Andrew and I often employ some advice that we heard from Jon Bergmann:

Do you want it perfect, or do you want it Tuesday?

Most of the time, we want it Tuesday.  There are very few ideas that merit spending extra time and energy on developing them when you have as much work as Andrew and I do.  We often feel pulled in so many directions that it's all we can do just to get them done to Tuesday-quality standards.

The one aspect of our practice where we make an exception is in video production.  Sure, we make quick videos, like the ones I do on ShowMe, or the close reading videos
that take more time to record than they do to edit.  But most of our best work takes hours.

That's why the summer is the time we get the most video work done.  Last summer, I re-edited the research paper series to make it more manageable and useful.  We did a series on writing a literary analysis essay using Twilight, by Stephanie Meyer (essay prewriting video here). 

And we started a video about The Great Gatsby.  It began as a close read of the opening passage, but evolved into something that has taken months to perfect.  In order to make it, I had to learn Adobe After Effects.  That alone was hundreds of hours.  We wrote, edited, assembled, designed, rendered, and then revised it all and started over.  

The goal of this video was to help students get excited about reading the novel in class.  Not only does it do that, but it also demonstrates how we developed the claims put forth in the video.

So here is the video we made.  It may not be absolutely perfect, but of all our work over the last year and a half, it is the product of which I'm proud.  If you enjoy it, pass it on.  We hope that it helps more than just our own students appreciate a text as rich and beautiful as The Great Gatsby.

And if people like it, we may just try to make another video that ends up more on the "perfect" side, rather than the "Tuesday" side.

Disclaimer:  I am probably crazy for even considering this.  That's what it feels like as I look out on students preparing right now.

In a week, every 9th grader at East Bay Arts will be delivering a TED-Talk style presentation.  They will get two minutes to talk about something about which they are really passionate.  They have to use a visual of some kind, and have been told DO NOT DO PUBLIC READING. ESPECIALLY FROM A POWERPOINT.  Unless they want to make their teachers cry, that is.

So let's back up.  Every students in 9th grade started the year with a unit on learning, the brain, and education.  The centrepoint of that unit was a series of TED-Talks.  We learned how to take notes and listen attentively.  We talked about passion, and how passion influences people to speak from a place of excitement and power.

Concurrently, they have been working on their very first all-school project.  At EBA, every grade level does one major project per trimester.  For the  first freshmen project, students have traditionally been asked to choose a social issue that is important to them and both write an essay about it and prepare a presentation to be given to a room of their peers and graded by the teacher.

If you read my blog and/or know Andrew and I, we tend to blow things apart and find the pieces in the rubble that work, and then build up the structure around those things.  That's kind of how this project started.  We liked the idea of self-selected topics.  We liked students giving a presentation that means something to them.   We also liked the idea of a project that all their teachers could see, work on with them, and learn from.  

But we also saw problems: most teachers from last year reported there being a ton of speeches on abortion or drug laws.  Having students write a research paper then deliver a persuasive speech seemed like a mismatch, and like too much for first trimester freshmen.  The topics don't necessarily touch the students' lives in a serious way, or in a way that is relatable in a 4-5 minute speech.  Also, the teacher in charge last year pretty much just told the other teachers what to do, and we really wanted to include the rest of the project team on the planning.

So we decided, in collaboration with the other two teachers on the team, to make it a presentation about how they wanted their school to change.  We started gearing up for that when we had a better idea.  Instead of advocating for a change at school, what would happen if we gave them the freedom to share something that made them truly passionate and interested?  What would school be like if every student got to share something they loved for a day?

Wouldn't that be the best day of school ever?  Wouldn't that MAKE the kind of school they would want to attend?

Then the next piece  that fell into place was when we realised that this was basically the structure of a TED Talk.  Since we've watched so many, it was an idea students quickly embraced.  It also has the benefit of being a real-world context for public speaking.  After all, how many people leave high school and ever have to present about a social issue for five minutes on their own?  But sharing an idea with passion and enthusiasm and clarity...that's something EVERYONE has to do.

And the final piece (stolen from Jon Corippo and Minarets): the teachers will not be assessing the students.  Instead, students will judge one another, based on the format of American Idol (the original).  There will be a Simon, a Paula and a Randy.  They will offer feedback based on the rubric categories and will decide the grade...but more importantly, will share what they thought and how it could be improved.

