I’ve written before about how reading, for me, is now social.  I didn’t expect that would ever change...I really expected that reading would be like it always has been - stories in my own head, and something that belonged to me in a very real way.

But when Andrew burst into my life nine months ago, the way I read (along with everything else) changed.  Suddenly, it wasn’t just me reading.  We read books the other recommended, then talked about it as we read.  Texted quotes and commentary, thoughtful emails and Direct Messages on Twitter about the meaning of certain passages, and the relevance to our own lives...all of that made reading something that was no longer just a refuge where I could live in a world of (at least partially) my own creation.

When I first flipped my class, I got an idea while I watched a reality television show to do something similar to how they engaged viewers.  Throughout the episode, the hashtag for the show appeared in the corner, and viewers were encouraged to tweet their comments in real time.  So I stole that idea and used it for reading and watching video in my English 10 class last year.  They used Today’s Meet as a backchannel, and I saw their level of engagement increase substantially.  They were asking questions that showed more trouble with comprehension than I had any idea existed.  And instead of me answering all the questions, they started answering each other’s questions.  Kids who refused to talk in class were suddenly revealed to be incredibly engaged and possessing more knowledge than anyone realised.  It was actually one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever done in class.

And that’s how we read Night.  I made videos of myself reading each chapter using ShowMe, and we watched them in class.  Students participated over Today’s Meet (we had 1:1 netbooks last year in my classroom).  At the end of the book, every kid passed the assessment...because they actually were engaged in the reading.

And when I started at Redwood, I threw those ideas out for the most part because we were no longer 1:1 and my students were supposedly avid independent, motivated readers.

And a semester later, I’m wondering why I abandoned everything that worked so beautifully for the sake of a little less technology and what turns out to be a group of students who aren’t used to reading for English class.  They are, however, much more adept at using sparknotes and the internet to help them avoid reading.  And they have fooled most of their teachers for a long time, or have simply had a teacher resigned to the fact that her students wouldn’t read what was assigned.  I think all English teachers understand that it's pretty hard to get students to read and focus and comprehend and be excited about books.  And with the influx of technology, attention spans get shorter and teenagers struggle to find as much meaning in Catcher in the Rye as they do in Call of Duty or Facebook.  It's not a problem of this school, or this state, or whatever.  It's a universal problem, at least in American culture.

I had an idea a few weeks ago to have students produce an interactive book of the text they’re reading.  It follows the “Why Read?” inquiry unit we did at the start of the course, because now we’ve read one book together and so we have some experience using the strategies they selected.  And frankly, the way teenagers read has changed.

In an era where they can get high-quality summaries and analysis of most books on the traditional canon for high school literature, and where they’ve come to believe that reading books for school rarely yields anything but pain and suffering, how can we possibly wonder why they choose to do their hours of other homework without even glancing over the pages assigned in their English novel?

But here’s the problem: you can’t analyse what you can’t understand.  And you can’t understand what you don’t read.  So we’re at an impasse.

Now, I’ve had two relatively successful novel units.  We are just wrapping up Death of a Salesman in American Literature, and we are just finished with Night in Humanities.  So for the end product, it makes sense to go back to the original inquiry question: Why Read?

But the more interesting question to me is how my students believe they can help other teens read.  And that’s where the idea for the interactive book comes into its own.  An interactive book, created by the students in my class for the book they are reading or have just finished, could put in features like video explanations of difficult passages, or hyperlinked vocabulary or historical terms, or summaries to start and end the chapter, or focus questions so students can read for deeper analytical meaning.  All of those things would help me as a reader, and my guess is that my students would be helped as well.  But it still doesn’t solve the problem of how to leverage the ability of books to create community.

That’s where the idea for the CoFlipBooks Reads The Fault in Our Stars came from.  We wanted to know what would happen if we got together a group of friends and made videos for each of the chapters that would serve to start a discussion and deepen our own connection to and understanding of the book.  We’ve already got an introduction video and a video for chapter one and it’s been amazing so far.

We’re working on translating this for use in the classroom, and how it could fit into an interactive book.  We don’t have all the answers yet, but that doesn’t matter.  Part of blogging for me is sharing what is in process, rather than just what is finished product.

