CF Scavenger Hunt!

Last Tuesday, Jean and I teamed up for our Central Falls Scavenger Hunt! Between traveling around on that Blustery Day and our dear old friend, the internet, here are 10(ish) things I learned about Central Falls, Rhode Island!

1. Central Falls became The City of Central Falls, rather than The Village of Central Falls in 1895. A vote was taken and the residents of CF were EXACTLY SPLIT on the issue. It was the voters in rural Lincoln who swung the decision, wary of devoting more resources to rapidly industrializing CF.

2. Central Falls was home to one of America’s first Chocolate Factories. Chocolate Mill Overlook, located within the 6 acre River Island Park and Campground, is how local residents remember this fact today. 

3. In the late 1800’s CF had its own newspaper, The Weekly Visitor. Today, the city reads the Valley Breeze and the Pawtucket Times.

4. Jean and I found that copy of The Valley Breeze at the CF library. It’s a pretty sweet library I have to say. There was a great YA section, with resources for students applying to college and tell of a sporadically attended Manga Club. Their downstairs was a beautiful room of children’s books with a stage for story time.

                                        Replay by Sharon Creech is a          These trashy pulp fiction YA 

                                        great YA book!!                              books look great! 

5. Speaking to librarian, Jean confirmed her suspicions that woman who “became wealthy during the Gold Rush of 1849” was indeed Caroline Cogswell, and she had Cogswell Tower constructed when she passed away.

6. Oh look! Right next to Cogswell Tower was Jenks Park. Sweet swing set! Too bad it is snowing like mad!

7. It turns out there are LOTS of places for CF youth to play sports or get moving. For example, the Higginson Avenue Complex, and Macomber Stadium. Macomber Stadium, by the way, is home to PANTHER FOOTBALL!

8. I had done a little research before Jean and I headed out, and was hoping to find the monument to the four strikers who died during the Saylesville Massacre on September 10th, 1934. CF was home to many mills around Blackstone Valley, and it looks like has a quite an interesting labor history. The incident in CF was part of a larger strike across New England organized by Textile Workers. I was under the impression the monument was at Moshassuck Cemetery but…

9. Jean and I found this instead! There is a large monument to those who died during the Civil War.

There's me, displaying an inappropriate level of joy for the setting.

10. I learned this morning that CF has an active and successful Chess team! Last year the middle and high school teams went to the Super-National Championship in Nashville, TN. The High School placed 8th out 65 teams, and the Middle School tied for 7th out 53 teams. Tonight they're hosting a fundraiser, taking on local politicians!

Courtesy of the their Facebook page!

OK SO WHAT?
          Thing 1: I loved learning about the Saylesville Massacre. I had this moment where information clicked into place. There is a lot of interesting and important labor history surrounding Blackstone Valley and connected to Slater Mill because of the intense industrialization during the later part of the 19th century. THIS IS NOT ISOLATED IN PAWTUCKET. Central Falls has an intense and important history with unions and strikers, as a place so close and also filled at one time with mills and factories. I wonder how this is included in CF classrooms? I remember growing up in RI hearing a lot about poor working conditions in factories, and specifically Slater Mills. However, the labor history was left out. I think stories of people in their own communities working together to make change are important and should be shared. Finding out these histories about the communities I end up working in will be important.

          Thing 2: The Manga Club! When Jean and I went to the library and I saw the poster for the Manga Club and the Anime section I thought it was super cool! I imagined a group of local kids who got together and talked about Manga and shared some drawings. Then I remember a story from a really good friend from the Bay Area in California. He and his mother were at the library one day and he realized that people from the community could rent out rooms during the week for meetings. He a friend got really excited and decided to form an Anime Club!! They booked the room, and made flyers!! They hung them up at school and in the Anime section at the local book stores. The day for their meeting finally came.....  I imagine my friend, young and Ernest, with high hopes! He and his friend wait by the door, expected droves of other young folks reading to poor over their anime collections. Well guess, what? One other kid showed up. I laugh out loud at this story (which I guess is a little cruel?... Whatever we're friends).  But you know what? Three people was just fine for the three of them. I asked the CF librarian if she gets a lot of students for the Manga Club and she shook her head. I am afraid that some people would hear that not many students go to the clubs at their library and shake their heads muttering something negative about CF. For me, the moral of the story is that kids are kids everywhere. Learning about all the parks, Panther Football and the Chess team was great because the narrative of CF being a national disaster is really powerful. In my experiences, that is far from true. I'm not saying it's a place free of problems, but it's definitely not a place full of rowdy directionless youth like so many people would have me believe. 

