I love using Project-Based Learning (PBL) in the classroom. There are about a zillion reasons why and a host of research exists on why using PBL is simply, well… good teaching. No need for me to really explain the sound theory behind it all right here. It would take too long.

PBL rocks! Let’s leave it at that.

On a practical level I find that using PBL as the cornerstone for ending the school year is especially effective in allowing me to achieve many of my objectives for this time of year.

Why? Because I want my students, in no particular order to…

• finish strong
• work hard
• demonstrate evidence of their learning
• have fun
• stretch themselves
• create something tangible
• collaborate and innovate
• feel as if their time is a valuable commodity in their lives, something not to be frittered away but rather be valued and respected.
• and on and on. (I fear I am about to digress into edu-babble, politically trite buzzword speak if I continue on.)

Of course, I want most of these things during the course of the year as well. However, having to bow at the altar of NCLB, ETS and their bubble tests while making sure to cover a host of “other things” that are not as PBL friendly for ELA teachers (like punctuating appositive phrases and teaching parallelism within sentences) well… as Mick Jagger once said, “You can’t always get what you want.”

So essentially, before my classes break for the summer, I ask my students to “step up” bigger than they ever have before through the creation of a “project”.

I preface my assignment with a little speech about how, at this very moment, my kids are most probably at the height of their aptitudes. They have never had more schooling, they’ve never been more worldly, they’ve never had more experiences, they’ve never been more ready to deliver something truly great. (Obviously, when dealing with 14-17 year olds, this can almost always be said; they are perpetually at their “height” in a way. Once you get old like me, however, you can’t always say you are “better” now than you ever were before because in 1986 I was a much better basketball player than I am today. However, as English students, they are often “better” than they were two, three or even five years ago. Thus this little warm-up speech.)

All in all it boils down to Envision, Plot, Refine, Build, Tinker, Reflect, Re-Tinker, Finalize, Present.

Ending the year with my students having created “SOMETHING” is my plan.

What is that SOMETHING? It’s really up to the teacher. From expository projects to poetry units to biographical studies and on and on and on, a host of truly great ideas are available.

PBL can be high tech… or not.
PBL can be assigned to both individuals or groups.
PBL can take the form of old school oratory or new wave multi-media.
PBL can be so, so, so many things.

All in all, when it comes to the end of the year, I want my students to have to climbed a final mountain, ascended to a new plateau, and really pushed it one last time before our moments together in my room have passed.

PBL offers me that opportunity. Showing fluffy movies, merely biding your time til the year is over, counting down the days is a freakin’ waste.

Use the time. It’s life’s true currency.

(FYI, I am going to host a free webinar on Finishing Strong next week (May 19th from 6:30 – 7:30 EST. If interested, you can sign up here.)

So since I am in the mood to offer up so many thoughts as of late about how to re-shape K-12 education (heck, who isn’t doing it these days) I thought I’d chime in on the silliness of the manner by which we choose to pink slip 194 teachers in a district with about 900 educators.

We did it by seniority. Merit played no role. (Don’t worry, this is not a post about the budget cuts… though they will certainly see some action, I am sure, going forward.)

I repeat, quality of service played absolutely no factor in the decision making process of who got to keep their job and who got to canned. It all came down to one simple question: when were you hired.

And these are the deepest staff cuts I’ve ever seen.

No one asked, how well did you work? No one asked, to what degree did you serve the needs of the students? No one took into consideration things like work ethic, degree of content knowledge, extra-curricular duties, ability to differentiate for various learning styles, and on and on and on.

Chronology slapped down worthiness.

Add it all up and it means that this past week I had a chat with an ELA teacher I greatly admire, one who is but a few years into her career – and is a real dynamo with a bright future – and told her I’d be happy to write her a smoking letter of rec if ever she wanted one.

Best I could really do.

I mean this is a teacher we should be fighting to hold on to. I know it. The principal knows it. Heck, even the folks in the district offices might know it.

But rules are rules and length of service in public education trumps quality of service.

It’s folly. Plain and simple. No one lets a better employee go so that they can keep an older employee.

BTW, this is not ageism at play. Some of the best educators I know have multiple decades under their belt. Matter of fact, the leading ELA teacher on our campus (in my opinion) is a lady right across the hall from me and she’s at year 32 in our district.

