Never, Nada, Zip, Zilch: No Grades

Posted on January 3, 2014 by pollybrown2013

In the teaching and learning I’ve written about for this blog, some things never happened–things taken for granted in most schools. I was lucky.

For starters: because my school didn’t require me to, I never summarized my assessments of students’ work using grades. No number grades; no letter grades; none of the judgments about mastery (not as clear a concept as you might think) summed up in terms that are just grades thinly disguised. None, never, nada.

Like all my colleagues, I gave plenty of careful attention to student work. The students received many kinds of feedback, and even more kinds of support. Above all, in ways small and large, we celebrated the culmination of authentic learning. But not with grades.

I was still a kid myself (and getting A’s) when I decided that grades were meaningless and dangerous. As an adult, I’ve been known to refer to grading as institutionalized child abuse.

Still, I’m used to the fact that people I respect may disagree. Occasionally, Touchstone families have decided they wanted grades, going somewhere else to get them. Other families have wished for the crispness of grades, but stayed for the quality of their children’s learning. Almost all our graduates have gone on to schools that use grades, and almost all of them have continued to belong to themselves and care most about meaning.

If you want to read essays about the uselessness (or outright harmfulness) of grades, track down the writings of Alfie Kohn. I think often of a less famous heroine, Meghan Southworth, a working math teacher and trainer for the Maine Mathematics and Science Alliance. She wasn’t able to eliminate all grades, because her school required them at the end of every quarter. In order to have some basis for those grades, she had to administer tests and other graded assessments, and record the results.

Here’s the kicker: she had stopped showing her students the grades they received through the term.

Instead, she continued to give her students written comments. I didn’t see hers, but I’m guessing they were a lot like mine: suggestions for ways to rethink problems, ways to improve quality control, ways to balance carefulness and momentum–along with acknowledgement of the kinds of engagement and effort, no matter how tentative, that can help a student move forward. Here’s a small sample of comments on a test:

$math quiz comments cropped$ This student was working to overcome test-taking anxiety, and needed to focus on how close she was to the full answer. Thus “almost” instead of an X.

Like most teachers everywhere, Southworth wanted her students to improve, not just stay at the level of achievement they arrived with. She had noticed that they wouldn’t really absorb or use the support embedded in her comments, as long as the shortcut of a grade was available. She quoted a student who caught on to her new system very quickly: “Oh, you want us to read the comments instead of just looking at the grades!”

Southworth also cited research describing most students’ response to grades: “Is this what I’m used to getting?” If the student is used to getting A’s, and this is an A, no need to stretch. If the student is used to getting C’s, and this is a C, no need to worry.

To put this as harshly as I’ve sometimes felt it: If it’s a teacher’s job to sort kids into levels, grades make sense. If a teacher is meant to be a gatekeeper restricting access to future opportunities, ensuring a scarcity of qualified applicants for those opportunities, then grades make sense.

But if a teacher’s job involves paying attention to learners, understanding them, and working with them to help them grow, then grades aren’t worth much, and can actually get in the way.

Think about what freedom from grading meant for me and my students, as we worked together:

$math work and progress cropped$ Freed from grading, I could put much of my energy into assessing what each child needed in order to make the best possible progress. I took lots of notes, and reviewed them less often than I thought I should, but often enough to keep my concerns and hopes for each student fresh.

We could make frequent and thoughtful use of student self-assessment. That’s awkward to incorporate into a grading system, but really important in helping students move forward.

$math self-assess and my response cropped$ Written quickly on the back of a math quiz, this is part of a student’s routine reflection on test-taking strategies and skills, with my response.

Here are some of the sentence starters for a reading journal self-assessment, leading up to a portfolio conference.

My students and I weren’t in the more-or-less adversarial relationship that grading so easily encourages. Kids tended to be fully invested in the goals we had set together. So I got to hear them say things like this: “Something in me just rushes right through instructions, because I want to get started on the answers. So I’m trying to build the habit of stopping myself and reading the instructions again.” Or: “Now I can really understand what I’m reading, I get involved in what’s happening, and hate it when you say that reading time is over.” These are kids realizing what they need–habits of rechecking, reachable books–and figuring out that they can provide that for themselves.

Freed from grading that would imply class standing, we didn’t have to worry about an “even playing field.” I could help kids make individual choices of topics and materials comfortable enough to encourage confidence, interesting enough to inspire excitement, and challenging enough to nurture flexibility and pride. Like our physical education teacher, I aimed for “challenge by choice”–and I found that well-supported students motivated by genuine interest almost always aimed high.

There had been a rage for home-made marble chutes, in a run of rainy-day recesses. This student worked on his own to explore a new idea, incorporating a toy vortex.

At a professional conference, another teacher asked me, “But why do kids work, if there’s no grade as a reward?” I didn’t actually burst into tears, but I felt some despair. We are in real trouble when teachers themselves have been conditioned to forget the intrinsic rewards of learning, the joy of feeling powerful as a learner, the genuine appetite kids bring to their mutual effort to understand the world.

What about my own reward? Immeasurable. My students grew like weeds, not just physically but intellectually. They bloomed! That was the real delight, for me, in teaching at a school that disavowed grades: I got to watch kids learning like mad, bright-eyed and working tirelessly, full of the meanings in their learning and full of themselves, taking off and flying for their own reasons.

I wouldn’t trade that for nothin’. (Nada. Zip.)

I could not fit this topic into anything resembling my 1000 word target. So I’ve saved some aspects for another post: the relationship between grading (or not) and group work; ditto the development of class community. Also: in the absence of grading, kinds of feedback students could come to expect–and my continuing fascination with learning that happened in odd little corners (like rainy-day recess) where feedback wasn’t a factor.

Word Ladders, Snowball Poems, and Dictionary Pickle

Posted on December 17, 2013 by pollybrown2013

Just before Thanksgiving, I wrote about the pleasures of playing with words. Apparently, getting-together times put me in mind of folks with whom I’ve savored our fabulously mongrel language.

I don’t want to slander all those other languages I’ve tried to learn but can’t speak worth beans. Still, I’m here to testify: I love English, with its many origins all braiding together into a zillion ways of saying almost anything, and its individual words revealing themselves as artifacts of long grassroots change never legislated and rarely neatened. It’s a mess, our language. Hooray!

The syllable game I described in that post can be a way of peering into a word’s history. It’s like sending off a sample of your blood to find out which long ago human voyages came together to be you. A look into the dictionary, to check on syllabication, can reveal aspects of a word’s genetic code. What other words are related? What parts does the word share with other words? If you’re using the kind of dictionary that gives information about a word’s origin, you can really trace your word’s genealogy.

The Syllable Game is particularly good at getting kids to see a word simultaneously as a whole and as its parts. That’s a crucial skill for future reading about history, geography, politics, sociology, or any sort of science. If you can’t break a word apart for help pronouncing and understanding it, you won’t be able to connect the word on the page or screen with the word you’ve heard in class, or the related words you already know.

Many word games help the player notice the ways our language is modular, like Lego, composed of small units that get combined–and that’s part of its genius. English is a good language for describing the world, because a word can be prefixed or supplemented to become more accurate. Like the mental flexibility that let early modern humans solve problems all over the planet, English is an open-minded toolkit, with an ability to morph that lets us all speak more clearly, whatever we want to say.

Deborah Melone, a fellow member of Every Other Thursday Poets, introduced us to Harry Matthews, who taught us a number of word games designed to get folks started writing. Teaching them, in turn, to my students, I discovered that these games work well for kids.

Word Ladders

You can use a word ladder to change a cat to a dog: cat / cot / dot / dog. The rules are simple:

You may change only one letter at a time.
The changed letter has to remain in the same position within the word.
All the steps on the ladder have to be real words.

A Scrabble dictionary can be a great help here.

It’s fun to reconcile opposites, but they both have to have the same number of letters. (There’s no way of changing night to day in this game.) Wet to dry seems like it’s going to be hard, but here’s one way: wet, set, sat, say, day, dry.

