fieldnotes on teaching

Reading List for High School
  Compiled from various lists

Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Diary of a Youth Girl, Anne Frank
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Chose, Chaim Potok
A Separate Peace, John Knowles
Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1984, George Orwell
My Antonia, Willa Cather
The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark
A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Michael Dorris
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Autobiography of Miss Jean Pittman
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee Harper
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien

The Ultimate Teen Reading List

E-courses
  online resources

Elements of Style

Writing with Style (Oregon)

Hyper Text Composition

The 11 rules of writing

OWL Writing Resources

E-texts
  Online literature resources

etexts

Errors in English

Identity and media
  notes on key concepts

Who am I?
What’s my story?

The passage from childhood to adulthood

Influences on identity

family
religion
peers
class
ethnicity
occupation
clothing
body image
intelligence

Social influences:
peers
parents
schools
laws and politics (values)
folk culture (values)
mass culture (values)

I’m a missionary
I’m a warrior
I’m a helper

Do I use brands to project an identity?

Lesson Plans for discussing media and identity formation
  by Dana M. Buckmir

The following lessons are suggested for a ninety minute block period. However, some of the lessons can be condensed to accommodate a forty-five minute period schedule and thereby extended over a longer time bracket.

Lesson One: Interview of a Female Role Model

Purpose: To initiate interest in a gender based topic by personalizing the information and applying it to the students’ lives and experiences therein. Asking a student to share information about an older sibling, mentor, coach, teacher, mother, grandmother or friend builds a sense of fosters community, pride, respect and responsibility in the classroom by demonstrating that we all share commonalties. Students will generate pride towards those individuals they admire and express their interest in the lives of others by participating in this lesson. Also, this lesson provides examples of positive female role models that inspire us to achieve higher expectations and withstand struggle

Initiation: Students will quick write in their journals: What makes a role model?

Think/Pair/Share: After thinking independently about the journal prompt students will share their responses in partners reading their responses word for word to their peer. This is a strategy that helps students improve their writing because when they listen to their writing read aloud they can recognize errors.

Reading: Students will read An Interview with Sandra Cisneros; however the interview will be separated on index cards designated by number in question and answer format. This interview contains thirteen questions followed by thirteen answers so in a typical classroom with twenty-six students each student will get a part. Each index card will be numbered one through thirteen and will say question or answer. We will proceed to read the interview together in question and answer form. Students will take turns reading aloud as if they are the role of the interviewer or interviewee. Organizing the lesson in the manner holds all students accountable because they each have responsibility in the learning. Also, it is more interactive and each student gets an opportunity to participate and express their voice.

Discussion of reading: How does Cisneros identify herself? What is her most difficult challenge? How did Cisneros find her voice as a writer? Does Cisneros feel that society views women in a positive or negative way?

Writing: Considering the interview we read, create three potential interview questions you would ask a female role model. When students finish generating their individual questions we will create a class list of potential interview questions. Some examples for possible interview questions may be: What do you remember most about growing up? What was the hardest experience you encountered? How did you manage to get through difficult times? Did you have a role model that guided you in the right direction? What were you passionate about?

Homework/Independent Assignment: Students will choose ten of the questions the class generated for potential interview questions and conduct an interview with a female role model of their choice. The interview will be in question and answer format similar to the Cisneros interview. The interview will be typed as a finished product and presented to the class one week from the date assigned.

Lesson Two: Response to Literature

Purpose: To increase reading comprehension skills by recognizing sensory and descriptive language in the literature. This short story provides an effective example for teaching this lesson because it is manageable for students in length; however the author does not sacrifice impact with brevity. Also, the topic can extend to discussion on gender roles and female expectations in society.

Initiation: Students will respond to an anticipation guide as a pre-reading strategy to the short story Girl by Jamaica Kincaid. The anticipation guide will consist of a list of statements organized in the form of a table that initiate an emotional response. For example, cooking, cleaning and raising children are not really considered work. Students will circle whether they agree or disagree with the statements provided prior to reading the story.

Reading: Students will read the story Girl by Jamaica Kincaid once independently. We will read the story a second time aloud while I read aloud students will highlight any words that they view significant to the meaning of the story in one color as well as sensory words in another color. Students will proceed with the Point Reading activity in an attempt to decipher meaning from the text. The purpose of this activity is to demonstrate to the students that multiple readings increase reading comprehension skills and overall understand of the text. Also, students will notice that after the first reading they didn’t necessarily understand the meaning in fact many will have questions and this is the right opportunity to have students discuss the text. Also, after students highlight the most important word they can tell why they chose that word which will later lead to a better understanding of the short story.

Discussion: After reading the story, I will make a list of all the sensory words the students discovered and post them on a transparency. On another transparency, I will transcribe significant words in the text. Because Kincaid uses a great deal of sensory language it would be effective for students to chart out their thinking from the text emphasizing the words that represent the five senses. What was the most important word or phrase? Does this remind you of anything you have heard, seen, read? What questions do you still have of the text?

Closure: Students will reconsider the anticipation guide to check their understanding and monitor if they have any changes in their thinking after reading the short story Girl. Does the story affirm their thinking or does the story alter their thinking? Students will discuss the change or consistency of their responses.

Lesson Three: Poem Interpretation

Purpose: To strengthen analytical and reading comprehension skills by reflecting on a poem.

Initiation: Students will participate in a pre-reading activity called Tea Party described by Kylene Beers to initiate thinking about the text before reading the text. The students will be able to make predictions about the text by using the information provided to make inferences about the relationships and sequencing. I find that students are often intimidated when I ask them to make inferences because they assume the activity is too sophisticated. However, what many students do not realize is that they make inferences on a daily basis subconsciously without even realizing they are practicing the skill. Students activate prior knowledge when they make inferences about a text before reading the text. For this particular lesson students are given separate lines from the poem Introspection by Nikki Giovanni. Students will consult with classmates by reading their line to as many people in a five minute period. Students will try to construct the poem from the various lines distributed. Students will read the lines they have organized and brainstorm about what they think the poem might be about and why they think so.

Reading: Students will read the whole copy form of Giovanni’s Introspection once independently, once following along while the teacher reads it aloud, and once in which each student will read a line as we go around the room.

Writing: Students will question the text by writing three “I wonder why questions” independently. Students will question anything they are uncertain about in the poem beginning each question with “I wonder why”.

Discussion: Students will exchange their questions with a partner and their partner will answer their questions while they answer their partner’s question. After, students will return papers and agree or disagree with the possible answers. If they disagree, students will describe what they feel the answer should be. So, when they are finished each student will have three questions with three possible answers that they agree or disagree with and explain why.

Closure: Students will check their predictions and see how they have changed by speculating on the meaning of the poem; that is an interpretation of the poem after multiple readings.

Lesson Four: Discussing Positive Black Women by examining Rap Lyrics and Poetry

Purpose: It is my understanding that for some reason black history education starts and finishes with Martin Luther King Jr. for many students that I teach. If they were taught about other aspects of black history they have not retained that knowledge. Students I have asked on the high school level know mainly Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and Rosa Parks. My observations of this injustice, that many black students do not know their history was apparent when I taught the play Fences by August Wilson. Prior to beginning the play, we learned about the time period leading up to and surrounding the civil rights movement. I have also noticed that students are easily persuaded by the medias’ image of black figures which is in many ways inaccurate and derogatory. During a time when role models are few and far between, it is imperative that students are exposed to positive images from prominent figures that cultivate solid morals and values. As a Language Arts teacher, poetry is always a genre that the students struggle with, especially the reluctant students who have been turned off by poetry and its ambiguity and difficulty level. However, I feel that if poetry is presented in a way that the students can relate to they are more readily engaged. Poetry is comparable to music lyrics because of its musical quality and the fluidity of words that can be interpreted in numerous ways. Many of the students that I teach enjoy rap and rhythm and blues music, so poetry and rap music make sense to incorporate together for a successful teaching strategy. Because women are generally portrayed in a negative image in rap music I chose to use rap lyrics that described women in a positive light along with a strong female poet Maya Angelou.

Initiation: It is important to precede this lesson with the sound recording of Angelou sharing her life as a child especially for this unit that concerns identity because she has endured many obstacles that have strengthened her character and shaped the successful woman she has become. Angelou is a good example to model to students because she is direct and the students can relate to her descriptive words. Also, in this particular sound recording she demonstrates a reading of her poem that illustrates the musical aspect of her words. Students will be assessed of their knowledge of the issues in the sound recording by the questions and the class discussion that precede the lyric poem pairing. Phenomenal Woman or Still I Rise are two examples of Maya Angelou poems that convey a positive image of female identity. Erika Badu or Lauren Hill are two female artists that convey messages of strong women who have endured struggles and survived.

Cooperative learning groups: Students will be organized into small groups of three to four. After listening to the poem and the lyrics they will answer the questions in writing together.