Do you know what I was doing 32 years ago? Lemme tell, ya, it wouldn’t make momma proud.

Just think about what would happen to an institution’s degree of impact if they sustained such a silly policy over the long haul. I tell ya what would happen, it would inevitably crumble over the course of time due to erosion as a result of such poor decision making. (Anyone ever hear of a small industry once based in Detroit?)

Essentially, okay, I get that we are going through a fiscal crisis that is pretty much unprecedented in our lifetimes. But at least make the most intelligent moves you can make. We are compounding the impact of the budget cuts by not better adapting our policies to meet the needs of the current times. Truly, these types of decisions are handcuffing us from being able to do the best job we can possibly do at one of the most important jobs that there is to do in our country.

Society is counting on us to do it well.

And these are the rules by which we determine who gets laid off?

If merit plays no role in determining who stays and who goes, at some point the institution of public education will crumble.

This week, a few stones in the edifice fell. And it’s a sad thing to watch.

Nancie Atwell recently published this article in Education Week about THE CASE FOR LITERATURE. It’s well worth a read.

Perhaps one of the most telling parts of the article comes from this passage where Nancie writes…

In 2007, fully 70 percent of U.S. 8th graders read below the proficient level on the NAEP exam. Our 13-year-olds aren’t reading well because they’re not reading enough: The National Endowment for the Arts has reported that only 30 percent of students in this age group read every day.

Now, I am not sure about a heck of a lot of things in this world, but I am pretty sure that if English teachers are not going to require that their students read books, then very few others are going to step up and fill in the gap.

And as I see more and more of, English teachers all over are foregoing book reading as an essential, core component of their classroom. Some claim that teaching “skills” is where they focus. Some claim that reading annotated passages and excerpts is good enough. Some claim that their “district won’t let them” teach real books.

We all look out on the horizon of public education and see troubles. We all see silliness and problems. We all see Herculean challenges. But if we, in this nation of ELA teachers that we are, do not also see the need for us to be making sure that we are having our young students read books then we, as ELA teachers, are complicit in the demise of student achievement.

We can blame others for the dysfunction, the budgets cuts, the campus shortcomings and the national calamity of over-testing. But we have no one to blame but ourselves if we allow the reading of real books to die.

We are their torchbearers and if we do not seize the reigns and more loudly stand up for the fact that real books need to be a core part of the academic lives of all American students then we are as complicit in the demise of U.S. public education as are so many of the others at whom we so often point our fingers.

All heed Nancie Atwell – and ignore her work at our collective peril.

Is there such a thing as an English class that doesn’t read a single, real, whole book over the course of the year? I mean I know there is. Some places — WAY TOO MANY in fact — have the The Lords of District Oversight that Ban the Reading of Novels in English Class

That’s right, they mandate that NO NOVELS be taught.

It’s all excerpts, pieces taken from anthologies, worksheets, scripted programming and… biggest of all, practice tests to prepare for the real tests.

Am I the only one who thinks this is nuts?

Every good English teacher I know uses real books in the classroom. From Crime and Punishment to The Outsiders to The Skin I’m In to Old Yeller to Hatchet to The Great Gatsby to The Pearl to The Lord of the Flies to Animal Farm to To Kill a Mockingbird and on and on and on, real books are part of the fabric of what makes for, in my estimation, the essential, core constitution of a real and effective and meaningful ELA class.

When exactly did that stop? (Don’t worry, I know. It’s rhetorical.)

So the question is, forgetting even my own prejudice towards the use of real books (prejudice because 1) I love them and 2) years and years of experience tell me that they work as my BEST tool for accomplishing all the literacy goals both I and my school district have for our students) am I the only one who believes we need to re-double our efforts to start fighting for primary source authentic literature (i.e. real books) in the classroom?

Because real books are under assault from the bean/bubble counters.

Could you teach an entire year as an ELA educator without being able to use one real novel? And if so, do you think that by doing so this would be a methodology that best serve the needs of your kids?

The Lords of District Oversight that Ban the Reading of Novels in English Class are a menace to the very fabric of our discipline… and isn’t it time that someone stood up to them and explained how the emperor has no clothes?

And a tiny wanker, too.

Sorry, just had to get that last “little one” in. Get it? Little one?

So what is to be done when a student farts in class?

Hey, don’t laugh, this is a serious academic issue.

