Talk about being a lifelong learner.  As I go through each day exploring with my son and learning from my mistakes, I think about the revelations that I have arrived at over the weeks.  The list is certainly adaptable, but here are a few that immediately come to mind …

1. The new grandparents, who used to enter your house and ask how you were, now start a conversation with the query “Where is he?”

2. You never before knew how relieved you will feel when your baby lets out an enormous burp or fart.

3. You unconsciously praise stranger’s babies when they burp or fart.

4. You long for just one adult conversation per day.

5. You have no problem switching from normal adult conversation to baby talk in the presence of your child.

6. You think that Apple should advertise the fact that iphones can take direct hits of milk and spit-up and still be fully functional.

7. You are constantly teaching yourself to complete many tasks one-handed.

8. You realize that you can actually be very efficient when the baby is down for a nap and you have T-minus 20 minutes to get something accomplished.

9. You don’t mind looking like a fool in public, as long as it calms the baby.

10. You will dredge up lyrics from every song that you have ever memorized in the hopes that this next one may calm the crying baby.

11. You will never be so exasperated and so completely in love with the same person at the exact same time.

My husband told me something this week: “Plans are useless.  Planning is essential”.  He says it’s a quotation from Dwight D. Eisenhower, but he also read it off the Internet, and you know what Abraham Lincoln says about Internet quotes:

But he’s right, and this holds true in the classroom.  You plan by thinking about pedagogy, your students’ learning abilities and personalities, and your own personal teaching philosophy.  You plan your lesson and unit plans using learning goals and outcomes, teaching strategies, and assessments.  Anyone who has walked into a classroom as a substitute teacher, or thought that they could teach a lesson well without writing anything in their day book, must know that planning is necessary.  However, sometimes the students aren’t at the point where they are ready to hear what you want to teach, and you have to quickly adapt and meet them at their level of knowledge.  Or the students are preoccupied with another school event or problem, and will have trouble focusing on your lesson. Or there’s an unexpected fire drill, or an unscheduled assembly, or a scheduled assembly that you’ve forgotten about, or your principal needs to speak to you, or there’s a parent on the phone, or your teaching partner’s lesson has run long.  At this point all the plans might have to be revised or simply thrown out the window.  Every teacher must also get used to this lesson flexibility throughout the course of his or her teaching day.  These contradictory statements hold truth not just in teaching, but in many aspects of life.  Whether or not it was actually stated by Eisenhower, it’s a good quotation to remember.

Starting mid-August I decided to reorganize my classroom library.  I had acquired new books from a teacher and from a favourite used book store, and decided that the time had come to sit in my classroom and assess the collection.  The result?  All of my classroom library books, as well as my literature circle books and my read-aloud books, are in a spreadsheet in alphabetical order.  The books that are not displayed on my blue library cart are stored in boxes according to the different literacy genres and labelled.  When I counted the books I had I was stunned: 336 books in my classroom library, and 127 literature circle books.  Here is what that looks like:

A quotation that I once stumbled upon while online states “I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”  I am inclined to agree with this statement.  If we want students to think that reading is important, then we have to show that we appreciate books.  I’m hoping that when students come into the classroom they will notice the boxes of books, the shelves lined with my teaching resources, and my library cart filled with novels and non-fiction they have access to, and they will realize that reading is so much a fundamental part of their lives that it needs to have a prominent place in the classroom.

The book a day challenge is complete, and I will write about it soon.  Until then, I hope everyone will be content with the final book title:

August 31st: Crispin: The Cross of Lead, by Avi

 

I like collecting quotations.  In my spare time, I go online and search for quotations about education, literacy, or just life in general.  I then cut and paste them into a word processing document.  I remember when my band teacher posted one music quotation per week around our band room.  We would arrive in the band room every Monday and look around to see what new idea had been placed on the wall.  Years later, during my first year of teaching, I volunteered to decorate the school library.  One of the first jobs I completed was to place a reading quotation above all the computers.  I enjoyed seeing the students walk around to read the quotations as they were perusing the bookshelves.

