New Look!

Thought I'd change it up a bit and use Andreas Viklund's templates, again. I've already sized up another of his templates for the Blackbird Blog, and I'm in the process of toying with the colors. I like this template's clean lines. Good place to jump off.

Happy Holidays to all! One more week!

Hope?

I received an email from Lori Knight at the Del Sol Review the other day. She told me that she was still plowing through their slush pile, and that my story, "Bluff," which had been there since July, was still waiting to be read. She told me to have patience. I know this is probably the wrong attitude, and that I should just take it for the rejection it eventually will be, but I can't help seeing it as a glimmer of hope. Perhaps it will be the next publication. Perhaps it will be the next rejection. I'm an optimist, so here's looking forwards to the next big publication!

Grades are Due

Yes, grades are due. I have a love/hate relationship with grades.

Being an AP teacher, I get to see kids that are obsessed with grades every day. They hunger for them. They fight for them. They scam the extra credit in an effort to be 1/10th of a point higher than the kid down the aisle, because that 1/10th of a point might lead to a better scholarship, or a higher place on the dais come graduation, or acceptance into a better school. I can see the stress, but it eats me up. I even give loads of advice, both in person and on my AP Blog (see the latest post at http://apenglishnews.blogspot.com/ ), but it still kills me.

But the actual process of calculating grades is another story. In a weird, counter intuitive way, I really enjoy tapping those numbers into my spreadsheet. I dig watching the formulas calculate the grades, etc. What I really hate is when my students do poorly. I believe that, contrary to popular belief, most teachers are not mean spirited. We wish for student success, and agonize over student failure. The results of such agonizing can either be the lowering of standards, thus ensuring higher grades, or grade inflation, a pandemic reaching from higher education to elementary schools. It seems we all have a thing about grades.

I don't know the answer. I only know that Excel is calling to me even now, and the numbers are just waiting to be crunched.

Re-Inventing Schools

The inevitable problem with 21st Century Skills, as seen at Blaugh.com. I recently went to the Re-Inventing 21st Century Skills Symposium in Washington D.C., and spent a lot of time talking about skills that kids need to succeed in the Friedman-esque flat world. I can envision my colleagues reacting to the presentation we have to put together with this kid in mind. I hope we can push beyond this type of thinking, though, because there is a whole new world waiting out there.

It kind of hit home, too, when one of my co-attendees told us about seeing the homeless sleeping in Rock Creek Park during his morning walk. Ironic that two thousand educators were sitting in a ballroom discussing DNA based computing and less than a mile away people are struggling to survive. I guess we all got a dose of perspective along with our excitement.

I hope that we are successful in firing up our colleagues. I would hate to see all of the good intentions we came home with fall apart.

Another Rejection

One more rejection...Del Sol Review went down after three months of holding on to my story. In a weird way, even rejection is exciting though (no, I don't have a prediliction for psychological punishment). It's the thrill of an email, the thrill of acknowledgement from someone in the world of publishing. It let's you know that you're still in the game, not hanging on the sidelines. I did enough of that in JV basketball (my buddy Chris and I had it down to a science!). So back at it, after all, because that's what it's all about. As Richard Wilbur said in "The Writer," one of my favorite poems,

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

Keep on writing...

Digital Storytelling Quiz

Every now and then I want to utilize the blog for class assignments. This is an example of one such assignment for my Digital Storytelling class.

Now that we have set up our blogs and have been working on writing entries, I want you to move towards the second element of blogging: responding to blogs. The idea of blogging is not only to have an outlet for your ideas and writing/music/photography/art work, but also to become a member of a community.

The concept here is, for this quiz, is to comment on as many blogs as you possibly can. I will offer you the opportunity to score as highly as you want, as long as you follow the ground rules below. The grading will run like this:

If you comment on all eight possible blogs (mine included), you will receive a 35/35 (100%).
If you comment on six possible blogs (mine included), you will receive a 32/35 (91%).
If you comment on four possible blogs (mine included), you will receive a 28/35 (80%).
If you comment on three possible blogs (mine included), you will receive a 25/35 (71%).
If you do not comment on at least two separate blogs , you will receive a 0/35 (0%).


