Thursday, September 26, 2013

One Thing Leads to Another, Part Two

Dear Faculty, 
Queen Victoria Orchid, with a new (second)
blossom, & two more buds forming!
I invite you to read and comment on the Senior Class Blogs.  Most students have at least two posts up, now, and some have even more.  I hope that, as you explore what the students have done so far, you might be inspired to have your students begin blogging, too.  

Middle School faculty should feel completely free to have their students read and comment on the Seniors' posts, especially the ones about summer, but some of the "My Favorite Book From the Shawshank Prison Library" posts would also be interesting.  Upper School teachers of Seniors could certainly piggyback on these blog accounts and ask the Seniors to write course-related posts.  If anyone has any other ideas of how to put these blogs to use, please let me know.


It would be fantastic if other grade-levels started blogging, too!  If I can help any teachers set up Blogger accounts for themselves or their students, I hereby offer my services.  

Below, I've inserted a couple of screenshots of the Student Portal page where you can find links to the Senior Class Blogs.  Enjoy!

Sincerely,
Dr N

PS:  Many thanks to Matt Whittaker for helping me get all this set up!  

PPS:  The title of this post, and the significance of the photo, will only be clear if you read some of my previous posts.





Tuesday, September 24, 2013

English 12 Students, Read This!

Here's a link to a great article from The Atlantic:  It's about Scandinavian prisons and connects nicely with Shawshank Redemption.  (And I'm not asking you to read it because I'm Scandinavian!)

Shawshank-Related Student Blog Posts

Students in section 2B of English 12 are writing blog-posts today in response to Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption.  Their assignment follows:  

Andy DuFresne is faced with several situations in which he can choose to Give In To Get By, or Hold Out And Pay The Price.  Although most people don’t face such dramatic or extreme situations every day, most people do encounter moments each day when they must decide whether they will compromise to keep the peace or hold onto their integrity (and when they do so, there’s usually a price to be paid).  Describe a time when you had to make such a choice—what did you do, and do you still think it was the right decision?  (Hint:  Sometimes compromise is the right or only choice.  Sometimes, you never know if you did the right thing.  There are no right or wrong answers, here…)  

Both Mr Breen and Mr Neblett have been talking to Marshall students and faculty about integrity lately.  Integrity is one of the core values from our Mission Statement, perhaps the most important one.  There's nothing more important than doing what's right, even if you don't want to, even if it's hard.  Sometimes, it might seem as though Marshall School is asking you to put aside your preferences and adhere to rules that might not immediately make sense to you, and that might feel like a compromise (but I bet in about 5 years or so, it won't seem that way!).  When you're part of a community, you can't always do exactly what you want to do.  That's a hard lesson to learn, and even adults struggle with it sometimes.  

Blog-Posts as Writing Assignments, Part Two.

Within the next fews days, all the seniors will be publishing a second blog-post about their summer experiences.  Their first posts were entitled "Snapshots of My Summer," and they were to describe some highlights of their vacation.  In this second post, entitled "My Summer of [X]," they are to reflect on their summer more deeply, think about it again, perhaps from a different perspective, and identify a theme, a big idea that dominated their vacation.  This can be difficult!  They were to model their posts after my first and second posts.  Let them know if (or how well) they succeeded in a comment or two!  (The page of links to senior blogs is on the student portal page of the school website--click on the "Senior Class Blogs" tab.) 

Using Blog-Posts as In-Class Writing Assignments: An Experiment

Today, my first period English 12 class wrote a blog-post as an in-class writing assessment.  They've been reading Stephen King's Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, and this was their assignment:  


My Favorite Book from the Shawshank Prison Library:  Andy DuFresne obviously believes that the prisoners of Shawshank need good books and can be helped by having a wide variety of books available to them.  If, like Andy DuFresne, you were in prison (!), what book would you want to have with you and why?  Explain how it would help you to deal with the challenges you would experience if you were deprived of most personal freedoms:  freedom of movement/travel, access to friends/family, access to the outdoors.  Think beyond simple entertainment value.  It should be a book you could read over and over again and learn more from each time.  Remember:  most book titles are italicized.

They had roughly half an hour to write their posts (though I gave them some hints last week about the topic), and I allowed them to help each other proofread their posts before they hit "Publish."  I'll be grading their posts over the next couple days, which, of course, means they can continue to edit until I get around to that (if they're paying attention, they'll see this, and continue to improve their posts!).  But you'll notice that this is a personal response assignment, not an assessment that measures their knowledge and retention of textual details.  

So I'm looking for good all-around writing skills as I also assess their ability to respond to the text by putting themselves in the main character's situation.  That involves imagining a condition (imprisonment) that most people can't connect with directly.  Using your imagination to put yourself in someone else's shoes, as the saying goes, is the whole point of literature.  That's what it's for.  

Perhaps you've heard the sayings "experience is the best teacher" or "learn from your mistakes."  We do indeed learn many important lessons, not only through direct experience, but also through making mistakes.  These are, however, painful and limited ways to learn.  No one lives long enough to learn everything one needs to know from experience alone.  And we are all limited by our circumstances, resources, and abilities.  Nor should we strive to make all the mistakes  we'd need to make in order to learn to live our lives well! 

Thus, the vicarious (or indirect) experience literature provides is invaluable.  Why learn from your own mistakes when you can learn by reading about the mistakes of others?  Learning from the experiences of literary characters is much more efficient, and perhaps even more effective, than learning from one's own experiences.  