We will be filming the whole thing, and students will vote on which ones to feature on our YouTube channel.  I also told students that this was their chance to show their teachers, their parents, their friends, and the world that they were more than just a "dumb teenager who only cares about stuff posed on Facebook."  This is their chance to prove that they can have 80 9th graders in one room, listening to each other talk about something they love and not fall apart.

I'm writing about it here because I'm very aware that it might fail.  In fact, failure is likely - not of the whole event, but of certain presentations, and certainly technology.  But I'm sharing it so that I am clear going into it that the outcome doesn't matter.  What matters is that we aimed high and worked hard.  And that we learn from whatever failures may come.

In a week, it will all be over.  I'm excited to share what happened.

As a teacher in the flipped learning movement, I sometimes struggle with sharing what I do in class.  Especially when I am running what looks more like a teacher-centred classroom than what I would like.  

However, I've had to come to the realisation that being student-centred is about doing what the students need for where they are in their education and with the content knowledge and academic habits they bring with them.  So sometimes that looks like me being at the "front" (there is no front in my classroom) and everyone engaged in a synchronous activity.  In fact, that's what it looks like most of the time right now.

For both years Andrew and I have team-taught, we started running several minutes before even hitting the ground.  We planned to throw our students into the deep end, and then hope that they could swim as well as we wanted them to.  And yeah, that failed.  Shocking, I know.

After only a few days (it took six weeks last time), we saw that we needed to take a few steps back and build their skills before expecting them to take ownership over their learning in any meaningful way.  Since that's the ultimate goal of any class we teach, it was important enough to change enough that we could get it right.

We were already planning the first unit (for me, the entire first trimester) to be about the brain, how teenagers think, feel, and learn, and to centre around the novel Looking for Alaska, by John Green.  So we started thinking about the skills and knowledge they would need in order to start taking responsibility for their learning.  The short (and nowhere near comprehensive) list came down to:

1. Taking notes, both as annotations while reading and while taking in information from a video or in class
2. Collaborating and having academic conversations with peers
3. Establishing a procedure for writing fluency - writing without stopping or talking for 3-10 mins
4. The basics of patterning - finding patterns in a text, categorising those patterns, and starting to find meaning
5. Using information from sources accurately and effectively
6. How to work productively and independently for a short amount of time without disrupting others
7. Using technology essential to the course - Google Drive, MentorMob, YouTube, Gmail, Blogger
8. What it means to work to mastery, rather than just for completion

We gave ourselves the first trimester or so to teach and assess those skills.

As we started to plan out the unit, we thought about what content we should use for this unit.  Other than Looking for Alaska, we didn't want to use fiction, either short or long-form, or poetry (or at least not predominantly).  So we decided to focus on two things:

1. How the teenage brain operates, and how it learns
2. What the purpose of school is, and how our understanding and decision-making is (or should be) influenced by brain development

So we began to build a unit that would teach our students those concepts; however, the real focus is on the skills.  So we will watch a TED Talk on the adolescent brain, but the actual assessed skill is note-taking.  The question on the open-notes assessment is just a way of checking to make sure students see the utility of good note-taking.  We may do a piece of visual art about one of the videos we watched, but the real skill is in finding patterns and showing the main idea clearly through their art (even if it's stick figures).  All of these skills are things that are required in the Common Core standards, or lead to students becoming more critical readers, writers, and thinkers.  We also believe that regardless of whether these things are in the standards verbatim, they are the skills that literate human beings need for whatever they do after leaving high school.

Everything is leading toward the project students are undertaking that centres around this question:
What is the purpose of a high school, and what can we do to implement one change at our school to make it fit that purpose better?

That question will guide all of our study.  If you want to see what this looks like, here is the MentorMob playlist that has all the videos we're using (we do a video every day at the start of class to get students in their seats on time and focused, and also to give them something to write about if they need a topic for their daily writing warm-up.  We also have used lots of TED Talks about education and the teen brain) and many of the assignments we've created to lead them towards thinking about education and their place in their school community.  I've also started getting in the habit of taking a picture of anything I write, whether it's on the board or my own personal notes about something.  I post these for my students, and many of the steps on the playlist are the notes/instructions that I've modelled and made available for all students.

