Bang on a Can

Posted on by Dale

OK, new topic. We all have daydreams about what we’ll do when we win the lottery. I’m putting mine on my blog as I come across them.

Today, for example, I received a very nice invitation from the folks at Bang on a Can, the new music concern in NYC. They’re having a fundraiser in conjunction with Bob Hurwitz of Nonesuch Records, on Tuesday, April 19, 2005, and I thought, why not? They’ve done some interesting things in the past, although frankly much of it is earsplitting, but hey, I’m always ready to be intrigued, and since money is no object now that I’ve won the lottery, let’s do it.

So I figure we’ll do it up right: a $10,000 Bang Benefactor donation, which entitles me to a 10-person table for drinks, dinner, and the concert, plus luxury accomodations, meals, and tickets to the BOAC Marathon in the Berkshires this summer, plus season-long recognition as a sponsor, plus four tickets to the BOAC All-Stars concert on April 29. That’s a pretty sweet deal.

This is assuming I can find nine other people who would like to attend with me. Perhaps I could put an ad in the Times-Herald:

Wanted: Adventurous persons who can stand new music, to accompany local aesthete to dinner and a show. Apply at P.O. Box 1039C.

I keep buying CDs of new music, trying to keep up, seeing if concert music is making any progress in reclaiming the human ear after losing it so disastrously with that soulless sojourn into serialism in the middle of last century. So far, it’s pretty hit or miss. Any one of the pieces I’ve heard that have been written since 1980, say, can be interesting in itself, but when you start lining them up and comparing them, most of them are much alike. Too much brass, too many broad leaps in the “melody,” too many 2nds and tone clusters in the harmony. As they cycle through the iPod, I find them impossible to identify, just so many angst-ridden tone poems.

And what are we to make of John Corigliano’s comment [pdf interview] that the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for music, awarded to Paul Moravec’s Tempest Fantasy, startled him because of its sunny nature? “I’ve never in my life ever seen a Pulitzer Prize go to a piece that is effervescent, not for the last 40 years,” he mused. Apparently recognizing that the overwhelming tone of much new music is tortured, he adds, “I think that it’s very important for us to have that rich experience in art and not to think of art in this romantic twisted view that art is only about anguish and angst. It isn’t. The best works of art of the 18th century were often comedies.”

Still, some new music can be exhilarating, and my official position is that people should keep writing it, because eventually some of it is going to work. It’s like when eminent musicolologist Prof. Peter Schickele refers to the “lesser but nevertheless competent composers that dotted the musical landscape of the Age of Enlightenment” in his lectures on P.D.Q. Bach: I think it takes all the ballast of less competent work to produce the geniuses of Bach (P.D.Q. and otherwise) or Mozart.

So, buy the $10,000 ticket, I say, and support new music.

This thing is taking place below Houston St., so clearly we’d need to stay at the Soho Grand, which is a really cool hotel. My treat. Since it’s on a Tuesday night, we’d have to fly in that day and back out the next morning so that people wouldn’t have to miss that much work. Not me, of course. I won the lottery and don’t have to worry about such things.

Governors, business, and the toughening of standards

Posted on by Dale

On Feb. 28, the estimable New York Times reported on one of the seemingly biweekly governors conferences. (Perdue on the phone to Schwarzenegger: “Hey, I’ve never been to Rhode Island either! Let’s go talk about inner city crime!”)

At this particular conference, they were rattling around about No Child Left Behind, or as we call it at my school, Every Child Dragged Along, and the Times reported that the governors said that “business leaders” said that workers were arriving without the appropriate level of skills. The governors responded by deciding to “toughen the standards,” i.e., make the tests harder. Well, thirteen of the governors did. Those big ol’ important states didn’t. But thirteen of the smaller ones did.

Workers without skills? What does that mean?

Let’s assume for a moment that these leaders of business cannot possibly be talking about college grads. And let’s be a little more generous and assume that they are probably not talking about graduates of any of our technical schools.

So what does that leave us? High school graduates? Are we talking about high school kids not having “skills”?