____

Reading: Students will receive a copy of the lyrics they will follow along with the sound recording and underline the most important word or phrase. Students will answer the following questions to accompany the song: What do you think the most important word in the text is and why?, Does this remind you of anything that you’ve seen either a movie, a book, another song, a story that you’ve heard from a friend or family member? How do the lyrics make you feel? What types of emotions do you think the artist is trying to convey to the audience? Students will use the same procedure and questions for the sound recording of the Angelou poems.

Writing: Students will chart their thinking on a transparency and share their information with the class.

Lesson Five: How powerful is the media’s representation of women?

Purpose: Students will use a variety of magazines to critique the media’s representation of female body images. This activity allows students to practice using a critical eye as they evaluate the different advertisements and articles that make up a typical female targeted audience magazine. Students will notice that many of the articles have a consistent theme base such as advice columns from experts on love, marriage, relationships, and sex, which reinforce the emphasis that women are interdependent and relationship oriented. Also, students will observe that many articles contain information on conflict resolution skills, communication with significant others, family and friends which are considered to be general qualities that women are expected to possess. Many articles describe how to accommodate others and improve appearances by weigh of clothes, changing body type through excursive and dieting as well as cosmetics. Students will evaluate the advertisements by recognizing marketing strategies that companies use to sell their products by way of celebrity endorsement, sexual appeal, status, statistic and Band wagon.

Hands on: Students will each choose a different advertisement to evaluate independently. Students will answer the following questions: Describe the product that is being marketed in this particular advertisement. Which technique does the company use to market their product? What type of audience do you think the company is targeting? How are women represented in this advertisement? How are men represented in this advertisement? Do the models in the advertisement represent the average person, why or why not? Do the images display an array of body types, are they realistic representations? Is their one central standard of beauty that you notice in the ads you have reviewed, if so what are the standards of beauty projected in the marketing strategy? What messages are these ads provided to adolescence about female beauty?

Published thinking: On a piece of poster board provided students will cut out the ad they have chosen and glue it in the middle of the paper. Students will use markers to label their responses to the above prompts on the poster board around the ad by diagramming with arrows that led from the image to their remarks.

Writing: Students will finish by reflecting in their journals about the activity and making a personal connection with the material presented and their lives. Considering the discussion and the magazine evaluations how does the media’s representation of body image and female standards of beauty affect the way you view yourself, explain? To modify this prompt for males I would ask them to write about how the media’s representation of body image and female standards of beauty affect the way you view women that you interact with on a daily basis?

Discussion: Sharing the responses from both the males and females will most certainly initiate an interesting discussion.

Lesson Six: Memoirs

Purpose: People are experts on their own lives. There is a persistent desire within people to convey or tell their stories in their own words. The genre of memoir is an effective way for students to practice the writing process and express their voice by way of the written word. Writing is a process that must be practiced regularly to improve. Frequently, students in my classroom practice writing informally through journaling, but the memoir is a step towards more formal published writing. My students have no difficulties expressing themselves verbally. They readily participate in conversation and class discussion; however they often lack the appropriate skills to communicate in writing to their audience. I like to use the memoir lesson to get the students interested in writing by discussing a specific time or event in their lives. Students will use descriptive, sensory language to describe a vivid memory using action words to paint a picture to the reader taking the reader on a journey along with the writer. Also, this lesson requires that students convey their experience through specific, detailed accounts there is no room for ambiguity or vagueness in a memoir. This lesson is the first lesson of a unit on teaching memoir.

Initiation: Students will participate in a chalk-talk about memory. I will place the word memory in a circle on the board and students will take turns writing everything they know about memory; for example, what is their earliest memory, what is memory? There are three rules for chalk-talk: everyone must go at least once, no one must talk during the activity only through writing, and no one can cross off anyone’s response.

Reading: Before assigning a memoir for students to write I like to model an example of my own personal memoir. If a personal memoir is unavailable, any vignette from Sandra Cisneros’ The House on Mango Street will be a helpful example for explaining the genre. Also, Cisneros is an appropriate pairing to incorporate while beginning to discuss gender and adolescence. What memory is the author conveying to the reader? What words does the author use to convey their message? What emotions do you feel as you read the memoir?

Pre-Writing: Students will brainstorm about an event in their past that sparks emotion or that they feel passionate about. For example, quince cumpleanos, graduation, the first day of high school or middle school, the birth of a child, a death or illness in the family, the loss of a friend, the end of a relationship. All of these examples noted above give the students an outlet or voice to express themselves through writing and sort out identity issues and adolescent experiences in a personalized genre.

Chalk-Talk is an activity I learned during a Connecticut Writing Project seminar. It is a method for introducing a topic and gaining prior knowledge from the students. The teacher will place a word or a phrase on the board and have students take turns writing a comment, example, question or description. After, each student has written as much as they can on the topic or time has elapsed the teacher will discuss the class findings.

Note created Oct 29, 2006
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Anticipation Guide is made up of statements that interest the students. The anticipation guide asks the student to agree or disagree with the statements presented. Generally, the statements are controversial and will spark a debate. The purpose is to get students thinking about the issues that will appear later in the text as the read.

Note created Oct 29, 2006
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Tea Party is a strategy that uses lines from the text to make predictions and inferences about meaning. This activity is called Tea Party because students are out of their desks interacting with each other and reading the lines provided similar to a party in which participants engage in conversation or mingle with others exchanging information. The lines from the text are presented to the students before they view a whole copy of the text, so the students are not familiar with the material they are just asked to take the lines they receive and share them with their classmates. After students share information they will attempt to organize the information and read the organized lines to make predictions and inferences about what they will read.

Note created Oct 29, 2006
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Think/Pair/Share allows the student to think about the topic and write their individual response, pair up with a partner closest to them and share their responses. This strategy allows the class to gain instant peer feedback in a smaller group setting with may be less intimidating than larger cooperative learning groups or whole class discussion where some students might feel reluctant to share their work.

Note created Oct 29, 2006
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Read alouds are effective strategies for modeling fluency and voice. Reluctant readers benefit from hearing skilled readers read aloud. The teacher will read the chosen text to the students in whole class instruction. I have discovered that students enjoy being read to regardless of their age. Picture books are good resources for read alouds

Note created Oct 29, 2006
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Point Reading is a strategy that increases comprehension and develops fluency through multiple readings. Poetry is an excellent genre for administering the point reading strategy. Before I introduce this strategy I like to give the students a justification for re-reading a text by making a connection to their interests. For example, I might ask the students about their favorite movie and ask them how many times they have viewed this particular movie. This line of questioning gets students excited about their movie and leads into a discussion about multiple viewing and multiple reading. At this time, I will explain to students that when you read you visualize similar to creating a movie in your head. Also, when you see a movie more than once you notice things that you would not have necessarily noticed had you only viewed the movie once. To use the point reading strategy first, the teacher will read the text one time while the students follow along. Next, the teacher will read the text again while the student highlights or underlines words, phrase, or lines that are significant to the meaning of the text. After, the teacher will read the text and the students will join in with the reading when they get to the point they have highlighted. After, the teacher will create a list from the students’ responses and narrow down the list to the most important one. This strategy is used as a method for interpreting the text and comprehending the meaning.

Note created Oct 29, 2006
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source

American Romanticism
  Online resources

American Romanticism: good overview of the major writers: http://usinfo.state.gov/products/pubs/oal/lit3.htm

Teaching Hawthorne
  Exploring the darkness

Hawthorne in Salem offers a good selection of critical commentary and background information

The modern bias
  Infatuated by Emerson and Whitman

Continuing the work of re-educating myself after concluding that my degrees in English included massive doses of mideducation, I find myself reading with quite a lot of skepticism the anthology (Elements of Literature, Fifth Course, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003) Ive been given to teach American Literature.

In the student’s introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for example, I came across this: . . .his tendency to leave these [Christian] values unexamined led to poetry that often offered easy comfort at the expense of illumination.”

Similar comments are made about the other Fireside Poets--John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes: Their choice of subject matter--love, patriotism, nature, family, God, and religion--was, for the most part, comforting rather than challenging to their audienceӔ (149). To illustrate the problem,Ӕ the editors refer students, dismissively, to one of Longfellows poems:

A Psalm of Life

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the worlds broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, however pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God oגerhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing oer lifeҒs solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

IsnҒt that simply awful? Or so the textbook editors invite us to think. Good writing, we have been told, challenges our traditional beliefs.

This, of course, is the modern bias. We are to give up our darkened faith in revealed religion, traditional morality and scriptural authority. We are to follow the new priests of art and of the intellect who will question everything and lead us to the future. Since weve been on that road for well over a hundred years now, it seems appropriate to ask where it has led.

“the Modern Movement was all a ghastly mistake, like Communism, and that, as with Communism, it will take a century or so to clean up the mess. “ John Derbyshire We moderns have cut ourselves off from a visionary tradition that formed many of the world’s most profound poets.