So when school starts on Monday, we will start talking about constructing an interactive book that will help students read socially and with thoughtfulness and depth.  I’d love to hear what you think about how that should work.

And please watch our book club videos!  And read with us!  And create video responses to any of the chapter videos!

As I’ve been reading some new books over break, I’ve noticed something.

The way I read has changed now that my use of technology has changed.  Let me give you an example.

I read Looking for Alaska. You should too.  But luckily for me, Andrew (my favourite person with whom to read a book) HAS read it.  So as I was reading, and crying, and laughing and wondering how John Green got so nerdfighting awesome, I was also doing something that has become part of my reading ritual/routine/practice these days.

I was messaging Andrew with quotes, thoughts, connections to our own lives, and questions.  I found that when I was struck by the beauty of something, I wanted to just send him the quote.  So I would type out the quote and often realise just how much more beautiful it was as I was copying it verbatim.  And he would respond, and we would talk about it.

And it made me love the book even more.

Then I read An Abundance of Katherines.  And he hasn’t read it.  But he (and you) should.  I found myself actually enjoying it a bit less, not because it was inherently less enjoyable, but because I wasn’t getting the same interaction I had with Looking for Alaska, and before that dozens of other books Andrew and I have read together (synchronously or asynchronously).

When I read, I often take on some of the images, metaphors, turns of phrase, or other subtle patterns in my own writing.  I’ve found that having that kind of assimilation with my favourite books deepens my own ability to express myself, and simultaneously communicates a deeper meaning to anyone familiar with the original work.  I can make an allusion to a character, or a particular scene, and the background of my writing becomes so rich with references that it is a tapestry of meaning to which only some of my readers have access.

That may sound elitist or exclusive, but it’s something we all do.  We make inside jokes with people as a function of relationship.  It connects us to them, and adds shades of depth to our ordinary interactions.  It creates backstory and shared history.  It knits us together in thousands of tiny stitches.  And that’s the same way authors connect to the readers - they give us in-jokes, references to famous stories and situations, and in that way, we understand the world they have created and can see ourselves in it.  If the book is really good, those ideas can actually mean something both inside of and outside of the original context of the novel.

You only have to look to fandom to see that this works extremely well.  How many people dress up like Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Hunger Games, etc. characters because they feel like it’s a world they inhabit?  On a smaller scale, I was at church on Sunday and someone came in wearing a The Fault In Our Stars shirt (the one that matches the cover, only it says “okay” instead of the book information).  I told her how much I loved John Green and the book and therefore, the shirt; instantly, we had a point of connection where none existed before.  The same thing happens when I wear my birthday present from Andrew - the NOT COOL ROBERT FROST! t-shirt.  Anyone who recognises it is really just recognising one of the stitches that hold us together.

It’s part of human nature to seek connection with others.  And one of the ways we do that is through telling stories and imagining ourselves and other people complexly.

So that is what Andrew and I have been talking about lately.  We wanted a way for our kids to engage in many of the same practices that we do as readers: practices we try to model for them so they can see proficient readers and start to change their conception of what it means to read with thoughtfulness and depth.

That’s originally where the ideas for reading journals came up.  When we read books that we’re teaching (or preparing to teach) we don’t do formal annotation, but we do some informal reading journal strategies (and one of us who will remain nameless uses only envelopes and file folders for these).  So I showed my students my crazy messy notes (that I have cleaned up and posted here, along with instructions if you are interested) and talked them through what my idea of a reading journal is.  

But first, what it’s not:

• Cornell Notes, or other kinds of structured note-taking
  
• Graded or evaluated in any way
  
• Treasure hunting for symbols or metaphors
  

In fact, there are only a few things I insist be included:

• Actual thoughts about the text
  
• Something that responds, connects, or interprets the text
  

That’s it.  They can illustrate or use other visuals, they can write out quotes, they can tell a personal story, they can make bullet points of key words or ideas, they can note patterns or repeating language/ideas/themes, etc.  Most of them do a combination of those things.  Some like to write down quick thoughts and then go back and write a more polished version at home that night.  

The point is that I want them to have something that they wrote about the text during or just after when they read.  I’ve found that it increases comprehension, helps them formulate questions so they engage the text more fully, and assists their composition and planning process when the time comes to write the essay or do the project at the end of the unit.

