6 posts tagged “alternative school”
See more at our Picassa slideshow. (I'm blogging during class so I don't have time to learn how to embed it!)
So last week, I launched our world poetry unit by inviting my arts partner Judi Petkau from the Weisman Art Museum to my classroom. Over two days, she reviewed gesture and contour drawing, asking students to draw leaves, tools, stones, and other elemental objects. Then, they created observed self-portraits.
My examples (culled from The New African Poetry, ed. Ojaide, Sallah):
Winter Spring
January is like a stone Joy surprises me.
that sits at the tip of my tongue, A little birdsong threatens
bitterness for the absence of sap. to burst out of my heart.
Selfishly, I lock in my heart All dreams are possible.
the memory of grass and warm rain. I offer my pollen to the wind.
Student examples (see resource list at the end for book information):
you live only for me and in me you are
reborn and in this way I live for you. You
changed my whole life. I need you so much
love, in these gray hours. Leave behind all life
that was life. A sensation of tranquility that
seems never ending love was the flower carried
in their mouths, and love blue like their fear.
It Flies High by Tyrone
It flies high
above the miniature beacon of light
the Lu bird flies with no set course
with inflexible heavens
never losing his way
while encountering the cold, solitude
rain. Even though the sky is like a
bedsheet and below a delicious hell where
furious birds dwell, spring is here.
Winter winds have blown out of the sky
the dark Earth drapes herself green
sailors are out on the broad sea,
Zephyrs duffing out their sails.
Nightingale deep in the woods
where bees make honey
and poets daydream silently seeing
beautiful birds sing.
Never Alone by Amy
the pine cones rustled
and I ached to be alone with the wind
an epic of flowers told as drops of dew
nights I dreamed in a fever
about houses wet with love
stories I tell from to the finger prints
left to mark a dream of loneliness
imagine how unfair that the dust
was my only companion
you will remember for we in our youth did these things by Marcy
I heat up the coffee, light my morning
cigarette & grab breakfast to go
but I'm distracted, so fully I feel
his flesh in me, that I don't feel
him on me
then I remember what he's done,
I treat him too well for how he's harmed me
frustrated I inhale the tobacco
until my lungs are heavily loaded
I look forward to tonight when
I can sit on my porch alone
with the moon & a jar of wine
Solemn Fool by Scott
I have only one question
for the solemn fool
Although I'm dead
I'm waiting for you
Do you miss me
like I miss you
Please, please tell me,
solemn fool.
As students finished a self-portrait, I directed them to find a line of poetry to be its caption. They were to write not a description of themselves, but of their portraits. For example, while I was feeling birdsong in my heart, by portrait turned out looking haggard and bitter (see below). Students helped me to choose "Life is made of thistles and black thorns. I would have liked it sweeter and less bitter."
Student examples:
Several students are complaining both about having to draw and having to read poetry. Such creative exercises are outside of their comfort zones. There are no blanks to fill in here, no correct answers. Only individual interpretations supported by evidentiary reasoning.
In the next week, we're going to translate a poem to canvas. That should be fun to document and post.
As Judi and I proceed, I need to articulate our goals and outcomes.
Knowing: Students will know about the role of poetry in other cultures. They will be able to identify language techniques used in poetry.
Comprehending: Students will understand that poetry can be read as an aesthetic experience similar to viewing visual art. They will understand how to support their interpretations with textual evidence.
Doing: Students will read self-selected works of world poetry. From this textual basis, they will create found poems, original poems, drawings, and a painting.
Resources (the books students referred to most in the first week of the unit)
20th Century Latin American Poetry
The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai
International Poetry on the Web
The Space Between Our Footsteps
Windcatcher: New and Selected Poems by Breyten Breytenbach
Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments
The New African Poetry
Contemporary Russian Poetry
:
Someone at my MWP presentation last week asked me to post this slide:
After my own presentation, I listened to Julie Landsman remind me about the racism inherent in low expectations and the need for white teachers to reclaim their authority in their classrooms to maintain high expectations. I wondered about this slide of mine. Is my decision to step outside of mainstream curriculum and pedagogy an excuse? Does it allow students to avoid the cultural capital of traditional curriculum? Do I use all the circumstances in the top half of the slide to apologize for students' poor performance?
I tend to see the glass half full--the unfinished draft is two more pages than he had ever written before, she can't spell but what insight!, he has attended every day for 10 days in a row. These are real successes. Yet, I can call them successful because my expectations for my students are just one step more than they've walked before. For some students, "low" can't even describe how simple success can be. He decided to show up today. And the accumulation of weeks of walking students toward progress so slowly and carefully overwhelms and drains, disheartens and disillusions. Until some of them gain enough confidence to make a leap. Some of them do.