The text is quite clear which writers are better than Longfellow: Emerson and Whitman: ғLimited by their essential literary conservatism, the Fireside Poets were unable to recognize the poetry of the future, which was being written right under their noses. Whittiers response in 1855 to reading the first volume of a certain poetҒs work was to throw the book into the fire. Ralph Waldo Emersons response was much more far-sighted. ґI greet you, Emerson wrote to this maverick poet, Walt Whitman, ґat the beginning of a great career.Ҕ (150)

This, from an introduction not to Emerson or Whitman, but to Whittier and Longfellow. If you were a student encountering them for the first time, would you continue on? Or would you flip ahead to the realӔ writers--Emerson and Whitman?

Lest a student tempted to read these writers on their own terms, we get this from the introduction to William Cullen Bryant: Today BryantӒs poems are not read as the spiritual counsels they were meant to be; instead, they are read as period pieces that authentically reflect their times (169).

So there. This is dead stuff. Only interesting as historical evidence of the dark past.

In a sense, the textbook writers are obliged to say something such. After all, their task is to introduce newcomers to the established literary tradition, and there is little doubt either that the Emerson and Whitman are important figures in todayԒs canon or that Longfellow has been dropped. Its quite true, as a historical matter, that Longfellow and Bryant are no longer taken seriously by the literary establishment.

But what may be more worth thinking about is that the literary establishment is no longer taken seriously by--well, by anyone, except those whose business it is to take it seriously. Longfellow was a vastly popular poet in a way no poet, except possibly Robert Frost, was in the twentieth century.

Continuing the work of re-educating myself after concluding that my degrees in English included massive doses of mideducation, I find myself reading with quite a lot of skepticism the anthology (Elements of Literature, Fifth Course, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 2003) I’ve been given to teach American Literature.

In the student’s introduction to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for example, I came across this: . . .his tendency to leave these [Christian] values unexamined led to poetry that often offered easy comfort at the expense of illumination.Ҕ
Similar comments are made about the other Fireside Poets--John Greenleaf Whittier, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Their choice of subject matter--love, patriotism, nature, family, God, and religion--was, for the most part, comforting rather than challenging to their audience” (149). To illustrate the “problem,” the editors refer students, dismissively, to one of Longfellow’s poems:

A Psalm of Life

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream! --
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the worlds broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howeҒer pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God oגerhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing oer lifeҒs solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

The text is quite clear which writers are better than Longfellow: Emerson and Whitman: “Limited by their essential literary conservatism, the Fireside Poets were unable to recognize the poetry of the future, which was being written right under their noses. Whittier’s response in 1855 to reading the first volume of a certain poet’s work was to throw the book into the fire. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s response was much more far-sighted. “I greet you,” Emerson wrote to this maverick poet, Walt Whitman, “at the beginning of a great career.” (150) This, from an introduction not to Emerson or Whitman, but to Whittier and Longfellow. If you were a student encountering them for the first time, would you pay attention?

Lest a student be so tempted, we get this from the introduction to William Cullen Bryant: “Today Bryant’s poems are not read as the spiritual counsels they were meant to be; intead, they are read as period pieces that authentically reflect their times” (169).

Reading Longfellow
  Background and Context

CHILDREN

Come to me, O ye children!
For I hear you at your play,
And the questions that perplexed me
Have vanished quite away.

Ye open the eastern windows,
That look towards the sun,
Where thoughts are singing swallows
And the brooks of morning run.

In your hearts are the birds and the sunshine,
In your thoughts the brooklet’s flow,
But in mine is the wind of Autumn
And the first fall of the snow.

Ah! what would the world be to us
If the children were no more?
We should dread the desert behind us
Worse than the dark before.

What the leaves are to the forest,
With light and air for food,
Ere their sweet and tender juices
Have been hardened into wood,--

That to the world are children;
Through them it feels the glow
Of a brighter and sunnier climate
Than reaches the trunks below.

Come to me, O ye children!
And whisper in my ear
What the birds and the winds are singing
In your sunny atmosphere.

For what are all our contrivings,
And the wisdom of our books,
When compared with your caresses,
And the gladness of your looks?

Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;
For ye are living poems,
And all the rest are dead.

Longfellow believed that the purpose of the imagination was not “to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, not creation but insight.” A Christian humanist, he generally avoided the sentimental nature pantheism popular in his time, and his essay The Defence of Poetry, published in the North American Review (1832), anticipated much of what Ralph Waldo Emerson would say, five years later, in his address “The American Scholar” to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa Society.

Longfellow & the fate of modern poetry: an essay by John Derbyshire published in the New Criterion. Derbyshire considers the mystery of why we no longer enjoy poetry as Longfellow’s audience did and of why modern critics do not think he matters: “We do not read as our grandfathers read, we do not hear as they heard.”

Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life:

“By ignoring Longfellow, or by mystifying or satirizing his poetry when we do not ignore it, we refuse to look nineteenth-century America full in the face. Longfellows critical twilight is at root historical avoidance.”

Stream audio (RAM) All things considered, November 3, 2000 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was one of the most famous Americans of his day. His influence on American mythology, through poems like The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, was profound. Poet J.D. McClatchy has edited a new compilation of the Longfellow’s work. McClatchy talks to host Linda Wertheimer about Longfellow’s prolific writing, and his sway on how American’s view themselves and their history.

Paul Revere’s Ride

Although there have been several movements to debunk “Paul Revere’s Ride,” due to its lack of historical accuracy, the poem has remained very much alive in our national consciousness. Warren Harding, president during the fashionable reign of debunk criticism, perhaps said it best when he remarked, “An iconoclastic American said there never was a ride by Paul Revere. Somebody made the ride, and stirred the minutemen in the colonies to fight the battle of Lexington, which was the beginning of independence in the new Republic of America. I love the story of Paul Revere, whether he rode or not” (Fischer 337). Thus, “despite every well-intentioned effort to correct it historically, Revere’s story is for all practical purposes the one Longfellow created for him,” (Calhoun 261). It was what Paul Revere’s Ride came to symbolize that was important, not the actual details of the ride itself.

Cross of Snow

Traditionally the Petrarchan sonnet as used by Francesco Petrarch was a 14 line lyric poem using a pattern of hendecasyllables and a strict end-line rhyme scheme; the first twelve lines followed one pattern and the last two lines another. The last two lines were the voltaғ or turnԓ in the poem. When the sonnet came to the United States sometime after 1775, through the work of Colonel David Humphreys, Longfellow was one of the first to write widely in this form, which he adapted to suit his tone.

Hendecasyllable verse (in Italian endecasillabo) is a kind of verse used mostly in Italian poetry, defined by its having the last stress on the tenth syllable. When, as often happens, this stress falls on the penultimate syllable, the line has exactly eleven syllables (and the literal meaning of the word is just “of eleven syllables").

Since 1900 poets have modified and experimented with the traditional traits of the sonnet form. The form Longfellow frequently used was a 14 line lyric poem written in iambic pentameter and divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The rhyme scheme for the octave was abbaabbaԓ and for the sestet was cdecde.ԓ

The voltaԓ Longfellow and the American Sonnet usually occurred between the octave and the sestet. In most sonnets that follow this form, the octave describes an image/setting and the sestet describes a concept/feeling. Longfellows sonnet ԒThe Cross of Snow was inspired by two images familiar to Longfellow. One was FannyӔs portrait by Samuel Worcester Rowse (1859) and the other was an engraving of Jacksons photograph of the ҒMountain of the Holy Cross (1875). This engraving showed a striking natural phenomenon in the Rocky Mountains; snowfilled crevices on the side of a mountain in the Rockies projected the image of a cross which could be seen from many miles away. Because the crevices were so high on the mountain, the crevices remained snow-filled year around.

In the mid 1800Ӕs few Easterners, including Longfellow, had visited the Rocky Mountains, and such an image created much interest back East.

Also of interest back East was the rather old-fashioned practice of sealing a lock of a childs hair into a paper packet. While doing so, FannyҒs dress caught fire. She ran to Henrys study where he put out the flames. However, her lower body and torso were badly burned, and she died the following morning, July 10, 1861. Eighteen years after FannyҒs tragic death, Longfellow uses the image on the mountain to describe his feelings about her and her death.

The octave locates her portrait in their bedroom where she died. He agonizes over her physical pain and extols the virtue of her soul. The voltaғ is after the eighth line and turns the readers focus to the first three lines of the sestet, which describe the cross-shaped, snow-filled crevices on the side of the mountain Ԓin the distant West. The last three lines of the sestet metaphorically describe the cross of sorrow Henry has worn for eighteen years. Just as the snow in the crevices remains an entire season and season after season, his love for Fanny remains Ӕchangeless since the day she died.