The words don’t have to be opposites, though. Going from crow to hawk is tricky, because vowels and consonants change position in the words. When I tried this one, my ladder list was fun to write from, embedding each step in the ladder in a new line of a poem–a poem that lured me into territory I wouldn’t otherwise have explored. That was Harry’s point.

It’s also fun just to play open-endedly, and see where you arrive. Watch for the words that are dead-ends, and think why. You can always backtrack and keep going.

Or experiment to see: what’s the limit on word-length that can work within these rules? Can you do a ladder of six-letter words? Ladder / sadder / sander / sender… There must be some way to get away from that er.

Snowball poems

Deborah became a brilliant practitioner of another Harry Matthews word game: the snowball poem. Here’s one of hers, from our anthology Something Understood, published by Every Other Thursday Press:

sad

lost

angry

always

needful

something

completely

unavailable

inaccessible

inappropriate

nevertheless

obstinately

determined

insistent

stubborn

growing

wildly

happy

some

way

I just noticed a place where this breaks the rule, which is to add or subtract just one letter per line. (It’s always lovely to have proof that rules are meant to be bent.)

One of my former adult students, Chuck Jackson, started a snowball poem like this:

I

go

out

from

these

places

seeking

Paradise

I’d give anything to find the piece of paper with the rest of that.

Dictionary Pickle

Here’s another game I invented myself, which can be played solitaire or with a partner. You need a dictionary that really works for the kid playing, that isn’t too fancy.

The first player just starts with a word that is likely to have an interesting definition.

The second player looks up the word. Let’s say my partner just gave me the word solstice. I’m using the student dictionary at Merriam-Webster’s wordcentral.com, and I find this definition:

Function: noun
1 : the point in the apparent path of the sun at which the sun is farthest north or south of the equator
2 : the time of the sun’s passing a solstice which occurs on June 22nd and on December 22nd

As the second player, I get to choose a word from that definition, and I’m going to choose equator.

My partner looks this up, and he and I go on a little detour over the idea of the celestial equator, but he decides to stick with the definition of equator, from which he chooses the word imaginary.

When I look that up I choose unicorns. And so on…

When students play this together in class, or with an older person at home for homework, I ask them to list the words, with just brief versions of the definitions from which the word for the next turn was taken. It’s important to ask kids to do some recording, I think, and equally important that that not be so onerous as to eliminate the fun.

Debriefing, I’d have each student tell us about one word on the list new to him, or a word that she’d like to use in her writing.

White-board Fun

Actually I’m not really going to write about this now– I’m going to stick with my self-imposed word count target, for once. But here’s a photographic preview. (This is like Jeopardy: What was the direction?)

My Place and Our Places

Posted on December 13, 2013 by pollybrown2013

Last week, I focused on the book My Place, by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins, in which a series of child narrators describe the place where they live–always the same place, on the same hillside, changing as the book moves backward through Australian history. Each of the child narrators has his or her own sense of that same place.

What builds a sense of place, for any of us? What do we even mean by that? What can adults do to give kids a sense of place–or to stay out of the way of their process of developing one?

The book My Place inspired Our Places, a book created by one of my classes in the spring of 2010, when the kids with whom I had worked that year decided that they wanted to make their own maps of their own places, and put them together into a book.

We had discussed other final group projects, but this was the one they chose. “Only it can’t be different years, like My Place, because we’re all living in this year.”

“Just our different places.”

“And we’ll tell about the same kinds of things.”

Here’s a detail from Anwyn’s pages:

Pets

By “the same things”, the kids meant the motifs we had noticed in My Place, and then listed, common threads from child narrator to child narrator. For example, in both books, My Place and Our Places, almost every child’s place includes a pet.

Jose wrote about his dog, Clayton.

Other kids wrote about cats named Oliver, or Shelly, or Scout. One described a parakeet named Tweety.

Another wrote about her hen, Penny, who is “smarter than the other chickens and always bosses the other chickens around, even though she is the smallest.”

Parties

In both books, there’s always some kind of party. Luke lives in two separate houses with the two sides of his family. He decided to write about the place where he lives part of the week with his dad, in a section of Boston.

The detail below is from Caroline, who had already explained that her next-door neighbors were “almost like grandparents.” We didn’t coordinate which kinds of parties which kids would write about, but we wound up with an interesting variety: birthday parties, generic summer parties, a Halloween party, a Super-Bowl-watching party, a Fourth of July party with lots of fireworks, a Christmas party, and the gathering to send a big sister off to her prom.

“Some of the parties in My Place are for sad occasions, not happy ones.”

“Like Michaelis going away to Vietnam.”

“Or Thommo’s family getting thrown out of their apartment.”

“Or there’s the time when the war is over, and some people cry because they’re glad the war is over, but sad that their boys aren’t coming home.”

“But that year’s kid walks on stilts and gets everyone to stop crying.”

Connections to the past

We talked about what the students could include that would be like the giant fig tree at the top of the hill in My Place, a landmark experienced and valued by every child narrator across a 200 year span.

Should the students each focus on some natural feature? They settled on just something old: an old tavern, the stone walls along which chipmunks and squirrels run, an old car, cemeteries, a big rock.

Freedom

Growing up in a time when some kids are asked to check in with their parents by cell phone as often as every half hour, my students had been interested in the way the My Place kids roamed all over their neighborhood or hillside, with and without permission. Although we hadn’t chosen it as a common thread, several students wrote about their range of freedom, and how that had changed as they’d gotten older.

For example, Abby described being allowed to bicycle further:

Another girl marked in green the streets on her map where she was allowed to walk by herself.

Maps

These were sketch maps, like the ones in My Place, made to scale as well as kids could manage, but not based on detailed measurements. (That would be another project.) Here’s Abby’s map of her newly enlarged territory: Some kids made their maps more accurate with the help of published maps, by tracing or just looking at an existing map or aerial photo to get a sense of relationships. Like the maps in My Place, the student maps told parts of each child’s story.

So what builds a sense of place?

A sense of place can’t require staying put. In My Place, the final narrator, an aboriginal child, says, “I belong to this place,” instead of “This is my place.” But the place shown is just one of several places where that extended family stays for different parts of the year.

What would it be like to stay in one place? Barangaroo’s grandmother says nobody would do that; it would be boring. For sure, though, Barangaroo has detailed knowledge and a strong emotional connection with that place.

When I moved to the house and neighborhood I think of as “where I grew up”, I had already lived in seven previous places.

Many of my students spoke in discussion about special summer places, or even, for one, a place she’d been only once, but memorably. I too had been strongly influenced by places where I’d never actually lived, including my Maine grandparents’ dairy farm, and my other grandmother’s urban lot in Brockton, Massachusetts, where I met the kids who lived on the street, and established hide-outs in the bushes.

Who knows? The sense of contrast between a variety of places may focus a child’s attention on the uniqueness of each place. In any case, here’s what seems to be more important than duration: a child’s active experience of the place. To bond with a place, a child needs experience of that place within some kind of freedom to explore, to take risks, to know a range of emotions, to act on a sense of possession. To grow her own garden and decide what to plant in it; to build a treehouse with his uncle, or a dam across the creek, or to follow the path across the brook; to create a little secret get-away under a wisteria bush.

Each experience becomes a tag, a label on the mental map the child is constantly creating, partly unconsciously. Each tag gets reviewed with revisits either physical or mental. Few kinds of learning more clearly deserve characterization as constructive learning, learning fitted together and made coherent by the learner; learning that constructs meaning instead of receiving it–in this case, meaning that is especially deep and nourishing.

I’m struck by the importance of peers in this process of place-bonding: siblings, or neighborhood pals, or cousins, or even rambunctious dogs–fellow explorers, with their own impulses and their own hesitations, often useful.

Time on one’s own matters also, and this is demonstrated in all my students’ equivalents of the hide-out in the My Place giant fig tree: their solitary bike rides, walks over to Dean Park, and charitable activities for ants.

