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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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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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Week One of Tech One - Whee!

Hi Colleagues! I hope you're enjoying the gorgeous weather this week. I'm trying to wrap my head around the materials and requirements for our Tech 1 course. A brand new Chromebook! Wow! So appreciated! I read Chapter 9 of Web 2.0 How-to for Educators this morning and although some of the terms went right over my head and some of the tools sounded off (Bing is an intelligent search engine? And the copyright of our text is 2010?), there were a lot of good ideas here. Page 162's claim that "object recognition, natural language and smart searching of the semantic web" will improve student searches was a thought-provoking idea. I loved the article about Bloom's Taxonomy for Web 2.0 . Cool way to look at the new set of actions we want from students. Now I'm off to email Jason about my Atomic Learning test. Eager to read your comments and post some of my own. Take care, Cindy Fey
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