My Lost Youth

A slide show of Longfellow’s Portland, Maine boyhood home, prepared by the Maine Historical Society

Field Notes and Local Culture
  Enhancing place through writing

Thinking about Thinking

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a masterpiece of world art. Michelangelo spent four years working on scaffolding up to fifty feet from the floor, lying cramped on his back, straining in dim light to depict the cosmos as people of his time understood it. In scene after scene, he interpreted important events from the Bible—the separation of light and dark, the creation of humanity, the expulsion from innocence. Each scene is powerful on its own, but each is also related to all the others, and to understand this mural is maybe to understand the intellectual and emotional framework of the Renaissance itself.

How did he imagine such a large and complex work? How did his thinking become powerful enough to bring “the big picture” into focus? According to psychology professor Merlin Donald, even a disciplined genius such as Michelangelo could not possibly hold the complete work in mind all at once. Human brains lack the working memory for such feats. (1)

And, like all of us, Michelangelo had things to think about besides his work. During the time he worked on the painting, he also dealt with severe financial and family problems, as well as an assortment of physical ailments. His accomplishment was not merely completing a great work of art; it was doing so while besieged by other problems. I find it easy to imagine him getting back to his work some mornings, sore and stressed, his thoughts about the painting fuzzy and unclear. When we turn our attention to issues such as money woes or that worsening back problem, we activate neural structures throughout the brain that we’ve constructed to handle such problems, and the structures associated with other areas of thought, such as our creative work, necessarily recede.

How did the artist remember what he had done, what he was doing, and what ideas he had for moving forward?

He looked at the painting.

He examined various figures, and what their gestures brought to mind, and what the quality and color of light evoked. He looked sometimes at the overall scheme, and how a scene in one place enlarged and changed the meaning of a scene in a different place, and he looked sometimes at details, how the line of a finger could evoke either passivity or power. Sometimes he pondered conceptual issues on a cosmic scale; sometimes he experimented with his materials to get the right texture. He could only concentrate on one or a few things at any given moment, but he could move his attention around, and the painting stayed where he had put it, allowing him to make progress.

No matter how complex things sometimes seemed, at some point in his looking, the next step became clear. His health and his money problems faded like the house lights when the play begins.

To imagine into existence the entire mural, Michelangelo had to rely on memory fields outside his brain. The painting itself was such a memory field. Michelangelo did what every artist or writer or engineer or architect does to complete large works. He made notes and drawings.

As he worked, the painting itself became an extension of his memory, as necessary to thought and imagination as the neural circuits of his brain. In effect, he had two memory systems: one inside his brain, made of chemicals and neurons and electric impulses, which scientists call engrams, and one outside his brain, which scientists call exograms, in this case made of pigments and oils and plaster. His mind constantly accessed both memory fields.

As he examined the painting in progress, he came alive again inside a place of his own creation. Neural structures lit up and the artist again entered the drama of the whole of creation—a majestic narrative of the great round of time from first creation to final judgment. He could not have imagined or thought what he did without putting “out there” an extension of his consciousness in symbolic representations.

It is much the same with all intellectual work on a large scale. Writers seldom if ever “figure it out” and then write it down. Most often writing it down is figuring it out. Or rather, writing it down and then reading, re-reading, adding, changing, removing, rearranging, re-reading, and re-writing is figuring it out. Without the writing, many of the connections, insights, ideas, and conclusions could not have occurred.

The painting itself was an aspect of Michelangelo’s mind, as necessary to his thought as the brain cells themselves.

He used the painting to hold thoughts and impressions in place, so his limited working memory could move forward. By representing his thoughts on a durable medium outside his brain, Michelangelo could return to them over and over giving them prolonged attention, revising what was there and building on it. He could not have imagined the vast mural—except in a vague and general way—without having painted it.

Michelangelo said that his unusual creative power had as much to do with persistence and hard work as with raw talent. Accomplishment takes time. Much of the secret, according to many people of great accomplishment, is the capacity to continue paying attention long after most people have turned their attention back to their chores or their pleasures.

This power of persistent attention can be magnified many times through writing, drawing and calculating. Without a ceiling or a wall to paint on, or a sketchbook to jot in, or a notebook to scribble in, or a website to tinker with, the human mind is quite limited in what it can imagine. One of the most astonishing things in the biosphere is how humans have extended their minds through external memory fields. These memory fields are important because our conscious minds, where we govern and plan our work, can only hold a few things at a time.

About seven. Seven, plus or minus two, to be more precise. The psychologist George Miller in a famous paper “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” published in 1956 pointed out that the number seven appears frequently in the literature of psychology as the limit of what we can store in short-term memory. The bandwidth of human consciousness is very narrow. You can remember a seven-digit number long enough to dial it. But to remember two or three seven-digit numbers, you need to jot them down.

When you jot them down, you are augmenting the memory available in the neural circuits in your brain with symbols on a piece of paper. The paper becomes the brain’s external storage, a new medium for extending consciousness. In many ways, such media work better than the neural circuitry we get from biology. We can’t hold words or images clearly in our working memory long enough for detailed study or reflection. “Natural memory is poor, lacks definition and detail, and is notoriously unreliable,” the scientists tell us. “The external memory field gives us sharper and more durable mental representations. This allows the conscious mind to reflect on thought itself and to evolve longer, more abstract, procedures.” (2)

The shift in consciousness that occurred with our development of external memory fields may be the most stunning occurrence in the history of the biosphere. This was done mostly through the emergence of written symbol systems and it occurred very recently—maybe less than ten thousand years ago, scientists now believe. We may be biologically no smarter than our stone age ancestors, but we have developed new memory media that greatly expand what we can achieve with our minds.

Field notes are a form of such media—they are the basic building blocks of many or most large projects. They are a good place to begin community self-study projects because they are located, for many people, in the “zone of proximal development.” This is psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s term for a theoretical space that skilled teachers identify and use in planning their teaching. It is made up of those skills that are just beyond what the learner can currently do. When we try to learn things that are too far out of reach, it’s easy to conclude we can never “get it.” Conversely, when we do only what we are already good at, we tend to get bored.

But we learn with maximum efficiency and excitement within the zone of proximal development. It’s a stimulating space. We are, after all, created to learn—"informavores," Merlin Donald calls us.

If you want to create something like the Sistine Chapel, an extension of your own consciousness, a place you can go to clarify and strengthen your thoughts, a refuge from a world of chores, you can begin by sketching your own hand, or writing a detailed set of notes about what goes on in the corner supermarket.

Writing polished articles and essays requires many sub-skills, among the most important of which are making and organizing notes. Novice writers can learn what they need to know largely by concentrating on making careful notes. Done well, such notes can have real historical value. You can think of the field notes you jot while observing some aspect of the world as the first draft of culture.

When we make field notes about people we interview, the history or ecology of sites we visit, actions we undertake, meetings we attend, adventures we have, and how things seem at various moments, we are in a sense on the front lines of culture, converting ignorance to knowledge.

Every family and neighborhood needs its Sistine Chapels: spaces transformed by human intelligence and labor into places that interpret where we are in the cosmos. The innate capacity to create such places is not rare. It is abundant, deeply ingrained in our nature and broadly fostered by literate culture.

You may as well get started.

Art and Local Culture

You may think that you are not Michelangelo, you are not creating a great masterpiece, and so what you do does not much matter. If so, you are quite wrong. You are likely developing considerable artistry in some area of your life. In truth, great artistry is not rare. It is only fame that is rare, but fame is a different and a lesser thing than artistry. Fame is an artifact of large-scale, centralized societies, and more often than not it is unrelated to greatness.

Artistry is something else. In a nutshell, art is about making and doing, and our world is held together by ordinary people scattered broadly among us who live as great artists. Anyone looking for them will meet them continually. A teacher who learns an important discipline while interacting deeply with younger minds, seeing what they know and can do, arranging projects to keep them moving along the path toward greater intelligence, is doing something as difficult and important as what Michelangelo did. A police officer entering hundreds of tense social situations each year, balancing keen perceptions of people and events with a continually growing repertoire of moves to get people to act wisely, to defuse trouble, to maintain a workable order, can be as great an artist as those we read about. A farmer or gardener who comes to know a particular place and what it offers and does not offer to life through the changing seasons, not to mention what life in its diverse forms might need, and learns how to bring that place to a robust form of health we call beauty, is combining labor and meditation in an artistry worthy of our fondest respect.

Such people learn more deeply and live more fully when a regular part of their work is documenting and reflecting on what they see and do. And if enough of their words were easily available to other interested minds, this alone would sponsor a flowering of human culture beyond anything we have yet seen.

Our destiny is to become a race of artists and scientists and scholars, and we are far along this path. We usually think of these as specialties, reserved for the few, but access to knowledge and tools to work with is spreading rapidly. It is no longer necessary, for example, to be affiliated with a university to have ready access to higher learning through books, journals, conferences and informed dialogue. It is no longer necessary to be certified by some authority to teach, learn, or publish.

