When I work with small groups of teachers and with students on to one or two I find that my iphone gets put to good service. As a Reading Consultant in a high school I am involved in a wide variety of learning opportunities throughout the day and week. Last week I used the following apps:
❑ Google Voice (web app): Because I have a “virtual” phone at school and rarely have time to collect messages from someone else’s real phone my voicemail message gives folks my Google Voice number. This way they can leave a message that is forwarded to my iphone (that I am not allowed to use during the day), send an SMS message with Google’s transcription and send an email. It has been very useful and sometimes humorous as the transcriptions can be tricky. Apple will not allow Google (or anyone else) to provide an app for this so the web app is the best alternative.
❑ finarXscan: After facilitating a meeting with a group of teachers I used this great program to get notes and agendas back to participants. Take a picture with the iphone, the program processes the picture with some choices for color and quality then turns the picture into a pdf. Multipage PDF’s can be created and emailed. Copies can also be stored on MobileMe or Dropbox. A great time and paper saver.
❑ Wurdle: This is essentially an electronic version of Boggle. Students enjoy using it and like to keep track of their scores. With no data to back me up here, I do think it helps students with word recognition and building fluency. And if these are just fantasies of mine, then I do know that playing with words makes struggling readers and spellers more confident. A nice touch to the game is the provision of a list of all the words one could have spelled, it highlights where the words are on the “cubes” and provides a definition of many of those words.
❑ Scrabble: see above-it all applies.
❑ Dictionary (.com): While learning to use the print dictionary is important, for many of my students the efficiency and suggested word lists make finding definitions much more appealing.
❑ Tweetie: I have been following #edchat (Tweets) and finding considerable helpful insights about teaching and literacy from some prolific Twitterers.
That is it for this entry. Hope you find some of these helpful.
February 15, 2010
Tech Stuff: Recently used Apps
Thoughts (having just settled) on Divorce
I would guess that I am not unusual, at least in this particular area, in my thinking and rethinking my recent divorce. So, because it is still has some emotional impact for me, I will not venture into the discussions about law, gender and fairness. My recent thinking comes from a question that struck me the other day: What are the real economic and social impacts in our society on the high rate of divorce. The considerations that came to mind were these:
- While we know that divorce can make the lives of our kids more stressful and emotionally challenging, do we know what the short and long term impacts are? Do we know what the educational, psychological and physiological impacts are over the span of their lives?
- Do we know what the true economic impacts are on families, schools, mental health, and other related entities?
- Does divorce often mean that both parents are working more? If they are does divorce mean that children get less parental attention?
- Does divorce mean that we need twice the housing for the annual 2.28 million (Wolfram alpha) divorces?
- What is the impact of divorce on the economy? (The average cost of a divorce some put at $20,000 which I assume are primarily legal fees which multiplied the 2.28 million divorces per year comes out to $45,600,000,000. The average length of time to settle ranges, according to internet sources from 9 to 12 months with a not unusual maximum of 2 years.)
No matter what perspective one takes on divorce, it is a costly phenomenon in our society and most industrialize societies today. From where I sit as a teacher about half of whose students come from non-intact families and as a parent new to the non-intact family scene the cost on our youth looms large.
November 15, 2009
November 14, 2009
September 6, 2009
Health Reform, up Close and Personal
It is 8:30pm and I am sitting in the dark beside my youngest brother’s bedside listening to his labored breathing against the background of the hissing of his oxygen mask, his intravenous pump, the whir of the air circulation, and the low background of the hospital ward. The room is lit though without lights because of the presence of myriad small switches and buttons providing an eery glow. It is my turn and I am happy to be here in Netherland that comes before death.
While we are in the midst of a deep, sad and poignant process, one that cuts sharply at the very core of his beautiful family of choice and the four brothers that are now his family of origin we also feel grateful for a loving and supportive community and generous and caring staff who have taken great pains to see to it that all of us have what we need on this amazing watch. I will never see hospitals and their people in the same light though I am pretty sure this is not the norm.
Postscript: 2/15/10 Returning to my blog, I realize that this entry, mostly typed at my brother’s bedside on my iphone while he slept fitfully, was never completed. I guess I have been avoiding bringing up the tender and sad follow-up to this weekend. Peter was stabilized a few days later and arrangements were made, with his involvement now that his mind was working, for Hospice which of course means that the preparations are for death. In this time he had a return to the generous, thoughtful man he was and showed interest in his kids,his wife, his brothers who were taking turns by his bedside, his gardens, his cats and his many friends. We were with him when he died and his whole community turned out at his memorial celebration (actually more like a memorial day) which was poignant, funny, tearful and joyous. That is the end of this entry.
