Writing in my Hand

I am working furiously on my Writing For Change Academy to open this summer when I realized how much Twitter impacts the development of this project and so many others. When I have a question about something I am just as likely to tweet it as post it elsewhere. It is amazing how many articles are posted out there on a daily basis. There are links to blogs I would have never discovered without trolling through Twitter. Bud Hunt is someone I would have never discovered had I not meandered from one tweet to another, and soon i was able to follow the work he is doing across the country that could have a serious impact on the work we will be doing with students and families this summer in the Academy.

The San Diego Area Writing Project is looking closely at how Twitter can enhance both the classroom instruction and professional development. We have a fellow from the project tweet for one week @SDAWP_Fellow, and I had the opportunity to share my classroom with the world of Twitter. It caused me to really re-think the value of Twitter, and I would love your input.

So here is my question, how do you use Twitter? How do you organize your information? How have you used it in the classroom?

Looking forward to hearing from you!

I train at a gym owned by Todd Durkin, called Fitness Quest. I describe Todd as Tony Robbins of the fitness world. His passion for life, his profession and fitness is amazing. He trains world class athletes, NFL players, out of shape teachers like me, kids and seniors. What inspires me about him is his passion. There are mornings that Drew Brees will be across the gym from my group, and the coolest thing of all is that although he obviously is a world class athlete, the gym is set up for everyone to make a difference in their lives. Every person who comes in contact with Todd gets the same true passion and enthusiasm, everyone is challenged to live their best life. Everyone is expected to bring it every day, no excuses. I love that about being there. So what does this have to do with the teaching of writing? Well everything.

I think sometimes we need to bring others into our classroom to inspire our kids. That is why I spend hours in my digital world, to bring voices to my kids that are broader than mine. It is why I continually search to work with others, because teaching writing, well anything as a matter of fact  is truly a team sport. And the inspiration comes from a variety of places. Today, it comes in the form of a video from Todd.

Todd continually posts his quick talks on his Facebook page. Now, before you watch this, be ready for some serious energy, and perhaps a little motion sickness as he is giving this talk while speeding down a ski slope. I am sharing this video clip with my students on Monday.

This is how I teach my kids, to push limits and to continually evaluate what we learn, how we share it, and why it is important. I feel that especially in middle school we need to bring a level of energy that challenges their thinking and inspires them to share their thoughts. I can’t ski, and I am not a professional athlete, but I bring it, every day to my classroom. I try to coach and inspire my students like Todd inspires the athletes and the athlete inside of each one of us. I work to ensure students see themselves as writers, and that their views are valued. But it is important to note that writing is work, and just like an athlete who trains to play, students have to train, stretch and challenge their writing muscles. My job is to set up a space that inspires and challenges, and accepts nothing less than their very best.

I have spent these past two weeks of vacation playing hard and working hard. The blog has been silent because I had to regroup, refocus on what is important. We tend at this time of year to focus only on the CST test. Teachers and students will slip into this crazy do or die mentality all focused on only one measure of student progress. It is a dangerous time for my students, that all or nothing attitude. What we need to do is train daily. Just like an athlete can’t expect to play the big game well without training, my students can’t expect to test for a few days and be done. So this year, I am making a conscious effort to take on this testing season differently. We will be writers first, test takers second. The test is a measure of one part of their learning, and in this edcuational climate, it has become the Super Bowl of assessment. To not acknowledge  and prepare for that fact would be ridiculous. But even more ridiculous would be to assume that the purpose of becoming a better writer begins and ends with that one assessment. So these last nine weeks, we will bring it! Get ready room 207, spring training has begun!

Friday was a particularly unusual day in  room 207, one that made me a proud mom, and an observer of my own students. How often do you get a chance to sit back in your classroom and truly observe your students? I had that opportunity this past Friday and I learned a lot by “simply watching” my kids.

My daughter has been in town this past week and is studying to be a teacher at Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo. Her passion is the tiny ones, those kindergartners and first grade souls, even preschool. She has spent most of her time these past few years teaching the small ones, until this year. This fall she got a job teaching Sunday school at the local temple. She was sure they would give her kindergarten, maybe first or second. Those of us teaching awhile know that best laid plans most likely change, she was charged with fifth graders. It was a rough first month, trying to figure out those bigger bodies, but figure it out she has. I know I am her mom, and biased, but I also know good teachers when I see them, and our profession is about to get a wonderful addition.

