Month: February 2010

Publishing: The Blue Pencil

In searching for venues where my more literary-minded students might get a start in publishing their work, I came across The Blue Pencil. It’s student edited and produced, so it fits the Montessori Philosophy very well. My thoughts based on their website based on my own criteria for publishing literary work:

  • The Blue Pencil “is edited and produced by the students in the Writing & Publishing Program at Walnut Hill School for the Arts“. It is aimed at young writers (12–18) around the world. You submit online and your work is evaluated on an ongoing basis during the school year and they say the try to respond within a month. Unfortunately you typically do not get feedback if your work is not accepted. On the plus side, they only have a one month embargo of your work after they’ve published it before you reacquire the publishing rights.

Students publishing their written work

I am constantly amazed by the quality of the writing my students turn in. The honesty of the reflection, the clarity of the writing and the elegant turns of phrase. Certainly better than anything I’ve ever churned out. I sometimes find it difficult to advise them on their pieces because their work is often so good that they’ve gone past issues of mechanics and my comments are purely my subjective opinions (and I’m clearly no expert). I have some serious writers in my class, so I was not too surprised when one of them asked me the other day if there were any venues to publish their work.

Byron (from Wikimedia Commons).

A little online searching turned up a few places that might by worthy venues for the serious writer, however, I have a few biases that narrow down the possible candidates even more. Of course the publication needs to be serious about publishing good work. In the online world anyone can self-publish, but because of the glut of information out there it is pretty hard to find the good stuff. A good, selective editorial staff is your friend there. It certainly makes it harder to publish, but it also helps you create better pieces.

The second key criterion is that the publisher should not retain all (or even most) of the rights to your work. Signing away the rights to something you spent a lot of time and energy creating never sat well with me when I was choosing journals for publication. I’m pleased to see that an increasing number of online scientific journals are rejecting the practice, but it remains to be seen if they will be successful in the long term.

With that in mind, I’ll post a what I find as I find them under the tag “publishing“. At the moment, I’m relying on two key resources, the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers Blog and Publish Me a website from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, for teens who want to publish.

Video Game Addiction

Boys tent to have more problems with games (From Hauge, Marney R., Gentile, Douglas A., (2003, April)).

While the American Psychiatric Association does not yet include it as a diagnosis (as of 2009) video game and internet addictions are problems I’ve seen first hand, and, given my own plugged-in-idess, are topics I personally think about when I reflect on my own computer use. The web is a powerful tool so it’s not so unusual that we’d spend a lot of time using it. There is a point however when it becomes compulsive and takes so much time that it becomes a detriment to our other work.

There are any number of website and online resources about the topic and even a few commercial sites that offer treatment. For anecdotal descriptions there is the Berkley Parents Network website. which has a few examples from parents dealing with the problem. The National Institute on Media and the Family has a good page describing video game addiction. For adolescents they describe the symptoms as;

  • Most of non-school hours are spent on the computer or playing video games.Falling asleep in school.
  • Not keeping up with assignments.
  • Worsening grades.
  • Not telling the truth about computer or video game use.
  • Choosing to use the computer or play video games, rather than see friends.
  • Dropping out of other social groups (clubs or sports).
  • Irritable when not playing a video game or on the computer.

Interestingly, this tends to be more of a problem for boys. And one solution recommended is wilderness therapy. I think that may be a bit extreme. Another suggestion was:

… the experts … said the best way to cure kids’ video game addiction is to set strict limits. They suggested not allowing kids to have computers, PlayStations, TVs, etc. in their bedrooms if monitoring their behavior is a problem.

The Montessori classroom is a closely knit community and, especially in a small classroom, falling asleep in class and being irritable (especially more so than normal teens) can be very disruptive to the entire class. It is, therefore, essential that the problem be addressed as soon and as quickly as possible.

Silence in the Middle School: The Little Rock Nine

My students watched the video about the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock and they were shocked. Truly shocked. They had already started reading the letters to and from President Eisenhower which are powerful in that they trace the story with the actual presidential records. Then one of the students brought up the video on a laptop and they all gathered around to watch. For 5 minutes afterward there was silence in the classroom.

The ugly, vicious hatred of the mob was powerful, and the one girl, Elizabeth Eckford, just a little older than the middleschoolers, just sitting there with the crowd all round, unable to speak, proud upright, but with a shell shocked look in her eyes. The video is moving, and it brings home the strength and courage of those nine kids in a world that must have seemed to be tipping toward destruction.

iSeismo app

Those who know me know how much I like the iSeismo app for the iPhone. The phone as a built-in accelerometer and the iSeismo app uses it to show the movement of the phone in three dimensions. The app show three graphs (seismographs), the first two show horizontal motions and the third vertical motion. So, if you put the phone on the table and hit the table the third line should jump up and down.

You can also export the data from the phone (or iPod Touch), and since the phones’ times should be synchronized pretty well, there should be a way to use two phones to triangulate the location of an impact, say on the floor in a room, in the same way that seismologists use seismographs to locate earthquakes. That would make a great demo if it was easy enough to do.

Update: iSeismo can also be used as a heartbeat monitor.

Desegregation of Central High School

Troops escort students to school (from Wikimedia Commons).