We have mostly (though not completely) succeeded at a crucial step toward universal literacy: today, most adults in America can read a newspaper, decipher a letter from the bank, or read an email from a son or daughter away from home. This is no small achievement.

The educational goal for today must be to move beyond simple literacy and to develop ourselves into highly skilled writers—a people who master their own words and meanings enough to defend against being mastered by other people’s words and meanings. We keep responding to school failure by lowering our aim and making threats, but we won’t make much progress until we begin talking to people about hope and joy and power.

Even after technologies such as the printing presses drove our progress toward universal reading by making books less rare, publishing was still limited to a very few. Now newer technologies are making access to publishing cheap and easy. Any small group that want to create and preserve its own literature can now find the means to do so.

The writing habit is a kind of meditation, akin to what any artist does along the way to making a masterpiece, and making good field notes is not a trivial skill. When you enter a situation intent on seeing and documenting it as fully as possible, that purpose prepares your mind to use its resources to the fullest.

There are many ways the note-making or journaling habit can help you think more powerfully. I’ll mention three.

Enhancing Memory

You probably won’t remember the facts and details you need to write well if you don’t jot things down immediately. The usual process of making field notes is to do jottings as things are happening, and then to write up more complete notes as soon as possible, preferably later the same day. I generally do something in between, making jottings when things are happening quickly, and writing more finished passages as I can.

Suppose you interviewed a retired farmer, Ed Smythe, two weeks ago, and now it is time to write up your findings. You might begin with a description of the interview setting. “The old man met us in the driveway, outside his garage,” you might begin, hoping to communicate what you experienced at the interview.

Then what?

You were quite impressed with the elderly gentleman—his habits of meticulous work and his commitment to keeping his part of the world in order through his own labor, despite his age and frailty. You could just say that: “He has a commitment to keeping the world in order despite his age.” But that seems a little flat.

Since you want to communicate the impressions he made, you want to describe what you saw and heard, to give the reader the same chance you had to experience the event.

So what did you see and hear?

If you’re like most people, the events of two weeks ago are now quite foggy.

You may remember conclusions you reached during the interview but your recollection of specific details—what the speaker did with his hands as he talked, what birds were singing, what objects were in the room—will fade quite quickly. Our memories don’t work well for vivid writing.

One of the tricks of remembering things is simply to hold them in consciousness long enough for them to make a more durable impression. Can you draw a Lincoln penny, getting all the design elements in the right places? There are four design elements on each side. If you are like most people, you may remember two or three of them, although you’ve probably seen pennies hundreds of times. The problem is that we tend not to pay attention to them long enough to make a durable impression.

If you take a penny out of your pocket right now and draw it, holding it in your awareness for a bit of time, you probably won’t have any trouble sketching it again tomorrow from memory. You can easily remember that on one side is Lincoln’s portrait, with the motto “In God We Trust” at the top, the word “Liberty” on the left, and the date of coinage on the right. The other side, you will remember, has an engraving of the Lincoln Memorial with “The United States of America” across the top, “E Pluribus Unum” under that, and “One Cent” at the bottom.

When we jot impressions down, we magnify the time they are in our consciousness, making it more likely we will remember them. Many students know that if they take careful notes of a lecture, they can remember it without reviewing the notes, but that if they don’t take notes, they won’t remember it. They take notes with no intention of studying them, but simply as a way of paying attention, of holding thoughts and impressions in mind long enough for them to register in memory.

Of course, if I test you again on that penny a month from now, you’ll probably have forgotten much of it again. What’s on a penny is not, after all, of great importance to you. You don’t much care. The mind is designed to be very good at forgetting things we don’t care about. Forgetting is very important. If you remembered everything you learned—the phone number where you used to work, what you wore to school on the third Monday in October your sophomore year, the precise location on a map of all the countries you have never visited, the prices of all the items you purchased on your last trip to the supermarket—you would drown in data. Though your brain’s resources are vast—your neural pathways may represent a network a million times more complex than the entire global internet—they are not unlimited.

So we discard information quickly to make room for new information, staying attuned to the world changing around us. This discarding of information occurs vividly when we are startled. An unexpected sound or image in our sensation field triggers a startle reflex, forcing us to focus on what is happening. When saber tooth tigers growl or seatbelt warning alarms beep, the thoughts we were thinking vanish, freeing up our mental resources. This occasionally has survival value.

Even when we are not startled, sensations fade from consciousness rapidly. We can keep vivid sensory impressions in our conscious minds for only ten to fifteen seconds. Our thoughts are similarly ephemeral. We can’t think long and complex thoughts without some way of stringing together brief segments. Our conscious thought is a stream of two to ten second moments, mostly occupied with what is happening in the world around us. One poet observed that it was hard to tell the difference between thinking and just gazing out the window.

“Until you have words in front of you to edit,” says anthropologist Harry Walcox, “words can jump around forever in your head in so abstract a form that they can neither be communicated to others nor sharpened to your own satisfaction.” (3) The poet Patricia Goedicke says she is “rich” when she has lots of unfinished drafts on hand, but “poor” when her projects have been mostly finished. Having something down on paper, even if it misses the mark, puts us much farther ahead in the thinking game than having nothing.

Without something like writing our thinking tends to be fragmentary and incoherent. The main joy of reading, for me, is simply the experience of sustained, coherent, complex thoughts. My mind alone is seldom so much fun as it is when it is following some other mind’s carefully constructed experiences—viewing Michelangelo’s painting, watching plays and movies, hearing intelligent lectures or epic poems or liturgies, or following symphonies.

Since forgetting is an essential survival skill, we do it in many ways. One is to simply summarize a lot of data into a conclusion, then throw away the data and keep the conclusion. You may have noticed that sometimes you remember an opinion without having a clear memory of what led you to it.

Science writer Tor Nørretranders uses the example of the checker at the supermarket. He enters the cost of each item until he gets to the sum, then he forgets all the other numbers. If you ask, “How much was that bottle of mayonnaise?” he’ll probably have to look it up. It’s only the total that is important. “That’ll be $21.38,” he might say. The amount of information included in the total is dramatically less than that included in the printout that lists each item and its cost, but unless there’s a mistake, the total is the information both of you are interested in. You write your check for $21.38, promptly forgetting the details.

Emotions

Fortunately, there is more to our minds than short-term memory. Some things we remember as long as we live. Some things make it into long-term memory. These are the things about which we have strong feelings. When an image or a statement evokes strong feelings, we are far more likely to remember it. It is probably the case that nothing gets into long-term memory unattached to an emotion. As an aside, this is why teaching without passion is not teaching at all. We remember best the things that are most important to us, and emotion is the mind’s way of registering of importance. Thinking and feeling are not separate activities.

Good researchers are alert to their own emotional reactions. Feelings of disgust or delight or anger or warmth flag the mind, alerting it that something important may be happening. Since we can see and hear faster than we can ponder, events that might move us can slip by before we realize what they mean. But if we feel an emotion stirring, even if we’re not sure what to make of it, and jot down a word or two as a memory cue, we can return to it later, retrieve it and reflect on it.

Writers call those facts that trigger associations with larger patterns or that encode larger meanings “telling details.” The art of poetry frequently revolves around noticing telling details and isolating them on the page to call attention to them. Field researchers can benefit from cultivating a similar awareness. As the afternoon sun moves towards evening in the sky, poet William Stafford notices that a dark shadow moves across the floor toward him. Robert Frost sees that as a boy climbs a birch toward heaven, his own weight bends the tree and he is returned to earth. W. S. Merwin observes travelers flying above spectacular views of the earth, reading newspapers and thinking of money.

Quite often as I’m working up a finished report from my field notes, a few jotted lines or even a single word will remind me of an entire segment of the experience that I had simply forgotten until I reviewed the notes. Since our minds store long-term memories by association, when we retrieve an impression we activate nearby memories as well, maybe from many periods of our lives. As we work on our notes, memories from many years ago, that we haven’t thought about for years, sometimes come to mind. These can help us understand the significance of the event we are thinking about.

Last week I attended an open house put on by a class of high school students I work with. They had completed a project researching the history of notable individuals in their home town. The audience sat at picnic tables under ponderosa pines on the lawn of the local museum which had sponsored their work and would archive their final products. Something in the sunlight on the pine needles overhead and the smell of the grass provoked a fleeting and subtle but very real feeling of gladness. In my notebook I simply jotted “pines, sunlight” then turned my mind back to following the speaker, who was talking about a star athlete from half a century before.

Back at home, as I wrote a report, I saw my jotting and paused and thought some more about that feeling. What came to mind were images of myself as a child, with my family on picnics. The setting of the school event had reminded me of all those times growing up when I felt surrounded by goodness—people who loved me and one another, peaceful sharing of time and stories, abundant food, a lovely place. Most of us, I hope, have memories of Eden, of childhood moments when the world felt right and we felt right within it. It was my personal memory of Eden that the light in the pines was prompting.