Okay, well, then, I think it’s wonderful that the leaders of our business world are concerned that their workers come to them without a firm knowledge of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, or the Bohr model of the atom, or the difference between a Petrarchan and a Shakespearean sonnet.

What? That’s not it? That’s not what they’re whining about? Oh, skills, not knowledge. I get it. They have an unacceptably large number of high school level workers who cannot read, write, compute, etc. Well, that’s different.

Now I can totally see why the governors would immediately want to make the tests harder.

Are these people actually the leaders of our economic system?

If it were me, I’d be taxing the hell out of business to pay for elementary reading coaches, to pay for a radical restructuring of K-2, to pay for whatever it would take so that every child who is capable would in fact be reading by 3rd grade. But that’s me, liberal that I am.

Last year, I was at the Georgia State STAR Student banquet, where I heard a leader of business actually say, “If we raised the graduation rate in Georgia to [some number I’ve forgotten], it would add an extra [some number in the millions] to our state’s economy.” He said it to a room full of Georgia’s absolute best educators and students, apparently without realizing that all of us were thinking, “So what you’re saying is that it would be worth it to Georgia’s businesses to give us that amount of money to improve schools?”

But, liberal that I am, I don’t think that’s what he was suggesting. I think what he and the governors want is for us to take those students who would have dropped out thirty years ago and, by sitting on them harder, turn them into the 12% who actually graduated, and that’s just the ones that graduated, not the ones who went to college. And then, you see, the profits will just roll in.

Well, not to the schools, but you get the idea.

Writing on paper

Posted on by Dale

The writing desk, closed
Here is the antique travel writing desk that my wife gave me for Christmas. (I have a thing for old, wooden boxes.) It’s about 12 inches wide, 8 inches long, and 4-1/2 inches tall, much bigger than a Mac Mini. It has a lock, but we do not have a key.

The outside is plain, unadorned, smooth wood, perhaps cherry. We know nothing about it, not when it was made or by whom, or where.

The writing desk, open
When you open it, you find that the two halves are not split evenly across the box, but at a slant, so that when it’s fully open the inner faces slope up to the inkwells and pen holder.

Whoever owned it before me had replaced the writing surface, no doubt leather and no doubt eaten away, with a nasty black felt, attached (as it turned out) with a spray adhesive. At least it was easy to remove, and I replaced it with real leather, firmly glued on with craft glue.

The writing desk, with lid open
Here you can see one of the lids lifted up to reveal the storage beneath. The lids are made of oak, with four or five fluted grooves cleanly and precisely etched around the writing area.

The two lids are held in place by the single piece of leather. The bottom half has a small brass latch that holds the lid in place as you lift it, the actual top half of the box, back into place.

Earlier this week I noticed that the long storage area in the middle had little notches on the side panels, which suggests to me that there was another little piece of wood that rested there, which makes sense. Pens could rest in that shallow area and not get banged around so much. I’ve bought a piece of thin birch plywood, some stain, and some red suede leather, and this weekend I will recreate that little shelf.

It was earlier this week that I actually got to put it to use. I was home all week with strep throat, and by Thursday I was looking for something to do. In the mail, I received a nice thank-you note from Paula Chambers, the fabulous once and future media specialist for the Governor’s Honors Program. She was thanking me for making the trek down to Bainbridge for her retirement party, and I thought, I know, I’ll write her a letter.

It must be understood that I am a stationery junkie. I love beautiful, elegant, or unusual stationery. I have lots of it.

But I do not write letters. Who does? And to whom? Almost all of the people with whom I want to share my thoughts are at the other end of a very short stream of electrons. Writing a letter is now a special effort for a special occasion… like having strep throat, I suppose.

So I fetched my best stationery: gray, 100% cotton rag paper, my name nicely stamped in dark green ink; envelopes lined with dark green paper; very Slytherin, very elegant. I thought I would start by stocking my writing desk, but no, the stationery is too wide. Very well, I’ll have it trimmed next week.

