pattiejparker-blog

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Becoming a reader ... again

Over the past year and a half, I’ve become a reborn reader. I never stopped loving reading, but I had stopped making time for it (outside of needed reading for work). While professional development books on the teaching of reading and writing have greatly impacted by career, my teaching philosophy, and my growth as an educator over the past several years, my personal reading life has waned. Today I am proud to say that I have a reading life that is alive and kicking again. It’s varied and I’m loving it, and my “want to read next” list is growing at a rate that I simply can’t keep up with. Thanks to a subscription to Audible and a read-before-bed routine, I’m consuming more stories and thought provoking books than I have since college. Quality of life? Increased.

Here’s a list of what I’ve read in 2017 so far:

World Without End by Ken Follet

Monster by Walter Dean Meyers

The Other Wes Moore by Wes Moore

The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben

The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

The Lost City of the Monkey Gods by Douglas Preston

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

Wild by Cheryl Strayed

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Appelgate

Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Books currently in progress: 

Dragonfly in Amber by Diana Gabaldon

Barbarian Days by William Finnegan

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Books I want to read next:

Natural Born Heroes by Christopher McDougall 

The Dream of a Common Language by Adrienne Rich

Mom and Me and Mom by Maya Angelou

11/22/63 by Stephen King

I’m hoping I can keep my #readinglife full throughout the holiday season and into the new year. #happyreading to all :)

[pattiejparker-blog]

" A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face."

Jorge Luis Borges, The Aleph (via fuckyeahjorgeluisborges)

My favorite

[pattiejparker-blog]

love tattoo

transferred from a journal circa 2008, edited

Her wrist bore the word 'love' in her own script, faced outwards towards the palm of her hand less than an inch below the wrinkle carved by the hand's movement inwards toward her forearm. Simple enough, the four letter word meant much to her.

When asked about it, she would sigh to herself and decide what to respond. To give the full reasoning would exhaust the listener, and to give a short explanation didn't serve the mark justice; so some in-between half-justified answer would emerge and she would leave the topic unsatisfied with the asker's eagerness to own the word up to a previous relationship or a youth’s whim. Many times the question was more of a formality or empty tease, and at those times she never hesitated to profess her love to those around her and observe the facial expressions in response. There were a few close friends who understood, and for that she was grateful. The word validated them, her, and strangers she was yet to meet.

She wondered sometimes if her right wrist might feel jealously of the marking, for while it was able to enjoy the presence of the permanent love, it would never be able to bear its scar. To be loved, the right wrist might tell you, is priceless, but to be in the presence of love and never be able to bear its burden can be the most cruel task assigned. What can love mean to a wrist that will never feel its mark? And so might the tattoo yet to be put onto her skin be envious, for it would never be the one on her left, just as a second love is never the first.

No matter. Above all, the only opinion that mattered was that of her left wrist, and so far it seemed to be wearing the word quite well.

[pattiejparker-blog]

February '08, Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Significance.

I remember the view of the city sprawl, light pastel colors of rooftops and foliage. Then, the extended and winding path through town from Park Güell to the marina where we stared at a floating statue of a man and were unimpressed. I was tired, but wine and laughter and gallivanting were more rewarding than sleep. Unpaid tapas and harmless young love.

A different Pattie visits the balcony now, breathing the salty-sweet air. Pink hued and yellow-green. A wide street with birds for sale. Mosaic towers, rounded corners, and canopies of vine. The forming of pillars from the drawings of a dead man. Weeping statues and cold air.

The significance then was not as it is now. A memory not trusted, but no matter. Unfinished work and tainted truths have beauty enough.

[pattiejparker-blog]

One day, in my dream school...

I often half-jokingly begin sentences this way in discussions with friends and colleagues about changes that I wish I could enact in our current educational system. The ideas that follow the ellipses usually make me feel better about a frustration that I experienced that day in class or at a meeting. I attended a conference this weekend which made me think about these dreams quite a bit, so I thought I'd put some down in writing. Perhaps an official outline of my "dream school" will someday contribute to its actual fruition. It should be said for contextual purposes that I am currently an ELA teacher in a Texas high school and that this is my 4th year of instruction.