On the other hand, for anyone who thinks that young adolescents don’t care about grownups: notice the importance of both parents and other adults, the next door sort-of-grandparents, the almost adult who babysits, the neighbor who takes all the kids for a ride in his old car, while everyone squeals going around the corners.

I loved how much I learned about each of these students, in the process of learning about their connections with their places. Teachers have to live with various kinds of grief, and one of them is this: it’s not possible to do every wonderful thing with every class. But I can’t help wishing I could have, and sometimes, in a group of adults, I have an almost irrepressible impulse to give them this assignment.

(Maybe some readers will comment with labels you would write on your own map, if you made one.) (Or with your own map.)

When we agreed to make the book, I said I would figure out how to send a copy to Nadia Wheatley. It took several steps of contact, and involved some suspense. Eventually, that summer, a package came back from Wheatley with thanks warmly expressed, and with a wonderful surprise: a DVD of episodes from the video series made for Australian television in the year of the book’s twentieth anniversary, with extra episodes to carry the story to 2008, exploring new dimensions of belonging or not belonging.

The video is wonderful, and does special justice to the book’s theme of transcending differences. Still, I feel as I often do about film adaptations of books I love: the book means more to me. It’s less about excitement, television style, and more purely about the role of place in our lives, the responsibilities a place can grow in us, and the ways sharing a place can connect us.

My Place

Posted on December 6, 2013 by pollybrown2013

We’re sitting in the meeting area–not in the circle we use for meetings in which we all talk with each other, but in the arc facing my corner, that works better for read-aloud books with illustrations. For a larger class I would need to make a Power Point. The intimacy of leaning forward, leaning together into the world of the book, can work here.

In this memory, I’m reading My Place, a book created by Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins, originally published in Australia in time for the bicentennial of their European settlement. One of my early class parents discovered the first U.S. edition, and donated a copy. (Most of the copies I’ve bought over the years have been from the later U.S. edition, from Kane Miller, who bring books from other countries to the States.)

After that first reading, one crop of kids have linked to the next, and students spending a second year in my mixed-age class have said almost every year, “You should read My Place again.”

As I begin to read aloud, puzzled faces remind me that the book can be confusing. Each year, reading My Place refreshes my appreciation for the full, rich range of interests and attention styles represented among my students. I’ve learned to trust them: they’ll get it, together.

There’s the kid who always notices numbers of any kind, including dates. She figures out, already on the second two-page spread, that we’re going backwards in time. “Before it was 1988, now 1978. The next one will be 1968.” It is, and that year’s child narrator, Sofia, has posters of the Beatles on her bedroom wall. She writes about an older brother who’s a soldier in Vietnam.

That step to the side–to a history both different from our own country’s, and similar to it–lets us notice things we may have been programmed not to notice. Kids say, “So they were involved in the Vietnam War, too?” “Both countries were settled by waves of immigrants?” Eventually, “This stuff about how the Aborigines were treated–it makes me think about our own Indians.”

Always, at least one kid is especially interested in maps–visual records of things that stay in one place. He looks at the progression of child narrators’ maps, a new (older) one for each jump back in time, and he begins to imagine a similar map of his own neighborhood: how far from his house he would include in each direction; what scale he would use; what he would put in and what he’d leave out; what he would label, and what colors he would use for different kinds of buildings–all the decisions we’re meant to imagine the book’s child narrators making. (The map below is from 1938, which was a hard time in Australia, too.)

Other kids make sure I read all the labeling on each map–partly because they’ve figured out that important clues are often embedded there.

Another kid is crazy about geography as lists and facts. She quickly picks up on the clues that we’re in Australia, something I try not to give away. Some years, we take this further: we use the detailed clues to convince ourselves that we’ve found the bay and canal near Sidney. (The map below is from 1838.)

Some kids are particularly able to pick up on detail in illustrations, and they’re the ones who say, “Wait! This is all the same house! Look at those railings!” Then we go back and compare, page by page: yes, yes, yes, yes.

And for much of the book it is the same house–each child narrator is the right-aged child living in that place–until the house hasn’t been built yet, and we’re with the sheep and pigs, on that hillside, below the big tree, above the bay and creek.

In every class, some kids will have unerring radar for family relationships, They’re the ones who first point out that Sofia in 1968 is the unwelcome baby sister in 1958; or that the Miss Miller who is almost 90 in 1948 is the zippy aunt with the bicycle in 1898, and also the nine-year-old Minna who makes friends with a Chinese immigrant vegetable farmer in 1868.

By 1798, almost the end of the book, everyone has learned to follow these connections through the book’s strangely inverted time. When 11-year-old Sam, indentured convict laborer, climbs up into the big tree and pretends that he can see all the way to Shoreditch and his mother and sisters and brother, the class grows even quieter. They know that he will become the Sam remembered in 1838 by one of his children, the father who has fallen off the rich landowner’s roof, and died.

I don’t want to tell about the actual ending of the book; I want you to go find it and read it, and join all of us in the complicated feelings it generates.

My Place and Place Based Education

There’s a new name for something I’ve always tried to do as a teacher: place based education, arising out of the resources of a place, helping students develop a sense of place, helping students feel responsibility to their place and empowered to make a difference there. (If this sounds good to you, you should go find the wonderful books David Sobel has written to explore place based education and document its effectiveness.)

Nadia Wheatley and Donna Rawlins were also doing place-based education before it was named that. Clearly, they created My Place to help Australian kids know more about their country, and to encourage those kids to know their own local and particular places, their personal equivalents of the big tree that is a landmark for every one of the child narrators, or the canal that was once a creek, or the ridge where the main street was once a footpath. Because there are so many narrators, the place itself assumes unusual importance.

I’ve always been fascinated that their book’s strategy works for American kids, too. Immersion in this other place encourages kids to notice their own places, and I’ll write more about that in a future post.

It seems to me that Wheatley and Rawlins must have wanted something else, too: they wanted to show their narrators experiencing the local versions of big picture history: the pros and cons of the immigration experience; the hurt of economic injustice and waves of joblessness; the recurrent mercilessness of war, and the injuries and losses and dislocations left in wars’ wake; the environmental impacts of economic development, as we travel back to a time when it was actually safe to swim in the creek. But also kids’ perennial delight at new technologies: streetlights! personal automobiles! television!

Within all that big picture stuff glimpsed small and made real, Wheatley and Rawlins have shown us each child narrator’s way of assembling and creating his or her own experience out of what is available. We see all the different reasons for perching or hiding in the big tree. We see the comfort children find in animals, and the things that can be learned about each child’s adults from the parties they throw.

Always, in each new older time opened out for us, something has been lost; always, something has been gained. Each child narrator exists within the river of time, which gives and takes away. The book itself, its spirit, becomes that river, revealed to us in a special way by the authors’ device of making it flow backwards.

For just a minute, I want to address directly all those years’ worth of kids sitting in a series of meeting areas together, taking up the book’s back-cover challenge: THIS BOOK IS A TIME MACHINE! Again and again, you showed me details and connections I would have missed by myself. But also, in the deep and brave way you experienced the book and its place and world, you helped me feel what it all meant, and for that especially I thank you.

There’s more to this story: the book’s wonderful success in Australia, and its transformation into a video series, brilliantly updated to the present; one class’s decision to make a spin-off book called Our Places. For various reasons, I’m saving those things for another time.

Heels-over-teakettle, and Other Festivities

Posted on November 27, 2013 by pollybrown2013

Today I’m thankful for all my fellow word-lovers, past and present.

I’m thankful for my grandmother, who chatted with everyone she met, and picked up other people’s conversational expressions the way a dog picks up burrs. She kept and passed on treats like enough blue sky for a Dutchman’s britches and one pickle short of a quart. Listening to my mother and my grandmother talk together–with a what in thunder is he celebrating? here, and a heels-over-teakettle there–marked me for life, in the best possible way.