The way I see it, there are a coupla options.

1) Try to pretend it didn’t happen. Of course, if it’s stinky one, the boys sitting in and around the — let’s pretend I teach in a church — the boys sitting in and around the “pew” are gonna keep disrupting whatever progress you want to make in your lesson with commentary and insights about the aroma.

Of course, when you try to actually teach an ELA lesson on the need to use precise, descriptive, vibrant vocabulary in English class, you get papers back that lay flat and are filled with bland vanilla. But let a kid break wind and all of a sudden, the vocabulary being bandied about the room would make a lovelorn poet from the Romantic era proud of its richness and poignancy.

2) Scold the perpetrator. Now for me, this one would never work. First of all, I am still immature enough to find farts kinda funny so to actually try and castigate a kid would probably result in me cracking a smile in the middle of trying to keep a stern face. (Note: I think there is a fart joke in almost every book of young adult fiction I’ve yet written. And the new books that’ll be out next year, well… let’s just say it doesn’t look like the streak is in any danger of being broken right now.)

3) Pretend nothing actually happened and keep pressing on with the lesson. Probably the best route, when all is said and done, but meta-cognitively, an educator must know that for up to 180 seconds after student cheese-cutting, a teacher shouldn’t relay any truly valuable academic information — or else you will need to make a plan to re-teach it. After all, one good blasting of some backdoor breeze from a kid in class is enough to render even the most diligent of AP kids out of sorts for a while.

I guess the question I, as the teacher, have to really ask myself before I go down the road of condemnation for public flatulence is, to what end am I going to reprimand a student for this stuff? Am I going to send a kid to the Dean? Am I going to give the kid detention? Come on, let’s be honest, the more I keep the main subject of the classroom on student gas, the more tickled the kids are that we are 1) talking about this and 2) not talking about things like appositive phrases. I mean I have boys that would gladly engage in a 20 minute analysis on the type of wind currents able to be generated through the human digestive tract — the tone, the pitch, the pungency, the types of foods best suited to achieve optimum results — and if I were to give fart homework, I have a feeling my some of my most reluctant students would suddenly turn into verifiable scholars.

You want student engagement in the classroom? Try a Socratic Seminar on bottom blasts from the big brown horn. Guaranteed participation from all kinds of kids.

You want to teach vocabulary? Use farts. They’ll never forget the definition of turgidity again.

And not to be sexist, but how come I’ve never once had a freshman interrupt class with the declaration, “Ew, Kimberly farted!”

I get, “Ew, Michael farted!”
I get, “Ew, Joesph farted!”
I get, “Ew, both Michael and Joseph farted!”

But never the girls. Hmmm… worth more investigation.

The Conundrum of Student Farts… in my opinion, it’s an issue that needs more high level discussion.

Last night after putting my daughter to sleep, I spent a long time writing a blog for today. Actually, it was too long. I’d spent over 45 minutes on it and knew it needed to be trimmed down or converted into a two-part piece, something like that.

See, I want to start adding in a little more about how I, as an author, write. The process of authoring a book, the ins-n-outs, the behind the scenes, from idea to page to literary agent to sale to publisher to bookstores. Looking behind the curtain at this process feels like it might have relevance to teaching ELA and I suspect there might be much to be mined in terms of making connections from the toils of a professional author to those of the student author — as they are really more closely related than most kids probably imagine.

It was a goodie, too. Really meaty.

Then my wife zapped it.

45 minutes worth of work gone-zo. I went to go score some jellybeans from the kitchen cabinet (the ones she’s been hiding from me cause I’ve been eating too many as of late… in her opinion) and she wanted to take a look at something on Web MD since everyone in our house right now has a bit of a tickle in their throat. So she opened a new tab and read a few pieces of info while I covertly munched some orange little droplets of love in the other room. Then, when she was done, she closed out ALL tabs on the computer.

Not just Web MD but all the tabs… and a heck of a lot of thoughtful work of mine went bye-bye.

So for today, it’s kinda like the dog ate my digital homework. I am frustrated that I have to do it again — and it will almost assuredly be different — but the thing is, stuff happens, right? At first I was steamed, aggravated and so on but the fact is, it was my fault, not hers. I could have “saved it as a draft”. I could have backed it up somehow. I could have taken steps to make sure I didn’t lose the material before I got up from my seat to go satisfy my sweet tooth.