 In no particular order, here are some things that currently follow the ... :

- Teachers will be encouraged to be academics

- Textbook adoptions will not be purchased

- State accreditation will not be sought

- Administrators will continue to instruct on a limited rotation basis

- Latin will be taught

- Students will be encouraged to have internships or employment

- Sports will not be a priority

- Food will be appetizing and healthy

- Classes will be taught on culture, philosophy, and religion

- Outside spaces will be designed for instruction

- Travel and study-abroad opportunities will be encouraged

- Students will be encouraged to specialize their coursework towards their interests

- Trades and craftsmanship will be of equal importance to academia

The list continues, but as I type it out (this also happens when I talk about it), I become tired and overwhelmed by the myriad of decisions that go into a system to foster learning. So for today, I'll stop with the few points listed here. These are some of the more radical or non-traditional components of my vision. Many of these wishes reflect my beliefs in a need for a fundamental change in what we currently hold valuable and important for education - things like standardized tests, bureaucratic evaluation systems, limited views on priorities, and the reliance on 'the way it's done' answers to questions.

I know that as life changes me, the list will change as well. Rather than changing many of these bullet points to be more muted and practical, I hope time makes them even more dynamic, radical, and perhaps even a little risky.

For inspiration, check out the Green School's website: http://www.greenschool.org/. They are a pretty encouraging example of alternative education possibilities.

[pattiejparker-blog]

Education can "and should be dangerous"

While admittedly subject to discredit and most likely inconclusive of societal truths, Google’s predictive text results from varying stems offer an interesting look at the world we live in.

Here, when looking at several educational stems, the statement ”education can and should be dangerous” appears. 

When paired with other educational stems, the interpretation of the word ‘dangerous’ can change:

School is dangerous to those in attendance via the threat of school violence.

School is dangerous to students and the economy due to the rising cost of post-secondary education.

School is dangerous to school as young people lose interest in learning and see school as a limiting and restrictive environment.

Of these, the latter provokes questions that concern me the most. Yet, this concern draws less attention in the media than school violence or debt. Still, our society sees the required education to all as an altruistic accomplishment. Although I am a strong advocate of the power of education, I struggle with the model. As a teacher who daily witnesses the negative effects of the ‘prison’ format of modern day education, I think of Ayn Rand’s foreword in Anthem when she warns that those “who accept collectivism by moral default” eventually end “in a world of bloody ruins and concentrations camps…wailing ‘But I didn’t mean this!’” Although perhaps an extreme parallel to our educational system, I see fully why many students feel angst towards their learning environment.

Recently, while browsing my student’s Twitter feeds (which I confess I lied and told them I wouldn’t do), I came across one that said “fuck ELA”. This came from a student who in all cases appears to enjoy my class: participating in discussions, turning in work on time, and saying “Bye, Ms. Parker!” everyday on his way out of my classroom. I immediately closed my Twitter app thinking to myself, “This is what you get for snooping,” and feeling down on my position in life. 

Days later and karma aside, I’m glad I saw this and more negative posts about school from my students. My dearest friend, Katie, once told me that she believes people too often ignore the unpleasant realities of life. She argued that seeing the truth, although it might be depressing, frustrating, or might move you to feelings of despair, is always better than ignoring it. Though she was referring to international realities of poverty and human despair at the time, I believe this is true in most cases where the perception of difficult truths is commonly avoided.

As for how to begin to fix the problems in education…that’s a different post for a different day. For now I’ll leave the predictive Googling and angry Twittering as a starting point. Unintended or not, we must confront the consequences of our good deeds and own the negative impacts. Perhaps in this way we can begin to progress.

