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Don't Ban Mockingbird! (And Maybe Don't Force Your Students to Read It.) FRAGMENT DRAFT...

My first exposure to Mockingbird was catching the first few minutes of the film some Saturday afternoon as a child.  The eerie black and white title sequence, a young girl humming a sing-song tune over music in a minor key, the sudden halt with the brutal rip of paper, followed by a dissolve into Halloween bare branches as the camera craned down to bare sidewalks and a lonely neighborhood -- I recognized this tone, this setup, this genre.  This was a horror movie.  A horror movie about children. Children doing evil, unspeakable cruelty in the name of innocence. In the same vein as the opening of The Wild Bunch, where cherubic children burn scorpions and ants with glee. In the same vein of child cruelty as The Bad Seed and The Children's Hour. See the Rocking Horse Winner, see the episode of the Twilight Zone where the boy sends people into the cornfield with his mind.  I read the actual book some time later, on my own, probably as a teen. The solid black cover and dr...
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Links from We All Fall Down

In my first days of tweeting, I tried to keep one Twitter profile for work and a separate one for personal posts and retweets, so I could swear in the latter and keep the former all professional and stuff. Ha ha, of course I mixed them up and cursed on both. Oh well.  Life, especially during and post-Covid, is not so clearly delineated between home and work as it once was. If you wanted to keep your job 2020, you had to Zoom from the intimate place that was supposed to be your refuge.  Some educators may find it easy to wear two hats, Jekyll and Hyding it as they move between their different worlds; I no longer can. Randy and the girls hear my stories of students; the students hear my stories of the dear fam. Such is the "relationship-building" on which so much success depends, we are told these days.  Same with this blog and my "personal" blog We All Fall Down . I wrote there about my classroom (ALWAYS OBSCURING PERSONAL IDENTIFYING OF STUDENTS) because it was abou...
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Check out the WBEZ Teacher Survival Guide, with Contributions by Yours Truly

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Thank you, WBEZ, for compiling this list of advice for surviving remote learning ! My contributions are under Keeping Students Engaged, Using Technology to Its Fullest Potential, Improving Poor Attendance and Helping Students Process the News.
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Do More of That

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    Oh, we stepped into it yesterday with the turning of the page of Of Mice and Men and the word in the first sentence at the top of page 20. And that "stepping," as I so delicately call it, was no accident. We've taught this book many times. We think we know this book. We did that. No accident. Full stop. Learning stopped. Talking went on, class went on, the audio tape kept playing, but the white women and the black kids (so Braveanna told us) stopped thinking about anything else but the word on the page and the sound of it still hanging in the air. "I understand," I said to B. when she waited after class to tell us The Truth We White Women Teachers Are Late To Learn.  "No, you don't," she replied. And I was schooled. Ashamed. Stricken. Enlightened. Energized. Curious. Ready to go at it again.   Hey Teachers, Hey, Ms. Fey! You all believe that there are a million ways to teach and a million ways to learn, right? That we are all sponges, some of ...
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Via Twitter, On Identity

it makes me think about how we can claim identities in order to be a part of something, or we can claim identities in order to separate ourselves from somethings/someones. i wonder when i do which and why... #miseducAsian — grace a chen (@graceachen) September 3, 2020
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Adjusting My Teaching

 Hoo doggie! Last time I taught, we were in a classroom for 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 weeks, live. Now we're remote from each other, for 50 minutes a day, 2 days a week, possibly for 12 weeks. We don't have time to watch movies together and share the joy. We don't have time for...like, anything. Except checking in and seeing each other. I just want to appreciate their attendance and their chiming in and their bravery in this weirdness. It's really a college model - I deliver the schedule of work and explain it, they run off and either choose to tackle it or flounder. In office hours, we work intensely one on one and they talk to me like Cambridge or Oxford orals. And those dear young ones who are not on the college trajectory fall further and further behind.
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Substituting is Like Being a Foster Parent

 My beloved colleague had assigned a NYTimes article for the students to read and discuss before she left for her maternity leave. I finally got to grading the student work this weekend and my first impression was "Oy vey, I would never have used this piece." The Lexile is through the roof, the cultural references were 5 years out of date, the light tone did not seem to suit our current storms. Oy.   "Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed. In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are." Then I started to read the student responses. They were honest with their struggles with the author's complicated points about identity and race and shifting gender norms. They grappled with the text, pulled out great quotes to work with, talked to each other (at this point in the relationship they are mostly agreeing with each other, but that's okay.) And I reconsidered. I realized my dear ...
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