Once again, I’m thankful for George Batchelder, brilliant junior high English teacher, the one who gave us whole class periods for the Times crossword puzzle. He also asked us to list, on a page in our notebooks, plausible but nonexistent words: words with English prefixes and suffixes and blends, that were nonetheless fake, of our own manufacture: beautaceous, recrunk, preventicate, loombipuddle.

I’m thankful for a host of word-crazy students, including Andrew Cozzens, who often leaned over at dismissal to confide his word of the day. Even after he had left my school, he wrote emails telling me wonderful words he had recently discovered, such as loquacious.

I’m grateful for the poets of Every Other Thursday, whose recent poems have included the words moonbeamed, canted, phlegmatic, and loris, and the phrase crammed and nuzzling.

I’m everlastingly thankful for Alex Brown, and his children (who are also my children), and for our tendency, when together, to lapse into the synonym game without warning. Why stop with playful, when you can keep right on with lively, exuberant, high-spirited, festive and frolicsome?

That leads me (inexorably, but also gleefully) to word games. Today I offer just a few, in honor of long car trips to and fro, and in tenderness toward family relationships more amenable to word games than to talk about affairs either local or international.

Warning: there may be a sequel, down the road. In my family, word games were not scarce as hen’s teeth; we were two-thirds wealthy with them. (What?) And then I went on to invent some.

First, my grandmother’s (and mother’s) special rules for Scrabble.

You may let a word edge over the boundary of the playing grid, by just one letter, any time you need to, in order to play a particularly satisfying word.
If you have the right letter to replace a blank, you may do so, and take possession of the blank, at any time; this doesn’t count as a turn. (My cousin’s wife Terry, during one particularly hilarious game, replaced a blank with a blank, but I can’t remember why, only the way we were reduced to mirthful tears.)
At the end of the game, everyone collaborates in an effort to place every last orphan letter on the board, in genuine legal words.

My mother, at 86, still won’t play Scrabble scored, because she wins so reliably that her opponents become discouraged (down-at-the-mouth, or even mad as a wet hen.) Once in a while, we’ll calculate the point value of a word just because it’s so delicious.

All my successive families have played the geography game in the car. My class used to play it when lining up for gym or dismissal.

The first player names a place: a town, a country, a street, a river, a mountain–anything that could be on an ordinary map. Let’s say Merrimack River.
The second player ignores parts of the name like River, focuses on the last letter, and comes up with a place name that begins with that letter. Given a K, the average person will say Kansas, but you can be playful–that’s the point, right?–and say Kalamazoo. I always try to, unless someone else has used it already in that game.
Small children may name a place somebody else has already used, if they need to, and anyone may have help with the spelling of tricky place names with ph making the f sound, like Phoenix, or endings that sound like ee but are actually spelled with a y. Etc. Our language, including our geographic language, is full of these opportunities, but adults should go easy on the pedanticism. (No, you won’t find it. It’s in the category of plausible but manufactured.)
You’ll want a good supply of place names that start with y, such as Ypsilanti.
Do not be alarmed if your game drifts into the dreaded A-swamp: America / Australia / Andalusia / Africa… My class once made it through the entire line (becoming slightly late for dismissal in the process) using place names that begin and end with A. Like many hardships, the A-swamp arose there in our geography to test your indomitable spirit.
In the days of smart phones, it’s easy to resolve arguments about spelling. In my family of origin, I was definitely not the final authority, having the spelling memory of a flea, or maybe a rock.

Speaking of spell-checkers, you can play a solitaire word game by typing in the names of your friends and seeing what the spell-checker makes of them. Or follow the eight-year-old Colby Brown’s example: randomly type a paragraph entirely in gibberish; then let the spell-checker do its best; then write an actual paragraph around whatever words the spell-checker has found.

Last, for now, here’s a game that requires either a dictionary or, if there are no dictionaries available, a referee. It’s called the Syllable Game, and this one I invented.

We played this game many times beginning with the word Touchstone, the name of our school. Compound words generally work well, but the rules just require words of at least two syllables to start, and for every turn. In fact, you’re better off beginning with a word of three or four syllables. In class, this was often a word central to our current study. So, for example, transportation, or, for the purposes of the game, trans / por / ta / tion.
The second player comes up with a word that preserves one of the syllables of the first word. This is where you need the dictionary, to check the official syllabication of the word, which will often contradict your first impression. (On the other hand, there is nothing like a car full of people carefully enunciating the word metamorphosis to judge its syllabication. Just designate a syllabication referee as well as a driver, and you’ll be fine.)
In class, students were absolutely required to use a dictionary, which gave them great practice, exposed them to related words, and could lead to all sorts of pleasant detours.
The pronunciation doesn’t have to be preserved, but the spelling has to be preserved exactly. So trans / late or por / tion or im / por / tant could all work as second turns, but port / man / teau or tran / scribe could not, because the por has been changed to port, and the trans has been changed to tran.
Let’s say that the second player decides on trans / at / lan / tic. In a two-player game, the first player now jumps forward from that word, with all sorts of lovely possibilities: lan / guage or fan / tas / tic or at / ten / tion. Etc.
The syllable you’re preserving can show up anywhere in the new word, jumping from second syllable to first, or third to first–so long as it’s the exact same syllable spelled the same way.

Assigning this as homework, I asked students to play with a parent or older sibling, and to record the whole ladder of turns, showing syllable breaks. Parents notoriously resisted using a dictionary, but came up with wonderful words.

Finally, for whole class play, to help the game move faster, I invented a variation called The Syllable Web Game, which we played on the spare white board at the front of the room. Any syllable on the board was available to any player, even if it had already been re-used. (In the illustration, you can see how the ce from cement was reused in celesta, and then in celestial and cerulean and something I can’t read in the photograph.)

Usually we played this game during morning sketching time; sometimes also writing time and silent reading time. Players showed the syllabication and initialed their words, and then explained their meanings in the class debrief.

So now I bow, gratefully, to all the sources and innovators and playful practitioners of the language we share. It’s a very full room, and you’re all in it!

Using Picture Books with Big Kids

Posted on November 22, 2013 by pollybrown2013

Lately I’ve been trying to imagine my sixth-grade teacher, Mrs. Tuthill, reading a picture book in class, or letting any of us read one. Within the school day, I can’t remember being encouraged to read anything but textbooks. (I was lucky, though; I had a much younger sister to read to at home, and my mother was well on her way to becoming a children’s librarian.)

The people who taught my daughter and son in middle school, good and competent teachers, never used picture books, to my knowledge.

Right now, this minute, most teachers face intense pressure to demonstrate rigor and grade-level competence. I would be thrilled to hear about a sixth-grade teacher in my town, using picture books or urging students to include them in their own reading. I know it’s improbable.

On the other hand, the teachers who taught me how to teach, and the colleagues who challenged and nurtured my teaching spirit, all used picture books in inspired ways. I can’t imagine the life of each class community in which I was honored to work and breathe, without picture books.

It’s amazing what is controversial in this world.

Susan Doty and I were setting up our classrooms, chatting now and then. She said, “I think I’ll start the year with Time of Wonder,” a Robert McCloskey book I didn’t know yet. It seemed like a sweeter book than I would usually choose for my cool and savvy 11 and 12-year-olds.

Still, I liked it, and tried it out on them. As I read aloud, the room grew quieter and quieter. I could gauge the attention of many of my listeners by their faces; could tell others were with me when they grinned at the book’s very subtle humor.

Like all the best picture books, Time of Wonder is powerful and efficient. Reading Time of Wonder together, my class and I shared summer, and summer adventures, and the inevitable ending of summer. We shared what it’s like to listen to adults talking about possible trouble, a hurricane coming. We shared what it’s like to sit with your grown-ups and sing through the storm, and wake up the next day to explore the branches and roots of a fallen tree.

A good picture book, like a poem, and like so much of our everyday storytelling for each other, means more than one thing by everything it means.

We talked about students’ experiences of a recent hurricane. The book had given us permission to admit to having been frightened–if we were–along with a model of opportunities for discovery everywhere–and we had had those, too.

