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Chestnut TAG 7th Grade Visits Baystate
On February 28, twenty-five 7th graders travelled just across the neighborhood to visit Baystate Hospital. Led by Ms. Eisermann (7th grade science) and Dr. Eichenlaub (7th grade ELA), the students met with Baystate neurologist Dr. William House, pathologist Dr. Chibuike Enwereuzo, and Baystate Springfield Educational Partnership director, Peter Blain.
The entire 7th grade at Chestnut TAG has been studying the brain in a linked, interdisciplinary unit in their science and ELA classes this winter. After building their background knowledge in brain science in both classes, they are reading deeply about the development of the teenage brain. In the coming weeks, their culminating project in this unit will be to pull all their knowledge of the brain together with the many articles and essays they’ve read to make their own arguments about the proper amount of screen time that a teenager should have each day.
The Baystate field trip gave students the chance to ask questions they wrote in advance to Dr. House. They asked questions such as “Can teens be more mature than adults even with their undeveloped prefrontal cortexes?” Dr. House’s response was an unequivocal ‘Yes!’ Students also asked questions about the brain’s response to peer pressure and how it enables people to sympathize. With pathologist Dr. Enwereuzo, students got to examine a real human brain up close in the lab, locating the brain’s cortical gyri, white matter, and limbic system in an actual specimen.
While Peter Blain led students through the large laboratory where test results are processed at Baystate, the group bumped into Chestnut TAG-graduate, and now lab technician, Manny Parrilla. Brandishing vials of blood that he was testing, he talked with our students enthusiastically about his work and his time at our school. The visit to Baystate was an opportunity not just for our students to learn more about the brain, but also to see pathways for their futures in medicine, right in their own neighborhood.
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Mapping The City’s Public and Private Mobilities
This spring I taught a week-long learning immersion class. The class, called "Street Cred," brought together thirteen students who chose the course because of their interest in cities and in thinking about place in general. The students brought their own experience of cities and suburbs with them--we had a diverse crew with students hailing from Rhode Island, Bed-Stuy, Park Slope, Fairfield County, Newark, and many other places.
To get oriented for the week's discussions, we spent the first day traipsing around Hartford, on foot, and with All-Day bus passes. We parked our mini-bus in Keney Park's lower lot and took in some of the excellent new graffiti on the handball courts there. From Keney, we road the bus to Heaven, walked to the riverfront, the library, and took the bus through Frog Hollow. We walked through Pope Park (including Pope Park West) and then retraced our steps back to Keney via Fastrak and Albany Ave.
Our first day in Hartford inspired the class and the next day we had a wide-ranging discussion of our experiences in the city and in the cities we each call home.
The centerpiece of the class was that we would each get to create something that would help us think through and imagine a particular urban space in a new way. The possibilities were wide open, and a number of students chose to write poems or narratives of their own lived, urban experience. In one powerful case, for instance, a student named Marie wrote about her experience as an African-American boarding school student living in predominantly white Simsbury. Most of us chose to make maps to investigate urban places further. But not just traditional maps. We took as inspiration a series of atlases created by author Rebecca Solnit to reimagine cities by mapping them with a few interesting layers in view at once, like the map seen here from her San Francisco atlas that maps queer public spaces and butterfly habitats together in the same panel.
Inspired by these maps, members of the class created a number of great projects, covering topics from women's health care to school systems in Connecticut.
I created this map ("Private and Public Mobilities", seen below) during the class as a way visualize the relationship between private means of getting around the city like the car and the bicycle versus public bus infrastructure in the city. Cars dominate public space in Hartford, whether they are being driven on streets or parked in our abundant parking lots. We tend to see a lot of maps of Hartford that feature our oversupply of parking lots, that bring home that Hartford has more parking than people (like that statistic about there being more sheep than people in New Zealand). In this map, I've depicted a different side of car ownership and use in the city--the fact that many cars, hundreds and even thousands of cars, are towed each year in the city. So this is actually a map of absent cars in Hartford.