But here’s the flaw in the plan: they are the only one benefitting from these.  They do share with their group, and then often with the whole class, but that is a very limited sphere of influence.

That’s the flaw this New Idea is designed to address.

So instead of doing all the reading journals individually on paper (some do them digitally on their own device), we want students to choose one section of the book and do a video reading journal.  This will look a little like the Death of a Salesman videos I wrote about in the last post, in that they will get a particular section of the book and will be asked to work in a small group to make a video.

But there’s a slight difference.  This video isn’t about analysing character.  It’s about connecting to the text.  And they can talk about anything they want, so long as it gets them to engage and read both academically and empathetically, treating the characters and situations with thoughtfulness and complexity.

It would be a little like a book talk, but with a focus on pointing out the things in that section of the text that can pull the reader in and help them understand the book more fully.  So a straight summary won’t do it.  Neither will some vague statements about character.

I don’t know if this will work, but I think the primary goal is to get students to make a video in which they make people care about the book and want to read it.

All the videos would be under four minutes, but other than that, could be put together however they wished.  They could use puppets, green screen, animation, RSA-style, still pictures, PowToons style, or just sit in front of the camera and talk.

The first step is to make some model videos.  So Andrew and I are working on a project that involves reading journal videos for John Green’s AMAZING book The Fault in Our Stars.  We’ll post it here when we finish it.  Our hope is that we will put together a series that involves members of our PLN (including non-English teachers, because hey, reading isn't an "English Teacher Only" activity) to model what these can look like, and then we can start our students with a plethora of models for inspiration.  We can also work out the bugs in the system before assigning it.  Eventually we’d love our students to actually make videos to send to their classmates across the country (so Andrew’s students make them for a book my students are reading too, and then my students make videos and then send them back, etc.).

And it just sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.  It’s kind of like a book club with more #EduAwesome.

We’d love to know if you’ve tried anything like this before, or have ideas to make this idea even better.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in Nerdfighteria lately.  One of the core values of that amazing online community is that part of our jobs as humans is to figure out how to imagine each other complexly.  We all know the epic failures that happen when one person or culture came to believe a single story about another person or culture - history is rife with examples of times when the failure to imagine The Other complexly resulted in torment, violence, war, and slaughter.

As human beings, our tendency is to try and fit other people into A Story to help us define them.  When we are children, this is necessary.  We need words to define and classify and divide and conquer because otherwise, the world would be a series of sounds and movements we couldn’t fathom into coherent patterns.  We need to define and we need to figure out a way of understanding things generally, or we will never understand anything.

But the more childlike we are, the more we cling to a single story, or a single understanding of something or someone.  The person we’re dating is PERFECT and then they disappoint us and they are suddenly THE WORST PERSON EVER.  We see black and white in all their terrible brilliance, but we fail to see the infinite shades of grey in between.

That’s right.  I just called all the people in the world who only see a single story childish.  And here’s the thing - there are issues where I see only the single story.  There are issues where you only see the single story.  It’s part of being human: if we could somehow actually see EVERYTHING complexly, we would explode trying to reconcile it all.

But we do get to choose the level of complexity we want to reconcile.

And it starts with ourselves.  We know that we each have more than A Story, but we spend most of our life trying to tell that story in a way that takes into account overwhelming complexity but also base simplicity.  If we’re lucky, we live a life where the people around us can imagine us complexly enough to not demand we fit the Single Story into which they’ve molded us.

So when a generally nice person acts like an asshole, we can reconcile the fact that it’s an unusual reaction and give them some compassion in trying to understand why.  And when a selfish person does something so “out of their nature,” we can appreciate the goodness of the deed without changing our overall impression of them.

Part of why I love literature is that it forces us to deal with complex characters who refuse to be defined neatly.  Odysseus is both a hero and not a hero.  Holden is both a whiny brat and a sad, lonely kid.  They defy our attempts to explain with a single story because they are Just Like Us.  They can do beautiful, heroic things, and at the same they can be a passive coward.

So how do we take students who are used to telling a Single Story and help them see characters as complex human beings?  