June 1, 2009
My article on boys and literacy
Literacy in School: What About the Boys?
David A. Marsters, M.Ed
In my position as Learning Center Coordinator/Reading Specialist I made a stunning discovery based on some hard data. But first you need to know some of what we do in the Learning Center. All day we have students, some assigned and some drop-in’s, with a diverse set of needs who are with us to get support on completing assignments, taking tests, or addressing specific skill deficits. So as I greet students, ask what they need, and how I can help there is one uniform response. You have probably guessed it by now. The boys, who, based on the research, should have the greatest deficits, universally disclaim any need for assistance. Quite to the contrary, most of the girls eagerly accept assistance. It took me a while to understand the impact of my approach with the boys and to find my way around their initial refusal. In the interim, as I caught on to the pattern, I started joking with the boys about it. Their response was often a wry smile of acknowledgement that there was no way they were going to admit they needed help. As we smile at each other, we each know that we have found some common ground. Thus another great lesson in the power of the language we use with students in the classroom.
This experience captures the essence of what I have learned about boys and literacy and especially boys who struggle with literacy. First, much of their approach to learning anything literacy related is impacted by their evolving sense of their maleness. Secondly, the desire for independence that burns in their souls makes it difficult for them to admit to the need for help especially in a mixed gender environment. Third, the language we use with boys must connect with the language in which they are fluent. This is the language of humor, of action, of respectful gibes and counter gibes. This is part of the process of negotiating our common understandings. When considering the issues related to boys and literacy, each of these issues must be considered. Of course, their history with literacy must also be part of the considerations. Before going into these issues in greater depth, I would like to take a quick look at what the data says about boys as learners in school.
In this article, I am referencing academic learning or learning in school to differentiate it from outside of school learning. There is no evidence that I have seen that these same boys who do not read are not fully capable of quite sophisticated learning in other settings. My favorite example happened the day some very well-educated and sophisticated New York friends drove off the road to Lincoln and came to rest at a very precarious angle in deep snow on a steep bank. Fortunately no one was injured. When asked who could extract the car, I recommended a wonderful young man I knew well who had dropped out of school. When he showed up with his wrecker, he went about hooking cables and positioning his truck with the required levels of bravado. When he started the towing the owners blanched, as it looked entirely possible that the car would roll and they turned to me with that “Can we trust him?” look. My response was that this man knows more about the physics of getting this car safely up the bank than any of us so leave him to his work. Indeed, the car came out smoothly; a clear demonstration of some pretty sophisticated notions of force, vectors energy, and gravity.)
There is an ever-growing body of research and literature about boys and academic learning We are learning more about boys and their specific needs in schools and in our culture. Read Garbarino’s Lost Boys , Pollack’s Real Boys or a host of other author and a sense of urgency about the condition of boys and masculinity in our culture today becomes quite evident. These authors and others speak with some consistency about education in the lives of boys and its impact on them. The literature is clear about the developmental differences between boys and girls:
• Through elementary and middle school, boys develop at a slower rate than girls.
• The average boy in the classroom is more active than three-fourths of the girls. (Kindlon & Thompson)
• The early teaching of reading is developmentally appropriate for girls but not for most boys. (Kindlon & Thompson)
The data about learning disabilities, special education, discipline problems, and ADHD are quite compelling though they vary some from source to source. In the following, I rely heavily on Kindlon & Thompson’s Raising Cain (1999), Gurian’s A Fine Young Man (1998) and Sebastian Kraemer’s “The Fragile Male” (2000).
• More boys are diagnosed with ADD and ADHD than girls at a ratio of 4 to 1.
• 60 to 80 percent of diagnosed learning disabilities are in boys.
• Girls out perform boys by as much as 10 percent in grades in England.
• Two thirds more boys than girls have been identified for special education.
• Some studies have found girls out performing boys at the fourth grade level in reading by 10 points. (Taylor)
• Grade retention (“staying back” is almost purely a male phenomenon.
• 90 percent of discipline problems in school are male.
• Most suspensions and expulsions involve males.
Looking beyond education, there is substantial evidence that boys are at great risk in our culture. Looking at dropout rates, criminal activity, and school violence perpetrators fills out the broad picture a little more. Indeed, while many of those writing about boys extend their concern for the health of boys (and masculinity) beyond school and learning. Our focus here is learning and specifically literacy.