I didn’t refer to these memories directly when I wrote my report, but they helped me understand what seemed right about the education program I was describing: it brought people together in ways that made them happy. This was no small part of the motive force that made quality academic work possible, I thought. I needed to at least hint at that possibility to tell the truth about that school event.

What was important was not the light in the pine trees, exactly. I live amid pines and see them nearly every day of my life. The image was a cue that triggered a feeling—re-minding me of similar social situations in my past. I realized that the afternoon with its quality of light in the pines and its aroma of spring grass and with people enjoying one another, sharing thoughts about who they were, “belonged with” memories of childhood picnics. The association transformed that short-term memory into a long-term memory. I will remember that afternoon as an important instance of a way the world sometimes is, a mental resource that might yet serve me in ways I can’t predict.

Automaticity

Of course, passion is not the only thing that improves our thinking. So does learning. As we repeatedly do complex cognitive tasks, we become more skilled and they take less of our working memory. This accounts for the difference between a lawyer quickly scanning a brief looking for significant phrases, completely unaware that he is translating ink marks into words and combining words into thoughts, and a first grader struggling to remember what the mark “A” stands for, maybe having a flash of recognition as he recalls that it is the same as “a.”

“Automaticity” is the word scientists use for activities we have learned well enough, through the hard work of giving them deliberate attention, that we can do them without thinking about them. Driving a car is an common example. Beginning drivers need all their conscious attention to keep the car on the road, miss other cars, move the gearshift in synchronization with the gas pedal and the clutch, read road signs, and so on. When they have practiced enough, they do all these things in heavy traffic with no conscious attention at all, and their consciousness is freed to think about other things.

The first few times we try to create written texts based on experiences, we may be overwhelmed because too much is happening given how slowly we can process it. But things get easier with practice. Many writing problems are simply solved, once and for all, and don’t need to be thought about again. In my early efforts to write up finished works based on my notes, I continually found myself wanting information that I’d simply neglected to gather—biographical information on people I met, descriptions of rooms where events happened. With practice, we develop a better sense of what we are going to need later.

We can even learn to see automatically entire patterns, full of far more information than we could manage if we tried to gather it item by item. We learn to see a bigger picture, and become capable of dealing with larger and larger issues. A child has all he can do to keep track of a bouncing rubber ball, trying to predict and control its delightful behavior. A seasoned politician, on the other hand, may be tracking the interactions of international militarism that involves hundreds of personalities and many thousands of variables, all colored by centuries of history.

Chunking

Experts seem to have mental powers the rest of us don’t have—and in a sense this is true but it’s important to remember, with proper respect for talent, that these are usually learned rather than innate powers. What they can do, we can learn to do. A famous psychological study asked both novice and expert chess players to look at chess positions from actual games. Each position contained 25 pieces. People were given 5 to 10 seconds to look at the board before being asked to reproduce the positions from memory. Novices could get about 5 pieces right. This fits the theory that we can store 5 to 9 things in short term memory.

But expert players often got 22 pieces right. How did they do it?

The answer becomes clear when the experiment is repeated, but with pieces placed randomly rather than in positions from actual games. Faced with such a board, experts could remember the positions of no more pieces than novices could. (4)

This suggested that experts were not memorizing the positions of 22 individual pieces. Instead, they were memorizing patterns they had become familiar with through studying thousands of actual chess games. They automatically saw several pieces as parts of a larger whole they were familiar with. They were still only remembering 7 plus or minus 2 things, but instead of remembering individual pieces they were remembering chunks, or patterns, and each pattern contained several individual chess pieces.

As we become more expert through learning and conscious practice, we see more in the situations we face, but we don’t do this by increasing the bandwidth of our consciousness. We do it by increasing our fluency with parts of the task becoming automatic. As we work at documenting and interpreting the world around us, it becomes possible for us to see and do more.

In a very real way, it becomes possible for us to live more.

That being said, it probably needs to be pointed out that the testimony of a great many very good writers is that writing never becomes easy. Though writing field notes is a simpler task than writing novels or poems, all writers share the same plight: it takes effort. As parts of writing that were once hard become effortless, new challenges fill our minds. Real work never gets real easy. Fortunately, we can acquire a taste for difficulty, which is why marathons and chess have their devotees. It can be fun to live what Theodore Roosevelt called the “strenuous life.”

It’s probably the case that making good field notes will always be difficult, in the best possible ways.

Focusing Attention

I’ve heard that a typical Clark’s Nuthatcher can remember 10,000 hiding places for seeds, but I spent a half hour this morning trying to track down my car keys. Of course, the bird did not need to think about whether all the speakers for a conference it was putting on later this month have the right equipment scheduled in the right rooms, or whether it ever returned the funnel it borrowed from its father, or how much of that trip to Louisiana might really be tax deductible, or whether a chapter about something as common as writing notes would be helpful in a book about community research.

The fact is that I couldn’t remember where I put my keys because “I"—that part of my mind that is conscious of itself, among other things—never knew to begin with. When I laid them on my desk, where I “never” put them, my limited consciousness was focused elsewhere, and though my eyes certainly sent information about what I was doing and though my ears surely transmitted the sound of them clanking onto the oak surface, I was not paying attention. My limited consciousness was busy with other affairs, maybe looking for the notebook I mislaid yesterday.

Many things we can’t remember are things we never “knew” to begin with, even though we saw or heard them. Most of the information available to us never gets to the level of consciousness. While you were standing in the checkout line at the supermarket, the checker might have called out the cost of each item and, if so, your ears certainly recorded the information. But if you were transfixed by tabloid headlines about renegade scientists in Tibet who performed a successful head transplant, information about the cost of radishes may not have made it into your consciousness.

Part of the reason for making field notes is to remember things, but it may be a little daunting to realize that what we forget is negligible compared to what we never notice to begin with.

The memory capacity of our brains is finite, but we are bombarded with millions of impressions. Most of the information that flows into our brains from our senses never makes it to our consciousness. Cognitive scientist estimate that “only one millionth of what our eyes see, our ears hear, and our other senses inform us about appears in our consciousness.” (5)

That’s worth repeating, in case your mind was wandering. We only become conscious of a millionth or so of what our senses perceive. We make jokes about the absent-minded professor who cannot find the eyeglasses perched on his forehead, but in truth we are all mostly absent-minded. Other parts of our brain use much more of this information, but still millions of bits of data bombard us every minute, while our consciousness processes very little of it—maybe as much as forty bits per second but more likely less than sixteen.

Purpose and Desire

Here’s the interesting question: if we ignore most things, how do we decide what to notice? This is important because to learn, we need to pay conscious attention. It’s the only way we ever figure anything out. In fact, most of learning to learn is learning to manage our attention.

Other than instinctive reactions such as our startle reflex, simple desire is the main governor of what we notice. We notice things we care about. This leads to the first rule of thumb of field research: go with a purpose. This doesn’t prevent you from occasionally allowing your attention to drift across the scene or the situation, open to inspiration. But if there isn’t anything you want to learn or understand, you are likely to return as unenlightened as you went.

When you go looking for something, what you see might lead you in a different direction than you thought you would go. You might be surprised, disappointed, confused, or challenged by what you find. But you are much more likely to find something than if you just wander into the situation, without any purpose.

Not only should you go with a purpose, you also need to review frequently whether you are finding what you are looking for. It’s nearly impossible for us to sustain intense attention to anything for a long time, so usually we find at some point that we are “just looking out the window” rather than thinking hard about what we see. The notebook open before us brings our attention back to the task, preparing us for another burst of concentrated observation.

Managing Attention

Making notes is a way of focusing our limited attention. It’s a form of self-management.

Writing field notes can help you see things, hear things, think things, feel things, and understand things that would never occur without focused attention. Your notebook becomes part of your mind, increasing your capacity to notice, remember, organize, reflect, and create. The notebook may be an essential tool for the full life.

One of the traditional ideals of field work has been objectivity. If by being objective it is meant that you need to be fair and open to seeing things in new ways and sensitive to other perspectives, that’s probably right.

But if it means you should not care one way or another what is happening, then I’m skeptical. We all have biases, which grow out of our desires. When we begin to see patterns and thus to expect certain things to happen, we are becoming biased. Harry F. Walcox regards “bias as entry-level theorizing.” It is, he says, “a thought-about position from which the researcher as inquirer feels drawn to an issue or problem and seeks to construct a firmer basis in both knowledge and understanding.” (6)

Our bias is rooted in our desire, without which we are all but ineducable. Trouble starts not when we have a bias but when we start loving being right more than we love learning. As we pursue inquiries, we encounter details that don’t fit our notions of how the world is and has been. If we really have the spirit of discovery, we are drawn toward these details, recognizing them as beacons marking unknown shoals that do not appear correctly on our maps.

