or change in the author ’s point of view; websites for information on a topic from different sources; stories from different cultures, including Aboriginal cultures, to compare treatments of similar themes)

Comprehension Strategies

1.3 identify a variety of reading comprehension strategies and use them appropriately before, during, and after reading to understand increasingly complex

or difficult texts (e.g., activate prior knowledge on a topic through dialogue or by developing mind maps; use visualization and comparisons with images in other texts or media to clarify impressions of characters, scenes, or concepts; ask questions to monitor and clarify understand ing; identify important ideas; synthesize ideas to broaden understanding)

Demonstrating Understanding

1.4 demonstrate understanding of increasingly complex and difficult texts by summarizing important ideas and explaining how the details support the main idea (e.g., theme or argument and supporting evidence in reviews, essays, plays, poems; key information and related data in public documents, online and print reference articles, manuals, surveys, graphs, tables and charts, websites, transcripts)

Making Inferences/Interpreting Texts

1.5 develop and explain interpretations of increasingly complex or difficult texts using stated and implied ideas from the texts to support their interpretations

Teacher prompt: “How do the stated and unstated messages in the dialogue between these characters complicate the plot of this story? What details in the dialogue support your interpretation?”

Extending Understanding

1.6 extend understanding of texts, including increasingly complex or difficult texts, by connecting the ideas in them to their own knowledge, experience, and insights, to other texts, and to the world around them

Teacher prompts: “Do you have knowledge or experiences that affect the way you interpret the author’s message?” “How does the author’s approach differ from the approach in other articles you have read on this topic?”

Analysing Texts

1.7 analyse a variety of texts, including complex or difficult texts, and explain how the various elements in them contribute to meaning and influence the reader’s reaction (e.g., narrative: rising action holds attention and creates suspense; report on an investigation: the opening paragraph tells the reader about the purpose, goals, and audience for the report)

Teacher prompts: “Why does the author spend so much time describing the preparation for the race?” “How does the information in the opening paragraph help you understand the rest of the report?”

Responding to and Evaluating Texts

1.8 evaluate the effectiveness of a text based on evidence taken from that text

Teacher prompts: “Were the instructions for doing the experiment clear and easy to follow? Why or why not?” “Were the author’s arguments well supported by credible evidence? Did the arguments make sense? Why, or why not?” “Identify three uses of imagery in the poem and explain how they help the poet communicate the theme effectively.”

Point of View

1.9 identify the point of view presented in texts, including increasingly complex or difficult texts; give evidence of any biases they may contain; and suggest other possible perspectives (e.g., determine whether an environmental argument should include an economic perspective or an economic argument should include an environmental perspective)

Teacher prompt: “How will the addition of another perspective affect the impact or appeal of the text?”

2. Understanding Form and Style

By the end of Grade 8, students will:

Text Forms

2.1 analyse a variety of text forms and explain how their particular characteristics help communicate meaning, with a focus on literary texts such as a memoir (e.g., the author’s personality and/or special experience of the subject are an important part of the narrative, even if the author is not the subject of the narrative), graphic texts such as a map (e.g., the different colours for land and water help readers understand what geographical features they are looking at), and informational texts such as a magazine article (e.g., sidebars allow minor themes to be developed in detail without interrupting the main narrative)

Text Patterns

2.2 analyse increasingly complex texts to identify different types of organizational patterns used in them and explain how the patterns help communicate meaning (e.g., a “before-and-after”comparison in an advertisement; time order and cause and effect in an online magazine or newspaper article)

Text Features

2.3 identify a variety of text features and explain how they help communicate meaning (e.g., tree diagrams, tables, endnotes, and “Works Cited”or “References” lists help readers locate information and understand its context)

Teacher prompt: “What do the types of sources in the ‘References’ list tell you about the author’s research?”