My daughter is extremely creative. Me? I can draw stick man, stick man in shorts, and stick man in a skirt, and that is about it. Alicia, she has talent, and more importantly the skill to bring that creativity to her students. We have been studying the holocaust, in particular lately the Children of Terezin, a concentration camp in Poland where children, artists and musicians were imprisoned.  We are participating in The Butterfly Project, a project sponsored by a Holocaust Museum in Texas where they are collecting butterfly artwork to represent the children who died during the Holocaust. You can check out our work  and links to more information about the project at http://schools.cajonvalley.net/webpages/jilko/index.cfm?subpage=812155 .

Now since I am extremely limited in my artistic ability, I asked my daughter to come in and teach on Friday. Since we both saw the Hunger Games at midnight the night before, it was even more entertaining to watch my daughter work with seventh and eighth graders with about 3.5 hours of sleep. Thank goodness for Starbucks! But something amazing happened that I didn’t expect, I got a chance to view my students in a whole new light.

First of all, they got to use art supplies. I can count on one hand the number of times we have used crayons this year, and we have never taken out the watercolors. With all my focus on digital work, I forgot to value other parts of the student mind, another outlet for creativity. The students were charged with creating a butterfly that represents a child poet from the camp. Students highlighted phrases and words that spoke to them. I watched in wonder as students who sat apathetically in class struggle to choose just the right word or phrase. When asked to pick two colors as a base to represent the poem, they were thoughtful. One student chose blues and greens for the top of the butterfly, to represent freedom, peace. They then wanted to take the bottom of the butterfly and make it grays, and then to black to signify the darkness of the camps. I was amazed.

I got to sit and watch my students, really look at them and listen to conversations, not as the director of the conversation, or even a facilitator, but as an observer. I think we all need time to do this. Now comes the challenge to do this without the aid of another person in the room. How can we step out of ourselves, our role as timekeeper and instructor, and really listen to the voices, to what they say and sometimes what they don’t?

We will finish the butterflies on Monday, then build our bulletin board, one board being the butterfly garden, the other a board all about the Terezin camp. One in color, one in black and white. I had this plan in my head, how I wanted these boards to look. I have since revised my ideas, and I don’t know how the final project will look, as I have decided to continue this creative work, and let the students take the lead. We have a community showcase this Wednesday. In 72 hours we need to have our space created, and I have faith that we will. I will post pictures on the blog this week.

A well respected colleague Kevin Hodgeson at   http://dogtrax.edublogs.org/ has this byline on his blog

“If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn.” Charlie Parker.

Kevin is one of the most prolific bloggers I know, and is willing to share so many cool things. I would love to have a student in his class, or be that teacher down the hall that gets to work with him on a daily basis. But I digress. My point is, we all need that inspiration to keep on growing. We need that extra push from a friend, a colleague, a spouse, or a student to keep us moving in positive directions. This month I am taking on another new challenge to keep my digital life moving forward. I am creating literary response blogs. I have been touting all year that my students deserve to have their own emails, that we need to respond and create blogs where we can communicate with each other. At the advice of my dear friend Holly, “for once Ilko, start small.” So I picked my most challenging class, my 8th graders. I call them the Breakfast Club. I am sharing this video clip with them tomorrow, so they can get a feeling why I selected the name. They truly believe it is because I have them for homeroom period 1 and then again 2, but in reality, they remind me of this classic movie.
Trying to explain the 80′s to eighth graders is no easy task, it is just sometimes fun to pull up music they believe to be new again and show it as a classic.

The message of this movie is that kids often feel labeled and misunderstood. Tomorrow we are doing another anti-bullying day in our district. The conversation of our blog tomorrow will be about the following video clip, “Who do you think you are?” In other words, how do you define yourself, and how do the definitions of others define how you behave both on campus and outside of the school day?

Oh, and the literary tie in? Don’t worry dear readers, I know full well the number of days left til testing, and more importantly, the number of instructional days (66) I have until I let my Breakfast Club walk off our campus and off into high school. We are reading the Hunger Games, and we will relate this entire idea of image and mind games and teen survival to that novel, and write an essay of course and create our own digital response. Busy times in the near future, will keep you posted!