Literacy Now

Become long enough in the tooth as an educator and you’ll realize that with the dawn of each new calendar year also comes the DONAROBA (Dawn of a New Round of Buzzwords and Acronyms) in the world of reading, writing, literacy, and schools.

It’s a COS (Confection of Scholarship) concocted by BBs (Bureaucratic Buffoons) about which you better not GCWYPD (Get Caught with Your Pants Down).

Luckily, my EIDE (Experience in Dissecting Edu-babble) can help guide you through the upcoming MOH (Morass of “Huhs?”) many readers of this quarterly column will surely face over the course of the next 12 months.

And so, without further ado, here’s a heads-up on the 2012 POO (Pipeline of Obfuscation).

Without a doubt we’ll all be in P4C-Core (Preparing for Common Core) mode. Unless you live in an NFM4UH (No Federal Money for You, Honey) state because Common Core is not on your DSDOE’s (Dysfunctional State Department of Education’s) to-do list. And while the BOSTs (Bashers of Standardized Testing) will be out in full force, the DOA’s (Defenders of Accountability) will be right there to meet them head on. Indeed, the bloody street fight pitting teacher versus teacher, administrator versus teacher, politician versus teacher and parent versus teacher will—sad to report—continue.

Unfortunately, this arms race is not contained to any one, single battlefield—it will be a time of war on many fronts. We’ll have the BUTULs (Break up the Union Loons) versus the PTUAACL (Preserve the Union at Any Cost Loons), we’ll have the AOBCSTTNROTC (Advocates of Blindly Chartering Schools Though They’re Really Not Outperforming Their Counterparts) lobby versus the QSOADAGETWDKS (Quit Stealing Our Average Daily Attendance Gripers Even Though We Do Kinda Stink) lobby, and of course, we’ll see the CEBM (Corporate Education Billionaire’s Mafia) take on any and all comers who dare to question their insight, ability or motives.

Indeed, each of these clashes will go toe-to-toe on television, on the Internet, and on Capitol Hill during the first eleven months of 2012. And why only eleven months? Well, it’s an EY (Election Year), which means that the CPWPAL (Cartoonish Politicians Who Pander and Lie) will be out in full force telling you anything they think you want to hear in order to secure your vote. Come December ‘12, they’ll all be back to their tone-deaf agendas.

Not to spoil your New Year’s diet plans, but since I come from the philosophical school of SPESDSS (Sugar Provides Emotional Solace During Stressful Situations), I suggest you plan on packing a few extra jelly doughnuts in your lunchbox this year. The kind with the GGO (Good Gooey Ooze) injected into them. When the seas of schooling get rough in the months ahead, you’ll thank me in spades.

Of course, the world of literacy instruction won’t be spared from all the tumult. The WGTNMFFF (We Gotta Teach New Media, Forward, Forward, Forward) progressives will launch lots of grenades at the ITCOTLNJTTTMETIDNRKHTUTTM (It’s the Content of the Lesson, Not Just the Technology, That Matters...Even Though I Do Not Really Know How to Use the Technology Myself) crowd. And though I do not consider myself to be all that prescient, I do believe this one is a battle that will most likely last for at least another decade.

The DOCs (Defenders of the Canon) will stand nose-to-nose with the AOYAL (Advocates of YA Literature). The EO (English Only) faction will knock heads with the BI (Bilingual Instruction) believers. And the WMDAWCTROTS (We Must Do Anything We Can to Raise Our Test Scores) crowd, well...who won’t they fight?

But curiously, there will be “shades-of-grey” skirmishes as well, such as when the fearful PEFOTOEWALOJs (Prepare ’Em for the Test or We’ll All Lose Our Jobs!) employees find themselves in conflict with LIAMTJTBT (Life is About More than Just the Bubble Tests) workers. Interestingly, this is will be a quarrel where members of each sideline find themselves opposing yet simultaneously sympathizing with their counterparts on the opposite sideline—a real head-scratcher indeed.