It is only when our bias leads us to dismiss or attack these details rather than to investigate them that it becomes a problem.

Maybe the greatest excitements in thinking come from encountering two sets of information, both seemingly correct, that apparently contradict one another. It is amid such confrontations that we often make cognitive leaps, not simply adding more facts like additional books to our mental shelves, but adding a whole new storey with a better view. Often contradictory facts are both correct, but at different levels in a conceptual hierarchy. To resolve the contradiction, we need to extend our understanding.

We need a theory of some sort to get started at all. The great psychologist William James supposedly said that “you can’t pick up rocks in a field without a theory.”

Our biases and theories shape our purpose. Our commitment to documenting what we observe with the goal of deeper understanding helps us stay focused.

People with the journaling habit sometimes feel they haven’t really experienced something until they’ve written about it. This doesn’t mean that much of the time they aren’t experiencing the world at the primary level of sensory impressions, as alert as a hunting cat to the information delivered by their senses. It just means that they also step back from such experiences, hunting for larger game in the realms of patterns, stories, and theories, focusing on what things might mean.

Recording Experience

It’s quite exciting that so simple a thing as documenting your experiences of both inner and outer worlds is the basic stuff of all the arts and sciences, the raw material of human progress. The simple fact that notes are a tangible, durable record is important. Converting experience to symbolic representation is the basis of all the disciplines.

Though we write first for ourselves, from the beginning you should also be working toward communication. If you have the time and inclination to aim at large, national markets, that’s fine, but we really don’t need more bestsellers. What we do need is more work that grows out of local places and is intended for them. Our communities are impoverished to the extent that they have not attracted storytellers, scientists, geographers, and historians dedicated to them. Until every pond has its Thoreau, many of our landscapes will be mute.

As the quality and quantity of local research and writing accumulates, we will enjoy a renaissance of local literature and local culture. Such renaissances are of necessity community events. They don’t occur until groups of readers and writers find one another. This is because a human mind, acting on its own, doesn’t amount to much. It needs community to find its voice.

One of the important insights of the twentieth century—contributed to by James in psychology, Whitehead in philosophy, Dewey in Education, and Einstein in science, to name but a few—was that the self is not an isolated phenomenon. Our bodies are bounded by our skin but our minds are not. We live by incorporating more and more of what was the world around us into our minds.

We cannot separate our minds from their environments or from society. Wendell Berry offers us this formula: mind = brain + body + world + local dwelling place + community + history. What we sometimes call our environment—as much of it as we are aware of, anyway—is part of our consciousness, which is to say, part of our minds. By history, Berry means “not just documented events but the whole heritage of culture, language, memory, tools, and skills.” (7)

Much of this environment from which we cannot separate ourselves consists of other minds and their works. We become human by learning to understand and use those shared aspects of mind outside us. We cannot become human alone. Language itself is a power of mind that human beings isolated from other human beings cannot create. There is no known case of a human child raised without contact with other people who ever developed a language.

The Culture of Literacy

Culture is our name for all those aspects of mind that are stored not inside individual brains but in external memory fields, such as writing but also such as rituals, family habits, songs, cities, dances, architecture, foodways, mathematical formulas, traditions, scientific theories, stories, and painting on church ceilings.

Education is primarily concerned with helping us become more skilled at using external memory fields. Throughout our lives we increase our power to access those memory fields by using reading and writing and mathematics. As we do this, we quite literally “rewire” our brains, building new neural structures that simply don’t exist in people who are not literate. This is hard work, but it’s worth it, because the external memory available to us is unimaginably vast compared to what we can store in our brains, and it is all but impossible to live in the modern world without accessing it.

To give mundane examples, no doctor could remember all the effects of drugs currently available or what research has shown about their interactions with one another. No engineer could carry around in her brain the specifications of all the off-the-shelf components she might use to build a new machine. No gardener could remember all she needs to know about what conditions of pH, moisture, temperature and light hundreds of different plants need at different stages of growth.

People who do complex work live amid and through books. There is no other way. Whether these works exist as ink on paper or as patterns of light on a monitor matters little. To get through the day, we access both our biological memories and the rich store of external memory fields we have invented, including notes tacked on the bulletin board in the kitchen, binders from a recent seminar, tax receipts tucked in the filing cabinet, a website maintained by kindred spirits, or the 518 miles of book shelves in the Library of Congress.

It may seem odd to think of that note tacked on your bulletin board as a feature of your mind, but it most certainly is, if you are conscious of it. So are those notes you jot in your journal. So are your family, your house, and your neighborhood. The idea of a disembodied mind is simply inconceivable. Without sensory organs connecting it to the external world, the brain could develop no images, no language, no thoughts-which are always based on differences and similarities, which are rooted in perception.

Helen Keller lacked sight and hearing but had the sense of touch, including internal sensations of her body, awareness of motion, and the warmth of sun and the chill of shade, along with her ability to smell and taste the world. The sense of touch was paramount to her. It was a slim reed, relatively speaking, but enough. Through touch she learned to communicate.

She referred to the creature she had been before her teacher Anne Sullivan brought language and with it connections to other humans as the Phantom. Fortunately, Helen had normal sight and hearing until she lost them after a fever when she was eighteen months old, and her brain had developed normally until then, including her beginning use of language. Without that basis, she would have been lost to us.

Through touch she was able to make contact with other minds, and through knowing others she became herself. This is the process we all follow, from the least of us to the greatest.

Einstein’s mind was composed of features of Galileo’s and Newton’s minds, as well as hundreds of others. By pondering and reflecting on their work, in the same ways they themselves had pondered and reflected upon it, by moving his conscious attention through the writings and diagrams and formulas they thought with, by examining the representations they made on paper (that were often more vivid traces of their mental activity than they themselves could access in their brain’s memory), Einstein was able to see some things they did not see. Without them, he could have accomplished very little—a point about which he himself was clear. He could see as far as he did, he said, because he stood on the shoulders of giants. He understood that a solitary mind on its own doesn’t amount to much and can’t see or do much.

The process of building shared memory fields has been going on for millennia, and has been the basis of the shift from tribalism to civilization. We are in the midst of another great shift, from centralized civilization to more dispersed forms.

Localism and Regionalism

Like all great changes in history, this will involve great dangers. Groups can organize for unwise as well as wise purposes. Of course, the forces of centralization are also getting more powerful, and this too has some good effects and many bad ones. Those who try to contest the forces of centralization head on find themselves forced to organize and centralize.

A stronger strategy is to put our energy into the work of building local and regional cultures. As local groups study, gather, interpret, create, preserve and present local culture, they are, among other things, preserving their freedom. A person or a town whose music comes pre-recorded, whose textbooks are written by distant committees, whose food materializes through unknown processes, whose conversation is drowned out by broadcast chatter, whose politics consists of filling out multiple choice forms, and whose education is planned by bickering factions is living in a fantasy if it imagines itself free.

Towns, farms, families, schools, museums, and local economies are forms of art just as sculptures, symphonies and novels are. To make them well may be the best use we can make of life. At the local level, there can be important work for all of us. At the local level, there can a place where each of us is greeted and understood. At the local level, we can know where we are and who we are with.

We need an abundance of local researchers and writers. We are beginning to understand that being a skilled writer is as valuable to a good life as being a skilled reader. Already many schools create portfolios of student writing that grow and follow each student through the years. This habit of creating and preserving records of one’s experience will for many become lifelong. Every family and town will maintain its archive of words and images that are too important to leave behind. Every town and every family will see the value of thoughtfulness, of paying attention, of hunting for meaning and they will increase their powers of clarity and of understanding by developing their skills as writers and readers.

Interestingly, the best strategy for teaching higher writing skills, both to young people and to not-so-young people, may be to work together on collaborative research projects. Writing involves solving ill-defined problems for which there are no simple algorithms. This makes it hard to teach and hard to learn.

Expert writers think about many things, in recursive processes. Concerns about sentence structure and word choice and clarity interact with thoughts about who the audience will be and what background they have. Analyses of logic or the appropriateness of illustrations and evidence play against thoughts about organization. They need to think about which of the many processes they should follow at any time, and when to let another process interrupt it, and what they were doing before they were interrupted and when to go back to it. Throughout the process, skilled writers think about the rhetorical moves that are available.

The complexity is what makes it so fun.

When we write we are faced with so many demands on our attention, so many things that need thinking about, that we may feel like an air traffic controller who is simultaneously doing his work while carrying on a phone conversation with a distraught spouse and playing a chess game with a colleague.