Recently I appealed to past students on Facebook. What picture books stood out for them? Taylor Davis responded almost immediately, “The one about the red canoe… something about a boy and his aunt…I remember falling in love with it!”

Two kids, two women who are sisters, a wonderful adventure with danger and glory, and a cat named Sixtoes waiting back at home for an offering of fish.

Some years I used “the red canoe book” as read-aloud to start the year, especially if we were going to be studying watersheds (or map reading, since they use maps to plan their trip.)

Some years, though, the canoe book waited with others to be chosen by individual students, out of a crate full of books brought from home, from my family’s picture book collection. That crate supplemented the classroom’s shelf of picture books, and another bin of books borrowed from the school library, and another from the public library. All together, kids could choose from an enriched and enlarged collection, in the two or three weeks at the start of the year when everyone read picture books during silent reading time.

That happened by my decree, a rare state of affairs which always met with some initial resistance. At home, for their official homework reading time (and, of course, in any additional time they spent curled in a tree or a favorite chair, or walking around a safe path in an open room) they could read the big thick fantasy novels in which they were immersed. In school, though, for those first few weeks, I needed to watch them choose, begin, read, finish, and pass along book after book after book.

It’s true that I felt grave concern about a real and present danger: without my intervention, students might get to adulthood never having read highlights of English literature such as Go, Dog. Go! by P. D. Eastman–or never having read them with their new-found, big-kid powers of observation, and sense of irony.

We needed picture books to help us take ourselves less seriously. We also needed picture books to help us take ourselves more seriously, to take us on an express trip into important questions about life and the world.

Jessica Unger, responding to my Facebook invitation, remembered Flight, in which the young Charles Lindbergh struggles to stay awake on his trans-Atlantic voyage. (In other words, in which the perils of lost focus or failing attention could be lethal.)

Several past students remembered Eric Carle’s Very Hungry Caterpillar, in which eating and eating, and growing and growing, result in transformation.

Ultimately, picture book season in September worked out well for everyone in the class, partly because many of the books I had gathered were what is known in the trade as “sophisticated picture books”, books definitely intended for somewhat older audiences.

Here’s one of many wonderful picture book biographies. This one, by Peter Sis, doesn’t dodge the horror of Galileo’s being put on trial for his life, for saying what he could see.

Non-fiction picture books could work well later in the year, too. If a group of students were exploring a topic together, reporting to each other on separate individual readings, the right picture book could enable a strong contribution even from a reader still overwhelmed by long blocks of text.

After the first couple weeks, for their individual reading, and for the read-aloud books we shared, the students and I mostly chose novels. I might suggest time with picture books for a student who had left her book at home, or a kid marking time until the next book in his series came out on Wednesday.

Sometimes this detour back into picture books would become extended, as a student tracked down all the available picture books by a particular author, or discovered a wacky series that satisfied a taste for British humor, juvenile grade, like this one. (This is a page from The Frog Band and the Owlnapper, by Jim Smith.)

Often, also, a picture book or two could launch a new thematic study–launch in the sense of full throttle forward.

For example, Henry the bear (Henry David Thoreau just barely in disguise) makes a case for his preferred mode of transportation–and a bet with a friend–to prove that hiking to Fitchburg takes no longer than working to pay for train fare.

Henry’s argument with his friend opened a thematic study called Transportation Choices. Other picture books helped us think about people with limited access to choice: people in our own world unable to drive due to disabilities or aging–or youth; people in places where a bicycle can change a family’s possibilities. In My Rows and Piles of Coins, by Tololwa M. Mollel, a young boy wants a bicycle not just to ride, but to serve as a mechanical pack animal, getting farm products to market.

The right picture book could widen–powerfully, effectively, almost magically–our sense of “us.”

Before my school opened an older student program, all my 12-year-olds graduated from our school and became immigrants into the cultures of other schools. Immigration made a particularly strong thematic study topic then, and picture books helped focus on the choices made by immigrants, including what they chose to bring–which could mean how they chose to be prepared. Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel follows Miss Bridie across the sea, and then through her life in her new land, where she uses her shovel to plant, to clean up after a fire, to dig a grave. Here she is, walking away without looking back, setting out into her new life with her shovel in hand.

There are so many other wonderful picture books I’m sad to leave out. My Place, an amazing book from Australia, which I read aloud almost every year, I’m saving for its own special post. The picture books we used to explore ideas about evolution, ditto.

For now, just one more. Almost always, on the last day of school, I read aloud this book. If you were ever in my class, you may remember how we created instant background music for certain pages. Singing the final song, to the tune of Popeye the Sailor Man, was a great antidote for any tendency to get weepy, especially my own.

According to my daughter, I’ve given at least three copies of Sailor Dog to her children, Abe and Julia. “That’s okay,” she says. “It’s good to have one on every floor of the house.”

Some notes:

The round shapes visible on many of the books shown aren’t part of the illustrations. They’re just stickers that marked the books belonging to the classroom collection, or my family collection.

I want to give you publisher information here, in gratitude to the people who keep these books in print. Some are in fact out of print, and harder to find, but I’ve discovered that I can often locate used copies of old favorites through web sellers. So here’s the list:

Time of Wonder, written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey. Puffin.

Three Days on a River with a Red Canoe, written and illustrated by Vera B. Williams. Greenwillow.

Go, Dog. Go! written and illustrated by P. D. Eastman. Random House.

Flight, by Robert Burleigh, illustrated by Mike Wimmer. Puffin.

A Very Hungry Caterpillar, written and illustrated by Eric Carle. Philomel.

Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei, created and illustrated by Peter Sis. Square Fish.

The Frog Band and the Owlnapper, written and illustrated by Jim Smith. Little Brown.

Henry Hikes to Fitchburg, written and illustrated by D. B. Johnson. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

My Rows and PIles of Coins, by Tololwa M. Mollel, illustrated by E. B. Lewis. Clarion.

Miss Bridie Chose a Shovel, by Leslie Connor, illustrated by Mary Azarian. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Sailor Dog, by Margaret Wise Brown, illustrated by Garth Williams. Golden Books.

Seven more thoughts about silent reading

Posted on November 16, 2013 by pollybrown2013

#1 I’m beginning this post the way I wanted to end the previous one, with photos of kids reading, in the various positions and conditions my students adopted for silent reading time. (I finally found photographs, and got permissions.)

Some sat on the floor leaning against the wall. Some sat on the big rug in the meeting area, often snuggled up next to each other like puppies.

Some sat at their table places, books on the table, heads bent over, sometimes inside a curtain of long hair.

(The girl in the background is going through a book stack, as in A Stack of Five.)

Some liked to hide in what kids called “the cave”, a little passage formed by the non-fiction bookshelves, with a rug on the floor, and with less visual or sound distraction than anywhere else in the room–which made another reason, besides privacy, to choose it.

One year I learned that I had to check that corner carefully if the fire alarm went off during reading time. A particular child remained cave-bound, reading straight through the horrific racket of the alarm. To my other overlapping mental categories of readers, I added, “children who could probably keep reading through an earthquake.”

#2 Intense mental adventures are happening in almost complete silence. I move around the room taking notes, but rarely interrupting. Conferences, one-on-one chats with an assessment often included, I try to do in the cubby area, outside the room.

The intensity of that quiet, a kind of sacredness, comes back to me as a I watch my grandson sleep, sense when he is dreaming, wonder what is happening in his dream.

#3 Reading is not sleeping, not dreaming, but reading fiction can be like dreaming someone else’s dream, so in a class of 15 there could be 30 minds dreaming, either creating or recreating stories: 15 students and 15 authors.

Often, though, there were local rages for particular authors. Several kids, recommending books for each other, might all be reading various titles by Nancy Farmer or Gary Paulsen, say. That could throw off my math.

Sometimes I imagined thought balloons above kids’ heads, full of the words they were reading, jostling with each other in the air space of the room; words perhaps moving from bubble to bubble, the way people can move from painting to painting in Harry Potter. The way enthusiasms can move through a reading community.