But I didn’t. But what I did do right after that was make sure I backed up every file on my computer to an external hard drive because losing 45 minutes worth of work is one thing — but losing an entire computer’s worth of work is something else entirely.

After all, who doesn’t have scores of irreplaceable pictures, lesson plans, writing and so forth on their computer? So in my small pain let their be a great lesson to all who have read this today: BACK YOUR STUFF UP!

Remember, the time to fix your roof is when the sun is shining.

And now, if you’ll forgive me, I have to go apologize to my wife for my outburst. There are two reasons for this. 1) I flew off the handle a bit and 2) cause if I don’t she’s gonna hide the damn jellybeans where I’ll never, ever find them again.

According to a new report by the Center for Disease Control, 9 out of every 10 teens are not eating enough of their recommended fruits and veggies.

You mean Hot Cheetos aren’t a vegetable?

Am I the only one that has kids walk in at 7 a.m. in the morning gulping down processed sugar? I mean we are talking about a breakfast that consists of a frosted Pop Tart, lunch that is a bag of salty chips and a soda, and then an after school snack of cupcakes or cookies — or more chips until dinner (which is so often, fast food). That’s the average teen diet these days.

As teachers, we see this every day. Thing is though, if you check the bottom left hand drawer of most desks (of teachers) you are probably going to find a Snickers Bar or a mini-bag of Chips Ahoy. It’s not just the students that are eating poorly — it’s the educators as well.

Me, of course I try to eat my fruits and veggies. Try, that is. Yet it seems as though I have to actively choose a pear while my hands just naturally gravitate towards peanut M&M’s without any real effort on my own behalf at all (peanut M&M’s cause they don’t make my keyboard too sticky when I blather on as a blogger, of course).

The fact is, the quickest way to get our ELA staff to buy into being engaged for an entire department meeting begins with good ol’ fashioned chocolate. Forget erudite discussions of Kafka, Orwell and Dickens. You want to get an our English department fired up, put out a tray filled with Oreos or Keebler Fudge Stix!! Then we’ll talk dis-aggragated data and methodologies to differentiate and accommodate for all sorts of learning styles in the classroom til the cows come home.

Fudge cake is the engine that drives a good meeting and really, I am not sure why more people don’t recognize this about teachers. We don’t really care about merit pay… but we all respond to homemade brownies.

Look, if we’re gonna nag kids about the junk food they eat, we’re pretty much the pot calling the kettle black. And if kids can smell anything, it’s the words of a hypocrite.

Everybody recognizes the spectacular value and importance of literacy. Or rather, everybody that actually gives serious thought to it when considering a means by which we can improve our schools recognizes the spectacular value and importance of literacy.

The research, the data, the biggest thinkers in education, they all agree: literacy is critical, if not absolutely essential, and there is a direct correlation between academic success and the literacy levels of students.

I mean it’s not that hard of a concept to grasp. Kids who are poor readers and writers are often poor students — in many subjects areas, not just in our ELA classes — and kids who have strong literacy skills have a much greater chance and capacity to successfully navigate the halls of our schools. Like I said, almost self-evident.

But try talking literacy instruction or its importance to “other” teachers in “other” academic disciplines. I mean really, don’t they they pretty much tune out?

Come on, do math department people really embrace the idea that literacy is actually monumentally important to their own effectiveness? Naw, not really. However, if you look at a state standardized test, in so many ways it’s a reading comprehension test before it is a math test.

And the same is true for science and history as well.

But do other departments buy into the idea of teaching literacy across the curriculum? If so, well… I’m just not seeing it. Yet to be fair, in the places I do see it, I see schools that seem to more closely resemble a smartly functioning organization.

For the haters and doubters, check out this latest capstone study by the Carnegie Foundation. It’s packed with good stuff.

It’s also titled Time To Act. But will we?

People who work in schools moan and moan all the time about how “the kids don’t read” but you know what… the people who are moaning aren’t really reading either. At least they’re not, in large part, doing the professional reading necessary (IMHO) to stay up to date with what’s going on the world of literacy and language arts.

I’ve got administrators screaming about how we need to make “data-driven decisions in the English Department” but these folks aren’t reading what I consider to be some of the best, most useful, most insightful books about the world of ELA Instruction — works that are replete with not only data, but reflections upon that data so that the reader/teacher/educator can make methodological decisions based on something other than “I am doing this because it came from above — and I must always do what comes from above — where it appears they simply pulled it out of their butt” mentality.