Heated Agreement!

Teachers must model the skills they want their students to develop. Yes! We must do this all over the place, including with our Reading Diets! I find myself in heated agreement with the ‘windows and mirrors’ concept (Daniels, Zemelman p. 59), and I want it to be a guiding principle for selecting content in my upcoming days as a professional educator. I want to model this practice of windows and mirrors, I want to, no, SHOULD, explain my selections and how I found them. I know the pain of a long dry spell between good books because everything I picked up was b o r i n g. Choosing what to read is a skill (p. 57). It took me years to find sources I liked to keep up with current events (Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC, Rethinking Schools) and other joys and interests I have (this comic, this other comic, this tumblr). I’d love to share my years of experience finding materials with my students, and learn some tips from them! 

Some Big Ideas regarding the ‘mirrors’ end of things: If my classroom doesn’t spend time with material that reflects my students and their lives, I am saying “in effect and not by accident, ‘Hey [folks], this ain’t your place’” (p. 59). YES! Did you catch that everyone?! If your curriculum and classroom library doesn’t have some mirrors you are ACTIVELY and INTENTIONALLY telling students that school is not a place for them. Don’t do that!!!

Some Big Ideas regarding the ‘window’s end of things: students deserve an insight into the lives and experiences of others, building empathy is perhaps the most beautiful outcome of reading! I believe schools should build compassionate responsible citizens, so let’s work to make students (and ourselves!) know and learn about experiences that are not our own. Plus, you know how when you look out a window and there’s a little glare and you can can see a faint reflection on the glass? Seeing little bits of yourself in folks you thought you had nothing in common with couldn’t hurt either. Something else I really wanna do with my windows is show students a bit of the controversy and excitement that exists in my field (p. 62). I find myself again in heated agreement with the text that to get this to happen, a Reading Diet with a lot of variety is certainly the way to go. This practice has so many exciting potential outcomes! My students would know how to find opposing ideas, and how to develop their own opinions on the issue. Students would know I encourage a variety of responses and perspectives  and will feel safe in my classroom voicing their own controversial ideas. I mean, WHOA. What if I had a classroom where students were not just trying to guess what was in my brain?! So cool.

            A final piece of dietary advice I find myself in heated agreement with, before I leave you, dear reader, "We'll say it loud and clear: kids need stuff they can read. This is non-negotiable...If this means bringing third-grade materials into a ninth-grade room, fine" (p.59). Yes! Students will never think reading be enjoyable if we never let them experience joy, comfort, and fun while they do it. 

Understanding by Design Response

“Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communication, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the ‘banking’ concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits…Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” - Paulo Freire Pedagogy of the Oppressed (p. 72).

This weeks readings felt like a wonderful response to the problem Paulo Freire calls the “banking system of education”. The principles outlined in the selections from Understanding by Design (Ubd) focus on ways to plan units that will help students developing understanding of big ideas instead of regurgitating facts that will easily be forgotten. I believe that education should empower students to solve problems and UbD’s goal for students to “‘know what to do when they don’t know what to do’” (p. 78) really resonated with me.