[pattiejparker-blog]

"Everything they taught us in third grade was wrong." - Fifth grader

I recently shared a short ride through the air with a fifth grader. His older brother, a ninth grader, sat to his left less inclined to spend the beginning of his three day weekend conversing with a teacher, much less a ninth grade ELA teacher at his school. Luck of the draw huh? Here he was escaping from weekdays into the weekend: onto the plane, into the window seat, nose in book, almost there and PLOP goes a teacher into the aisle seat. Even worse she introduced herself and asked questions.

Fifth graders don’t seem to mind as much as ninth graders that a teacher is trying to strike up a conversation with them. They invite it.

"Guess what I like?" he said with a grin.

"What’s that?" I prodded back, satisfying a basic need of childhood: assurance from an adult that we care.

"Magic!"

"Wow, that’s pretty cool! Do you like to do magic tricks? Read about magic? Watch movies about magical things?"

"Yeah, all of that. I just LOVE magic. All kinds!" he exclaimed with an even bigger smile.

At that point the plane ride changed. I normally loathe trips on planes for obvious reasons: the smell, the closed quarters, the all too often rude or unaccommodating seat partner, but this ride was different. I laughed, I attempted to make an anteater out of a dollar bill, and although I didn’t accomplish this goal, I mustered a half-believable fox and gifted it to my buddy in the middle seat. The magic loving wannabe Accelerated Reader millionaire.

"This kid in my class became a millionaire in 3rd grade. He read like almost 2 million words, and now he is trying to hit 7 million."

"Wow, that’s a lot of words!"

"Yeah, and we had to write about what we like to do, and he wrote about how he likes to READ! I mean, he has NO gaming console, no TV, NOTHING! He just reads ALL of the time!"

"Can you even talk to him? When does he eat? How does he sleep?!"

Laughter that comes from a child is pure joy and entertainment. It’s infectious and heartwarming. To be the one that brings it out of them? Mastercard.

"And, and you know what else?" He continued with the air of a run-on sentence waiting to happen.

"What?" Anything else had to be good.

"In third grade, I mean fourth grade, my teachers told us that everything they taught us in third grade was wrong!"

"What?!" I couldn’t help but laugh. A fellow educator that sat two seats away also laughed and I could see him bend his ear back to keep listening.

"Yeah, I mean they said that everything they taught us was WRONG! Composition? WRONG! Math? WRONG! Reading? WRONG! And all the smart kids in class were like ‘WHAT THE HECK?!’"

"So fourth grade was pretty hard, huh?" I prodded.

"Well I thought third grade was hard, so fourth should be easy, but then they told us everything was wrong so fourth grade was pretty hard and now I’m in fifth grade and I just want to be a millionaire so…" and the stories continued for the remainder of the flight.

I learned some things in the remaining time: apparently reading Harry Potter is quite possibly the best way to ensure millionaire status in the AR program, science is everyone’s favorite subject because they get to do projects, and ninth graders are terribly embarrassed by their little brothers.

I also learned that changes in state testing - which is my only probable explanation for a teacher telling a student that what they learned the year previous was incorrect - cause elementary school students to actually think that they learned something wrong.

Ten years old and they are doubting their education.

Instead of this lie, I wish this young man could understand that he was taught wrong only by state standardized testing expectations. The Texas STAAR exam created by Pearson and rolled out 2 years ago has supposedly ‘upped rigor’ and ‘increased expectations’ for students. As districts scramble to learn the new testing format, teachers scramble to teach correctly.

Or, in other words, we scramble to teach to the new test so that our district can meet Adequate Yearly Progress and receive funding. We teach now to a more ‘rigorous’ test based on a more in depth reading of our assessed curriculum, a timed test with specific wording of questions to mirror state curriculum ‘specificities’ as outlined in Vertical Alignment Documents available on the TEA website, and we worry about questions stems and formats that mimic examinations so much that we spend tax dollars purchasing programs to generate district benchmarks and district assessments that look and feel like the ‘real-deal’ state assessments.

This is sure as heck not what a teacher should be worried about when approaching a fifth grade student who loves magic.