But more importantly, how do we help them accept their own complexity?  And how do we help them accept the complexity of the world around them?  And how do we help them move from a worldview in which a person can only be one thing to a worldview where a person is many things simultaneously and yet also just one thing?

Humanity is beautiful yet broken, complex yet crooked, terrible and yet transcendent.  It’s art, and music, and war, and YouTube comments, and genocide, and Gatsby and Alyosha Karamazov, and Alaska Young.  Humanity is all of that and none of that.

With all that complexity, how do we teach our students to be human?  And how do we model for them what complex humanity is when they only see us, their teachers, as a single story?

We recently had students make short analysis videos about one of the two sons in Death of a Salesman.  Their videos were supposed to do two things:

• demonstrate they can read with thoughtfulness and depth
• connect with the character and show them complexly

And guess what - they can do the first really well.  But for some reason, most of them had a lot of trouble seeing their character as more than a stereotype.  Happy is (to use his mother’s words) a philandering bum who gets ignored and so needs attention.  Biff is (to use his father’s words) a good-for-nothing bum who steals and hates his father.

But those are the Single Stories that Arthur Miller gives us.  And if we stop there, we miss the beautiful complexity of those two characters.  Most critics spend more time talking about Biff.  So I’m going to talk about Happy.

Happy is a walking contradiction: he never feels like his father loves him enough, and so he looks for love in the relationships he creates.  But instead of looking for women like his mother - solid, loyal, the kind of woman you marry - he looks for women who are unavailable.  He wants to want the right kind of woman so much that he takes those women from other men...thus making them the wrong kind of woman.  And once he has slept with them, he loses interest and moves on.  The need he has to gain approval is never met in the accomplishment of the conquest of women.  But he also realises that his tendency towards philandering means that he loses the approval of his mother.  She sees him as a single story - a story she loves, but a single story.  

All of that can be determined by reading with thoughtfulness and depth - and most of my students said those kinds of things.  

But nothing I just said shows you that I empathise with Happy or see him as a complex human being.  So here’s my attempt.

When you have a parent who always expects more of you than you can possibly do, you choose one of two options: you try harder, or you give up.  Happy knows that his life will never measure up - it’s clear that Biff is the superior brother, but even BIFF can’t make his father happy.  He hears Willy say, “Good job, son.”  And he hears what is not being said audibly, but is thick in the air nonetheless: “You did a good job.  But not good enough.”

So Happy starts lying constantly - that he’s getting married, that he’s got a good job, that he is happy.  He builds up an identity around those lies until his entire identity IS a lie, and he deals with the fact that he feels unimpressive by making himself seem impressive.  Then he hits crisis point - his father dies.  And his father’s death means that his chance to earn Willy’s approval is permanently buried alongside Willy.  After nearly three decades of trying to live up to impossible expectations, he can either admit his failures and try to rebuild his identity from the ground up, or he can double-down and keep chasing the impossible dream.

So which is the easy choice?  Is it easier to admit that your life is a lie?  Is it easier to work towards something that is always a little out of reach?  Is it easier to tell the truth or to continue to try to make the lie the truth?

And that leads to an overwhelming question: What if there is no easy choice?  

What if Happy is far more complex than just a boy needing his father to love him more?  

What if some of our own brokenness was the same as his?

THAT’S what my students didn’t see.  

It’s the same reason why we started this semester with a discussion about the point of reading.  My students thought that empathy was important in reading - they even made it one of the 5 E’s of reading: Entertainment, Escape, Equality, Education and Empathy.  

But they don’t know how to do read empathetically AND academically.

Here’s what I believe about reading, now that I’ve been reading for 26 years, and reading academically for about 16 of those years.

Reading the whole book is important.  You need to know the characters before you can understand them, and you need to understand them before you can imagine them complexly, and you need to imagine them complexly before you can empathise with them.  Reading that way doesn’t make the author less important.  It makes the experience more personal - just as it was to the author when they wrote it.

Reading closely is important.  The words the author chooses are important, and chosen for greatest impact.  When we read closely, we are engaging with the writer on their level.  We are reading in the same way we write - carefully, thoughtfully, critically, and intimately.  Reading that way doesn’t murder the text.  It illuminates it.