Out comes the fountain pen, and I begin writing. The leather is soft, and the pen pushes at the paper with a scratching sound that is amplified by the hollow wooden box beneath it. It is a struggle to make my handwriting even, legible, connected. More than once, the fingers that are more used to typing go awry and letters are pulled beyond recognition into shapes like twisted coat hangers. The word letter itself threatens to fall apart every time I write it: big loop, little loop, two no-loops, little loop, squiggle…

But I keep writing to my friend Paula, absorbed in the very act of putting pen to paper, and ideas about writing on paper emerge and wallow across the message. I’m afraid by the time I’ve finished, six pages in all, she must wonder what has possessed me.

I tell of the blog I found that led me to an artist on the web who was clearly excited to have discovered this absolutely amazing substitute for the Moleskine Cahiers notebook: take 8-1/2 x 11 paper, cut it in half, punch holes in it, and put it in a 3-ring binder! And all the comments were equally ecstatic, either having already tried this for themselves, or thrilled to have stumbled across such an incredible solution. “The thing I like about loose-leaf binders is that you can move stuff around in them.” And I thought, Is this satire?

Are these people for real? Do they live in some milieu where only Moleskine notebooks have even been considered, and a trip to the Staples on 42nd St, or more likely for this crew, on Water St, is a revelation? I’ve had a Moleskine, they’re perfect, they’re beautiful, they’re a gorgeous way to record your life and organize it, but the only way? Deliver me.

I myself have used so many different ways to record my ideas, my tasks, my appointments, that I can scarcely remember them all. I have, however, swung wildly between writing it all down in a succession of notebooks and planners, and typing it all in to whatever application seemed easiest to use at the time. Incredibly, I have never used a PDA, nor have I ever wanted to. It seemed to me to be too much duplication: I have a laptop, I have a black leather notebook that zips up, why would I need a clunky little device to replace either?

It seems to me that all the systems served me well, but it has been my written ones that have served me best. There’s something about the physicality of the writing, again, that is seductive. And overall, the black leather notebook is more likely to be right there with you, not needing a battery or a plug or a network or a printer. It opens immediately for your inspection of your completed duties and appointments (people to call, things to produce, other to do, things to buy, runs my adapted overprint of a Day Runner page), and you can see your successes and failures at a glance, and dutifully carry the failures over to the next day.

And the flipping of pages back and forth, moving through time like some kind of extradimensional being, lighting on today, calculating one month from now, skimming back, seeding necessary tasks along the way, until I reach today again and can release time’s flow back into its normal channel, now I know what I need to do next, only the flipping of pages really feels right.

And yet, when I returned home from Governor’s Honors this past July, the black leather notebook faded and by the end of August was gone. As I look at it now, I never used it past the middle of September. I didn’t even buy the 2005 calendar and run it through the printer to stamp it with my own structure of busy-ness.

It’s all back on the laptop now. Pristine, color-coded, carefully displayed and ready to beep when I’ve told it to.

But this writing, this pen against paper against leather over wood, this ridiculous New York artist who has saved the world with a 3-ring binder, even the act of opening the black leather notebook to find where I abandoned it, I crave the act of writing, the sewing up of past and present in scribbled hieroglyphs here and there across pages.

I think I may get myself another Moleskine notebook for the summer.

Here we go!

Posted on by Dale

Those of you, and I think there must be… oh, two?, who have been following my ranting over on the Curriculum Liberation Front blog on Blogger will not be surprised to find that I’ve moved the whole thing over here to my website, where I can actually do more with it. Look: categories! Pages! Links!

I just got this up and running this morning, so expect to see changes… Actually, that’s a hoot, since no one will even know of the existence of this place for a few days! I’m talking to you as if you exist, and you can’t possibly exist, dear reader, until I create you. Hey, Marc, is that post- enough for us all?

added this afternoon: To make it even more post-, I’ve moved all my Curriculum Liberation Front posts from my blogspot.com blog over here and given them their original timestamp. So at the moment, the bulk of the postings have been posted before this blog even was created. Kewl.

A moratorium

Posted on by Dale

I hereby propose a moratorium on the word important in any GPS enduring understanding or essential question.

