Here’s a link to my Masters Action Research Project that charts my work in classrooms.

Here’s a link to a unit a colleague, Ale Aleman. and I created on reading with a critical lens

Here’s a link to my synthesis of what it means to interpret and teach interpretation that I based largely on others’ work.

Here’s a link to a case study on interpretation and some mini-lessons I plan that aim to teach students to generate and complicate big ideas they find in books.

What has become, I think, the most well-known photo from Abu Ghraib (the one depicting the robed man with the pointy sac over his head standing on a box arms outstretched, holding a wire in each hand) wasn’t even considered by the military prosecutor to be “torture”.

Somewhere underneath us now, a dictator protects his people from a gift horse with a hundred hungry cameramen crouching inside its belly. The countrymen and cameramen will all starve, but what they require different types of sustenance.

Somewhere underneath us now, a rat is electrocuted by a subway train that heads south down 8th Avenue. The train is packed with people seeking Saturday night who aren’t thinking that somewhere underneath us now there is a squid and a whale and a dictator and his countrymen and some cameramen and a rat.

I’m having a hard time understanding what’s happening in China right now in the after effects of an earthquake that has killed 12,000 people so far. I’ve read the articles and heard some reports, but my brain isn’t recognizing the shock and compassion that I would expect to feel. I stared at a picture of a row of bodies of middle school children who had been pulled out of the rubble of their collapsed schools, and I did my best to practice my “good reader skills”: envisioning, empathizing, synthesizing. Nothing. Is it the physical distance or cultural differences between my world and the worlds of the earthquakes? Is it my inability to make a connection to what this might be like? Would a television report help me engage more of my senses and aid in my personal response?  I’m actually embarrassed by my lack of response.

This morning, I was walking past the mosque down the street and ogling at the main entrance (unmarked) and the women’s entrance that’s labeled–in English, curiously enough– off to the side. From what I can tell, the storefront mosque is frequented by the Senegalese in our neighborhood who are Sufi. A couple of days a week, female vendors from the mosque’s community set up on the sidewalk in front of the entrances and sell homemade treats, slippers and robes. The women wear bright, busy printed dresses and head scarves that appear more decorative than inhibitive; their children play on the sidewalk, darting around pedestrians and chasing after one another. What happens inside the mosque looks harsh and dark, and I have a hard time reconciling it with the colors and liveliness on the sidewalk in front.

When I got back from my walk this morning, I read an article about teenage girls coming of age in Saudi Arabia (Love on the Girls’ Side of Saudi Arabia). The article reports that some young women cross-dress to gain entry into male spheres or develop sexual relationships with their female friends; both practices are explained as ways these females play with their identity, test their curiosity and otherwise spend time before they get engaged. Why do these women, bold enough to draw whiskers on their chins with eyeliner, still long for the day when they will first show their faces to the husbands their parents arrange for them?

It is not my place to reconcile others’ cultures with my own cultural logic. I can only try to expand my logic to include more words like but, maybe and however. However, what do I lose in the process?… An ability to believe, unwavering, in a spiritual practice… to belong, without question, to a community… to know, without cynicism, a way of being.

The process of watching this movie has coincided with some recent thinking I’ve been doing about interpretation and why it feels different depending on the type of text (book, film, TV show, etc…) I’m a notorious sleeper during movies. I fell asleep during a movie John and I watched on our second date. Granted we were watching The Straight Story –one of the slower movies I’ve seen, but it doesn’t matter; I’ve slept during thrillers too. I can be really enjoying a movie– as I was Naked City– and still fall asleep. (The great thing about Netflix, though, is that there is no guilt involved in my naps.)

I don’t fall asleep when I read, and maybe this is because my brain is more actively processing information? When I’m reading, I’m thinking more about possibility and interpretation. I guess I see most movies as pretty fixed in terms of interpretation (besides these frustratingly non-sequiter Godard movies John’s been into recently); I don’t think this can really be right given that I don’t think Rosenblatt’s work only applies to written texts, but I’m not sure what else to attribute it to.

Fixtures

My book club consists of myself and three other women from class who teach or have taught a range of elementary grades. We read The Tiger Rising by Kate DiCamillo and So B. It by Sarah Weeks. After spring break, we will begin to discuss From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun by Jacqueline Woodson. Each meeting takes about thirty minutes, and we have met once in the middle of the book and again after each book is finished. We decided to extend our discussion of So B. It for a third meeting after we had finished reading as an experiment to test how much we could extend conversation about a text. I am including my ongoing book club log in which I wrote at a variety of times throughout the process: as I read, in preparation for each meeting, during each meeting, and in reflection of each meeting. Throughout the process of establishing, experimenting with, and maintaining our book club, I have learned a great deal about what it means to have an effective book club in terms of both structure and content. This learning, synthesized below, will have huge implications for my classroom.