Boys’ evolving sense of their own maleness and individuality seems, based on both the literature as well as my own experience, to be in conflict with their early introduction to literacy. There is, what some have called, a “feminization” of instruction in the elementary grades. Boys have little access to male teachers or other male role models. Learning tasks are generally geared to the girl’s development, not boys. Activities like extended seat time, series or sequences of oral instructions, designated reading materials, and fine motor activities are difficult or even foreign for many boys. In addition much of the language of instruction is oriented towards feelings and emotions. There is strong evidence that boys not only lack the facility for the language of feelings (a condition which even has the name alexthymia [Kraemer]). Boys also find it unmasculine to engage in discussions of feeling or emotions. Taylor also notes that boys are drawn to different texts than girls and often read for different purposes.
There are steps we can take to engage boys in literacy activities (with thanks to Taylor).
• Men can take every opportunity to model reading. Boys need to see that men read and read for many different reasons.
• Provide a variety of texts for boys to read with strong non-fiction choices.
• Give boys a sense of agency around their reading by providing them with choices of texts.
• Provide boys with opportunities to read and discuss texts with other boys.
• To get boys engaged with texts, provide opportunities for them to read about issues or problems about which they have some feeling. This allows for “reading for inquiry [which] is different than reading for comprehension” (Taylor).
• Provide for more physical activity related to literacy. Acting out a plot or character, creating charts and posters, or utilizing technology may encourage engagement.
• Maximize opportunities for boys to demonstrate competence by drawing upon the information they know and their problem-solving skills.
• Teachers need to build relationships with boys that center on boys’ interests and expertise. (As a non-hunter, I never expected I would spend so much of my fall listening to detailed hunting stories.)
• Under the bravado of the “boy code” more often than not lies a high level of sensitivity. Sometimes we need to see boys through dual lenses. The bravado is paired with the fear of humiliation.
• On the other hand, we must resist the “boys will be boys” or the “little prince” syndromes. Pollard found that responses to boys are often at either end of the spectrum of responses-we either demonize them or let them off as “boys will be boys.” Neither response is appropriate nor helpful for boys. (One particularly astute young man saw some of the research on my desk and quipped humorously “Now you are going after boys will be boys? Not fair.” )
This morning I was explaining to a young man in the Learning Center about this article. We were discussing what works for him when he is assigned reading. He answered that he reads books that are about things he knows and he will reread those books many times. One can surmise that the rereading provides a strong sense of competence and expertise for this young man, a feeling not often experienced by him in school. He then summarized beautifully when he said “doing it and reading it are two different things.” What I hear in this statement and what I hear often from boys is request for a connection between the reading and the doing.
Addressing an issue like this invites generalizations and stereotyping. Clearly there are boys who like to read and are comfortable as readers in school. Yet it is also clear that adolescent boys as a group would benefit from rethinking our classroom approaches to literacy. I offer these suggestions with the full knowledge that other teachers have more strategies for addressing the gaps in male literacy and that many teachers have put in great time, energy, and expertise to assure that all their students have literacy skills.
April 25, 2009
March 15, 2009
Buddhist Wisdom
He who experiences the unity of life sees his own Self in all beings,
and all beings in his own Self, and looks on everything with an
impartial eye.
December 10, 2008
The Changes Needed in High School Part One
I am of the age where I can look back and see (but try not to say) something like “the more things change the more they are the same” which is infinitely better than saying “Why the last time I saw you, you were……(you fill in the gap). I will soon be 63 and have spent 98% of my adult life working with adolescents and most, but not all, of that work was done in a school. I have a love-hate relationship with our schools. I love the devotion, creativity, commitment and intellect that many teachers bring to their sometimes exhausting, sometimes exhilarating work. Most teachers I have worked with as a peer, as a school board member, as a consultant, as an administrator, as a reading consultant really like their students and earnestly attempt to support student learning in whatever ways they are able or permitted. I admire and honor the generosity of taxpayers and businesses who respond as best they can to the many requests for resources that they get. Having been one, I empathize with the sacrifices administrators make so that they can attend to the endless list of the trivial and profane that populates their every hour. Every day I am in school I see how much there is to love.
