Kozol/Week 2 reflections.

Chapters 8 and 9 were my favorite chapters so far in Letters to a Young Teacher. The chapter on teacher jargon was hilariously relevant to the types of word-trends I feel that we are all coaxed into when immersed in education study. I have found that these latinized verbs-that-stand-for-shorter-verbs-that-mean-the-same-thing have almost fully taken over my professional writing style. I am not sure if it is necessarily a bad thing. It is just a different code to speak in. However, if we are using these terms with our students in an attempt to be transparent in our teaching practices, we should make sure they know what they mean. Utilize means use, for example.
We should also be sure that we are not using these terms simply for their abstractive qualities. In other words, we should not use these words to help us say something when we really don't have anything to say.
Remember what Camus says in The Plague:

But tell us, Tarrou, what is it that causes all the troubles of the world? "Language. We don’t have clear, plain language." 

This is not always the easiest thing to do, but it is what I believe what Francesca and Kozol are really pushing back against. 

Chapter 9 was beautiful. If teachers can find ways to let children feel comfortable with experiencing merriment in the school setting, they are doing their job. School cannot be all about content learning and objective-reaching. Kids need time to look out the window. I love that Francesca realizes this but also sees how the kids can help to enlighten her within these moments.
This type of thing seems to lend itself more to younger kids. How can we inspire aesthetic merriment in seventeen year-olds, kids who are often much more worried about being grown up than being young?


So this past week I decided I needed to try something new with my Freshman periods (especially period 8) so I came up with something I thought was pretty cool. We are studying Fahrenheit 451. My colleague Eliot White emailed me this article (http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html) written about censorship and book burning by Kurt Vonnegut. His book Slaughterhouse Five was actually burned in a school's furnace by the Drake school board in North Dakota. He wrote this letter to the president of the school board to explain that writers, including himself, were real people--people with pure and moral purposes. So I printed out this article for my kids to read. Afterward I was going to have them break into groups of four and each group would act as though they were their own school. These little school boards had to make decisions about how they would deal with censorship. What books would they allow? What would be the factors that would keep books from being allowed in their school? How would they deal with a teacher or student reading a book in school that wasn't "appropriate"? How would they deal with parents?

Since my Co-op doesn't like most of my ideas or give me much freedom, I decided to try the project without really giving her a full description of what it was I would be doing. So after we read the article, I broke the kids into groups and started explaining. When I began to walk around and facilitate the small group discussions, my co-op pulled me aside and said she didn't like the idea. "I wish you would have told me about this: I don't think it serves a purpose in their understanding of the novel," she said.
She's entitled to her opinion.
And yes, I probably should have told her what I was planning on doing first. But, I knew she wouldn't probably like it, and I really wanted to try it. I don't know if I made the right decision.
So she told me that instead of giving them the 20 minutes to work on this project, I should give them 5 and then have them get back to their seats so she could play a recording of Ray Bradbury reading an excerpt from the novel...
I was very annoyed but I did what she wanted. So for the final 15 minutes of the week, the students sat and payed no attention to a CD that my co-op played for them. I sat in the front and watched them not paying attention and watching the clock.
 I thought: this is a missed opportunity.