Here’s a list of a few books NOT read by the folks who are barking at my department with orders as to how to improve, of course, our test scores:

Readicide
Holding On To Good Ideas in Times of Bad Ones
The Reading Zone
Disrupting Class
A Whole New Mind
I Read It but I Don’t Get It
Why Students Don’t Like School
Outliers

Now I could go on. And please do not ask me how I know that most of the top-ranking folks have not read these books because I’ve surreptitiously tested them in my own nefarious ways. However, the point is not to embarrass anyone. The point is to question how can anyone taking on the challenge of improving ELA in the 2009/2010 school year really be considered seriously if they haven’t done this type of reading. (And yes, I know there are more titles as well.)

Sure, it’s hard, time-consuming and dense. But not having the time is, to me, just an excuse. I mean me, I teach, I write YA fiction, I blog, I spend good time with my family and I try to exercise… but I also read! Why? Because I find it absolutely necessary to the development, implementation and application of my professional craft. And I am not drawing an administrator’s salary, either. I do this as a regular ol’ classroom teacher.

So when these folks come to me with “strategies for success” that seem to have ben taken right out of some field book from a Master’s Class in the 1990′s to deal with the problems we are facing in the here and now, I just gotta shrug and say, “Yo, before you open your mouth, open a book, huh?”

Had an exceptionally interesting conversation today with my literary agent about the need for an interesting villain in fiction. He spoke quite eloquently about the idea that the strength of a hero is really predicated on the force of opposition that your hero must face. After all, a weak villain doesn’t require any great, spectacular heroism to conquer — and this a problem with a large majority of the slush pile fiction he sees almost on a daily basis.

And to walk into his office and see all the manuscripts, all the aspiring writers, all the folks who are hoping to pen their way into the canon of our literary imaginations, well… let’s just say it’s remarkable how many books every year people were only hoping to publish… forget all the legions of books which are being published.

Obviously, as a writer, I know this. And I work at this. The better the bad guy, the better the hero must be… and therefore the better the book should be (theoretically) because, as Aristotle, Egri, McKee, Vogler, Campbell, and so on talk about — audiences crave heroic triumph… and if the odds aren’t bleak and the forces aligned against your protagonist aren’t insurmountable and phew, how in the heck will they ever be able to handle THAT curveball solid… then people have better things to do with their time. They will lose interest, tune out and walk away.

Now of course, I’ve read all the heavies… but our students most often have not. And a cool thing I like to do — especially when it comes to really engaging reluctant readers — is to celebrate the bad guy. To view the villain through the prism of admiration. Change perspectives and celebrate the devious for their unabashed lust. Good guys, we see them all the time. How about examining a complicated villain?

Lady Macbeth is a gimme for almost all ELA teachers. Inevitably, it’s where all discussions of Macbeth go. And it’s because she’s a great villain, a heck of character with a lot to be admired if ambition and power hungry manipulation is your thing. And as heartless folks go, Bill Sikes from Oliver Twist certainly shows an admirable coldness that deserves some celebration for just how ruthless he can be. Iago is one of my favorite characters in all of literature and come on, Dr. Jeckyll ain’t got nothing if he don’t have Mr. Hyde.

There are all kinds of good ways to get into books with your students. How about a little love for the bad guys? If the Socs aren’t such jerks, the Greasers aren’t so admirable. If Andy “It” Evans, isn’t such a date-raping senior dirtbag preying on susceptible freshman, then Speak doesn’t creep you out nearly as much. If white people weren’t so psychotic, Roots isn’t so gripping.

When it comes to stories, antagonists make the piece. And the badder, the better.

Yet, to be truly bad, you must have some good. Something admirable. Something that doesn’t allow us to put you in a convenient mental box of “it’s all black and white and they are the black”. Seeing the white, that’s what makes us twist. Villains who are black and white are boring. But interesting villains, they’ll keep us up late at nights, turning page after page wondering, what is this person going to do next?

Think about Satan… Jesus doesn’t resonate nearly as much without him.

If your students are going to branch into fiction, the cardinal rule is, “Show some love to the bad guy… they are the reason why heroes are forced to shine.”