The numbers on the map in yellow circles are the number of cars towed in the past 30 days in that neighborhood. (I got these numbers directly from https://data.hartford.gov; they have numbers, and maps of their own, on a lot of interesting things beyond crime data.) As anyone who has ever had a car towed knows, it is a major pain and often a large expense to recover it, and this map quickly conveys the spread of this financial burden and hassle across the city. For me this map raises a number of questions, including why are cars towed more frequently in some neighborhoods than others and what do folks who lose their cars in the city from towing have to use as a back-up--what is the state of our bicycling and bus infrastructure that they might use instead when this happens? That same bicycle, bus, and pedestrian infrastructure that those who cannot afford or who do not want a car are already using.
So amidst the sea of towed, absent cars, I've also included the organizations and infrastructure that can help to fill such voids--the Swift Factory bike program, CTfastrak, BiciCo and even the Hockanum trail stand on this map like landmarks from one of metro Hartford's potential futures in which the burdens of personal car ownership (and the loss of cars from towing, crashes, and expense) are lessened by improved opportunities for public and active transportation.
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Two simple experiments for class discussion in 6th grade English
Teaching students who range in age from 12 to 18 each week gives me the opportunity to think longitudinally about what and how students are learning in school. I use Harkness-style discussions in my 6th, 9th, and 12th grade classrooms. This year I’ve been focusing on learning from my seniors’ strengths and weaknesses during class discussions to lay the best foundations for successful discussion skills in my 6th graders. Both middle schoolers and seniors often share the challenge of modulating their level of participation and varying the kinds of contributions they make to class discussion (e.g. the mix of text references, asking of a clarifying question, making a claim or statement of their own). Just as with writers, good conversationalists and discussants are not born. It takes a lot of practice for almost all of us to learn to strike a balance between how much we talk and how much we genuinely listen. It takes a pretty vigilant self-awareness to strike the right balance, and self-awareness is not a skill we talk about teaching much.
So, I wonder, what could I do with my 6th graders to help lay the foundation for their discussion skills in their English class? What will help them practice becoming the kind of discussants we want them to be when they are upper schoolers? In this spirit I’ve tried a couple experiments so far. In the photo of the girls sitting around the table here, I gave each of them four rectangular cards--two greens, a blue, and a yellow. They all started with a full set of cards; the greens are for “a comment based on a specific reference to the text” (the students came up with the idea to write those specific text references on their green cards themselves) (2); the blue is for a “question to the group or a comment that summarizes what the discussion has been about so far or in the past few minutes” (1); and the yellow was for “new claim or comment of their own/ starting a new thread” (1). Keeping with Harkness style I sat at the table and kept track of their conversation but largely stayed out of the discussion except to provide information or ask a question they needed to move on. To participate, students pushed their chosen card forward, signalling in a more subtle way than raising their hand, that they had something to say and that they were ready to speak. The main effect of this system is that the most talkative students quickly become more self-aware and recognize the restraint they have to exercise because they only get so many comments, while many of the quieter students in discussion find it much easier to jump into the conversation and get to share their ideas more frequently. A quiet student still has to being willing to put herself and her ideas out there in the room, but I’ve found this simple trick can help quite a bit. It puts some pressure on them to participate, but allows them to control their engagement more than a situation where they might be called on ‘cold’ to answer a question in class.
This seems like a pretty successful way to scaffold their discussion and my students liked the system. Their conversation with only four cards is pretty short and it can feel a little stilted. In future discussions I am going to increase the number of cards they get so that the scaffolding can feel a little less restrictive by giving them more opportunities to speak and contribute. A ‘wild card’ option might also be a good way to begin strengthening their self-awareness and sense of agency in the discussion.
The second experiment I tried was a bit more of a stretch as it required me to use my lackluster art and design skills. The results are shown in the second photograph here. It was fun to try nevertheless!