As with all our curriculum, please take what works for you and use it.  We do ask that you credit us if you take something exactly as-is.  We also acknowledge that NONE of this would be possible without having TED Talks available for free online, and without the work of many of our colleagues, particularly Karl Lindgren-Streicher, who did a version of the "What would you do to make a positive change at our school" project.  We are blessed to have such amazing people share so freely with us, and we'd like to extend the same offer to all of you.

A year ago, we started our YouTube Channel to host our research paper videos.  As we were preparing for our FlipCon12 presentation, we went back and watched those videos for the first time.

Both of us were shocked by how bad they were.  We actually had to stop watching because it made us cringe.

We recognise how revolutionary it was at the time for both of us to be in the same video and to show the process of writing an essay together, live on screen.  But there were lots of reasons why our early videos sucked so much:

1. We didn't know what we were doing
   
2. I didn't know what I was doing with editing
   
3. Neither of us had made enough videos or used them in class to understand what made for a good video
   
4. We were enjoying the process so much that we talked.  Way.  Too.  Much.
   

We didn't end up having a huge need for the video series this year - both of us ended up teaching something different than we had been assigned at the end of the school year, So they kind of sat there on our channel for the last year, and we mostly forgot the existed.

Then when we watched them again, I had an idea.  Now that I know what I'm doing with the editing side, and have some time to kill (yay summer!)I should go back and edit them down from 10-15 minutes to 5-6 minute videos.  So that's been the project that consumes most of my time these days, when I'm not working on our book chapters (PREORDER OUR BOOK HERE!).

I'd love to have some feedback on the updated videos.  I've added the updated video next to the original, just for the sake of comparison.

The old videos are on the left, and the new ones are on the right.  I made the old ones smaller because it made me happy and made the page look better.  The first video is about finding sources.  I've put the videos below the fold because I didn't want them to make the page load slowly for as long as they're on the front page of the blog.  Apologies for the inconvenience.  Please watch them anyway!

So much to say.

In the last few days of our time in Minnesota, Andrew and I talked a lot about what the next year will hold for us.  You can watch our 5-5-5-5 video reflection here, but that's really just the Big Picture Overview.

And the first thing you have to do when you look at changing your classroom is take stock of where you've been.  I haven't blogged much since early March, which is for lots of reasons (all of them, I assure you, are Very Good Reasons.  I know that Andrew will write me a note attesting to the veracity of that statement).  Practically, what that means is that all of the work we did in the last two units are completely and utterly unblogged.

So there are several major summer projects on the table for Thomasson Morris Instruction (TMI), but more than anything, we need to start by reflecting on the work we have been too busy working on to blog about.  Here are some of the blog topics/subjects we'll be covering in the near future, either as separate posts or combined in some way:

• Close reading
• Collaborative reading activities
• Student-designed novel unit(s)
• Use of student-made #coflip videos
• Integrating blogging into the 20% project (Blank White Page)
• Integrating blogging into a novel unit
• Going paperless without having 1:1
• The Really Hard (but No Rules) College Test
• Flipping feedback with VoiceComments
• Reading analytically as you go vs. reading entire novel, then analysing it
• Socratic Seminar as part of #CoFlipReads The Fault In Our Stars
• Student-selected literature circle unit (hint: Not A Success)
• Reading journals with a difference (and choice!)
• Student feedback and reflections
• Critical reading --> critical thinking --> critical writing?
• Using new media and YouTube Edutainment to engage students

That's a pretty good list.  And of course, that doesn't include any of our plans for next year, or our extended reflections on #FlipCon13.  We have about two hours of video with Andrew and me IN THE SAME ROOM AT THE SAME TIME and that will eventually be a series of short videos about what we learned and how we plan to use it in our classrooms.

Now, because I believe in adding value, I'll write about one thing in this blog post that's not on the list, but is relevant nonetheless.

