I’m catching up on old NCTE Inbox articles today. Since my computer died two weeks ago, I have had even less opportunity to read email newsletters. When you share a computer (or would have to stay late or come early to school), people are less likely to let you sit and read for long stretches of time.
Today, I read an NYT article from mid-November about the practice of teachers selling lesson plans online. I hadn’t realized there was a controversy. I am a big fan of ReadWriteThink.org, and I use other free lesson plans to support my own all time. Simply basing my discussions off the recommendations in the margins of my teacher’s editions is using someone else’s ideas to help me teach. If I ask my mentor teacher for help, he is giving me ideas. Who would expect me to come up with everything from scratch?
When teachers with classroom experience go to work for education companies (like those who have been selling prepackaged units for ages, or even textbook publishers), it makes sense that they take their experience and lessons along with them. No one expects to pick up a lesson plan or unit and do exactly what it says; something always needs adjusting. The problem seems to be in selling those lessons. If you have used ideas from another teacher or your textbook, that person deserves the credit. But if it’s your idea, and you don’t want to give it away for free, don’t. It’s a simple concept for every other profession: why not teaching?
Tags: education
One’s opinions on books and writing evolves when one becomes an English teacher. At least mine have. For example, when I read this NYT article on hybrid books, I was scandalized. Books are meant to stay in their static, text-based format. Part of the charm of a book is that it is portable, requires no electricity, and only sometimes has pictures. I love the narrative nature of movies as much as the next lit specialist, but if a book demanded that I log on to find out what happens, I would honestly return it (and who returns books?). I think that if such texts were designed for online publication, then interspersing videos would be ideal. They came up with that idea already; it’s called hypertext. But please, leave my four-by-six mass-market editions alone.
One of my favorite things about the NCTE Inbox is that it works for me like a selective lit and ed news aggregator. This week, in addition to the aforementioned “book” article, it brought me an essay about teaching writing: another of my primary interests at the moment because I teach sophomore composition. (A stack of essays is waiting to avalanche me in just a few minutes.) The author, a former writing instructor, shares his experiences teaching college students and adults about how to write. These perspectives always interest me because one of the reasons I became a high school teacher was to help create better adult writers. It is a classic teacher fallback to blame previous instructors’ inadequacies and failings for your students’ missing abilities. (You, a tenth-grader, can’t spell? Your third-grade teacher must have sucked.) As a sophomore, I nearly drooled from my dropped jaw when an English major classmate couldn’t punctuate dialogue. (Of course you need quotation marks around things the characters said!) With every grammar lesson I teach, I take one small step toward fighting the disintegration of writing skills that has plagued Generation IM.
Tags: education
