Dear Student: Rethinking Assignment Deadlines

Dear Student,

I realize that your life is complicated.

I know you have family commitments. I know your mom and dad fight or maybe they don't because you don't have one or either. I know you might live with grandma or big brother or foster mom and things can be busy. I know that even if you are fortunate enough to live with your biological parents who are happily married, they might be stressed and yell at you for no reason. They may have high expectations for you and expect everything to be done a certain way and it drives you crazy and you are simply trying to reach their goals for you.

Express Yourself: A Letter of Invitation to Language Teachers Everywhere

Dear Esteemed Colleagues:

I can say "Language is not a" in my honors class and the students will respond "word to word translation." This is one of my catch phrases this year, along with "staring is not studying" and "how you feel and where you are, always use the verb estar." I use them so often that I'm thinking of having posters made to hang in my room of what I dub as Cleggisms.

Language is not a word to word translation.

I began saying this two years ago when I collected journals from my students and found the rampant use of translators. It was frustrating and that's putting it mildly. I always start the year talking to the students about what cheating is and how translators are not acceptable. I talk to them about online dictionaries and have embraced wordreference.com as a mainly reliable online dictionary.

However given how trusting my students are of anything online, be it translators or online dictionaries, I started looking into Google Translator and how it works. I put together a twenty minute lesson on translators wherein I wrote a paragraph in English, put it through Google translator and then translated that back to English. We talked about how translators can sometimes give you an idea but they largely work on the idea that languages do translate word to word but languages don't. Languages require context and meaning, not simply a word for a word.

PWC: My Second Family

PART ONE

Two years ago, in early fall, I was invited to attend a CDWP leadership retreat. I never really viewed myself as a leader as I’ve always seen myself as a follower or wallflower but I said yes since I knew a couple people who were also going. Unfortunately, that weekend I was terribly ill and was unable to attend. When the group met again in December, I popped the address into my GPS and finally found out how far Averill Park was from anything I knew. I entered a stranger’s house and broke bread with a dozen people, only three of whom I really knew. We began the meeting with writing, in true CDWP form. The prompt given was “What do you think is our future? What do you want to get out of this?” This then led to a rich discussion as we talked about the function of CDWP in our lives and what we needed.

In reviewing my writing from that evening, I see that I wrote “I would really like to be involved with some writing project group to push myself to write personally/professionally, to refine pieces and get feedback or even co-write something to be sent to a newspaper, journal or the NWP/CDWP sites.” I remember having a discussion with another participant during which he expressed his frustration that teachers are being given knowledge, being handed common core, being told the best ways to do something and that we are ineffective. I wrote down this following conclusion from this discussion: Be producers of knowledge and not just consumers.

The List

I'm sure we can all look through the rosters from year to year and remember a lot of the students: their faces, their handwriting, where they liked to sit, who they laughed with. But I want to talk about the students that stay with us. The names, that even ten or twenty years later, we know we will never forget.

There are many students on my list that I remember fondly, a few that I even meet for lunch from time to time. There are dozens of students who have now friended me on Facebook and I enjoy seeing the photos they post from college and beyond, some have even posted wedding photos. Though I might not see them frequently, it's nice to know they are out in this wonderful world, chasing their dreams. These aren't the students I want to address today either.

I have another list: the ones I worry about. It's a list that changes as time passes.

These students might not even realize that I am still worried about them, still betting on them, still hoping that life will be kind to them. They probably don't realize how deeply my experience with them still affects me. I would like to hate their stories, as I know them, with you.

Be The Change

I was asked to be the keynote speaker for the National Honor Society induction ceremony this year and a friend suggested that I post the speech. Here it is in it's entirety:

Be The Change

The Art of Presenting

Over the last two days, my students have been presenting their ideas from the environment project they've been doing that was described in this blog entry. As I sat watching their presentations, I was struck by how lightly most took the presentation portion of their project. I started to think about why. I wondered if it was because I did not stress the importance of doing a good job or because they didn't think I was serious when I told them they had to memorize their Spanish sentences.