I realize that collecting quotations might be considered cheating, because why would I want to use the words of someone else when I can create my own?  I would counter that argument by stating that quotations allow me to perfect my own reading analysis.  I can determine what wisdom the speaker is trying to impart, and I can use his or her statement to help my students understand the themes we are exploring in a larger piece of text.  I can use a particular quotation in a lesson plan to add impact to my points.  Finally, I can use my collection to gain some insights into my own life, and learn how I can use these written statements to improve my own thinking and actions.  The quotations might have been said by someone else, but the critical thinking they can provide belongs to the reader.

Last week I was at Chapters, slowly perusing the different selections of books, when a particular sign caught my eye.  A table was advertising a sale with a colourful sign drawing attention to “Books You Loved From School”.  One of the books sitting on the table was Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brönte.  Now, I know that opinions are different, and that this book is a classic because so many people enjoyed it.  However, all I could think about was how much I hated the book when I had to read it in school.  I remember being annoyed by all the cruelty Heathcliff and Catherine committed in the name of their all-consuming, caring-to-the-point-of-insanity love.  After pointing out the display to my husband, we started talking about all the books that were assigned to us in school that we really disliked.  On my list was The Lord of the Flies (the teacher could never answer my question about what an island full of girls would do differently), while my husband appeared to be fairly irritated by the death of Leslie Burke in Katherine Patterson’s Bridge to Terabitha.  I started thinking that there are quite a few books that are commonly presented in schools that may not appeal to students.  How can we prevent these students from equating these particular books to a general dislike for reading?

I believe that one way to overcome this issue is to teach children that it is OK to hate a book they have read.  Let kids know that if they take a book out of the library they do not have to finish it if it is unappealing to them.  Introduce them to the Reading Bill of Rights.  Don’t be upset if a student dislikes a book you have chosen for the class to read.  Teach them that Newberry Award winners are not enjoyed by everybody.  Create lessons where students are taught how to give reasons why they hate a book (this will give you more enjoyable reasons than “It was boring.”).  Give assignments where students review and rate the books they have read, and post these reviews for other students to read.  Share your own experiences of reading books that you have hated.  Finally, let students know that by understanding what books they dislike, they are on their way to discovering what they do like to read and becoming a more discriminating and sophisticated reader.

When I was in school my favourite subject was Language Arts.  Reading was my passion.  Writing was my emotional release.  The ideas, the comprehension, the inferences, and the arguments were just there in my mind, waiting to be articulated.  Conversely, Mathematics was my worst subject, and I struggled to understand the concepts that were shown to me.  As I progressed through my teacher training, however, I noticed something that at first struck me as unusual: teaching Math came more easily to me than teaching Reading and Writing.  After some reflection, I concluded that because I had struggled with Math throughout my educational career, I was better able to understand my students’ difficulties and help them to overcome their mental barriers.  I could teach a Math concept three different ways because it had often taken me three tries to understand the same concept myself.  But because I had inherently understood stories, plays, and poems, how was I supposed to teach reading to struggling readers?  Because I had always been full of ideas on what to write in my own creative stories, poems, and essays, how was I supposed to teach writing to those with low writing output?  How was I going to establish that literacy is crucial to understanding our world, and instill that same interest in my students that I experienced growing up?

Seven years of teaching later, and to be honest, I’m not close to mastering the teaching of literacy.  But I am also working to discover the tools, strategies, novels, and techniques that will assist me in this journey.  These are the ideas I want to share with others who have the same goal of encouraging literacy.  Some posts will be a discussion of curriculum theories and pedagogy.  Others will be reviews of novels for the intermediate grades, and still others will be literacy lesson plans that can be directly pulled from the site during one of those “Whatever will I teach the kids tomorrow?” moments.  To quote W.B. Yeats: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”  If I have a passion for literacy, I want others to share in this passion, and together we can learn how to light these fires for our students.