We read because we believe that good literature can speak to us, regardless of the original time, place, culture or language.  Good books tell us what it means to be human.  If it’s a really good book, it does it in such a way that it sneaks up on us.  It’s the grenade in the corner that the book leaves, glinting in the sunlight just enough for us to feel its presence.  And when the walls collapse around our life of lies, it explodes, and in the rubble, it helps us see what should go in its place.  It remakes us into more beautiful, equally broken, and stunningly complex human beings.

And the very best books are the ones that not only tell us who we have been, but who we can be.  

They articulate the things we’ve always known, but could never say or explain.  

They reflect us, in all our despair and loss and pain and joy, and help us understand ourselves and each other.

They leave behind pieces of the characters so that we are less alone.

And it is that feeling - the feeling of being less alone in a cold, painful, and lonely world - that I want my students to feel as they read.

That is my personal goal for the rest of this year: to teach my students how to read closely, understand deeply, and allow for complexity.  To empathise with the characters, no matter how bad they seem.  To look for the ways in which they reveal the humanity we all share.

To read empathetically, academically, and complexly.

Like I’ve learned to do.

Each year, people all over the world choose something to give up for Lent.  The idea is to die to the physical self so that the spiritual self can be strengthened in preparation for Easter.  I know a lot of non-religious or non-faithed people who practice Lent as a kind of ascetic lesson in doing without.

In college, I practiced giving things up for Lent.  One year, it was soda.  One year, it was TV.  One year, I tried technology...and that didn't last.  That was even before the iPhone and iPad and MacBook, and I still failed.  Can't imagine what would happen now.

But there's a big difference between College Me and 30-Year-Old Me.  Now, I am not surrounded by my friends in the same way I was when I lived in a dorm, and I'm not using technology as a distraction from the hard work of relationship.  Instead, if I stopped using technology, I would have literally no way of being with many of my friends.  If I cut off my use of my computer, phone and iPad, I would have to cut off Andrew, who has made my life better in so many ways that it's hard to picture what it would look like without him.  Not to mention the rest of my amazing colleagues in my Filled-With-Awesome-PLN (FWAPLN).  So I would be taking something that is meant to refocus your priorities and use it to cut off the people whom I love and from whom I learn every day.

And as I was thinking through how I would use the incredible blessing of an entire week off (Yay Ski Week!), I started to think.

I want to fill this week with things that I love.  On first glance, that seems kind of opposed to the idea of Lent.  But as I thought through it, here is what I discovered:  there are four things that I need desperately, and that I'm not doing a good job focusing on:
1. Being with my people.  Both IRL and virtually.
2. Sleeping and get my migraines (which often stem from lack of sleep over time) under control
3. Writing.  Tell the stories that need to be told.
4. Reading.  Unfill the Kindle I've spent about six months filling with unread books.

That's when I realised that Lent is not about what you give up as much as what you fill that space from what you have given up.  It is all about refocusing priorities.  It's like how we talk about the flipped classroom - it's not about what you remove from class as much as what you use with the time you've created by removing it.

So my Lent is about filling in, rather than opting out.

By hanging out with people, sleeping as much as I can, writing at least 1,200 words a day (which will make about 50,000 words by the end of Lent), and reading at least a book every 4-5 days (which will be 8-10 books I hope), I am filling in the spaces with things that make me engage with people, with ideas, and with myself.  

So here's how I'm going to do all of those things in a way that will make me engage, rather than separate.  I think the Sleeping and Being With People ones are more obvious, so here are my reading and writing plans.

Writing
I've always considered doing NaNoWriMo, especially this past year.  I was actually teaching a writing class then, and I think I missed my opportunity on that one.  So I thought about a way to lead into NaNoWriMo13 and figured that this could be like a SortaNaNoWriLent.  I'm not going to commit to any particular genre, except that I'll tell the stories that come to my mind.  It may be journal articles, blog posts, memoir/reflection, or it could be short stories or flash fiction.  But the only way to be a writer is to write.  And I am a writer.  So I'm going to write.  I will share some of that work here, but mostly, it's just for me.

Sometimes the only way to exorcise the demons is to let them inhabit the paper instead of the corners of your mind.  By engaging with the act of putting those words on the page, I am choosing to translate and interpret my past in a way that stops it from pushing any longer into the present and the future.  Writing helps me be present in my life.  It helps me engage.  So I'm going to write.  

