Flipping the minority

I love love loved to Wolfe reading this week.  A very interesting topic, and very well written.  However, I wonder if the same research has been applied to schools were Caucasians are the minority.  When I completed my student teaching the high school I was at had a 90% Hispanic population. Would the results based on ethnicity change if the "minority" was not actually the "minority" in the school?  What is Caucasians only make up 2%?  Would hey still answer more questions.  If women outnumbered men, would they still rely on computers?

Quantifying Discourse

Wolfe’s article had me thinking about how this study would work with an elementary age group; things like gender would still factor in, age would be neutral, and maybe ethnicity participation would be come out to be about the same. I ask this because children seem less susceptible-maybe innocent is too strong a word- to the hegemonic views on participation, they speak their minds freely. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a child of today’s computer literate age participating successfully online; but that brings up another point on the quality of the participation as opposed to just the amount. Does more discourse generally mean deeper insight? I didn’t get that connection from the article but  they are related. The date also seems unreliable since there is more than a 2:1 ration of women to men, most being white women.

Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds

An article from The Guardian (of London) summarizing recent psychological research at The New School for Social Research. New York Times writeup of the same research.

Facebook- multi literacy teaching?

I once gave my students a mock up of Facebook and asked them to write their info in there and present it to the class. Don't judge me, it was a get to know you activity during the beginning of the year. With technology so rampant and ever changing, many teachers want to incorporate technology into the classroom to help their students (iPAD in LAUSD?). However, with so many possibilities out there with technology, teachers have to be careful how and why they integrate it. I collaborate with several teachers at my school, and we want our students to learn "20th century multi-literacy skills" (they presented at the NCTE conference last year, not me though cause i'm still trying to figure out what it all means). What I know is that my students still struggle to do MLA format, and a lot of them don't know how to cite a paper and do a header and footer. But I guess those are more practical problems than content.

I thought that the article was an original way to look at Facebook, because it shows another way of looking at ethos, pathos, logos other than teaching it through advertisement. Facebook, as other posters have said, is advertisement of yourself and the lifestyle you want people to think you live. You're selling your audience an idea. You analyze, you predict, you write stuff that makes people want to respond to you. It contains multiple skills that students might use throughout their English class. Interesting, but can we really depends on the information we get from rhetorically analyzing Facebook if half the things on there are lies?

Lindemann on Responding to Student Writing

I think Diagnostic Reading was the most useful part of this chapter of Lindemann. Classroom diagnostics (early assessments of skill and goal-setting meetings) are useful in multiple ways. For one, it/they help the teacher identify student strengths and weaknesses, which in turn helps with classroom management, group assignments, individual learning, and testing. At the elementary school level, we call diagnostic reading "goal-setting conferences" and these are done one-on-one with the parents not the students. These typically happen at the end of the third full week of school and are a review of the classroom behavior and work ethic the teacher has observed from each student. Then he/she meets with each child's parents individually to talk about realistic goals they each have for their child.

I imagine this situation would work for conferences between teachers and the students themselves at the high school+ levels. Once students are old enough to be held accountable to their own expectations, a teacher can do a lot to enhance their learning. A teacher that knows what a student wants out of a course has the power to reach those goals, or at least has the tools, whereas a teacher who "blanket teaches" may never reach the outliers.

"Comments that enhance learning differ from traditional methods of hunting errors and identifying what's wrong with a paper" (226).

This is another important part of the diagnostic process. Teachers that poach errors and only comment on the negative are the types of teachers that teach students that they are stupid or inept. Teaching with high standards is very different from condescending teaching and belittling behavior. Goal-setting conferences also help teachers to manage their own "red-penning" and belittling tendencies because once you have a one-on-one conversation with another human being and learn about their specific struggles in the field that you teach, you are more likely to ease-up when you see those grammatical errors in an actually interesting piece of writing that came from a student who openly told you they are embarrassed by their vocabulary and spelling skills, but proud of their thoughts and writing abilities.

Rothskelly

I don’t remember a lot of group work when I was in high school. Most of this is because our classes were so short, and now when I teach, we have a block schedule of 100 minutes, and so there is much more time to incorporate group work. In English classes, I use literature circle roles, and I think that in itself is also very difficult. Each student has a role to fulfill, and that is all they focus on instead of discussing the text or sharing ideas. I have found too, that in a classroom, the kids who are on the same level tend to stick together, while the off task students will want to form their own group and complete no work at all. When you divide those off task students up, the situation is a lot like what “Beth” describes where one student is working and the rest fooling around. The only other group work I do is when we do writer’s workshop, and that in itself takes a lot of coordinating, setting up the classroom, and keeping kids accountable. Before even thinking about group work and writing in groups, what I want to know is how to get students motivated in writing. When I assign an essay, I have maybe 6 kids turn it in on time out of a classroom of 26. We break down the prompt together, we read a model essay, and then we have writing time. How else can I get students to write? 

Co-Authoring?

After reading through the "Two Cheers for Peer Response" article again, I became somewhat intrigued with the concept of co-authoring.  This "in-class, co-authored writing assignment" entails students being given forty minutes to compose a paragraph together.  I'm curious if any of you teachers have done an assignment like this in your classroom.  Was it effective?  Ineffective?  Also curious as to a possible prompt for this kind of assignment.  I think constructing an argument would be difficult if two students with opposing views were paired together.  Do you let students pick their own partners? 

I'd like to try this out in a workshop but definitely wouldn't mind some more direction before I dive in...