#4 When I first started teaching this age level, watching whole rooms full of kids reading, I was startled by how much I could tell about them as readers, just by watching their reading behavior, without even hearing them read.

Kids with strong reading skills, who nevertheless had to struggle to maintain focus / kids who were thrillingly a little drunk with the glory of new-found reading fluency / kids who were just too tired to read without falling asleep / kids for whom reading offered a sanctuary they might kill to protect / kids who began book after book but could never manage to finish one / kids who strongly preferred certain kinds of books / kids who could not read funny books without at least shaking slightly, or more likely poking a neighbor. All of that showed, with no need for assessments.

#5 I also discovered that assessments could be very useful. I used the Burns & Roe Informal Reading Inventory, a fairly standard assessment tool to which I had been introduced in graduate school. It gave me lists of words to hand a child, in order to check for ability to decode words without context clues. Then the child would read a passage, and answer the comprehension questions provided.

On my own, I requested a free retelling, which teased out slightly different aspects of a student’s comprehension. Finally, if we had time, I often asked for kids’ reactions, things the passage made them think about or wonder.

Depending on the child, I sometimes shared the results, and we talked over whatever they seemed to show. I wanted to get the kids’ own insights into their experience and history as readers.

An assessment of this sort is often used primarily to get a sense of the grade level at which a child is reading. More than that, I valued the way this series of activities gave me a sense of a child’s approach to reading.

Does the reader seem confident and engaged? Will she stop and deconstruct and parse out unfamiliar multisyllabic words, and use other clues besides the word itself, when those are available? Is he self-monitoring, or is he willing to tolerate and ignore meaningless readings? Is she finding a balance between inferring things the author never intended, and failing to make any inferences at all? Does he start out strong but wear out, or start out faltering and warm up? Does she read aloud flawlessly but then have no memory of what she read? Is he one of those slow and patient readers with lots of miscues, who nonetheless gives an inspired free retelling, and then answers every comprehension question perfectly?

Above all, is she comfortable enough to laugh out loud at my all-time favorite reading assessment line, about the ratio of sheep to humans in New Zealand? (18 to 1.)

Jokes aside, it’s how a child is reading, the kinds of energy a student brings to reading, that can tell us how to help that child move forward. We need to know what strengths can be the seeds for new growth, and we need that especially if there are also weaknesses. The same assessment tool I was taught to use in graduate school, with its capacity for pigeonholing, nonetheless turned out to be a great way to find out what I wanted to know: how a child’s intelligence was meeting the world of print, and what I could do to cheer and help.

#6 There are some important lessons to learn about reading, it’s true, and some of them can be taught in a whole class setting. For a while we received a classroom set of Boston Globes every Monday. (We were sad when their distribution arrangements no longer worked for us.) One day, we would read the bridge column–easily decoded words, all of them, that conveyed almost exactly nothing to a person without the right background knowledge.

This was a great way to encourage students to think about the difference between decoding and comprehending, and then go beyond that and think about the dimension of remembering. It’s hard to remember something that is gobbledygook in the first place–even if all the words are words you know. Remembering requires understanding, and understanding requires not just decoding–turning symbols into sounds–but thinking.

Definitely there’s a place for teaching reading skills. But…

It’s even more important to talk about the meanings in a piece of reading, and what the author has done to let them bloom. It’s important to write about reading, to use the discovery process of writing as a way of opening out the experience of reading, and sharing it with others. But…

None of those other peripheral activities should ever be allowed to displace actual time for reading, because actual time for reading is what most builds readers.

All that other stuff is what you do whenever you have enough time in the schedule. Reading itself has to happen no matter what.

#7 “It’s part of your religion,” a kid once said. She felt the same way, and probably had some truth on her side.

I imagine the same feeling in whoever made this little statuette, which I found on wikimedia commons, with no other attribution besides the name Pierre. Thank you, whoever offered this for us to find and remember!

A Stack of Five

Posted on November 10, 2013 by pollybrown2013

Last year, one of my students told me about ‟open reading” at her previous school. ‟It’s called that,” she said, ‟but there isn’t really any open.” The students all read different books, but the teacher chose the book for each child.

I didn’t know whether to cry or throw things. On the whole, people who love reading have had a chance to choose what they read.

On the other hand, it can be difficult for kids to choose books for themselves.

Some kids don’t yet know what it feels like to read comfortably at their actual reading level. For these kids, reading is laborious—possibly a labor of love, but inherently so challenging that they choose books for content alone, and often wind up reading, very slowly, books that are too hard. Reading that slowly, a student has trouble carrying the plot, or feeling any momentum in the story–or looking forward to reading.
Sometimes kids have been caught in a strange trap in which their reading choices have to prove things to adults, or to other kids, or even to themselves: how brilliant they are; how sophisticated they are; how cute or tough they are.
Sometimes kids become genre addicts, overly dependent on what works for them about a particular genre or author: low memory demand, or a relatively predictable plot pattern, or constant nail-biting suspense.

How could I give kids the opportunity and responsibility to choose, and at the same time help them choose from what was likely to work? How could I help them expand the world of what could work for them? Enter the book stack.

The procedure was very simple. If a student asked me for it, I would choose not one book, but a stack of five books. (Yes, this is another routine involving choosing from five possibilities. I wrote about one for writing in the post Think of Five.)

I liked to have the student stand with me in front of the shelves of the type of book we were after, most typically novels, sometimes picture books or non-fiction. Especially at the beginning of the year, as I was getting to know a student, I’d ask, ‟What have you been reading lately?” Or, ‟Can you point to some books that have worked for you?” Or just ‟Have you already read this?” as I began to pull books from the shelf and hand them to the student.

Affirming the value of a range of reading levels, I tended to include one or two lower-level classics that the student had not yet read and was in danger of never reading. ‟Ah,” I would say, as I handed over Dear Mr. Henshaw or Number the Stars. “One of those books that nobody should grow up without reading.” (‟Oh,” the student might say, if he or she knew me well enough, ‟you say that about everything.”)

Usually, the stack included at least one book that might have special meaning for that student. In the stack above, I’m offering some books in which characters discover new possibilities of self-reliance and courage. For an Asian-American student, for example, I might include at least one book with Asian or Asian-American characters. For a student struggling through a parent divorce or a friend’s parents’ divorce, I might include a book or two in which the hero or heroine faces a similar challenge. So long as the stack included other books, I could be led by my own agenda for the child, usually unspoken, gently offered–but often pursued. Most kids do tend to reach for the books that can help them grow, if the reach is voluntary.

Sometimes a student would ask for a particular category. ‟I want books about World War II and the Holocaust.” ‟I want books about time travel.” Or a student might ask for an exclusion: no talking animals; no books told in the first person; no books with anyone dying.

Sometimes I was very open about a theme for a stack. ‟This stack is all realistic fiction, because we’re doing research to figure out what sorts of realistic fiction will appeal to you as much as fantasy.” ‟These are books that I’m pretty sure you can read easily and quickly, any of them, to help you build fluency.” ‟This is a whole stack of funny books, because we both agree that you’ve been reading really serious stuff lately, and could use a change.”

When we had five (or sometimes six—enough and not too much), the student would go back to his or her table place and examine the books.

In a mini-lesson early in the year we would have helped each other list ways to select a book.

Of course, kids went beyond these strategies, finding their own. In fact, as I watched out of the corner of my eye from across the room, I saw and savored tremendous variation, child to child, that reminded me of watching adult friends play poker.

Student A spread the books out on the table, face down, and then turned them over one by one as she spent time with each book. Student B used a numerical rating system. Student C would start with a pile on the left, and sort into three piles on the right: yes, no, and maybe–and then go back and reconsider. (Frequently, Student C hadn’t made a choice by the end of reading time, and kept the whole stack in his crate overnight.)

Student D knew all along which one he really wanted, and came back 20 seconds after I sent him away. For him, I’d say, ‟Please spend a little more time and really look at all of them, for the sake of next time.”