So what more can you do beyond arming yourself with jelly doughnuts to make sure your PFTQ (Preparation for this Quagmire) is where it needs to be as the calendar year turns?

To that I say, think MBAS (Mind, Body and Spirit).

To fortify your mind, think like a child.
To nourish your body, I recommend green apples.
And when it comes to your spirit, well...has any teacher ever really gone wrong watching this?

Alphabet soup has long since absconded with literacy education, public schooling and cogent administration. Therefore, in 2012, you might as well just EMOTS (Expect More of the Same) because you know soon enough someone is gonna PALOHMROOTBACIONP (Pull Another Load of Horse Manure Right Out of Their Butt and Call it Our New Policy).

Alan Sitomer was named California's 2007 Teacher of the Year. In addition to being an inner-city high school English teacher and former professor in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Alan is a nationally renowned speaker specializing in engaging reluctant readers who received the 2004 award for Classroom Excellence from the Southern California Teachers of English, the 2003 Teacher of the Year honor from California Literacy, the 2007 Educator of the Year award by Loyola Marymount University and the 2008 Innovative Educator of the Year from The Insight Education Group. He’s the author of six young adult novels, three children's picture books, two teacher methodology books, and a classroom curriculum series for secondary English Language Arts instruction called THE ALAN SITOMER BOOK JAM. A Fun Look at Our Serious Work will appear quarterly on the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog.

Last month, I compared research to a row of tumbling dominoes, using my own experience in researching and writing the biography SACAGAWEA.

I’ve written novels, too, and if I could name one thing about the process that has most surprised me, it’s this: Writing fiction often requires as much research as writing nonfiction.

When you think about it, it makes sense. Any made-up story, regardless of genre, must have an element of truth. Truth lends a story integrity; it allows the suspension of disbelief. This is an obvious tenet for historical fiction, but it’s equally true for contemporary stories. THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN reads like a tall tale, until Sherman Alexie confides that the story truly is “absolutely true.” (I’ll happily interpret that as “absolutely mostly true,” because even autobiography benefits from good story structure. But that’s another blog post.)

Science fiction and fantasy must also contain elements of truth; perhaps even more so than realistic fiction, since the suspension of disbelief is even more important. WHEN YOU REACH ME, by Rebecca Stead, is set in a gritty, realistic 1970s New York City. This setting is so vividly rendered, and the characters are so true-to-life, that the story’s fantastical elements are readily accepted.

Even the highest fantasy requires research, though perhaps of a different sort. The completely fabricated world of THE HOBBIT builds upon ancient lore and languages, giving Tolkien’s story an aura of integrity and a connection to authentic culture and history.

In my own contemporary YA novel, JUMP THE CRACKS, a young teen tries to help an abused toddler, only to find herself running away with him. In order for readers to accept this premise, I needed to create a protagonist who would believably do such a thing, when confronted with a difficult choice. And so I establish that Victoria is mature enough to ride a train alone (and living in a place where train travel is common), yet immature enough to be impetuous—a child of divorce, with an emotional axe to grind.

Next, I needed to make Victoria’s journey logically possible, if not precisely, then at least nearly so. And so I studied Amtrak schedules and calculated the cost of train tickets. I checked the price of diapers. I read up on the GPS capabilities of cell phones (circa 2003). I don’t expect readers to put down the book and check Amtrak schedules (I hope they don’t!), but if they did, they would discover that Victoria’s journey was entirely possible. An author owes it to readers to get a story’s underpinnings right, or she will lose her readers’ trust.

How can this information be used in the classroom? Flip the author’s process and conduct backward research. For instance, instead of researching a topic first and then writing about it, students could choose a favorite piece of fiction—a picture book, a novel, even a fairy tale—and trace back one or more facts of the story.

Some stories’ facts are contained in small, telling details. For example, from CHARLOTTE’S WEB: Do farmers really bathe their pigs in buttermilk? Why? Why is Charlotte’s full name Charlotte A. Cavatica?