Alternative school teaching presents an exhausting daily dichotomy: would it be better to start with high expectations (that send a large group back out the door to learn by suffering the consequences of dropping out), or to attempt to repair the damage of years of school failure and apathy with careful, measured steps toward accomplishment (that may grant motivating credit for substandard work)?
And the truth is, I feed them as often as I can. Though it is against district policy, I have on rare occasions transported them. I present myself as their role model and talk about my own healthy and unhealthy families. I talk about drugs, drinking and smoking more openly than I should. I try to teach them to analyze the media critically. I challenge their personal fables as often as I can in ways they understand, telling about my student who died, the ones I taught in jail. I don't take them into my home, tell their parents what I really think about them, call the police when I suspect I know of some dangerous choice they are considering. These boundaries shift because every kid is different, because I believe like Atticus Finch that knowing you can't win doesn't mean you shouldn't fight.
The top half of the slide doesn't offer excuses. It lobs in variables for good teachers to consider as, during one of the 4,000 decisions they make in a day, they calculate a fair, useful expectation for a child.
I told my students in the middle of last week that we would be learning to "read" and "write" images, that written composition and image composition have more in common than they might think. It was a brash claim, and they wanted to argue. We'll see if they're too worn down to pick a fight by our last day of the unit just before MEA break.
On day one, we "read" this Target ad using Critical Response Protocol:
First hour was sluggish as usual, but by second hour, several students had begun to notice mixed and agitating elements without yet being able to identify the choices that led to the ad's composition. Afterwards, they went hunting for similarly ambiguous advertising in a pile of magazines I keep in the classroom and were generaly shocked how easy they were to find.
Each day of the unit, we'll be studying one element of visual composition: schema, gaze, composition, and color theory. I modeled each in a PowerPoint and after taking notes and listening to me ramble at the beginning of each class, students go looking for the element we've learned. For schema, they scanned magazine ads for circular, square and triangular underlying organizational patterns. (We made old school collages of the images they found.) For gaze today, they used our MacBook iSight cameras to create self-portraits from a variety of angles. I think tomorrow, for composition, we'll look at some art or news photography. In the end, students will design their own avatars and write an in-class essay analyzing an image.
Written Analysis of an advertisement:
Student Self-Portraits/ Avatars:
One of the hardest lessons of alternative school teaching is to let students be who they are and not judge them for it. Most of their life experiences have been censored out of mainstream classrooms. The burning stories they have to tell are about getting arrested, getting high, unconventional home lives, being different in ways that are not appreciated as "creative." So my purpose in starting the year with this unit is to make space for their honest voices.
- What is the best way to tell your life story?
- What kinds of stories are "life stories"?
- What writing strategies do good storytellers use?
- How does language create emotion?
- Who is the audience for your life story, and what's your purpose in telling it?
- What is the best form for your story?
Of course, to make space for their honest voices, I have to bring in model texts that talk about similar experiences in engaging ways. I arrange the unit by text pairs so that students can compare and contrast writing strategies and approaches to difficult topics.
"Reality and Its Duration," Roseann Lloyd
"Something Neat This Way Comes," Cris Crutcher (excerpt)
"The Learning Curve," David Sedaris
An Ordinary Man, Paul Rusesabagina (excerpt)
Always Running, Luis Rodriguez (excerpt)
Nigger, Dick Gregory (excerpt)
"How To Tame a Wild Tongue," Gloria Anzaldua (excerpt)
"Girl," Jamaica Kinkaid
"Zip Code: 80759," Emma WestRasmus
Faith of My Fathers, John McCain (excerpt)
Dream of My Father, Barack Obama (excerpt)
Each day we mimicked either the style or substance of the text pairs in our own writers' notebooks, either before or after analytically reading the texts. At the end of two weeks, students have a rich repertoire of first drafts to draw from.
To give myself a little wiggle room, I'm going to claim that it took me over a year to forget this. I was, after all, on sabbatical. But last Wednesday I made a critical mistake.
On hump day of the third week of school, our honeymoon was clearly over. Students wandered in tardy having clung to the last ashy drag of their cigarettes before class. A couple of students were asked to leave. A couple were arrested. The other teachers and I had developed bags under our eyes and switched from half-caf to regular.
I made a rookie error. I decided to motivate my students with structured choice. What did I forget? How critical routine is among the "at risk" population. Sure, my routine seemed to be fatiguing them, and research does show that structured choice motivates students. But they don't often research alternative kids, and my job is to coach them through the tough parts--not pull away their net. School usually offers the only reliable, predictable routine in their lives. Silly me. Expecting them to choose without teaching them how to make a responsible choice.