In preparation for our first meeting, we only planned to read halfway through The Tiger Rising and come prepared to discuss. One of us had recently reread Calkins’ chapter on book clubs in The Art of Teaching Reading and suggested that we each lay our ideas on the table. We spent the next twenty minutes reading our notes to the group and oohing and awing over the novelty of one another’s ideas. When our time ran out, we recognized that we hadn’t had a true discussion that aimed to develop ideas. For the next meeting, we planned to come prepared with one quick idea to share and to then spend the remaining time analyzing it. This conversation was amazing in that ideas were developed through our talk. At one point, in our discussion that originally focused Willie May, one of us noticed the Christ metaphor at play with the tiger. This was an idea borne out of the discussion of how Willie May wanted to protect Rob from the tiger but also seemed to know that its “rising” was inevitable. We excitedly shifted our focus from Willie May to the Christ metaphor at play in the book, and ended by celebrating the work we had done through talk. The lessoned we learned in this meeting has profound implications in the classroom. So often, we give students prompts for digging in deeply to one topic and repeatedly encourage them not to shift focus. My book club work has taught me that the purpose of digging deep is to make connections between other ideas in and beyond the book. We have to teach students how to dig deeply to a topic and almost move through it to connect other ideas.

While reading So B. It, our mid-book meeting served to engage me in a book that I had previously been uninterested in. One participant shared her knowledge of the author based on her book talk at a February Calendar Day, and others spoke of their interests in particular themes in the story. This discussion offered me context and helped sway me to consider aspects of the book I had previously ignored. I was also able to voice my initial dislike of the book and move forward through the second half of the book with new eyes. Up until that meeting, I had questioned the purpose of meeting mid-book; none of my adult book clubs had ever done that before, and it was forcing my new club into a slow pace. I recognize now that the purpose of a book club is to understand books better based on interactions with others, and meeting midway through a book allows us time reconsider our initial ideas and redirect our reading. I have never explicitly taught my students about the differences between a mid-book meeting and a post-book meeting, and now I have access to these new realizations for my curriculum.

When we finished So B. It, one of us decided to start the meeting by writing on the chosen topic for the day. After spending our customary first few minutes laying our cards on the table, we took 5 minutes to gather and develop our ideas independently. This process allowed us to be more efficient with our talking time because we had already prioritized our trains of thought independently so our conversation was clearer. On the other hand, I wonder what ideas we sacrificed; could we have pushed one another more deeply had we not edited out ideas through our independent writing? In my classroom, students might try this strategy if a club is having difficulty getting going, or taking turns sharing, but I would be hesitant to name it as a rule because of risk of losing some of the productiveness of oral exploration.

In the middle of our second meeting on So B. It, one of posed a question that we recognized for its significance, and we decided to “table it” for a third So B. It meeting. This gave each of us a week to think over the question. (Why did Weeks say that the central message of book is one of hope?) When we came together the following week, we spent about fifteen minutes in discussion and were able to come to somewhat of a consensus. This flexibility of our structure allowed us to pursue outstanding questions that were of genuine interest with us, and I realized how much we as teachers need to encourage our students to experiment with their structure to adjust to the content they are discussing. When accountable talk, book club timers, or meetings per book become regimented and required, we risk stifling the creation of ideas with unhelpful frameworks.

One outstanding question my book club will certainly continue to address is the role of a facilitator. We have not currently formalized any roles. We decided to read So B. It and From the Notebooks of Melanin Sun through informal group emails during which those of us with a burning desire to read a particular book suggested something and others agreed. I worry that we need to adopt a more democratic process that would ensure we are all involved in both the selection of texts and the production of ideas. It might help us get each meeting off the ground quickly if we had a designated (and perhaps rotating) facilitator. This designation might also encourage us to continue to experiment with structures because an official facilitator might feel more responsibility to ensuring productive talk. Rotating jobs is not a structure that I have seen successfully play out in a classroom setting, but my hunch is that this is because of flaws in the specifics of its planning and execution—not in the idea itself.

Lately, I’ve found myself adopting a new lens, and I’m not sure what to call it. My colleagues and I just read An Inconvenient Truth, and that experience has made me seek to figure out how texts position humans and their environment. I just read the beginning of Stanley Fish’s personal essay on his cars, and I actually stopped reading, frustrated because he was writing paragraphs about his car as his identity without questioning the implications on our world. Maybe academics call it an “environmental lens…” I should probably finish reading the Fish thing now before I call him irresponsible.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Economists say that’s not going to happen. They say this is going to go straight into the profits of the oil companies. They’re not going to actually lower their prices. And the two top leaders in the House are against it. Nearly every editorial board and economist in the country has come out against it. Even a supporter of yours, Paul Krugman of The New York Times, calls it pointless and disappointing.

Can you name one economist, a credible economist who supports the suspension?

CLINTON: Well, you know, George, I think we’ve been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion basically behind policies that haven’t worked well for the middle class and hard-working Americans. From the moment I started this campaign, I’ve said that I am absolutely determined that we’re going to reverse the trends that have been going on in our government and in our political system, because what I have seen is that the rich have gotten richer. A vast majority — I think something like 90 percent — of the wealth gains over the last seven years have gone to the top 10 percent of wage earners in America.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But can you name an economist who thinks this makes sense?

CLINTON: Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to put my lot in with economists, because I know if we get it right, if we actually did it right, if we had a president who used all the tools of the presidency, we would design it in such a way that it would be implemented effectively.

I know this issue has been opined on all week, so I apologize for being redundant. But:

- Is a gas tax disadvantaging the working class any more than our culture of consumption that feels entitled to destroy the planet on which we live?

- How is it “elitist” to take advice from an entire community of economists who advise against suspending the gas tax? This is the same kind of rebellious attitude that Bush has assumed at the expense of common sense and prevailing opinion.