Other stories might be traced back to their origins in history. For example, the Pied Piper legend is supposedly based on true events in the real-life town of Hamelin, Germany. And vampire stories have been around for a long time. For how long? In what cultures? What purpose did the stories serve? Were the original vampire tales based on real people or events? Is there more to the origin than Vlad the Impaler?

Here are a few more examples of backward research that students might do:

Rumpelstiltskin: Is it possible to spin real thread made of gold? How is it done? How is gold thread used in science, or in art? Find some examples.

GOODNIGHT MOON: Notice the moon rising outside the window and moving across the sky as the pages turn. Younger kids could go home and record the movement of the moon outside their own windows. Older kids might consult an almanac to determine what time of day it is in the story, based on a chosen calendar date. Or, using the almanac again, imagine it’s 7:30 p.m. in the story. What might the calendar date be?

Hansel and Gretel: Write a recipe for gingerbread large enough to build a cottage ten feet wide and ten feet long. (This can get more complicated: What will the roof be made of? Will gumdrops be involved?)

As these examples show, any genre of fiction is fair game, and the level and depth of research can be adjusted to fit the grade level. Projects can span the curriculum, tying literature to history, science, math, and art.

In more ways than one, research is a way of getting at the truth—even the truth behind any work of fiction.

Stacy DeKeyser is the author of the nonfiction books SACAGAWEA and THE WAMPANOAG. Her YA novel JUMP THE CRACKS received a Truman Reader’s Award in Missouri, and has been nominated for South Dakota’s YARP Teen Choice Award. Her newest novel, THE BRIXEN WITCH, will be published in June 2012.



Beyond the Notebook: It's Only Natural to Write Nonfiction

December 20 marks 199 years since the quiet death of a young woman in a backwater frontier fort. A woman of low status and meager means, her passing would have gone unnoticed if not for one witness who knew about her role in a watershed event: the 1805-06 expedition of Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery. Without her participation, the expedition would likely have failed several times over. Westward expansion, and the history of our nation, might have taken a very different path. This woman was Sacagawea.

Or was she?

When I first set out to write about Sacagawea’s life, I didn’t know more than the basics. I certainly didn’t know about the two very different theories of her death, both of which have passionate supporters. But I was given an assignment: to research and write a comprehensive biography in 6,500 words or less, and I had six months to do it. By the time I was finished, I had become an expert on Sacagawea. Moreover, I had become a passionate fan myself, so that even now, six years after publishing her biography, I can’t get enough of her. But at the beginning, when I faced a daunting task, I started where most anyone would: I Googled her.

Is Google a bad thing? A good thing? Or is it just a thing? Author Philip Pullman, an outspoken advocate of public libraries in Great Britain, says that “using the internet is like looking at a landscape through a keyhole.” True enough. But it’s not the digital-ness that makes it so. It’s the limited-ness. The same can be said for getting all your information from any single source or database, whether that source is Google or one branch of the library. The information is incomplete; it’s filtered, it’s biased.

But it’s a start. Think of it as the first domino.

I like to imagine the research process as a winding, intersecting network of standing dominoes. The dominoes might be books, print journals, digital media, or real people. Just as with the real thing, gathering and setting up the dominoes takes time, planning, and steady guidance. But if it’s done right, one source leads to another, and another, and the result is a beautifully orchestrated tumble. And here’s the real payoff: Students who can set up their dominoes skillfully will have learned not just how to research, but how to research thoroughly enough to formulate their own opinions about what they’ve read. They may even sow a lifelong interest in their topic.

For those reasons, I hope teachers will let kids choose their own research topics to the extent it’s possible. In addition to having a sense of ownership, kids will have more fun studying a topic that already interests them, and goodness knows academics and fun are too rare a combination. Besides, is it possible for anyone to know too much about a topic? Deep digging is where true discovery lies. If a student is dragged kicking and screaming to research and write about Sacagawea, for instance, he may very well stop at the first domino and conclude that the two theories of her death have equal weight. But a student who’s already interested, even casually, will be motivated to dig deeper—deeply enough to sort out truth from speculation, opinion, or misinformation. Best of all, curiosity indulged can grow into a lifelong passion.