Inspired by my friend Constanza Segovia’s brilliant, “Live Drawing” posters, I tried to capture the content, themes, and argumentative lines present in the 6th graders’ Harkness-style discussion on the novel The City of Ember. The discussion proceeded naturally and the students were able to follow along with their thoughts together as I depicted them on the board with arrows, circles, venn diagrams, and drawings. At a couple moments I was able to interject and prompt them to think about connecting different ideas that had come up on different parts of the board. I like this way of capturing what the students themselves are thinking about a text and what their questions are in a less linear fashion than just generating lists about characters, plots, themes, etc. on the board (a technique I’ve also used with success). It seemed that at least to some degree the students’ interest in the discussion was piqued because they could see what they were doing with their words in a new way.
This small experiment’s focus on collecting, recording and representing their discussion lends itself to them gaining a better social and collective awareness of what they are producing in their conversations, and in this way is a nice complement to the more individual-focused colored card scaffold.
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Opening Chapel speech, 9.6.16
I want to speak to you for a minute about A block, C block, and even X block. You’ve been through this before. New girls and orientation leaders, you’ve been talking about ‘the schedule’ and the many varieties of schedules here at Walker’s for the past two days--the Wednesday schedule, ‘the-family-weekend-half-day-of-classes-on Saturday-schedule,’ and the snow day schedule. (Too soon?)
But I doubt you’ve thought deeply about what our schedules mean in terms of how we live our lives; I doubt you’ve considered them philosophically.
I begin to think about schedules in an abstract way during the summer when I don’t have one. For me, to face days without a pre-ordained routine is to get some sense of what it is like to be an independent artist or writer. These people are driven by a desire to create, to make things, and to imagine new worlds--but it is hard work, and they don’t have the luxury of someone else arranging their time for them into manageable 50 and 80 min chunks with organized sports in the afternoon. I hate this part in particular--at 3:30 every day in the summer I have to motivate myself to go for a run or a hike and there’s no fun group to do it with.
The contemporary author Annie Dillard has some thoughts on this issue that I think are useful for us as we each take on the beginning of a new year and a new schedule. Dillard writes that “A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days….it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.”
This idea of our schedule as something that structures and shapes our present and immediate future makes sense--it is a net for catching what we will be doing today, tomorrow, and for the coming week. But in Dillard’s last metaphor she suggests something strange and almost scary when she claims that a schedule is a “lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living.” Really? What does she mean here? Are our lives going to be comprised of chapels, long-haul drives to Ms. Hall’s, X blocks and 7-9pm study halls for the rest of eternity? I don’t think this is what she means exactly.
Because later, Dillard reveals what she really thinks about schedules. She writes, quote “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I find this quotation both exciting and unsettling. It might seem like a platitude at first, but I think it is complex, interesting, and provocative.
‘How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.’
In this moment of insight Dillard’s lifeboat metaphor becomes clear. It is our many, everyday actions and activities that will determine how we ultimately spend our one life. The habits, traits, and activities we practice and cultivate each day this year become components of each of our lifeboats. In this there is a charge and a call to action for each one of you.
Since each and every day has implications not just for that day but for your life, suddenly today and tomorrow and the next day are not just stepping stones to your future life. They are your life.
In a poem about Odysseus, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson writes, quote “that which we are, we are,” which is to say that the habits and actions we choose today define who we are. If you want to be a nice person, a singer, a reader, start today. Don’t delay and tell yourself you can wait ten years to become one.
At Walker’s you have an incredible opportunity to fill your schedule with classes and activities that you are passionate about. Take a minute as you begin this new year to consider that what you do in Advanced Biochemistry, at soccer practice, and in WINGS and Grapes are not just ‘school activities’ but they are your life. This year keep in mind Dillard’s challenging but exciting reminder that How we spend our days is how we spend our lives. For it is here, at Walker’s, that you will begin to build the lifeboat on which you will find yourself, decades later, still living.
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The sage at the seminar table
We often talk about student-centered teaching as getting away from the “sage on a stage” (the pedagogy still, to education’s detriment, valorized in most films that depict university and high school classrooms). Spending this past week at Phillips Exeter’s Humanities Institute I realize that what I’m after is not just getting off the stage but also moving beyond being “the sage at the seminar table”--it’s not enough to just move beyond traditional lecture, I also want to move beyond the traditional seminar discussions that I’ve lead in college and high school classrooms where my guidance and knowledge is still the fulcrum and center of attention, where I am still in charge of disseminating the structure and content of the discussion. In this video to the right, Jim Heal, Wellington College, London, explains a bit about how he interprets Harkness pedagogy and how his students use it to get beyond the “sage at the seminar table.”
https://www.youtube.com/embed/dKnVteBrdLw.