Andrew and I are approaching summer much like we would the regular year.  We have a schedule that includes several important projects: short and long-form writing, making and editing instructional videos, planning our courses for next year, etc.  My first administrator told me that if you ever take a summer off from work (he was talking about summer school particularly) that you'll never go back to it because you will be forever spoiled by luxury.  Well, that turns out to not be true in this case.  I took the large majority of last summer off, and this summer, I'm actually MORE excited to work than I have been in a while.  I know the tasks won't all be "fun" but honestly, there have been very few times in the last year (of intense collaboration) where it hasn't been enjoyable.  It feels less like work and more like hanging out with my best friend and co-teacher.

I know inspiration is fleeting, but the excitement I have for our summer work is founded on a few reasons.  First, FlipCon helped to light a fire in me.  I have been so drained and worn down and exhausted that I really limped over the finish line of spring semester.  But now, I have had so many ideas, and feel much more energised and ready to work.  I know it will be difficult, and there will be times we don't feel like continuing on.  But this is more excited than I've been about summer....maybe ever.  And it's not because I get to sleep in until 10 AM every day and watch a lot of Dexter and Wheezy Waiter all day; it's because of work.


Well, it's sort of about work.  Like EVERYTHING we do, it's more about collaboration.  Andrew has made even the most mundane of tasks much more fun.  There is a rumour that we are indeed one person, and sometimes, that doesn't feel so incorrect.  It's pretty difficult to write anything substantial without his #SpecialSkillz in writing and editing and thinking now that I've gotten used to having his help.


But more importantly than a shared brain, is the real reason behind "Better Together": that we know we would have burnt out alone.  Yes, the collaboration gives us new ideas, and it gives us a second brain to help when ours isn't finding the right words.  But more than anything, I have someone invested in my success.  I have someone who believes in me far more than I believe in myself.  I have someone to filter my thoughts and writing so I don't say something stupid on the internet...where NOTHING EVER DIES.  Andrew pushes me to be a better teacher, a better writer, and a better learner.  I know not everyone needs that, but I do.  He knows when I'm doing something half-assedly, and isn't afraid to call me on it, but then also will help me fix it.  I trust his opinion more than my own.

It is totally possible to flip your class on your own, but we sure don't recommend it.  I think the reason our story resonates with people is because most teachers, and nearly all #flipclass teachers, want someone who will help them do a better job for their students.  But the reality for most of us is that there are few colleagues willing to help us do that, or if some are willing, many are pedagogically opposed, or over-scheduled to the point of uselessness.  That's why Andrew and I needed each other - neither of us had colleagues willing to experiment with flipped learning.  Neither of us had the knowledge, the tools, or the experience to know how to flip our class.

So we embarked on this journey together, just three days short of one year ago.  I would not still be blogging, I would not have attended #FlipCon13, I would not have several Very Exciting Offers to consider, and I would not be as happy as I am now.  I don't need Andrew to be a good teacher.  But this way, even with the many, many challenges we face, is So Much Better than anything I ever did on my own.  And I am grateful - ridiculously so - to have a teaching partner and friend like Andrew.

So I'm really looking forward to this summer - there is much to be done, and I am excited to see what crazy ideas we hatch as we dive into our projects. I would love to hear which of the topics you'd like us to write up first, so leave that in comments if you have a preference.  And if you are part of (or starting) a collaborative partnership, please let us know!  Andrew and I love to talk to people who are starting this same journey.  We were lucky enough to meet half a dozen collaborative partnerships at #FlipCon13, and we'd love to add to that list.

Happy start of summer, everyone, and we'll see you all at #flipclass chat Monday night!  All are welcome, 8 EST, to talk about #FlipCon13, #CanFlip, and all other #flipclass summer work and reflections.

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.

I never realised just how much I took for granted about reading.  Every year, I vastly overestimate my students' ability to read on their own.  I assume that just because everyone in my department assigns reading regularly as homework that students are actually doing it and getting it.

This week has been the reality check for me: They aren't.  Even the "high achievers" either aren't doing the reading or they are doing it and not understanding it.  Even the AP students in some cases.  These are kids who get A's in everything, who can write and articulate intelligent arguments.  And they aren't reading what we assign.

These are the kids who are getting accepted left and right to Purdue and Brown and Cornell and UCLA and Cal.  These are the best kids from the best school in the best area.  