While in the throes of my own research, I was thrilled to discover that two theories of Sacagawea’s demise do not simply exist, but persist. And not just online, but in books, too. With that in mind, I wrote the line that became my favorite in the book: “It may never be known for certain which story is true.” How subversive! Suggesting that history is more than a pile of dry, immutable facts. That even experts don’t know everything there is to know. That relying on one or two sources is not sufficient historical research, because who knows what the third source might say, or the thirtieth? That just because something is written down doesn’t necessarily mean it’s The Truth.

Which brings us back to the dominoes. Which dominoes do we choose from the huge pile at our disposal, both in print and online? The challenge is the same as it’s always been: to find reliable information, and to know what to do with it. With the proliferation of information from a mind-boggling array of sources, students need teachers and librarians more than ever. Kids need to learn how to sort through all the information available to them, and how to judge the integrity of that information, so the initial nudge of curiosity can take them down the right paths.

Students who develop strong research skills will come to realize that even reliable sources can conflict. But that’s okay, because kids will learn another valuable lesson: that history is constantly being interpreted, and re-interpreted. They will also learn that their interpretation can be as valid as anyone else’s, especially if they’ve researched thoroughly.

Did Sacagawea die a quiet death in the wilds of the Dakotas in 1812? Or did she live to be nearly 100, among her Shoshone people, spinning yarns of a journey across the continent with a troop of soldiers? “It may never be known for certain...”

What I learned, though, is that she was an extraordinary young woman. She rose above every expectation to hold her own among more than thirty adult white males, and in the process she earned their respect and admiration. She’s earned mine, too.

Building toward that beautifully orchestrated tumble of dominoes—conducting research that begins out of curiosity and progresses to passion and perhaps even to a lifelong interest in a topic—can be a skill that sticks with students through graduation and beyond.

Stacy DeKeyser is the author of the nonfiction books SACAGAWEA and THE WAMPANOAG. Her YA novel JUMP THE CRACKS received a Truman Reader’s Award in Missouri, and has been nominated for South Dakota’s YARP Teen Choice Award. Her newest novel, THE BRIXEN WITCH, will be published in June 2012.

Tell me if this sounds familiar.

It’s the end of the day. Your friends have been dismissed. You return to your classroom to deal with the remnants of learning left all over your floor and spilling out of your beautifully labeled baskets. You pause to eat the chocolate that you snagged from the secretary’s desk on your way back upstairs. And then, it is go time. You begin to move systematically and purposefully through your classroom, organizing and setting up for tomorrow.

Empty the homework basket and make a pile to take home? Check.
Erase the board and write a new morning message? Check.
Straighten up the library and set out tomorrow’s read alouds? Check.
Move to your back table and begin to organize books for tomorrow’s guided reading groups? Check.

Are you picking up what I’m putting down? If not, let me just come right out and say it.

(Ahem.)

Teachers are creatures of habit and routine. We thrive on predictable patterns and are the epitome of efficiency when left to our own devices.

Am I right or am I left? When we really want to get things done, we create a system, incorporate it into our routine and cruise through these rituals, moving on autopilot.

Let me paint you another picture.

It’s Friday. It’s been a long week. One of those weeks. Your friends are totally packed up and ready to go. And, despite your best efforts at timing, there are still twenty minutes left to go in the day. You reach for a read-aloud to help blissfully pass this miscalculation in time.

Stop right there. What book did you pick up? Just now, in your imagination. Was it the same cute-pictures-seems-funny-saw-it-on-the-wall-at-the-bookstore read-aloud you always choose?

If you are like me, that "go-to" read-aloud looks the same every time. That’s not to say that these books were bad choices—it’s more that they represented the same choice every single time. A read-loud rut, if you will.