Today I attended a very good session for third grade teachers on “unpacking” a standard. When it got down to writing essential questions, it was amazing at the number of EQs that contained the word important. What got me to thinking about the issue was an EQ that my team wrote on the writing standard. We proposed, “Why is writing so hard?”, the idea being that we would tap into the students’ dislike/fear of writing and springboard into the various solutions as suggested by the elements of that standard.

The crowd reaction at first was one of excitement, but then it was suggested that the EQ was too “negative,” and the next thing we knew, the EQ had been amended to “Why is writing important?”

Well.

If the purpose of an essential question is to provoke discussion and exploration, and it is, then why in the name of all that’s engaging would we shy away from a provocative question like “Why is writing so hard?” and replace it with some teacher-talk like “Why is writing important?” There isn’t a kid on this planet who doesn’t see right through the “important” BS: it’s just a trap to enforce the student’s compliance with the teacher’s view of things. It is humbug of the most offensive sort.

I completely understand that not every teacher would want to lead off with such an in-your-face EQ, but honey, please. Most of the EQs were simply lesson plans in disguise. Do you really want to dig into whether “following the rules of grammar helps you understand written and oral communication?” ::yawn::

So we could have rewritten the question, “Are there ways to make writing easier for me?”, or “What can I do to make my writing better?”, or any other question that actually sounds like it might be asked by a student, preferably a question that produces some interest in seeing it answered.

Therefore, teachers, a new commandment: Thou shalt not write essential questions that merely embed thine unfiltered instructional agenda without any attempt to understand how a student in thy care might actually think.

Because that’s important.

GPS training

Posted on by Dale

Yesterday, I got to go to a session presented by dedicated fellow professionals here in Coweta County, the purpose of which was to nudge our teachers one more step into getting ready for the GPS.

First, let me say that the information was spot on, very important stuff, and that our presenters were sharp and prepared.

Second, let me say why I think it was not enough.

The purpose of the session was simply to introduce the vocabulary of the new curriculum: performance standard, essential question, enduring understandings, task, elements, etc., etc., etc. This all fell squarely into our View #1 of learning, taxon memory, in which the brain is confronted with what appears to be random, non-contextualized information, and it very appropriately resists learning it.

So here we had a very large room of dedicated teachers, most of whom I wager have been dreaming of a curriculum like the one we’re getting, and yet most of whom I’d wager again left that room still without the basic vocabulary of that new curriculum. Again, not the fault of our presenters.

What would I do differently, if my wand still worked?

  • Smaller groups. Plenty of discussion and sharing. It’s too easy for 100 people to abdicate responsibility for the information when there are 150 people in the room.
  • Examples of implementation at every step. Sure, there’s ELA2R1, but what will it look like when I have to do it with students?
  • Recognition of concerns, rooting out of misconceptions, confirming understanding, you know, the very things we’re supposed to do with students

Sure, easy enough for me to say, but my wand doesn’t work and there’s not enough funding or staffing to do it this way. Ah well.

And I will say this: Backwards design begins at home. Yo, State Department of Education, before we can design instruction that will fulfill these standards, before we can do our performance task, we have to know what the assessment is going to be! I can have all kinds of evidence of understanding on the part of our third graders about the travails of Frederick Douglass and the dynamics of slavery, but what is the CRCT going to ask about?

Page 1 problem

Posted on by Dale

Here’s the problem that crops up immediately in our study of Frederick Douglass: “Frederick Douglass was born a slave.” And what, to a 21st century third grader, does that mean? If our average 8-year-old doesn’t understand what slavery is, the whole point of choosing Douglass as part of our third-grade curriculum is lost.

Here’s a quick experiment:

The Three Kindreds of the Eldar were the Vanyar, the Noldor and the Teleri. All of the Vanyar and Noldor went to Aman. Many of the Teleri also journeyed to Valinor, but twice a host of this people turned away from the Journey in Middle-earth; these two kindreds are called Amanyar, the Eldar not of Aman. The first of these were the Nandor, who turned aside east of the Misty Mountains, and travelled down the River Anduin. The second, the Sindar, tarried in Beleriand seeking their lord, Elwë Singollo.