But I said love-hate so here is the other part of that picture and it is not really hate. We (the big we) have a awya of embracing innovation and change that seems to be short-sighted and often mundane. Not that there has not been great value in many of those changes but they seem to fail to embrace the magnitude of change in our culture, our communities, our families, our information access, our technology and, most importantly, our students. I am as guilty, if that is even the right word, of this as anyone. At times in my career I have led the change, spouted the data, relied on the research usually ending up with just a twist in the road rather than a u-turn. So when I write about schools it is not from that ”so 90’s“ trash-the-schools talk that some business leaders started and their firestorm then pulled in the press and finally parents. Rightly or wrongly this jihad against American schools was, in my view, a major element in building the unreasonable sense of entitlement that we now encounter from many students and their parents. (While entitlement is the subject of another piece I am working on I maintain that the unrealistic sense of entitlement substantially contributes to the cultural issues we face.) Of course this is a broad generalization as generally speaking polls show parents very supportive of their local schools and many businesses have devoted many resources to support improved learning outcomes for students. But still we have many challenges and sometimes it seems that ”the more we have changed the more we are the same.“
At the risk of getting into a conceptual arena for which I am poorly prepared, I want to expose an essential element of my thinking about school change. Many have postulated about cultural shifts and the history of western culture. Some theorize that we are either entering a third major shift in Western culture. C. Sidney Burrus and Richard Baraniuk identify the three major shifts as aligned with the development of writing and literacy, the second the invention of the printing press and the third and current ”paradigm shift“ is our shift to an electronic, digital culture. Some would argue that there are more complex ways of looking at cultural change such as Dr. Andreas Eppink in The Modern Globalizing Culture Part III: Major Cultural Shifts in Western History . Dr. Eppink identifies ten ”hidden goals“ which are the product of culture and thus play a part in cultural change depending on what is valued. I have heard the argument that we are in the third major cultural shift in western civilization in other places. My own bias is that there is validity and that we are indeed in the midst of major cultural shifts. Further the extraordinary events in the US over the last six months seem to me to be signs of cultural shifts. The viability of a presidential primary campaign being waged between a black man and a woman is a huge sign of some shift. The election of a black man to be our next president is an amazing shift. Unfortunately Obama inherits a third sign of a major shift with the global economic collapse. I imagine that the only way we can restore some global economic security is to rethink our economic structures and realign economic priorities. While I am neither an economist nor a philosopher, I choose to see our western culture on the precipice of another major shift and that the shifting economies and political realities are creating a new context in which we need to investigate how the structure and delivery of essential learning will best meet the needs of our culture and our students.
So why should high schools change?
- Daniel Pink in A Whole New Mind argues convincingly that our culture is demanding a change from Left Directed Thinking to Right Directed Thinking which means the literal, sequential, functional and analytic kind of thinking” that has dominated is being replaced by ”simultaneous, metaphorical, aesthetic, contextual and synthetic“ thinking. (26)If we are to prepare students for this new thinking then we must restructure and revise our curriculum.
- “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” – Clay Shirky We have yet to adjust to the incredible amount of information that our kids are bombarded with. We try substitution (use the textbook), prohibition (wikipedia, cell phones, electronic/digital games), denial (we have always done it this way) and authority but we are not helping them filter.
- Post high school education success rate as measured by the number of students who complete their first year hovers in the mid 50’s. So there is approximately a 45-49% failure rate. One can extrapolate from this that nearly half of our high school graduates are not well prepared for further academic studies.
- In many high schools we continue to make the assumption that the developmental needs of twelfth graders are largely the same as ninth graders. We also appear to believe that the developmental needs of these twelfth graders are the mostly same as their parents and grandparents needs were when they were in high school. It is not so.
- Bill Gates has funded some of the most profound and forward-thinking high school research and reforms. Last year he asserted that the senior year in high school is becoming increasingly “irrelevant” to our students.
All of this by way of introducing some ideas for school change and specifically for the senior year that I believe could make a significant difference in learning. In my mind this is just one piece of a larger systemic change but it is probably the most urgent. While many pieces of my recommendations are already present in many schools, I want to see implementation in a more systemic manner.
September 17, 2008
Csikszentmihalyi: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality.
Csikszentmihalyi: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality. :
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they?re also often quiet and at rest.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time.
3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
Despite the carefree air that many creative people affect, most of them work late into the night and persist when less driven individuals would not. Vasari wrote in 1550 that when Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello was working out the laws of visual perspective, he would walk back and forth all night, muttering to himself: ?What a beautiful thing is this perspective!? while his wife called him back to bed with no success.
4. Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality.
5. Creative people trend to be both extroverted and introverted.
6. Creative people are humble and proud at the same time.
7. Creative people, to an extent, escape rigid gender role stereotyping.
This tendency toward androgyny is sometimes understood in purely sexual terms, and therefore it gets confused with homosexuality. But psychological androgyny is a much wider concept referring to a person?s ability to be at the same time aggressive and nurturant, sensitive and rigid, dominant and submissive, regardless of gender. A psychologically androgynous person in effect doubles his or her repertoire of responses.
8. Creative people are both rebellious and conservative.
9. Most creative people are very passionate about their work, yet they can be extremely objective about it as well.
10. Creative people?s openness and sensitivity often exposes them to suffering and pain, yet also to a great deal of enjoyment.
(via via)
from Austin Kleon Blog