I hope this assignment helps students in two way:  1, that it makes them imagine, however briefly, what it would be like to have access only to the world they carry in their imaginations; 2, that it reminds them they have intellectual resources, in the form of books, that can open their minds, expand their view of the world, and perhaps even set them free.  If one's imagination is rich enough, one's limited physical circumstances don't matter so much.  Back in the 1600s, Richard Lovelace said it best, in "To Althea, From Prison":  

Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage;
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.

Students in the same class read and acted out Lovelace's entire poem, and I filmed their performance.  Enjoy.  



Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Read This, Part Three!

Today, Mr Breen called my attention to this article, written by Elaine Bransford, a high school English teacher in Stillwater, MN.  It includes a list of ten things "every high school English student [should] know before graduation."  I really like numbers 7 and 9.  You'll have to read the article to find out what they are.  

One Thing Leads to Another...

Queen Vic orchid, from behind, with two
buds sprouting now from the stem.
I didn't expect to like blogging as much as I do.  I find myself looking forward to writing posts, and ideas for future posts seem to be everywhere I look.  Everything seems like blog material now!

Just as a flower produces one bud after another, so one blog post leads to others, and one comment leads to more, and soon you end up with a conversation, maybe even a garden of ideas.  

That's my hope for the Senior Class Blogs--that they'll seed a whole network of possibilities in the Marshall community.  I talked to Ms Ball today about the blogs, and she's eager to start reading and commenting on them.  We talked about how she might use the Seniors' blogs in her 7th and 8th grade classes to get her students interested in blogging.  

I hope that, before too long, everybody's blogging, all the time!
  

Sunday, September 8, 2013

More Lady Slippers, and a Lesson about Using Images in Blogs

As you know, I am more than a bit obsessed with wild orchids, specifically with the Lady Slippers that grow in our region.  Lady Slipper season is pretty much over by the start of August, but my obsession never ends--such is the nature of obsessions!  This summer, I started reading up on other kinds of Lady Slippers and found that Slipper Orchids grow all over the world.  Many of the Slipper Orchids from South America and Southeast Asia have been cultivated by orchid growers and are now available as houseplants, albeit houseplants that need a certain amount of special care.  

Just before school started, I made a trip to Orchids Limited in Minneapolis, one of the largest orchid greenhouses in the state.  I spent a little time talking to the owner, who's been growing orchids since the 1970s, and I asked him to help me choose an Asian Slipper Orchid to take home with me.  


Paphiopedilum victoria-regina,
with bud ready to open and a
second bud forming on the stem
He picked out a nice Paphiopedilum that grows wild in Sumatra, but which has been cultivated by orchid growers for a long time now.  It had a bud on it, and it's the kind of orchid which is supposed to keep producing flowers for months at a time.  He said it might blossom all winter for me, if I'm lucky.  (This particular orchid is named after Queen Victoria, and if you've been reading the captions of my previous photos, you'll notice that the Latin word for Queen is also part of the scientific name of our state flower.)
Paphiopedilum victoria-regina in bloom



With all the hot humid weather we've had lately, that bud quickly plumped up and burst open, just as classes were beginning.  You can see the family resemblance to our local Lady Slippers, but it also has its own special features--the flower itself is smaller, but much less fragile, than North American Slipper Orchids.  Its petals are thicker and rather waxy in texture. The petals on the sides are not covered in peach-fuzz, like the Showy Slipper, but they are very hairy!
Petal, with lots of hair!

Some folks think these orchids look a bit scary, or even ugly, and they certainly are strange, exotic, and almost other-worldly.  I think they look kind of primitive, and indeed, orchids are among the oldest flowers on the planet, and some people think they may have existed along with dinosaurs.  


OneEighteen / Foter / CC BY-NC
I, of course, think of them as sublime, not beautiful in an ideal or classical sense (I'm using the word "classical" to refer to the notions of beauty developed by the ancient Greek and Roman thinkers), but beautiful in the same way that a thunderstorm can be beautiful--beautiful, scary, and maybe a bit dangerous.  Notice that the photo of the thunderstorm to the right is one that I did not take myself.  I went looking for a free stock photo on the internet.  I found a website called Foter.com that helps bloggers find free photos and, more importantly, helps them give proper credit to the original source of the image.  

When you find an image on Foter that you want to use, you click on it, and get access to lots of info about the source and details of the Creative Commons license that makes the image available.  There's also a handy "Add to Blog" button you can click.  When you click that, you have the chance to format the image a bit, and then you hit the "Get the Code" button, which gives you the embed code that you paste into your compose window on Blogger (though you have to hit the HTML button in the upper left of the compose screen).  I'll show you how to do this in class very soon!  

The embed code comes with a pre-made caption that gives proper credit (and links directly to the original source).  You also get a "Photo credit" line to copy and paste at the bottom of your post (see below).  This should be a very useful tool, so bookmark Foter.com.  You should also take a look at this infographic that explains the various kinds of Creative Commons licenses and how bloggers can use CC images responsibly.  

As you compose your blog posts, I hope that most of the time you'll use photos you've taken yourself, but I'll give you assignments from time to time that require you to include photos taken by others.  I want to make certain that we do this properly and responsibly, as good digital citizens, and I think Foter.com is one tool that will help us.  I also want to give credit to the Langwitches Blog, which is where I found out about Foter.com.  I think that's where I also found out about Open Attribute, a browser extension that you might find useful.  (For now, I'm also posting image sources and tools in the "Miscellaneous Links" section of  "Basics, 2" on Sophia.org.)

One important note:  Not all the images in Foter.com are completely school appropriate.  So behave like an adult and choose wisely!

Photo credit: OneEighteen / Foter / CC BY-NC