Granted, this was the first time I have done this project with my students so I wasn't really sure what I was looking for or expecting. I admit that my directions were not clear nor specific. I did inform the students that they should each say two sentences in Spanish and as much English as they wanted. I directed them that they should tell what their idea for helping the environment was, where that idea came from and how it will help people.

Literacy & Language

Literacy.

What is literacy? I have taken many classes on this and I remember when it first became really clear to me that literacy is not simply the ability to read. Literacy involves understanding the world's communications as well as the cultural and social contexts of those messages. We receive these messages via written texts or images as well as through body language and facial expressions. When we speak of literacy, more often than not, we are referring to the written texts or images of society. However the message and context are not mutually exclusive. In order to read these messages and interpret them accurately, one must understand how you create them and why.

The Intersection of Creation, Collaboration & Chrome

Having the Chromebooks in my classroom has really afforded me some interesting opportunities the past six months. I've had the students taking online quizzes, visiting websites for information on traveling and collaborating on chapter summaries. I am only now beginning to understand the power of technology to facilitate true collaboration and creation in my classroom.

I have long been interested in the project-based learning models. Certainly when the possibility of Chromebooks was presented to the faculty, project-based learning was mentioned as a use of the technology. Though I have not studied extensively about it, I had considered it but never found the time to think about what it would look like in the classroom. The presence of the Chromebooks and my desire to have my students create something complimented each other perfectly.

My Spanish 4 classes, a combination of sophomores and juniors, were approaching the second part of the environment unit in which the vocabulary lends itself to social activism. I gave the students a double-sided sheet, that I dubbed their "Trash Journal," on which they were to record anything they discarded. They were to keep track of their trash items until both sides were filled. They wrote the item, where they were when they discarded it and where it went (ex: trash, recycle bin, compost, or reuse). When I created the trash journal, I hadn't even decided what the project was. I knew I wanted them to analyze their trash in some way but I hadn't thought that far ahead. I avoided writing the project description until the last minute because I had no idea what it would be. When I finally sat down to write it, the night before I wanted to give it out, I still had no idea but needed to get something down for the following day. The description that I wrote can be found here.

The Single Story

I have once again, for the third year in a row, embarked upon The Single Story. This two day lesson is a product of my summer spent with the Capital District Writing Project. Each year, a layer has been added based on what I've learned from previous years and new experienced I've had. This year, it begins with some journaling and then will move to the Chromebooks.

It is my hope that you might use this lesson as a guide. If you are an educator reading this, please feel free to use this lesson plan exactly or take it and change it to meet the needs of your learners. Please comment or email me any changes you make so that I might learn from those experiences.


It starts with the first prompt wherein my students receive three minutes to journal a "sound off". I told them to sound off in English about anything on their minds, anything bothering them, anything they're looking forward to- anything swimming around in their head. I told them to swear if they needed to and if they don't want me to read it later, to color it over in black crayon or marker. Then I asked them to set those things aside and bring their full attention and thought to our work today.

What Matters

When my mother passed away in April of 2010, it fell up on my sister, my niece and myself to clean out her house. The task of undoing someone's life and deciding if their knickknacks are meaningless to you or not is extremely daunting. She had a house full of belongings she thought treasured. It was so packed with things that our shock and disbelief at her death turned into anger and rage as we discovered thing after thing that she had saved.

The more we cleaned, the more we found and the angrier we became. I believe we ended up getting rid of a lot of things that perhaps, now, I'd want but it is too late for that. As we emptied out my mother's life and pulled apart her existence, we found many things that were expected and many that were not. The numerous school projects and photos were lovely to find. However, the drawer of every pen or pencil we've ever owned was extreme. We found a bag of bags and a suitcase with another suitcase inside with another bag inside of that and smaller bags inside that with yet smaller bags inside them.