The real tragedy is that these are the exact kids who need the beauty and the breath of fresh air that comes with a good book.  The bookroom is filled with titles that I would have killed to teach at previous schools - Kite Runner, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sula, The Things They Carried, Things Fall Apart, The Namesake, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Indian Country, Slaughterhouse Five, Pride and Prejudice, Man's Search For Meaning...our bookroom has hundreds of choices.

Hundreds of choices that our students pretend to read or understand for most of their four years here.

I'm not pointing fingers at my colleagues - I assigned reading homework last semester, and many of my students told me they didn't read all of those books either.  And some of them got A's from me too.  So we're taking kids who love reading, who read for pleasure, who will do homework, who are compliant, and churning out students addicted to Sparknotes, trained to jump into the point in the discussion where their failure to read or understand will be noticed least, and who think that literature is just an excuse for a treasure hunt for symbols that they can identify and spit back out on a test.

So what's going on?  And more importantly, how do we fix it?

If we believe that teaching through literature is the Right Way, and that the skills developed through beautiful literature can help students see their own life more clearly, analyse more carefully, and engage with the world more actively, then it's imperative we figure this out.  And I'm the least capable person to figure this out, because I did all the assigned reading in high school and college, loved it, and understood the vast majority of it.

So I asked my students.  In a previous post, I outlined the process we went through to ascertain what would be the best reading strategy for them.  I would encourage you to read that before continuing with this post.

So here's are some of the take-aways from that mini-unit.

First of all, it's different for every group of students.  That makes sense - any teacher can tell you that the climate of one section can be wildly different to another section of the same class.  But how often have we treated them the same in the method we use for reading?  I know I have.

Secondly, it will be a system of trial and error.  When we came up with the plan, I had a student ask, "What happens if we end up not liking this, or it doesn't work - are we stuck with it?"  NO!  The whole purpose in giving them voice and choice is to make it work for them.  Why would I force them to stick with something that wasn't working just because "they chose it"?

Thirdly, students are not used to being asked these questions.  They haven't thought about it either, on the whole.  They never think to question their teachers.  They said to me, when I asked why they don't question what we're doing, "But we just assume that either you have a reason or that it would be rude to ask.  So we don't ask why."  I died a little inside on that one.  Any student, regardless of age or ethnicity or grade level or ability, should be able to respectfully ask the teacher for rationale behind any assignment.  And if the teacher doesn't have one, it should prompt some serious reflection on the teacher's part.  I told my students that I would never ask them to do something for which I couldn't articulate a reason.

Finally, it's not enough just to have class discussions or to have students reflect on what they're learning and why.  Students need to be given far more voice and choice than they usually get in factory-style education.  I've found, over and over, that when I ask them for input, their ideas and cognitive process are amazing...often better than what Andrew and I came up with.  Most of the plans are a result of students advocating for what they need, and trying to take ownership over their education.  I'm confident that more students will be reading the assigned novels for these courses.  And it's not because they like me.  It's because they feel like it was their choice, and that if they have something to say about the process, the product, or the text itself, they have the freedom to say it.  They don't have to hide the fact that they hate the book - in fact, sometimes that's the start of the best discussions in my classroom.  And if they honestly aren't reading at home, how is it helpful to act out a farce in which we all pretend they ARE reading?  It's teaching them that education has shortcuts.  That they can get all of the answers off the internet.*  

Is that really what we want to be teaching them?

*side note: When I said that many of my PLN agree that "if you can google it, it's not a good question to include on a test" they just couldn't understand what a test would look like with information that wasn't googleable.  I gave some examples, such as: instead of memorising the dates of the Civil War (googleable), argue whether or not Lincoln did enough to prevent the war (not googleable).  Their words: "Yeah, that second option is way more interesting and useful."  Yes.  Yes, it is.

Below the fold are the specific plans that we worked out in each of my three classes that have started a novel. 

So in about a week and a half, I start over.  Andrew and I have been brainstorming a way to start the semester, given that about 1/3 of each class will be returning students and the rest new.  I've wished more than once that I could just keep all my kids until the end of the year - we are at the point where the real amazing movement and progress is possible.

But there's no point in looking back.  It's time to move forward.

