Adolescent Literacy

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Comment by Joan F. Kaywell on September 11, 2009 at 4:02pm

If you consider yourself an English langauge arts teacher (at any level), please post something you wrote TODAY in the gallery I'm curating: A (Fri)Day in the Life of an English Teacher
Description: Teachers write for a variety of purposes in the classroom. To give the general public an idea of the kinds of writing that teachers do on a daily basis, please submit anything you write in school on the day (Friday) of SEPTEMBER 11, 2009.

Only material written on the actual day of September 11, 2009, should be submitted. What you write might or might not have anything to do with 9/11. The purpose of this gallery is to give non-educators an idea of the kinds of writing that are required of teachers during a school day. Go to the following link and follow the directions to post.

http://galleryofwriting.org/galleries/98928

THANKS

Comment by Virginia Little on September 3, 2009 at 7:51am

I write 3 articles a week that are lesson plans for secondary ed. students. These are posted on http://www.examiner.com/Billings under the name Virginia Little, Tools for Teachers reviewer. Please come visit and I think you will find great ideas for classroom ideas. Short articles, easy to implement.

Comment by Andrene Bonner on August 9, 2009 at 4:57pm

I teach English at Mount Vernon High School in Westchester County, NY and my students find it quite exciting that their teacher has written a book. I will be reading exerpts for my summer school students this week. It is a coming-of-age book set in Jamaica, Caribbean and is titled, Olympic Gardens. It received the 2009 Lorna Goodison Caribbean Award for Transformative Literature at the Tamarind Festival for Caribbean Literature in Washington, DC on June 14, 2009.

About the Book: By the time Roderick Brissett learns that he is being shipped away from his rural family home to live with his aunt in the city, it is too late. His mother’s decision came without questions or answers. Roderick’s youth is tested under the most adverse conditions. It is within the abyss of such harsh realities that he must find strength and seek some semblance of joy that will help him to survive, grow, and find his place in the world. You can read what they say about the book at http://andrenebonner.wordpress.com. The book is perfect for high school and college. Just thought I'd let the group know about this. Walk good.

Comment by Andrene Bonner on August 9, 2009 at 12:11pm

Currently developing a unit on social justice for my high school English class. Just wondered if anyone has ideas about teaching this area of study in the English classroom. What worked best in your classroom?

Comment by freida golden on December 28, 2008 at 10:42pm

Yes, this is exactly what I wanted to know. I am not finished with the book, but I skipped and read a bit of the ending. I can't see that the author ever answers the betrayal the young girl feels from the father, so I think your daughter's review of it as mostly "fluff" is what I am seeing also. It will be interesting to see if it becomes a student-to-student recommended book.

Comment by Maggie Dorsey on December 28, 2008 at 4:54pm

I also picked up a copy of Castration Celebration, thinking it was perfect for my 8th grade students who had been over-saturated in all things High School Musical (mostly at the hands of their younger siblings). While the actual events of the book were relatively "normal," there were definitely topics and conversations that were, as you say, "strange." I then handed it over to my almost-14-year-old daughter (in 9th grade), who said "it was good and it was realistic but it was mostly fluff." I asked her if she would recommend it to other high school students and she said, "Yeah, it should be recommended." I pushed, asking "By a teacher?" She gave me that look teenage girls reserve for their mothers. "By a TEACHER?! That would be AWKWARD."

I'm not sure that answers your question...I did let her pass it along to a friend, on the condition that I called the friend's mother FIRST to make sure it was OK.

Comment by freida golden on December 27, 2008 at 9:52pm

Did anyone else get a free copy of a book at NCTE by Jake Wizner, Castration Celebration? I am reading it right now and I have questions about sharing it with adolescents. He also wrote Spanking Shakespeare, haven't read that but would like to her about it if you have.
I am absolutely not into censorship and if a student brought in the book on their own, I would allow them to read it. I just don't think I would reccomend it.
One example is a tie in to Twilight, a vampire would enjoy oral sex during a girl's period. This discussion involves 3 pages of the book and includes a song written about it.
This is only one very strange part of the book.
Has anyone else read it? Are there any other views about it? Am I missing something?