Video via @camseib
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Writing conferences in the university vs. the high school classroom
I have been teaching writing for a decade, in a range of programs, in literature, culture, and composition classes. I taught my first intensive composition classes as a second-year graduate student at Stanford in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric (PWR). At the time, the program was run by Andrea Lunsford, and the focus was on giving all entering freshmen a course in rhetoric (with a particular focus on ethos, pathos, logos) and composition in which the final project would be a long, research-based paper. The class was required of all freshmen, but my classes were still small, ranging from 9 to 15 students. I didn’t appreciate this teaching opportunity, nor the training that came with it, nearly enough at the time.
At the core of PWR classes were 30-minute writing conferences with each student for each major assignment. As an inexperienced graduate student teacher, these conferences seemed like a lot of work and the payoff was unclear. As I taught more in the years that followed, I quickly came to see that this one-on-one time was the single most effective way to consolidate a student’s learning and their thinking about their own writing. Knowledge and action do not always align, however. While I realized the great value of those conferences, with the lack of PWR’s built-in structure, writing conferences usually didn’t happen unless a student came to my office hours. After I finished graduate school, as a busy adjunct teaching one or two classes here or there, spending way too much time on the university job market each fall and winter, and working on my own writing, time for conferencing simply fell by the wayside.
One of the best things about transitioning into full-time, middle and secondary school teaching is that I now have the time and freedom to build writing conferences into the structure of all my classes. The schedule and pace of high school is very different from that of the university of course, so gone are the days of lengthy, thirty-minute student conferences with coffee breaks in between. And in many ways that’s not a bad thing. Those thirty minutes are spread over many days now, in short quick interactions on workshop days during class time, in emails with students, and, still, in traditional one-on-one conferences. In fact, conferring in short, impromptu exchanges in class with a student seems to me to be much more pedagogically effective than setting aside three days a term for longer conferences.
However, I’m still trying to keep some aspects of those longer PWR conferences intact. For instance, I met with each of my Literature & Culture of the Environment students for five minutes each, in rapid-fire succession, during a long 80 minute block this week. The students are building outlines for their final paper, and for many of them meeting for five minutes felt like a good amount of time. But five minutes won’t be time when it comes to meet about their first drafts, and I’m still trying to figure out how to plug in more one-on-one time into a school day that is already packed to the gills with classes, clubs, and sports. In our program at Stanford, thirty-minute conferences were required of every student, no matter where they were at with their writing. I’m realizing that the way forward for high school writing conferences, given the less flexible schedule, is not to insist on spending the same amount of time with each student, but rather in making strategic decisions about which students will benefit the most from one-on-one conferencing and which students need less time, or who will benefit more from other kinds of communication about their writing, e.g. an email with suggestions for how to take their writing to the next level. Unlike at the university, the focus and end game at my new school is pedagogy, so I feel like I have the time and the incentive to figure all of this out.
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I teach English Language Arts at the public Chesnut Talented and Gifted Middle School in Springfield, MA. I’ve taught at private and public schools in the past, teaching students ranging from 6th graders to college seniors.
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I wrote some news analysis and a call for better bus service in Hartford at http://www.realhartford.org/2014/03/10/whens-the-next-bus-the-future-of-hartfords-transit-system/
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I don't agree with every finding and claim in John Hattie's Visible Learning, but I've incorporated a number of his key ideas into my teaching in the past year. I particularly like his emphasis on always paying attention to the perspective we have on our own teaching, particularly his key argument that we should see ourselves as vigilant evaluators of our effects on student learning every day in the classroom.
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2014 article on the growth of “The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities,” a program I served as Assistant Director for two years.