Student E, after agonizing cheerfully, would copy all the unchosen titles and authors into her reading journal for future reference.

The only way to do it wrong was not to do it at all.

Now and then, a student who hated choosing would propose a variation: the student would make the book stack, and I would choose. That was hard for me.

Some kids asked for book stacks every time they finished books, collaborating with me on almost every choice. Others asked for a book stack less often. Once in a while, if a student seemed stuck in a rut, I’d be the one to initiate the process, saying, ‟When you’ve finished this book, ask me to help you make a stack.”

Once in a very great while, the chosen book turned out not to work, after a fair trial, and I encouraged the student to figure out why, but then start over with another book. There’s no better way to dull the love of reading than to finish books dutifully, no matter who chose them.

All this took time, of course. It helped that I knew the very substantial collection in the room fairly well; that as the year went by I knew students increasingly well; that in my mixed-age classroom I was almost always working with some students for a second year. (To watch and nurture two years of reading growth! Incredibly delicious.) Often I recruited more experienced or faster readers to suggest new titles, or help me assess books I had ordered but not yet read.

In any case, this was time I enjoyed spending, for so many reasons. It satisfied my inner librarian. More importantly, though, it gave me a way to facilitate rather than dictate. I didn’t want, ever, to say, “Here–read this.” No matter how long it took, I’d rather hand over five books, and let the reader take it from there.

Progress Report

Posted on October 31, 2013 by pollybrown2013

My most recent post was the fifteenth on this blog. That felt to me like time to think over my “time to think it over,” and as usual I did that by watching mental videos: my newest grandson, the river of students I’ve taught, and myself, as blogger.

Zen Meditation

During the months in which I’ve been writing these posts, and figuring out what comes next in my life, I’ve also spent a happy amount of time with Zen, who is about to be four months old.

Lately, I’ve been inspired by watching him discover his hands, which are very small.

At first, when Zen was set down on one of those mats with soft bright toys suspended on long crossing wands, he waved his arms and legs with huge pleasure, but not much control. When one of his wild waves connected, his eyes opened wide, and he made a reflective comment in Zen language. Increasingly, he tried to bat those toys around his small heaven.

Once he developed a little more control, he would hold his right fist at the length of his outstretched arm, intently focusing. He seemed to be figuring out that since he could use that hand, it must belong to him. I thought—and said, since he’s incredibly easy to talk to, and doesn’t yet roll his eyes when I come out with teacher talk: Yes, it’s amazing! We have these perfect tools built in!

I watched Zen work consciously, painstakingly, to practice opening his hand, before closing it on something he wanted to grasp. He got hold of my sleeve as I was changing his diaper, and I laughed. His look was a combination of who, me? and yes, I’m cool.

Now, sitting in his swing, Zen can grasp his favorite model of the cosmos in both hands.

When he’s lying on the play mat, he has all sorts of ambidextrous fun. His left hand plays the crackly wings of the parrot; his right hand tickles a couple of giraffe feet. One evening his parents watched him manage to include the monkey, a three-ring circus. Yesterday, he pulled so hard on all these fabric friends, trying to get them into his mouth, that the entire superstructure seemed to be undergoing an earthquake, with crackly-parrot-wing sound effects. Total mayhem! Produced by a four-month-old! Whoever designs these baby toys is doing a great job.

A river of students

So that’s Zen, learning up a storm. Meanwhile, back in my own part of the state, I’m still sorting through the evidence of my past students.

I’ve reduced a large number of boxes full of records and work samples–I won’t tell how many–to four binders, with one clear plastic sleeve for each student, all in alphabetical order: three Aarons, so far; five Bens. Etc. I’m maybe half done with that part of the overall job I’ve set myself.

Meanwhile, in my mind, for those past students who are grown to adulthood, I’m holding those layers of evidence next to who they’ve turned out to be. They travel through Nepal; they figure out the evolutionary history of squirrels; they teach kindergarten, or help middle-school city kids make videos, or become involved in their kids’ preschools; they solve problems for internet start-ups; they help cities plan evacuation routes or plant trees; they run campus businesses and theater productions; they move expensive paintings–Picasso!–from one city to another; they tackle contact improvisation classes in Italy. I love it all, and keep finding out more.

What about my more recent students? I’ve just been to the Halloween parade and community meeting, with its traditional skits. Those kids, too, when I look back and forth, now / then, have simultaneously changed and stayed the same–the same unique and vivid selves, learning learning learning.

So I’ve stepped back from the day-to-day teaching of one group of students, who tended to absorb almost all my waking energy, to look at the flow of students through all these years, like a river. Thanks to my inability to throw things away, it’s a river that shimmers with detail.

Watching myself as blogger

Writing this blog, focusing on one small chosen view after another in the landscape of school life as I have been lucky to know it, I’ve been moved again and again by the sheer power of human learning—not just at the early adolescent ages I taught, but in the strength and stretch and increasing individualization of every year that comes after.

In addition, writing this blog is a lot like watching an infant. In fact, I am the four-month-old, and way slower than Zen. But persistent.

I started working on the blog just about when he was born, at the beginning of July. I had five posts at least partly written before I took any of them public. (There are familiar patterns here. I learned to walk by holding onto the furniture for quite a while.)

Figuring out how to add photographs as illustrations took me days. No–I’m still getting the hang of it, so call that months. Figuring out how to scan Justin McCarthy’s hummanacraft design took over a week, even with the help of my perennial backstage helper and cheerleader, the wonderful wizard with the mustache, Alex Brown.

So far, writing has been easier than I feared it might be, because I already knew, most days, how to take risks and have fun in a first draft, how to let it lead me, and then how to throw out whatever didn’t work for me or couldn’t fit. I already knew how to revise and revise and revise. (My record, so far, is 23 separately saved drafts.) I love all the second and sixth and nineteenth chances of revision. I’d rather exercise that particular freedom than eat, or get up to put on another layer of fleece when the house cools down.

On the other hand, I still go into a steep decline immediately after hitting the publish button. Every time. Obviously, somehow I’ve felt like I had honed each paragraph as long and as well as I could in a mortal world, when I get to that point. But I hit that publish button and suddenly I’m convinced it’s all hogwash.

This isn’t just about the blog, and isn’t new. John Hodgen once described Polly Brown, poet, being extracted from a street mailbox by public safety officials using the jaws of life.

I am really good at second thoughts. On the other hand, I keep risking it all again.

This past week, I wrote to Alex Dunn. His blogs, at thedailybirdnewengland.blogspot.com and at mooglegaps.blogspot.com, have given me important inspiration. In each of his blogs, Alex is building up a body of perspective on some aspect of the world, piece by piece. He believes in the details, the tiny things that make each type of bird distinctive, and in the overall perspective. Like me, he’s obsessed with maps, which offer ways to view both.

In his return email, Alex thanked me for letting him know he’d had an impact. He said, ‟It is a strange thing sending writing out into the void and never really knowing what comes of it.” Yes. Like sending out poems, and feeling like they might as well have gone to Mars. It’s never been likely that someone would stop me in the drugstore and say, “Here’s what your poem (or your post) made me think about…”

But that’s what I want to know about each of these posts: Not is it good or bad? But what did it make you think about? So I’ve loved the comments some of you have written—adding your own memories of Dana’s death, or your own experience of a watershed far away from me, or your experience with teaching.

On the other hand, some of the blog’s regular readers (I’m pretty sure I can count at least five) say that you’re not sure how to comment. I can’t figure out how to control whether there’s a comment box showing, where I want it, at the bottom of every post. Sometimes, it seems, you have to click on the little blue dialog icon up near the title.

Should I say that at the end of every post? Should I keep giving people prompts for ways they might jump in? Should I just tell you, here and now, that I am most interested in what resonates, in your own story, whatever my story made you think of? Just a few of my current questions.

Although some of my nearest and dearest supporters think it’s a mistake, I do check the stats and maps available behind the scenes. I had a private cheering moment when I passed the landmark of 1000 views.