There are, of course, ground rules for this assignment. They are:
1) Responses must be posted on the separate blogs in order to count.
2) Responses must be constructive criticism based on the first film. The responses must be substantitive in nature (you can't just say "Good Job!").
3) You may offer suggestions or tips, but cannot be hurtful or destructive.

EXTRA CREDIT: If you really get into the response thing, I’ll give you extra credit! Over twelve responses will get you an extra 20/20. Don’t laugh, these things add up.

DUE: all responses are due in by Friday, October 20, 2006. Fill out the form below and hand it in to me on Friday.

The Blogs

Sharper Thesis (this one)
http://cagsproduction.blogspot.com/
http://jjpproductions.blogspot.com/
http://mas-productions.blogspot.com/
http://conman1.blogspot.com/
http://camacproductions.blogspot.com/
http://whiterosepictures.blogspot.com/
http://duke-of-farooq-productions.blogspot.com/

Writing and Teaching

It is inevitable that every fall I get hit with the depressing fact that in order to put food on the table I have to teach. It sounds obvious, I know. I'm a teacher. I teach. But I also create, a fact that can very easily get lost in the shuffle of everyday life. And the weird part is that if I don't create, I get terribly anxious.

Now I have had the fortune of being able to teach in a place that allows me the creative license to generate new material at will, a fact that all of my colleagues in the field decidedly don't share. But while they are busy following restrictive curriculum guides, I am busily developing and implementing new lessons, paper ideas, and activities. Before any teacher screams that teaching is a creative art!, or I create new lessons/tests/etc., too!, let me clarify. I choose, sometimes foolishly, to generate new material all of the time. I think it has something to do with my creative side coming out to play in a subconscious way. I think it means that I secretly want to write, or am too afraid to really go for it, and the new unit/lesson/test/paper somehow satisfies the creative side of my mind. And so, in the end, no new writing gets done, but some pretty interesting pedagogical materials get created. And who feels the greater loss? Me?

Perhaps.

All I know is that I should be grading essays right now. But it feels really good to be writing.

Three Times in Cyber Print!

My third story to be published online has just come out! The story, "Fines Double in Workzone," was published in the autumn issue of Antithesis Common. Check it out!

http://www.antithesiscommon.com/Issue5/toc.htm

My second story, "Dreamers," was published in the summer 2003 issue of The Square Table.

http://www.thesquaretable.com/Summer03/dreamers.htm

My first story, "Lighthouse," was published in the summer 2003 issue of Arbutus magazine, which has since gone belly up, so I can't link to it. I guess that frees that one up for another round of submissions!

It's great to see your name in print, whether online or in hard copy! So I have two more stories floating out in the void...we'll see what comes of them.

Back to the essays...

Student Generated List of Summer Reading Books, excerpt

As promised, here is the compiled list of summer reads my students tackled this summer. This is not an exhaustive list, only a brief, truncated one. These tend to be the most interesting titles, although there were many other books that could have been placed here. It is, in a sense, refreshing to see the variety of titles. I hope they enjoyed their books as much as I did mine.

Bee Season
Tuesdays with Maurie
Heat
The Lovely Bones
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
Cell
The Boys of Winter
Bleachers
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A Million Little Pieces
The DaVinci Code
Angels and Demons
The Chosen
The Secret Life of Bees
The Devil Wears Prada
Requiem for a Dream

...And the Inevitable Sorrow of Summer Reading

And so it ends. Summer is over and the beach reading has to disappear. Which really is the sorrow of the whole process, the ending. Summer is such a freeing time for us all, a time to read and write without the constraints, and, for me, the requisite guilt that comes with them, of class obligations. Now we're back to it, back to prescribing books and assigning essays. But the hope is that there are readers out there, young people who are as voracious for the text as they are the iPod and the Play Station. I believe that there are, only we don't see them because they are hidden under the blanket of bad press their generation consistently garners. As a society, we'll have to wait and see. As a teacher, I'll get a more immediate chance today.

Students in my senior English classes sit down today to write the traditional summer reading essay, an opportunity for them to divulge what they found exciting or boring about their summer books. We moved to a choice system this year, as opposed to previous years where we simply dictated what books students would read (although I still do that somewhat for my AP class), and I am now anxiously awaiting the results. In my next post I'll share with you some of the books the students read this summer, and give some snippets of their reviews.

