Aaron's Unit Update for November 18th

I’m catching up slowly with my unit. I’m still working on the preliminary calendar and the relationship between the calendar and the content. During my observation this semester, I found that a serious problem the class faced was the vicissitudes of student attendance. Many students missed chunks of school at a time and then reappeared far behind the rest of the class. Students entered at random times throughout the semester (having been expelled from the charter system). My cooperating teacher’s class had a big influx after an English teacher was reassigned as the dean of freshman (the school did not have the funds to fill her teaching vacancy). A loss of an English teacher is a relatively rare event (at least per school, per year), but the volatility of student attendance seems to be a serious and ongoing issue.  The reason I focus on it here is that students who were new additions (or those who had been gone long enough function in that niche of the classroom system) often disconnected from the task at hand when they felt lost and realized how far behind they were.  I don’t agree with some of the values embedded in its methodology, but I was reminded of the field of time and motion study.  The attendance issue raised the following question in my mind, which (again) builds off of Lillian Moller Gilbreth and her husband: how might we as urban educators minimize the interconnected losses of time and engagement caused by inconsistent attendance? It seems to me that one potential solution is to begin with the end in mind (or, as we’ve been calling a related concept in class, backward design) when it comes to selecting reading content. It seems to me that those of us in urban education (especially in neighborhood schools) may do our students a service by choosing readings (when we are allowed to choose readings) and lessons that are as self-contained as possible. These would include short essays, flash fiction, poetry, novels with self-contained chapters, etc­—anything that a student who has not been to class for weeks can drop in and contribute to a discussion about. Longer texts (though obviously very beneficial in schools without volatile attendance) seemed to me (in the class I observed)  to result in increasing levels of disengagement from students who found themselves dropped into a class (a disconcerting social experience for many students regardless of the class’s texts) and lost. Likewise, I’m trying to modify the time span spent covering the content/skill-practice/activity/assessment chronology into single class periods (with stand alone readings).

The first problem I’ve run into on this task regards the difficulty I’ve had to coming up with readings that are simultaneously 1) relevant to student interests, 2) intellectually rigorous, 3) a Flesch reading ease of around the mid-sixties (i.e. what would be called a seventh grade reading level—this is an approximation of the standard normative literacy of the class I observed), and 4) self contained. 

To end on a positive note, a strategy I’ve come up with to connect these four issues (with some limited success) is what I’ve been calling the grafted intro. I borrow the term grafting from horticulture. Grafting is when a gardener cuts off a branch of one plant and (for lack of a better word) surgically attaches it to the trunk of another plant. If the two species are close enough, the two pieces heal together, creating one plant. You see this a lot in roses because growers can use a stronger rootstock from a hardy species (one that’s tough but doesn’t have bright blooms) and the upper portion of the species with the brighter blooms. The resulting plant has the attributes of each species the gardener wanted.  (Some trivia: a pest killed the wine rootstock of the old European vineyards a little over a hundred years ago. Europeans replanted new, hardier imported American rootstock and grafted their vines onto it. Since many people believe the roots of the vines, and whether or not vines are grafted, can influence the taste of the wine, the extremely few vineyards that had old roots survive raised their prices.  But the pest never hit Chile—where emigrants had brought that now-coveted old European rootstock years earlier. So if you want a cheap bottle of wine from that fancy old European rootstock that Europe couldn’t keep, grab some Chilean wine next time you’re heading to your friend's dinner party.) The reason I’m going on about grafting here is it’s my way to connect relevancy, intellectual rigor, normative reading ease and self-containment. I take a student interest and a relatively academically rigorous article and then graft them together. Then (here’s the hardest part), I manually reduce the readability to the range of most students in the class.  For example, here’s the reading I made for an exercise on summarizing (which worked well when I used it in my taught lesson for 432):

Was Brian Right?

            In a Family Guy show from this year, Peter joined a fancy club for rich men. Brain saw that Peter started being mean to people after he joined the club. Brian shrugged and said, “It’s just human nature to crap on those beneath you.” 

            Does Brain have a point?  Teachers at the University of California and the University of Toronto have studied what being very rich can do to people. They made experiments to try to find out if the rich are worse than the poor at knowing what other people are feeling. 

            In the experiment, people were asked to look at pictures of faces and try to guess what the people in the photos were feeling. The rich people got the answer wrong more than the poor people.

            The researchers say they know why: earlier studies have found that poor people (who cannot afford cars or babysitters) rely more on neighbors and family for things like a ride to work or child care. So they have to develop better social skills—ones that will create good will.

            “Upper-class people, in spite of all their advantages, suffer empathy deficits,” Dr. Keltner (a teacher at the University of California) said. “And there are enormous consequences.”

That reading is Brian’s observation (from the No Country Club for Old Men Family Guy episode, which aired this year) grafted onto this article from The New York Times.

Needless, to say, this is pretty time consuming. But if we follow Smagorinsky's reasoning about the test (where he was critical of his colleague's use of a predesigned test on a group of students the test was not designed for), it seems reasonable that we not limit the scope of his point to that test. The scope of that point (at least it seems to me) includes every element of every class.