So the best idea we had was about reading.  All three of my classes are reading heavy - four to six novels in the semester.  I've really struggled with how to do reading in a way that fits with the mindset that Andrew and I have pedagogically and the context I have practically.  I don't want students to have to do all the reading at home.  We know that doesn't work for most of them, and it's often the homework left for last - many times, following 3-4 hours of homework into the early hours of the morning. 

So there has to be a way to give students the ability to use class time to read; that, paired with the ways that I'm encouraging reading rather than punishing the lack of reading, means that students won't have the stress that normally accompanies the teaching of a novel.  And part of that process is helping students explore why reading is so important.

So why do we read?  That's the question that will kick off our Explore-Flip-Apply mini-unit for all three classes.  From reading the essays from my Essay Exposition class about their experience in English thus far, it's clear that they do not understand why we're asking them to read books that have little to do with them or their lives.

Again - why are we asking them to read these books?  

It's because we believe that literature has a universality that can speak to the experiences that make us human.  Books tell us what it means to love, how to grieve well for lost love, why friendship is essential, how travel broadens our horizons.  They connect us to people with whom we have no connection, and will never know.  They show us the range of human experience and guide us through challenges and successes.

But more importantly for English teachers, literature is a vehicle to get our students to write and think critically.  Not to say that the "universality of human experience" angle isn't important - that's certainly the reason that adults continue to read after their education is complete.  But for our students, we use the characters, the plot, the setting and the writing itself to show them how we have analytical conversations, how to build a rational argument in writing, and to make connections.

But what do our students see?  They see us asking them to analyse the development of a main character.  They see us asking them to write a business letter in the voice of a character.  They see us assign reading quizzes and journals that ask them to interpret specific passages through a critical lens.

They don't see that all of those things are building their ability to become strong critical thinkers.  Is it any wonder that they push back against reading?  Is it any wonder that they don't see reading as important?

For our first unit, we want them to see both sides.  I have a feeling they can generate the "universality of human experience" answer, and that is what they will do on day one.  We will pose the question - why read literature? - we will see the reasons they develop.  Then for "homework" that first night, we will have students watch a short video where Andrew and I talk about why we use literature to teach our classes - and they will take notes.  

The next day, they will be in the computer lab and will be introduced to Google Drive and the AutoCrat script* we'll be using to create new documents for each assignment.  Once that is set up, we will compile the notes students took the night before onto a collaborative note-taking document.  The idea is that they start to develop note-taking strategies that will serve them well in college.  They will not often need to take notes in our class (rarely is there direct instruction, rarely is note-taking required while watching a video, and rarely do we assign ANY homework, let alone a video with notes) but working on collaborative documents will set the foundation for the CO-Lab partner work we will do later.  Then they will work on a reading timeline for their own life.  

The last two days of the mini-unit will be a Socratic Seminar (with collaborative note-taking, live during class and a backchannel discussion**) on why reading literature is important for high schoolers and a short vignette about a meaningful literary experience, positive or negative, from their own life.

The hope is that showing them that reading is about more than getting a grade, hearing about heartbreak, analysing a symbol, or memorising plot points will help them see the relevance of the reading we'll be doing.

The next portion of the unit will be watching Derren Brown's Apocalypse, which plays with the notion of a zombie apocalypse and uses a strong literary reference to The Wizard of Oz...yet another reason to read: so you understand references in popular culture.

I'd love to hear your reasons for why people should read literature.  Having a list of reasons for our video that draw from our PLN would be amazing.

*The amazing thing about this script is that students fill out a google form on the tmiclass.com website, then get emailed a document that is automatically shared with us, dropped in the correct folder, and titled with a standard naming convention.  It's pretty much the coolest thing in the entire world.  Second to collaboration, I guess.


**During our Socratic Seminar at the beginning of the year, I introduced a format I used for reading and watching movies last year and wrote about here on the blog.  Essentially, I open a todaysmeet.com thread, and display it on the front board.  Students then choose inner circle - talking - or outer circle - participating on the todaysmeet thread.  Then there is one students responsible for bringing in the interesting ideas from the students in the outer circle.  Started using this structure in September, and students have loved it and told me that it drastically lowers the anxiety associated with how they have been graded for discussions in the past.