However, one vacation (when I actually had a moment to read for pleasure!), it hit me like a ton of nerdy little bricks. When I read for pleasure I read all sorts of texts—professional journals (nerd alert!), trashy magazines (reality check), embarrassingly popular young adult novels, children’s picture books, cooking magazines, anything memoir, home decorating blogs, humor blogs, and snippets of the newspaper on my iPad. You know, I really mix it up. But when I read for pleasure with my class, the text I choose always feels the same.

In that moment, I thought to myself, “Self, what are you doing? How are you modeling a layered, bold reading life for your friends? How are you developing their sense of identity as readers? How are you exposing them to a variety of texts so they can decide if they are a trashy magazine person or a self-help book person or a DIY blog person?

So, in true teacher style, I spent most of my vacation working. (Bye bye pleasure reading!) I looked up and bookmarked free online news websites for kids. I found and followed several kid friendly blogs that covered a range of topics. I clipped my favorite recipes. I bought a few graphic novels and other texts that previously felt out of my comfort zone. I took all of these texts and I worked them into my rotation. I pushed myself to change my old habits because the reality is there are always going to be days when I find myself with ten extra minutes and forty expectant eyeballs. What I do with those ten minutes? Well, that’s where I can change.

When it comes to cleaning up at the end of the day, checking homework or making sure that our emails get answered, this type of routine is just plain survival. Years of having more on your plate than seems humanly possible will do that to you.

However, as this calendar year draws to a close, I’d like to invite you to rethink some of the other ruts routines you’ve created for yourself. Are some of them brilliant moments of hyper-productivity? Or are some of them an opportunity for growth and change?

Mrs. Mimi is a pseudonymous teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of IT'S NOT ALL FLOWERS AND SAUSAGES: MY ADVENTURES IN SECOND GRADE, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.



In Other Words: To-Do Lists—Your Best Friend or Worst Nightmare?

QUIET! Teacher in Progress: Focus on the 'How'

Time for a Pop Quiz. Question: What do you called kindergarten without art or music?

Answer: High school.

(All right, all right, if you said middle school, it’s worth half-credit.)

Now to some of us, the little Q & A above delivers a small chuckle. To others, it represents a brutal reality. The fact is schools are bludgeoning today’s kids with flavorless, sanitized, exuberant-less content nowadays—more so than we ever have ever done before—and too many classrooms are plagued by a contagion of joylessness in the pursuit of standardized, homogenized ideals.

If I ever get a chance to dictate our nation’s educational policy, I am going to bring back that extra-cheesy, covered in orange grease, stored under the heat lamp, pepperoni pizza I used to be able to scarf down at lunchtime (you know, the slices that got thrown under the bus by the politically correct helicopter moms who wanted their little angels to eat tree bark and locally grown organic berries for mid-day nutrition). And I will mandate that the first and foremost rule of educational policy—particularly when it comes to advancing literacy skills—is that KIDS MUST TASTE ACADEMIC FUN! That’s right, I believe in the power of joy to bring out the best in student work and learning.

Now, stay with me here, because no, I am not about to kick rigor to the curb. And no, I do not think that “fun” represents the penultimate aspiration for teaching and learning. And bzzp, my proposal does not warrant a lowering of scholarly expectations, either. In fact, I think the contrary. Extensive experience has shown me that students who enjoy their studies will learn more than students who don’t give a poop. (Note: I can back that up with hard research for all the data wonks out there.)

Indeed, it’s time we collectively go to bat more officially for the power of joy as it relates to learning. Why? Well, to paraphrase a semi-famous theater hack, “Let me count the ways.”

1) The vice grip approach of turning the screws on low-performing students through a drill-n-kill line of attack on elevating skills is contributing to America’s egregious drop out rate and exacerbating the Achievement Gap it actually aims to alleviate. That’s right, our current methodology is creating more of the problems we are supposedly purporting to solve. Really, who does that? (Note: Feel free to fill in your own snarky government/big corporation/family relative’s name here __________________ ).