The first week is over, and the year has officially started. No turning back, now.

The Joys of Summer Reading

Let me upend an established fallacy right now: as an English teacher, I have very little time to read. Popular opinion seems to rest in the camp that feels as an English teacher, I must be so thoroughly devoted to reading that I have the time and inclination to read not only the classics, but also all of the current entries on the NY Times Bestseller List. So let me again put his notion down. I have very little time to read. In fact, during the school year, the only reading texts I can claim for my own are the loads of student essays that are generated out of my AP and English 12 classes. Well, that's not entirely true. I do get my weekly New Yorker, but, I confess with a certain amount of shame, the book and media reviews come right after the cartoons on my mental reading list. I usually can get those pieces of the magazine done by, say, Wednesday of a typical week, which leaves me a scant few days to sink into the more meaty offerings. But a novel? For pleasure? I think not.

That said, I enjoy summer simply for the fact that I can devour leisure reading books without the requisite guilt that is attached to in-semester reading, and this summer was exceptional for the quantity and quality of the books I managed to read. Aside from a joyous (well, perhaps an exaggeration) re-reading of Wuthering Heights, a text I use with my AP English Literature class, I also read Wicked, Lost, and Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, all by Greg Maguire. I have to confess that these, too, were part of an AP summer assignment where my students had to pick one Maguire text, and, being the teacher, I tried to devour them all (I came up two short: Son of a Witch and Mirror, Mirror), but the effort was well worth it.

But beyond school summer assignments, I also read John Grogan's Marley and Me, a must for all dog owners, and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's Heat and Dust, a Booker Prize winner set in colonial India. Both are quick reads, with Marley being a light memoir that makes you smile as you quickly flip through those pages, and Heat being a bit more meaty, with its dual narratives of love and adultery each wrapped in the exotic Indian countryside. Both are good reads, and Jhabvala's book qualifies as a modern classic, for all those looking to assuage their snobbish sides while beach reading.

But the big find of the summer for me was David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, short listed in 2004 for the Booker Prize. This text, six inter-connected stories that comprise a novel, all resonate with the themes of loss, connection, death, and hope. They are put together like a set of nested dolls, with the first half of the first story abruptly stopping to make way for the first half of the second story, and so on. The sixth story, a post-apocalyptic tale which creates a world both strikingly familiar and weirdly strange, is told in its entirety, and, when it finishes, the last half of the fifth story picks up in medea res. As each story ends, and you make your way to the last, which is really the first, story, your understanding of the world Mitchell envisions becomes ever clearer. Suffice it to say, this guy can write! His grasp of story and language is so acute that his leaps from genre to genre, and he does leap from 18th century journal to 19th century epistolary text all the way to the above mentioned post-apocalyptic science fiction adventure text, are seamless. He does it all without blinking an eye. It's a wonder he's not better known in America, but I think he probably will be soon. His latest book, Black Swan Green, is on the list for this year's Booker Prize, as well!

It has been a great reading summer. The combination of quality and quantity has really been a plus for me, and I've discovered books and writers that I really enjoy. That's what summer reading is all about, right?

Now just don't ask me how the writing has been going.

Welcome to Sharper Thesis, the blog!

Why do it? Why blog? My wife asked me that question as I fervently and excitedly started the process of typing and formatting another web related adventure, and I suppose she has a point. I've worked hard to develop and maintain a few school related web sites, but now a blog, too?

I suppose it has to do with the act of writing as much as teaching. My students, probably the only readers of this thing, will no doubt groan when I assign them their own blogs this fall, and that's ok. They need to understand this stuff as much as I do. But for me, being an English teacher simply has to transcend the realm of just quizzes and papers...it has to somehow be a vehicle that I can use to show my students that writing, especially writing in the 21st century, has a very public face, and can have its uses. Writers write...no profundity there. Now it's time to put my money where my mouth is.

I suppose I'll use this spot to post assignments and comment on class events, but I also want to use it as a place to share books with people, and to talk about writing and the many hazrds that life holds. But most of all, I hope it's a place where I can write and share and have people interact with me. It's a grandiose wish, I know, but I hope it will happen.

That's all for now. See you in September.