Elements of Style

2.4 identify a range of elements of style – including symbolism, irony, analogy, metaphor, and other rhetorical devices – and explain how they help communicate meaning and enhance the effectiveness of texts (e.g., the use of dramatic irony, in which the audience understands the implications of words or actions better than the characters do themselves, can create humour or a sense of foreboding)

3. Reading With Fluency

By the end of Grade 8, students will:

Reading Familiar Words

3.1 automatically read and understand most words in a wide range of reading contexts (e.g., words from grade-level texts; terminology used in discussions and posted in the classroom; words from shared-, guided-, and independent- reading texts, electronic texts, and resource material used in the curriculum subject areas)

Reading Unfamiliar Words

3.2 predict the meaning of and rapidly solve unfamiliar words using different types of cues, including:

• semantic (meaning) cues (e.g., base words, prefixes, suffixes, phrases, sentences, and visuals that activate existing knowledge of oral and written language);

• syntactic (language structure) cues (e.g., word order and the relationship between words, language patterns, punctuation);

• graphophonic (phonological and graphic) cues (e.g., familiar words within larger words, syllables within larger words, similarities between words with known spelling patterns and unknown words)

Teacher prompt: “Read to the end of the paragraph and see if the context will help you solve the word. Is the word essential to your understanding? If so, reread and see if you can solve the word by…”

Reading Fluently

3.3 read appropriate texts with expression and confidence, adjusting reading strategies and reading rate to match the form and purpose (e.g., orally read to entertain a younger class, using suitable emphasis, intonation, and phrasing)

4. Reflecting on Reading Skills and Strategies

Metacognition

By the end of Grade 8, students will:

4.1 identify the strategies they found most helpful before, during, and after reading and explain, in conversation with the teacher and/or peers or in a reader’s notebook/reflective journal, how they can use these and other strategies to improve as readers

Teacher prompts: “What strategies do you use most consistently to help you understand a new text?” “What types of questions do you ask yourself to help you monitor your reading?” “What ‘fix-up’ strategies do you use when you don’t understand?” “What strategies do you use confidently and effectively?”

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To be clear – this isn’t a terrible curriculum. I think it’s better than the last couple we’ve had in Ontario. But what the fork does it really say? There is information in this document, and there are things that one can implement in class, and points one can aim toward/keep in mind. It certainly doesn’t, however, say anything clearly about what to teach or how to teach it.

There are good things about this: teachers who care to can create really wonderful units and lessons about the subject areas about which they are passionate, and satisfy the curriculum – a great academic freedom. But teachers are rarely passionate or even knowledgeable about everything they teach – grade school teachers trained in literary studies also teach math, geography, history, science, phys ed, etc – and so couldn’t come up with brilliant lessons even if they had time, which they do not.

So where do teachers get the lessons to teach? Three places that I can think of: first, they collect interesting ideas they’ve encountered over the years, and eventually have a roster of favourite lessons in specific areas.

Second, teachers just teach what they themselves learned in that grade. Nowhere is it written that Romeo and Juliet is a text to be studied in grade nine, nor is it dictated anywhere that students must cover one Shakespeare play in each English class. It’s just become a tradition (like the literary Canon in general).

Third, and worst, is that teachers get their courses from textbooks: readers in English, whole course texts in Science, History and Geography. These books are created to comply with and satisfy the curricula of the day – but the curricula are so vague that the “writers” of the textbooks have a lot of free reign over what happens in classrooms across the province. Teachers struggle to “get through the course” when they really are struggling to complete the textbook during the school year or semester.

This is messed up, isn’t it? When did we decide that Pearson would educate our kids? The people writing those books are not grade- or high-school teachers, for the most part: they’re college or university “teachers”, who are generally rotten and very traditional teachers, totally untrained in individualized teaching. The teachers I have met who do participate in writing texts have all been ex-teachers – people who’ve “moved up” into administration or are teaching teachers – and are unconnected to the present-day classroom. And as a matter of course, they write like robots, politicians or lawyers – so they obfuscate when they’re supposed to be illuminating.

The government doesn’t want to spell out specifically what should be taught in every classroom in every grade, because that would seem draconian; but their fear of being clear doesn’t wind up helping.

I’m not sure what the answer to this is, aside from very long-term pipe-dreamy thoughts: it’d be wonderful if teachers were able to teach what they were passionate and articulate about, because I’m pretty sure most of them would be creating their own clear courses. That’d require much more money in the system, so that more passionate and articulate people would choose to teach, so that teachers wouldn’t need to teach things they don’t truly understand, so that teachers would have time to stay current, to stay passionate. And it’d require a path laid out by the curriculum that was both clear and open, which I’m not sure any bureaucracy can create.

I met up with an uncle last week who had overseen the development of a clear curriculum for Alberta back in the eighties – I want to have a look at that, and see what it’s like. I wonder if there are exemplary curricula, and what they’d look like. If I can find anything resembling one, I’ll share it here. If you know of one, let me know.