2) Making learning a pleasurable experience requires no more cost than making it a tedious one… except that it learns the little ones a whole lot better. See, joy, smiles, and delight in school are free. (Not to mention highly effective.) This is key these days because when you look at how the budget cuts have decimated our classroom supplies, eviscerated our nation’s librarians, and levied a full frontal assault on every corner of education in our country, creatively solving problems with a sober recognition of the fact that “there ain’t no money” requires all of us to use the tools we do have instead of complaining about all of the tools we do not.

3) Have you done your professional reading? READICIDE, THE BOOK WHISPERER, THE READING ZONE, MAKING THE MATCH, WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA?, TEACHING LITERACY FOR LOVE AND WISDOM… I could go on and on.

4) Have we forgotten that the ultimate goal of education is not to be able to bubble in a correct A, B, C, or D answer choice on a standardized test? Sure, the loons who make policy may have lost their goofy minds by over-emphasizing the information which can be gleaned from bubble test scores and then making political hay with cherry-picked information to advance their own personal ambitions, but that doesn’t mean that those on the front lines need to forget that we are dealing with real kids. REAL PEOPLE. The kind who live, eat, breathe, and come to our classrooms starving for a meaningful human connection to their school work. In fact, this is why I became a YA author in the first place—to write books that reach real kids. Through humor. Through drama. Through the ageless art of telling salient, “Whoa, did I dig that” stories. And what’s my great “here’s how you, too, can learn to reach real kids” secret? Well, understanding that today’s kids are reachable is a good start. (Plus, caffeine helps as well, he added as his left eyelid twitched.)

Fifthly—if that’s even a word—kids like to learn. That’s not a misprint; that’s a fact. And if you don’t know this about today’s young people I’d suggest that you do not know much about today’s students at all. It’s like a great fisherman once said, “You don’t bait the hook with what the fisherman likes; you bait the hook with what the fish likes.” Kids will read. Kids will write. In fact, it could be argued that today’s students are actually doing more reading and writing than any generation prior. (But since we devalue the digital literacy component in the world of academia… okay, okay, I’ll save this tangent for another blog post.)

Now it’s time for points 6 through 2,867 which can best be summarized by connecting a few dots. Fun leads to joy. But fun is like sugar, the high quickly wears off and the need for something more substantive arises. This is where meaningfulness, relevance, accessibility, and challenge come into play. This is also where depth, breath, scope, and purpose come in. This is also where a sense of self-direction, self-discipline, and hard work factor in as well. Kids will do the hard work for objectives they find meaningful (can anyone say, “Boys who game?”) but they will not do so simply because the task has been legislated. Without a doubt today’s students are eager to grow, learn, give a great effort, and demonstrate their aptitudes in mind-blowing ways if they are internally motivated to do so. But if they’re not, they won’t.

Reality is a cold beast. Like it or not, smiles, fun, joy, and personal fulfillment matter.

BTW, if you require more reading on the subject, check out DRIVE, SWITCH, or the thoughts of Sir Ken Robinson. Indeed, they may have killed the orange-oiled pepperoni pizza in our halls of academia, but if we let them kill the fun, they will have ripped out our entire soul. And none of us will be the better for it.

Alan Sitomer was named California's 2007 Teacher of the Year. In addition to being an inner-city high school English teacher and former professor in the Graduate School of Education at Loyola Marymount University, Alan is a nationally renowned speaker specializing in engaging reluctant readers who received the 2004 award for Classroom Excellence from the Southern California Teachers of English, the 2003 Teacher of the Year honor from California Literacy, the 2007 Educator of the Year award by Loyola Marymount University and the 2008 Innovative Educator of the Year from The Insight Education Group. He’s the author of six young adult novels, three children's picture books, two teacher methodology books, and a classroom curriculum series for secondary English Language Arts instruction called THE ALAN SITOMER BOOK JAM.