Ubd’s model of backward design emphasizes the importance of determining what acceptable evidence will be of the learning teacher’s want to take place. Designing ongoing and authentic assessments must happen at the beginning of planning a unit, not during or at the end.  A shift in thinking I experienced is that the goal of assessments should primarily be to collect the evidence of learning rather than to generate grades. This shift represents an increased value in looking for and documenting learning, which has been encouraged during my time at Central Falls. This shift in the goal of assessments is one that could be felt by students. As the hypothetical 5th grade teacher Bob James posits, “...one thing that has always disturbed me is that the kids tend to focus on their grades rather than on their learning. Perhaps the way I’ve used assessments - more for grading purposes than to document learning - has contributed to their attitude” (p. 16). James wishes to see his students value learning. To see this shift, he must shift first. At the heart of UbD is the assertion that learning will be valued when it honors the big ideas that live beyond the classroom. This echos Freire’s call for us to acknowledge that knowledge is built “in the word, with the world, and with each other” (p. 72). I hope that this shift in how I perceive assessments will help me make my classroom a place that is interacting with my student’s worlds. This emphasis on classroom learning transferring to real world experiences is again reflected in the passages discussing what makes an essential question essential. Essential questions are alive, they are “essential for students to continuously consider so as to gain insight, make connections, and facilitate transfer of learning” (p. 76).

While many of the Essential Questions listed on pages 74 and 75 I found wonderful, one that aggravated me as future English teacher was, “What is the author saying? What makes you think so?” (I was under the impression that the author is dead.) I believe identifying the purpose of text is a useful skill, but a dangerous place to stop. The task at the heart of this essential question asserts that finding out what the author meant to say is the ultimate interpretation of a text.  It disregards that the intent of an author can be very different than the impact of the text. I would submit for replacement: “What is relationship of intent and impact?” I think this would work nicely in a social studies unit as well.

  What is your response to my critique and suggestions?

What were your reactions to the list of EQ’s? Any favorites? Any you might critique?

"Subjects Matter", Chapter 1 and 2 Response

The anecdote provided in Chapter 1 about the Fast Food Nation at Best Practice in Chicago encourages me to believe that when you help students fill their reading and writing toolboxes, they can really rise to any occasion. I’d be lying if I said the idea of my students distributing flyers and causing a bit of scene in a McDonalds didn’t worry me. Basically, I read that and my mind says, “What if someone called the cops?!?” I am really trying to imagine that… Did these students discuss the level they were going to push their protest with teachers before doing it, and what to do if someone called security or the police? Am I being alarmist? Daniels (2004) suggests later that teachers should “prefer to see students overly worked up than not worked up at all” (p. 13). This seems reasonable to me. A curriculum where students need to be reigned in does sound preferable to a unit where I need to pull them out. I loved that Daniels emphasizes that the reading and writing skills being taught are just as important as the content in allowing the students to get so worked up and be so engaged, “In this unit, for example, the teachers made use of text coding tools, book clubs, dialogue journals, bookmarks, post-it notes, text annotations, admit slips, and exit slips” (p. 4).

I appreciated very much that Daniels says “there is a robust industry of public school debunking, with think tanks pundits and publications deployed in loud unanimous doom saying” (p. 12). When community schools who need assistance are successfully portrayed as beyond assistance with the help of standardized tests, it makes room for for-profit companies to come in through the rapidly changing charter school movement. Stan Karp (2013) suggests in his article Charter Schools and the Future of Public Education that “Gradually this charter movement attracted the attention of political and financial interests who saw the public school system as a “government monopoly” ripe for market reform.” In a time where the very existence of a school can be at stake when student success is examined, it is very important to use the practices that Daniels describes which “have scientific research showing that these practices work - and plenty of it” (p. 17).

The reading exercises in Chapter 2 did a wonderful job of reminding me that much of the reading I do has become habit, I tend to just ‘click’ along. I certainly feel as though as I have “cobbled together [my] inventory of reading/thinking skills” (Daniels p. 31). The reading exercise regarding Columbus truly underscored Daniel’s point that activating a student’s prior knowledge is key, and that a student’s trouble reading is probably not an issues of poor phonics. I’m looking forward to the strategies the rest of the book will provide.