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Here's video of a short talk I gave at Funny Kinds of Love, a recent conference expertly organized by Harlan Weaver at Berkeley. The presentation is one small part of a larger project on vampire narratives (beginning with and returning to Stoker's Dracula, and including Hong Kong and Chinese vampire movies), zoonotic diseases, and the production of animals. Very little time for close readings here, but I did manage to sneak in a clip from Herman Yau's brutal exploitation film Ebola Syndrome which I argue captures and then replays back at us so much of the racist disgust directed towards contemporary Chinese consumption patterns.
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My students and I started reading Chris Ware's latest project, Building Stories, this week. At one level it is an incredibly easy text to teach--there is so much to engage with, so many things to say about the project's form, its melancholy content, and the relationship between human and nonhuman characters in the story--buildings and spaces are the primary non-human characters here, though plants and pets do get a few 'non-speaking speaking parts' as well.
The novel also presents some interesting pedagogical challenges. There is no order to the project's 14 component pieces, no page numbers whatsoever, and the project is filled with formal innovations in comics. I asked students to read any 6 of the 14 individual components (varying lengths, sizes, formats from newsprint-like sheafs to Early Reader-style hardbacks) of the project for our first day discussing it, a little anxious about how class would go with us not all having read the same parts of the book. This ends up not being a problem because of the basic fact that all of us will always be reading 'in no particular order' and this reading experience itself can become a topic for discussion--how do we construct a linear order in our heads even as we read this way? how does the materiality of the book itself affect or disrupt our normal reading patterns? (a number of students commented on how it was hard to just get certain game-board-like elements out of the box the 'book' comes in). Since one of our key questions for the class is the function of the built environment as setting, Richared McGuire's1989 RAW magazine strip "Here" played an important role in our first day of discussion--McGuire's focus on a single corner of space throughout geological time is an important and clear influence on Ware's own spatial concerns. My students discerned some very nice disjunctions between what McGuire's strip tells us about spaces over time, and how we inhabit them, and how Ware develops and extends this conceit in a host of new ways. It is exciting to be coming up with a formal and a critical vocabulary for Ware's innovations in class.
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Train travel and the cinema are 19CE innovations. Infrastructuralism begins tomorrow with a very famous Bay Area phantom ride, and Thom Andersen's idea that “If we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary reflections.”
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I'm speaking at a one-day conference on critical animal studies this afternoon at Berkeley, presenting some of the theoretical work that is part of my next project on what Harriet Ritvo calls "the English and other creatures in the Victorian Age." Other speakers include Claire Jane Kim (Asian Studies, UC Irvine), Carla Freccero (Chair of History of Consciousness at UCSC) and Charis Thompson (Gender & Womens' Studies at Berkeley).
I'm going to be talking about road violence (human and animal abuse in the road, vehicular 'accidents,' etc.) and their relationship to ideas of vulnerability and advocacy. It turns out that nineteenth-century animal advocacy began in the street and on the road--as this image advertising the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association (founded in 1867) attests; Victorian animal welfare advocates, many of them also pioneering feminists like Frances Power Cobbe, worked to lessen the difficulties of working animals in the street and animals being brought to market at Smithfield with drinking troughs and fountains for the animals and their human counterparts.
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Detail from a plan for a Garden City, Ebeneezer Howard.
I'm excited to be at the North American Victorian Studies Association Conference this weekend in Madison, WI. The theme is Victorian networks, and I'm looking forward to presenting a talk tomorrow afternoon on suburban form in William Morris's News from Nowhere and Keble Howard's blockbuster The Smiths of Surbiton, two unlikely allies in thinking through the spatial consequences of suburban design for writing novels, whether 'radical' or 'popular.' Looking forward to panels on Darwinian networks as well.
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In "Dickens, Griffith, and The Film Today" Sergei Eisenstein links several early chapters of Dickens's Oliver Twist to cinematic montage. D.W. Griffith's early film A Corner in Wheat is an interesting example for thinking about and teaching Dickens's precocious use of "parallel intercutting" of scenes and events in the chapters when Oliver's position is tenuous, somewhere between Brownlow's suburban house and the thieves' slum lair.
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