Discovering I’d had a hit from someone going online in Nepal—and guessing who it was!—absolutely made my day. My week!

I try to ignore the intimidating statistics on other blogs, in the thousands every day. Is that what I want?

Right now, the most personal success–again, so much like writing poems–comes with this: putting life in words helps me cherish it. I am cherishing that life I led as a teacher, and everyone who led it with me. I’m glad that many of my readers are people who shared that with me, directly or indirectly, near or far. I feel, often, like I’m writing, and celebrating, on behalf of us all.

I do have wider, more public intentions, also, and hope to have a gradually increasing public audience. Mostly, I want to encourage people to think about authentic learning, because it’s endangered in the world around us. In some small way, I want to contribute to collective, sensible, committed mindfulness about what learning really looks like and means and needs and produces, so different from the loudest mainstream trends. I want to do that without arguing, actually, just by showing what can work, because I know it has.

So—in sum, as my attorney daughter would say—I am very glad, these days, to have the freedom to drive out the turnpike, across all those rivers, and spend some hours with Zen. Grateful that my older grandchildren are only a day’s train ride away. Grateful for more phone and email contact with the rest of my far-flung family. All of us are learning, moving from one version of ourselves to another, and I’m paying better attention now.

I’m also more aware than ever before that I was lucky-and-a-half to stumble into teaching, to teach for so long in a rare and wonderful place, and to have known so many young learners one by one by one, within the communities we built together.

Finally, I am grateful—in every word I type and then change and then change back again—for every bit of encouragement you’ve given me, one way or another, to try this and keep trying.

I hold you in the light, whether I know you or not, as I send you off to watch and cheer and cherish whatever learning is happening in your own life’s neighborhood.

Just for Five

Posted on October 21, 2013 by pollybrown2013

If you’re stumped and blank as a new field of snow, at least try writing, without removing your pencil from the paper or your hands from the keyboard, for five minutes. Just five.

The previous post focused on brainstorming a topic list, but said almost nothing about actually choosing. Although decisions often challenge me, even I can just ‟go with my gut,” as my daughter says, if I’ve brainstormed first. Students seemed to share that.

Here’s part of the writing that came from one of the brainstorms shown in the previous post, about taking care of baby ducks.

(Once in a while, a student would ask, ‟What if I can find a way to put all of my brainstormed ideas together?” This made me think of my friend John Hodgen, a poet who sometimes seems to have done exactly that: to have noticed and listened to and named the different crickets chirping in the dark corners of his mind, and taught them to sing their brightness-against-the-dark songs together. How could I be doctrinaire about any of these instructions, given such models of make-it-your-own?)

One way or another, all of us sitting in the classroom together, almost always, could choose—just like that—and start writing—partly because this exercise only committed us to writing for five minutes.

I sat at the front of the room, at the little old wooden student desk I had rescued from the basement. (My big desk was back in the corner.) For other writing activities I moved around the room, conferencing, but for the fluency exercises I sat with half an eye on the clock and my heart in my throat, inspired by all that energy around me–and I wrote like mad, myself, for most of the five minutes.

As a young adult I attended Quaker Meeting, sitting every week in silent meetings of collective reflection and searching. In addition to meeting for worship, Quakers have specialized meetings, always beginning with silence, for specialized purposes—‟meeting for business,” for example. This intense short writing in my classroom was a silent meeting for writing, and we were all in it together, reinforcing each other.

Unlike ordinary open writing time, we weren’t asking each other questions, or getting up to consult dictionaries or spell-checkers, or losing time over punctuation, if that got in the way. We were just writing, writing, writing. The brevity—five minutes, no more, at the beginning—helped to create an intensity, a suspension of self-conscious critiquing, a focus on the act of inventing and constructing with words—and that led to some amazing beginnings.

Some students at this age (in this case 12) are able to use conventional spelling and paragraph breaks, even in a quick first draft.

What about paper vs. screen? I wrote in front of my students on paper, by hand, but I do this exercise at home on the computer. On the other hand, I don’t carry my laptop in my backpack when I’m out walking or bicycling, so plenty of writing, including brainstorming, happens in a paper journal. For me, different kinds of writing have emerged in the two different situations. It makes sense to me for students to be comfortable with both, if they can, and to have that additional option of switching, like having another gear on a bicycle.

With more and more computers in the classroom, I could encourage students who had already developed some typing fluency, or for whom writing by hand involved special difficulties, to use typing in this situation. Increasingly, over the past decade, students with writing challenges, throughout the older grades of my school, have been allowed to bring and use their own laptop computers. While some kids found their sheets of paper and pencils, others set up their laptops, or got settled at one of the classroom computers. It worked fine.

As the days and weeks went by, even the most challenged kids would figure it out: you can write about almost anything if you’re only committed to writing for five minutes, and if you focus on the meaning of what you’re exploring, not the mechanics.

I loved that point somewhere in the second week when kids would start looking at me warily, or actually wave their hands, in a universal gesture meaning, ‟No! Don’t you dare call time!” If everyone else seemed okay, I’d just go for it and give us a few minutes more. This could lead to sudden exhilarating jumps in word count. At the rational age of 11 or 12, kids knew they couldn’t make a direct comparison between quick writes of different durations—but they felt the power of their own stamina, and that’s what I wanted them to be able to feel.

about war2 cropped When I did call time, students counted words, including any words crossed out. (Those crossed out words got written first, so they represented part of the writer’s output.) Nobody was allowed to marvel publicly about how many or how few words they’d written. They were meant to compare not with each other, but with themselves, day by day, page by page in their notebooks.

I think of a child who wrote just nine words the first day, and was proud to do that, but even prouder to get to 43 after a few repetitions of the exercise format, over the next week. I think, also, of other children whose word count actually started high and went down, as they worked to figure out how to think and write at the same time. That, too, was a good thing.

So: if you need to write and you’re stuck, just write for five minutes. If you want to cast a line into the file cabinets of your mind, and see what comes up, you can make a surprisingly good start in five minutes. If you think you know nothing about a topic, five minutes is long enough to prove yourself wrong—to prove yourself ready to begin.

Finally, although there’s a special power to this exercise when a whole group does it together, you can do it by yourself, and kids sometimes did, in open writing time. I could see them glancing at the clock—or forgetting to glance at the clock, which is even better.

All in all, another slogan to live by.

On days when we did this exercise, kids typically had a choice for how they used the rest of that day’s writing time. A child could keep going with that piece she had just started within the exercise, and many students chose that. A child could also work on something else entirely, a story in progress, a letter to an editor, a menu, a poem–maybe a poem in the form of a menu? Some kids spontaneously began revising what they’d written in the exercise; many waited until we were all working on revision together, when I did mini-lessons to help support that.

Of course, the writing curriculum as a whole was much more complicated than this one brainstorm-and-free-write exercise. I want to write, in other posts somewhere down the road, about kids sharing their writing, and about revision, and about some specific genres of writing.

This exercise, though, was the fundamental practice, the opening of the heart, the first opening of that packet of seeds each of us carries, ready to germinate. We followed the exercise again whenever we needed to warm up, or to have a new beginning: after vacations, after the long individual research reports were finished in the spring, or after a week of very little writing time due to field trips or community events.

Writing this, I am moved all over again by the remembered hush of a class full of kids whose pens and pencils and keyboards are making the only sound; whose hearts and minds are brave, or surprised, or faithful, patient, excited—one version or another of busy. They could risk that little storm of intense composition; their hands and minds could work together that long; they could be that generous to themselves.

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	pollybrown2013 on Just for Five

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Word Ladders

sad

lost

angry

always

needful

something

completely

unavailable

inaccessible

inappropriate

nevertheless

obstinately

determined

insistent

stubborn

growing

wildly

happy

some

way

I

go

out

from

these

places

seeking

Paradise

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Pets

Parties

Connections to the past

Freedom

Maps

So what builds a sense of place?

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My Place and Place Based Education

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Zen Meditation

A river of students

Watching myself as blogger

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