In my classroom, I face the current reality that 52% of Texas’ ninth grade students failed the state examination for writing skills last Spring. In December, my reputation as a teacher will be partially based on how my own students perform on this same examination. Odds are I’ll look like I’m doing something wrong too.

Despite the realities of the power being absolutely out of the hands of teachers to change the obvious inconsistencies and outright excessive focus on the dis-aggregation of data from multiple choice tests and written responses that are scored on a four point scale, nothing can take away the human factor of education.

Unfortunately we have heard many times by administrators, state execs, peers, parents and the public that it is the job of a teacher to perform a balancing act: teach state standards, prepare students for examinations, inspire students to love learning, personally connect with students, conduct projects, flip classrooms, provide individualized instruction for a myriad of learning disabilities and levels of language development, attend extracurricular activities, earn continuing education hours and do it all under the framework of little to no performance based incentives and a lot of performance based consequences. However reality is the present educational standards dictate that if we are to keep up with expectations on state standardized exams - for the sake of our personal and district’s professional reputation - we frankly don’t have much time for the human factor in the classroom.

Laughing to learn, listening to a child’s interests and curiosities, feeding them questions and prodding for unique answers: this is what is should be ‘correct’, but it is intangible and unable to be assessed through a state exam. However, thanks to plane rides and fifth graders, perhaps all is not yet lost.

[pattiejparker-blog]

Feelings Friday

During a recent interview I was asked about my proudest professional moment.  I feel fortunate that I was so easily able to pick a moment that happened less than 2 months ago in one of the final days of the school year. Up until this day, I had not fully grasped the scope of impact that I could have on the individuals I instruct. To quickly contextualize, this moment happened during a “Feelings Friday”, which is a label I placed on occasional Fridays that we had a free 20-30 minutes of class time I could set aside to break away from the curriculum. I began “Feelings Fridays” in the attempt to grow my relationships with my students as well as the relationships between them. Perhaps in a later post I can share some more about these occasional yet special days in which students and myself stood in front of the classroom and shared feelings about life, school, relationships, fears, etc. This particular proud moment that I would like to share with you now, as I did in my interview, was particularly humbling and humanizing.

On the final “Feelings Friday” of the school year, many of my students felt compelled to stand in front of the class and share feelings about their experience throughout the year, the changes they had in their personal lives, and their emotions about the road to college in their imminent futures. One particular student’s feelings in my third block class are what constitute my moment of pride. When she got up to speak, she began like many of the others expressing appreciation for the relationships she had formed with her fellow classmates and her nerves about college. After facing her peers, she turned and faced me. Overcome with emotion, she explained that throughout her life, she had not been provided with a strong woman figure. Her parents went through a divorce when she was young and she lived with her father as her primary parent. The last time this 17 year old young lady spoke to her mother she was three years old. After briefly explaining her situation, she related that she had been looking her entire life for a strong woman to look up to. When she explained that she felt that she had finally found that woman, I was awed to hear that it was me. She said that she thanked God for putting me in her life and giving her someone to look up to and respect. Through tears and a shaking voice, she thanked me for being this person for her. My internal reaction was both shock and humility. I looked her straight back in the eyes, smiled, and remained speechless. The only word I said was her name, understanding that her words had said enough.

In the interview, I hesitated before relating this moment. Although the question is inherently one that demands self-praise, I always feel odd in situations where I must laud myself as an ‘important’ human being. In this particular case, this student’s revelation of my importance to her life was leveling. Until this moment, I had underestimated just how much impact I could have through my position. I had always understood that to many students I was important, perhaps their ‘favorite’ teacher, or someone they enjoyed learning from. However, until this moment, I had not considered that I could truly fill a void in someone’s life. Inspired, awed, and humbled, I will never forget this young lady or this lesson in the importance of relationships. 

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As I look to begin this blog, I see it as a form of release. Thoughts, opinions, questions that are unanswered: this is what I can share through this medium. Expression is healthy, healing, and a necessary part of growth. This is true of the individual as well as of society. I hope to play but one small part in the machine, and I hope that part is productive.