It's National Readathon Day!

As if I needed an excuse to curl up with a good book.
I've been reading voraciously since a young age. On my first trip to the library I came home with 21 books. I couldn't believe they were letting me take home books to read and all I had to do was promise to bring them back when I was done. I knew then that I lived in a great country. I average a trip to the library once a month to this day.
The first chapter book that I fell in love with was The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. I realized then that books were not just for learning or enjoying, but they could transform your world. I still love that book because I remember how it made me feel. Books have been doing that ever since.
My most impressive accomplishment is that I read The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough in one day. It's 692 pages. That was definitely a situation where I couldn't put it down, so I didn't. I was up early on a Saturday when I started it, and realized sometime in the late afternoon I could get it done in one day, so I kept going. It was late that night when I finished it, and then I couldn't fall asleep afterwards. It was a great day.
Reading can be considered a solitary experience, but I disagree. I'm a member of a few bookclubs, one has been meeting once a month for over 15 years. We've read a lot of books, and enjoyed sharing the experience with each other. Books have given me many joys, and they've also helped me bond with my friends. My Goodreads account doesn't just help me keep track of what I've read and what I want to read, it connects me with even more of my friends. I love seeing what they think about the books I'm reading and finding out what they're reading. I can pick and choose from their recommendations to see what I should tackle next.
Reading has been one of the greatest joys in my life. I love getting lost in a world and then taking a piece of that world back into my own, forever. So on National Readathon Day, I just want to say thank you to the authors of the thousands of books I've read, I can't imagine my life without them.

Sitting in my own classroom

If I was a student of mine, I would drive me crazy.
I took a PD class last week and I was the one being taught something on the computer. I tried to stay on task, but I sometimes got distracted, or bored and went off to look at something else, and I got lost. I needed to ask for help from the person sitting next to me, I even needed help from one of the facilitators of the program at one point. I was a nightmare.
It made me think long and hard about my own classroom. While I can't prevent students from getting distracted or lost, how can I help them get back on track and stay there? To be fair, the workshop was moving pretty quick because they assumed that teachers who are proficient on computers didn't need a lot of help. The problem is the lesson could have been differentiated. All the teachers had different levels of expertise, which made for some problems with the speed of the class. They assumed we could follow along easily, which wasn't always the case. When they had to stop and help too many people, the ones who were ready got bored and wondered off (me.)
It's an inherent problem with computer class; some lessons need specific directions to acquire the skill being taught. Everyone needs to follow step by step, but they might not go at the same speed, so it can be frustrating. I need to better address this problem in my classroom.
I think I will start developing more visual clues for students to help them with the steps they should follow. I will check for understanding even more, if that's possible, and I will move slower, much slower. I will repeat directions five more times than I do right now.
Some kids don't have problems in my class, so I think things are fine. I need to think about the struggling kid, the kid who counts on the person sitting next to them to know what to do.
I learned a lot from the PD class, only half of which was what they were trying to teach me. The rest was what I needed to learn about myself as a teacher.

BYOD from the NYCDOE

The NYC Board of Education is lifting it's cell phone ban for all students, which is great news if it happened ten years ago. Students have had their phones with them everyday, unless there's a metal detector at the door. In that case there's a van parked across the street from the school that stores the students phones for them everyday for a fee.
My children have carried their cell phones with them. After some natural and unnatural disasters that affected my family (9/11 cut off access to my home that day, flight 587 crashed a mile away from us, and Hurricane Sandy left us homeless for a while) I believed it was important to be able to get in touch with my children in an emergency, so I ignored the rule. They went to school with their phones, but were instructed not to take them out or use them.
The conversations I'm hearing now are how the children will be on their phones all day and not listen to the teacher, or that they'll record video in the classroom that will be a privacy violation of the teacher and other students. Guess what, that's already happening. What we need to do is not ignore reality, but embrace it and make it work to our advantage. Use the medium the students are permanently attached to and reach them where they are right now. We need to stop trying to maintain the classroom from 20 years ago. It's gone. We are constantly playing catch-up in the world that children live in today. It's hard to effectively teach when they know more than we do. Social media is not going away, it's taking over more and more of our lives, and that is not always a bad thing. They can be connected to their teachers all the time, not just 45 minutes each day. They can find other students interested in similar causes and make real change. Focus on the good of this situation, and make it work for you. That's a lesson that children can learn from us too.

Good Writing

I never really thought of myself as a writer. I've written in diaries all my life, but for no one else but me. I've written papers for all sorts of classes, but just to complete an assignment. What writing for a blog has changed for me is that I now write just for the enjoyment of getting my thoughts down and hopefully find an audience for my musings.
What I'm worried about is while I was a good student, I was never taught how to be a good writer. I know nouns and verbs, but good writing is an art. Even as an art form, it still takes lots of work and practice. So I know how to write, but I'm not kidding myself into believing that I actually write well. I hope to practice and just get better by keep trying.
My process is to write these entries and let them ferment. I don't post them immediately, I let them sit for a few days and I revisit them and try to salvage what I can from my horrible first attempt. I will rework the original at least twice before it's ready for public consumption.
I'm jealous of my children; they went to a school where they really learned writing skills. They know how to persuade, infer, captivate. They learned the art, not just the mechanics. So this is my latest attempt at slogging away at writing. Be gentle.