Comment by Michael Steres on November 10, 2008 at 1:35am

The students in my class would be appalled at the lack of respect for their goddess, Stephanie Meyer. I have 11 copies of each of the four Twilight books in my classroom library and as of this moment there is only one book available. A group of my former students have tickets to the midnight premier of the movie and are very upset that I will be at NCTE and thus not able to join them. While the books are sold as "vampire" novels they really are classic teen romances with enough action to interest the boys. One of my most reluctant readers (she bragged that she had never read a book on her own) is about to complete a 3,000 page journey through the world of Twilight. At my school, Twilight is the ultimate literary sensation.

Comment by Kia Jane Richmond on October 30, 2008 at 9:20pm

For the past two years students in my secondary English methods course (those who are preparing to student teach in grades 6-12) have worked with selected teachers in Michigan to develop lesson plans for Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli. One class created a variety of lesson plans for an 11th grade American Literature class; they focused on meeting requirements of the new Michigan Merit Curriculum for high school students. Another class constructed several lessons for an 8th grade Language Arts class; these students worked with Michigan’s 8th Grade Level Content Expectations. These academic service learning lessons allowed my students to converse with “real” teachers and think about “real” students as they gathered ideas for engaging individual and group activities to use with Stargirl. What’s more, several of the lessons that were created by these teacher candidates invited middle school and high school teachers to think about ways to help students use literature to connect to the world beyond the classroom walls.
(For more on ASL, see http://servicelearning.org/what_is_service-learning/service-learning_is/index.php, http://www.learningtogive.org/papers/paper1.html, or http://webb.nmu.edu/Centers/StudentEnrichment/Service/SiteSections/AboutASL.shtml)
During this same time period, I’ve taught Stargirl (as well as many other texts) in my EN/ED 462 Literature for Young Adults class. I used ideas from Don Gallo and Sarah Herz’s From Hinton to Hamlet text, which argues for using YA lit as a bridge to the classics. We’ve found success with pairing Stargirl with Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak as well as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. We also effectively connected Joyce Carol Oates’s Big Mouth and Ugly Girl and The Crucible by Arthur Miller; Out of Control by Norma Fox Mazer, Chris Crutcher’s Whale Talk, and Lord of the Flies by William Golding; and Every Time a Rainbow Dies by Rita Williams-Garcia, Sharon Draper’s Romiette and Julio, and Romeo and Juliet.

One semester, my YA lit students at Northern Michigan University were paired up with high school students in a nearby school’s AP Senior English class. Everyone read Speak and The Scarlet Letter, discussed the texts in an online web-based classroom environment called Nicenet (see http://www.nicenet.org/philosophy.cfm for more info) and then gathered in person on our campus to share individually constructed responses to the books. This allowed us to continue the conversations started online and to exchange ideas about responding both to classic and contemporary literature.

I urge anyone who hasn’t taken the opportunity to try these strategies (academic service learning or paired texts, or a combination of both) to do so this year. I have seen positive outcomes for middle and high school students, teacher candidates, teachers in the schools, and for those of us working in English Education programs at the university level.

Kia Jane Richmond, Associate Professor of English, Northern Michigan University

Comment by Penny Kittle on October 21, 2008 at 9:06am

Yesterday a parent of a student came to class to lead the book talk of the day. She brought Fight Club, The Poisonwood Bible, Midwives, and The Red Tent. She told the students how much she loved the books one after another... finally one of my students interrupted her. "That's not the way you do a book talk. I need to know what it's about..." Luckily she didn't mind. It reminded me how much my students depend on the book talk, the daily beginning of our class, to help them make plans. They say readers 'have plans for what to read next' so we work on that day after day, telling a little about the book and then what the reader thought, then reading a short passage so the rest of the class can get a sense for the writing style. My students lead them, I lead them, and I entice parents in to lead them. Next week: the principal.

I live in the poorest area of Carroll County in New Hampshire where rural family life is hard, especially in this economy. My students are just not going to hear about good books--the library full of good books--any other way.

Last year I taught in our Eagle Academy, a night school for former drop outs, and I took Rob to the bookstore on our last night of class together. As we stood scanning the shelves he said, "I don't know where to look." I said, "How about a biography?" He said, "I don't know what that means." And I was struck by how kids who don't read, don't know even how to navigate the sub-titles in a book store. He doesn't picture 'books about people he might be interested in' when he hears the term 'biographies,' he doesn't picture anything at all. There is so much kids don't know about books.

And there are so many good ones! I just finished Random Family about a loosely-related group of people in the Bronx over about ten years. It is non-fiction, but so well-written it is story from start to finish... captivating. I hope our classrooms are big enough to let all of the interests and abilities in to the big world of reading.

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