Recording of Eisenhower’s address to the nation on the situation in Little Rock.

In going over the timeline of human rights today, we realized that it did not have a card for the civil rights struggle of the 1950’s and 60’s. One of the key events that middle school students should be able to relate to is the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas. Imagine having to have troops escort you into school. Imagine having to endure racial taunts every day when you were only one of nine African American students in the entire school.

The Encyclopedia of Arkansas has a nice outline of the events of 1957 in the context of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. However, the National Park Service’s website is perhaps better targeted to Middle School age range. The video below is also a good primer, and my students found it to be very powerful.

The Eisenhower Presidential Library has some of the primary documents related to the events. They give a vivid account of the events from the perspective of what the president saw.

The Little Rock Nine (in New York, 1958)

The difference between poetry and prose

Words exist that can, when used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body’s love, but beyond that they fail miserably. – John Wyndham, The Crysalids

Gustave Dore's illustration of the Ancient Mariner (from Wikimedia Commons)

Going into poetry next cycle I’m having some mixed feelings. I like reading poetry, I love hearing poetry, especially when it has something to say. But I can’t write it worth a lick. I have a lot more practice writing prose, and, well, you can judge how well I can do that.

I’ve always wanted to be able to write poetry. I’ve always liked the John Wyndham quote cited above. Poetry can be expressive in a way that prose can’t. Yet prose can tell a story in ways that poetry cannot. There is, of course, a long history of story poems. The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was a constant companion when I was bicycling solo around Lake Superior.

At any rate, Brian Beglin has a wonderful review of a novel written by a poet (Margo Berdeshevsky) (found via the Daily Dish). Belgin writes that often the combination does not quite mesh, and in working through why not he comes to the conclusion that poetic phrase do not work in prose because:

When poets write fiction, it can sometimes read like a transfer student trying to navigate the unfamiliar hallways of a new school. Sometimes this works to brilliant effect, as the poet can put a fresh shine on the fiction writer’s familiar tools. In Simon Van Booy’s The Secret Lives of People in Love, the sentences feel brisk, bright, exact, like blocks of ice chiseled into smooth, brimming faces. Conversely, Berdeshevsky’s sentences seem to ache for line breaks, for the leaps and turns vital to a poem but often detrimental to fiction: “There’s a noise she is not waiting for. Scratching like—a light knocking—and again a scratching, as of unsheathed nails on her door.” Craft-wise, these bursts of language are fascinating; yet they have the net effect of poetry: they stop time with their beauty. They can bring a story—which relies on forward momentum, on cause and effect—to a halt.

Not having read the books he references I can’t opine on if he’s right or wrong, however, it is a beautiful distinction he makes: poetic sentences stop time with their beauty, but you don’t want to stop anything when you’re telling a story.

Good teachers …

How do you know if you’re a good teacher is a question we all ask ourselves as we go through the Montessori teacher training and when we reflect on our time in the classroom. Most of us do not come from traditional educational backgrounds. Angeline Stoll Lillard (2007; p. 379), who literally wrote the book on the cognitive and pedagogic research that supports the Montessori approach, writes that in 1946 Maria Montessori “advised that Montessori teachers not take traditional education courses, because such courses would deepen their adherence to traditional methods and ideas.”

Lillard’s own belief is that although educational training programs have improved since the 1940’s (they teach more constructivist methods similar to Montessori) new teachers going into traditional schools today get pounded down by the institutional structure of these schools (the traditional classroom layout, the testing etc.) so that they are rarely able to apply those approaches and end up falling back into the traditional methods. Interestingly, according to an article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic, “a master’s degree in education seems to have no impact on classroom effectiveness.” (at least within the Teach for America program). The Teach for America research found that the key traits that predicted a teacher would be good are contentedness with their own life and perseverance.

Of course you have to ask yourself, how do they determine if a teacher is a good teacher? Unfortunately, they do it through standardized test scores. This, in and of itself, is not necessarily a bad thing, because evaluating good teaching is important and difficult to put into numbers. Even crude measures of the quality of teaching can be useful if there is no other available evidence. But increasing the uses of standardized tests has a tendency to shape the entire educational system toward the test itself. In addition, there is a lot of evidence that a focus on testing is not a good way to get students to learn. It devalues the learning to the student, and focuses the attention of the teacher on the test, and, “The very structure of such tests, breaking learning into components that are tested in a disjointed manner, discourages integrated learning” (Lillard, 2005; p 344).

Yet the focus on testing intensifies. In Washington D.C., teachers are now being scored and potentially fired based on test scores. According to Ripley, teaching quality will now be numerically scored, and for “teachers whose students take standardized tests, half their score will be based on how much their students improved.” At the federal level, there is a new educational initiative where:

states must first remove any legal barriers to linking student test scores to teachers—something California and Wisconsin are already doing. To win money, states must also begin distinguishing between effective and ineffective teachers—and consider that information when deciding whether to grant tenure, give raises, or fire a teacher or principal

The two sentences above are separated by a period into two different ideas, but their confluence appears to be inexorable. While testing should be a component of evaluation, test scores are easy to use and come in the form of easy to understand numbers, so the over-reliance on them seems inevitable.

While there is a clear need to identify good teaching and teachers, I do not believe that standardized tests are the answer.