Reading
As to the reading, I have a few ideas, and they are rather less coherent than my writing goals.  I want to read everything John Green has written.  I've already read the phenomenal The Fault In Our Stars, the you're-breaking-my-crooked-little-heart Looking for Alaska, and the touching Abundance of Katherines (the latter two I read yesterday).  I still have Paper Towns and Will Grayson Will Grayson to go.  Then I might start over (but those won't count to the total) with TFiOS.

I also want to read the two books that I hated so much I couldn't finish: The Great Gatsby and Catcher in the Rye.  I think I unfairly maligned them and want to give them another chance now that I'm a little older and more patient.  I also want to read a book that I preemptively hate so much I never read it at all: Twilight.  It's not okay to hate a book I haven't read.  So that's my logic behind all three of those.

After that, I have a few other books that have been waiting to be read - Reading Like a Writer, The Stranger, Something Rising Light and Swift, the new Lionel Shriver book, and the new Jodi Picoult book.  I also love rereading books that made an impact on me.  That's why I started Brothers Karamazov a few weeks ago.  And I want to read Hunger Games again too - this time less for plot and more for nuance.

Most of all, I want to be reading and talking about books.  Good books demand conversation to untangle, and some of being an English teacher is being willing to have those untangling conversations in which you admit that you don't have all the answers, and sometimes, are just as confused as the students.  I love being reminded what it's like to be on the other side of the equation.  

And all of these goals came from conversations with other people in my FWAPLN.  That means that I can engage with them as I work through all of these books.  Some are books recommended by friends, and some are books that have a global and nearly-timeless audience, so I can easily find places to talk about them, and people with whom to talk about them.  

I believe that novels are vehicles for truth that is too painful for ordinary life.  By telling us a story, they help us see ourselves, not as we want to be, but more as we hoped we aren't.  I think that I hated Gatsby and Catcher because their truth was a little too raw for my reality, and I needed more distance at that point in my life.  Now, I know that I'm beautifully flawed and crooked, and I know that it's only in this state that I can hear what they have to say about who I am.

I'm tired of creating distance.  It's time to close the distance instead.  The distance between other people and me, the distance between my memory and my identity, the distance between Who I Am and Who I Wish I Was.

So that's what I want to do for Lent: Close the Distance.

In a sense, I am giving up something for Lent: I'm giving up being so focused on work and distracting myself from work.  I'm giving up spending my time NOT doing the things I need most to be better at everything in my life.  I am giving up the things that create distance from the hurting things, the joyful things, the messy business of real life.

More than anything, Lent reminds us all that it is possible to be remade, to be given new life.  But that new life always involves something dying.  And death hurts - that's why distance is so much easier for me.  I need there to be distance so I can just Be Okay.  But Lent is about feeling that hurt intimately, closely, viscerally, in order to get the blessing of being more free.  The reminder that we are more than the choices and habits of our pasts,  That everyone can start over, and that we're more than the sum of our failures.

**

So what is out of focus in your life?  What do you need to do more of, or do less of?  What can you observe - whether or not you have faith or practice Lent - that will give your life deeper joy?  What do you need to do in order to be remade?  What distances need closing?

I'd love to know your thoughts, so please respond in comments. There's something important about putting your commitments in writing; it makes us consider carefully, and it gives us people to help us stay on track.

Note: This is not the normal blog content here.  But I wanted to publish it and this is my blog.  If you’re only here for the flipped English stuff, don’t worry.  I have a few posts coming about the really awesome projects my students are working on and some of the writing instruction stuff Andrew and I are working on.  So check back soon, and I’m sorry for the departure from the usual content.

I turned 30 on Saturday, and as I’ve been reflecting on that milestone, I’ve been thinking that the last year of my life was like a marathon I hadn’t been training for, but now that it’s over, I can be really proud that I finished...no matter how many times I almost died or wanted to quit in the middle.

I also really thought that Leaving My 20’s would bother me more than it does.  I thought that turning 30 had to be like a bad sitcom - so traumatic that it launches several decades of denial about the year on my driver’s license.