Got it? Unless you are a Silmarillion scholar (we prefer that term over “Tolkien freak”), you’d find it very difficult to begin any kind of activity based on the knowledge implicit in this one paragraph. For example: Draw a chart showing how the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar are related. Name the most prominent Eldar of each people. Easy enough, unless you have no clue about the Noldor and the mess they got themselves and Middle-Earth into at the end of the First Age. (Bet you had no idea that Galadriel was an unrepentant rebel, and that’s why she’s still hanging around Lothlorien when Frodo shows up.)

So, let’s look at our Douglass book and how we need to think about getting the kids into it. Page one starts with his birth, his birthname, and the fact that he and his mother were slaves. He was “born a slave.”

Page two tells us that Douglass lived with his grandmother twelve miles away from the plantation. He saw his mother four or five times before she died when he was seven.

Page three: when he was six, his grandmother took him to the “big house” and left him, where he began his life of servitude.

Page four: we learn that slaves were beaten. When Douglass’s “own aunt Hester was tied to a hook and whipped,” he ran into a closet and hid.

There’s our first day of reading. What key context do we need to provide to students so that they can even suggest the obstacles Douglass had to overcome in his life?

Page 1

Posted on by Dale

Having selected David A. Adler’s Picture book of Frederick Douglass as our base text, I photocopied the pages and put them into a notebook. I’ve gone through every page, selecting vocabulary words; creating comprension questions; proposing activities for advanced/gifteed students.

On page one, we’re given his birthplace, his birthname (Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey), and the facts that he and his mother were slaves, while his father was an unknown white man, perhaps his owner, Captain Aaron Anthony.

Comprehension questions:

  • Why did he change his name?
  • What does “his first owner” mean?
  • Why doesn’t the book tell us his birthday?

Our lesson plan calls for the class to keep a chart of characters in our narrative, most of whom are mentioned only once. This page has Harriet Bailey, his mother; and Capt. Anthony, his first owner.

Activities:

  • Start the timeline with Douglass’s birth in 1818.
  • Show Maryland on the regional map. (Students have a regional map, a U.S. map, and a world map.)
  • Use an atlas to find where Talbot County is in Maryland, and show it on the map.
  • Use a chart showing the dates of the states’ admission to the Union and color in the states that were states in 1818.

We immediately have a problem, which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

Selecting a text

Posted on by Dale

Happy New Year!

You may recall that many of the biographies of Frederick Douglass I had been examining were too involved for 3rd graders to use as a text, especially since we had further plans to challenge them as readers with the article from the New York Times. I have gotten our choices down to two: Frederick Douglass: a photo-illustrated biography, by Margo McLoone (Capstone Press); and A picture book of Frederick Douglass, by David A. Adler (Holiday House).

The McLoone text is readable at a 2nd grade level and is illustrated on every lefthand page with a primary source photo or engraving. The righthand page is text.

The Adler text is illustrated on every page with color paintings that are not actually first-rate. The text is superimposed on the illustration, but is legible. Readability is probably at the upper end of 3rd grade.

I think I prefer the Adler text for a couple of reasons. First, the McLoone is very clunky, simply one declarative statement after another. Secondly, the Adler gives a much more comprehensive look at the society in which Douglass lived and the obstacles he overcame, which is of course our main point. Finally, the Adler uses quotes from Douglass himself, which would be easy to expand into a reading of the pertinent sections of Douglass’s autobiography.

The McLoone text might be useful as a remedial text for students whose reading skills are just not up to par.

The real curriculum

Posted on by Dale

The more I work on this Douglass project, and the deeper I get with my QCC/GPS comparisons, the more anxious I become to see the real curriculum, the thing we really have to teach, and by that of course I mean the CRCT [Criterion-Referenced Competency Test], because we won’t know what the state really wants to have happen in the classroom until we know what it is they’re generating standardized tests on.

They can give us interesting performance standards, suggested tasks, and examples of student work all they want, but if their CRCTs don’t reflect a performance-based instructional outlook, they’re not going to get that in the classroom. No one in his right mind would strike out into performance assessment knowing that students are going to be quizzed on discrete facts. And that’s a fact.

What’s unassessed is unaddressed… and vice versa.