Cognitive scientists believe we use our working memory for three kinds of processes as we write: planning what we intend to accomplish, transferring our plans into actual texts, then reviewing what we have done to see if it worked. They find that expert writers tend to monitor these processes, always judging how things will work for their audience and their purpose. Novice writers, on the other hand, tend to focus on what they know about a topic and writing it down. They tend to write it down in the order that it occurs to them. They tend to write down everything they think of, without wondering whether it is useful to their writing goals or whether it will be interesting for their audience. John T. Bruer summarizes the difference this way: for novice writers, the task is to “reduce a writing assignment to a topic and tell what you know about the topic.” For a skilled writer, the task “is building bridges between what he or she knows and what others might know.” (8)

Since the usual purpose of school writing is simply to display what you know, it’s easy to get through school with novice writing. Many high school graduates have not encountered writing situations designed to help them learn powerful writing. What students need are authentic writing tasks within discourse communities, groups that are formed around topics of common interest.

When they are involved with other people in real research that is intended to result in public presentations, the group process itself teaches the cognitive strategies used by expert writers. When various people share their notes, both from library and field research, in a shared data base that all the community members read, and then discuss together what to make of it and how to present it, the group is doing externally precisely the complex balancing and juggling that expert writers do by themselves. A students who has participated with a group that manipulates the information, considers it from several angles, considers what is missing, and so on is unlikely to simply list facts as they arrive from associational memory. The process of arranging the information for rhetorical purposes becomes tangible and visible, helping make clear what is involved in successful writing. People talk their way past the inadequate protocol of simply listing what they know.

This also reverses the traditional approach to teaching writing. Instead of teaching better writing with the assumption that this will lead to better thinking, the community model of doing research, discussing the findings, planning public presentations, and working together to create quality intellectual products teaches better thinking, with the assumption that it will lead to better writing. The evidence indicates that this works. (9)

As better writers become more widely spread throughout the population, more and more literature and science will speak with a local accent. Creating and sustaining local cultures should attract a larger portion of our resources. Our heritage of industrial design and sophisticated machines are freeing us to do other work, if we choose to.

We live in interesting times, when each year we need less of the world’s human energy to produce the goods necessary for a comfortable life but many people nonetheless feel that the wolf at the door is getting louder and bolder. This is a side effect of our culture’s widespread experiment in faithlessness, with its consequent distrust and fear not only of each other but of life itself. With intelligent, self-governing communities weakened, the ever-present forces of both tyranny and anarchy are on the march. More than ever before, young people need to research, analyze, and interpret information and to speak with honest and intelligent voices.

We need young people to develop a personal voices, backed by hard research, and made bold by a faith that one really has seen what one has seen, really heard what one has heard, and really felt what one has felt. My own faith, at least in part, is that honest feeling and clear thinking form a powerful defense against bogeymen that now proliferate like vampires in a budget movie. Without confidence in our personal voices, and a bone-deep belief that they matter, we have no defense against other voices that get louder each year and seldom have our best interests at heart.

It is through the work of local culture that we can shape our destiny. Self-determination is never going to be achieved by begging for it from centralized power-so conceived it amounts to little more than a self-defeating contradiction. It will be achieved by local communities applying their intelligence to the places they live, asking where they are, who they are, what is worthy of their desire, and what they can responsibly do to attain it. And multiculturalism developed as a living consequence of local intelligence responding to local circumstances is far more powerful than multiculturalism understood mostly as a lobbying throng of racial or ethnic identities based on historical categories drawn in worlds that no longer exist.

“Personal experience is the soul of a town,” wrote high school student Desarae Baker from Simms, Montana, as she meditated on the history her class was working on of buildings that have fallen down and are rotting away in her dying rural village. She noted sadly that such places “are part of [people’s] knowledge of each other.” Her study and reflection have brought her to the realization that as the buildings vanish, so do features of our minds and our relationships.

Every family and neighborhood and community would benefit from having thoughtful members writing and preserving their histories. Many towns and families and individuals may face only poverty and loss unless they make, remember, and tell their own stories. Many towns on the Great Plains may become ghost towns, having already been abandoned by the railroads and by the impersonal agricultural economy favored by central planning.

If they do not, I suspect this will be because the people who live there ask and answer for themselves such questions as these: What has happened here? Where are we now? What capacities and abilities do we have? What can we do to take care of ourselves and our place? These are questions groups can ask and answer at the level of family, neighborhood, town, and region. Only in the asking and answering do possibilities emerge beyond those imagined by merging corporations, whose directors find it harder and harder to understand reasons deeper than profit, broader than careerism, or higher than winning.

After repairing a fence his grandfather built, high school student Zeb Engstrom from the small prairie town of Chester, Montana, paused to write about what it meant. “The barrier of time between me and the man who built it thinned and shimmered in the summer heat. . .I can almost feel the old hired hands sitting around the stove in the bunkhouse telling jokes and stories, and the air smells faintly of the soup that boiled on the stove,” he said.

It moved him to see himself as taking his place in a larger picture, wanting to make himself a strong link in the chain of generations. “It was on that day that I stopped complaining about fixing fence or building buildings. Without my grandpa’s work and my dad’s work, my life would be a lot harder.”

Young people like Desarae and Zeb are helping create a local literature, based on local history, local folkways, local geography, and local science.

Their work raises questions, of the sort asked by Wendell Berry:

“Suppose that the ultimate standard of our work were to be, not professionalism and profitability, but the health and durability of human and natural communities. Suppose we learned to ask of any proposed innovation the question that so far only the Amish have been wise enough to ask: What will this do to our community? Suppose we attempted the authentic multiculturalism of adapting our ways of life to the nature of the places where we live. Suppose, in short, that we should take seriously the proposition that our arts and sciences have the power to help us adapt and survive. What then?” (10)

The answer cannot be provided ready-made like a tv dinner.

Notes

1. Donald, Merlin. A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001, p. 314.

2. Merlin, 313

3. Walcott, Harry F. The Art of Fieldwork. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 1995, p. 216.

4. Chase, W. G., and Simon, H. A. “Perception in Chess,” Cognitive Psychology, 1973: 4: 55-81.

5. Nørretranders, Tor. The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size. New York: Viking, 1998, p. 126.

6. Walcott, p. 186.

7. Berry, Wendell. Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition. Washington D. C.: Counterpoint, 2000, p. 48-49.

8. Bruer, John T. Schools for Thought: A Science of Learning in the Classroom. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1993, pp. 243-44.

9. Bruer, p. 251.

10. Berry, p. 134.

Read Alouds: What Do Good Readers Do?
  Strategies to Model

Good readers:

1. Draw on background knowledge as they read
2. Make predictions as they read
3. Visualize the events of a text as they read
4. Recognize confusion as they read
5. Recognize a text’s structure/organization as they read
6. Identify/recognize a purpose for reading
7. Monitor their strategy use according to the purpose for reading the text

Graphic Organizers for Practicing Reading
  from readingrockets

* Venn-Diagrams (29K PDF)*
Used to compare or contrast information from two sources. For example, comparing two Dr. Seuss books.

* Storyboard/Chain of Events (29K PDF)*
Used to order or sequence events within a text. For example, listing the steps for brushing your teeth.

* Story Map 19K PDF)*
Used to chart the story structure. These can be organized into fiction and nonfiction text structures. For example, defining characters, setting, events, problem, resolution in a fiction story; however in a nonfiction story, main idea and details would be identified.

* Cause/Effect (13K PDF)*
Used to illustrate the cause and effects told within a text. For example, staying in the sun too long may lead to a painful sunburn.

* Click here for more free graphic organizers.

Strategies for teaching adolescent literacy
  Judith Langer

Judith Langer’s, five-year study of English programs found major differences between effective adolescent literacy programs and ineffective ones. Successful programs, Langer found, use six instructional practices:
1. Teach students using a variety of activities, including independent lessons, exercises, and drills; lessons involving reading and writing about new concepts and information; and lessons in which students apply new learning in class discussions.
2. Prepare students for tests by emphasizing the knowledge on which they’ll be assessed, and integrate test preparation into daily lessons instead of giving students separate drills.
3. Incorporate students’ real-life experiences both in and out of school into daily lessons.
4. Give students critical reading and writing strategies they need to succeed on daily lessons and homework assignments.
5. Provide time for students to read broadly on topics of interest, explore texts from many points of view, and conduct their own research.
6. Foster collaborative learning by placing students in well-chosen groups. Prompt students to raise questions, discuss ideas, and “bump minds” with one another

Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension

Teaching reading comprehension in high school
  Literacy Coaching

English teachers are often called on to bear the bulk, if not the entirety, of the responsibility for students’ literacy— this despite the fact that they, similar to colleagues from other disciplines, do not typically benefit from extensive preparation in teaching secondary students who are poor readers and writers. Thus the opportunity to work in partnership with literacy coaches who can facilitate schoolwide approaches to advancing literacy skills is extremely valuable to our members.

Data show that 25% of high school students are not able to identify the main idea of a passage; many tend to dwell on details and subordinate ideas (Kamil, 2003). Research reveals that comprehension failure is attributed to the text processing skills of these readers who, among other things, are often unaware of the purpose for reading and thus are less apt to modify their reading rates (Smith, 1967); less able to detect text inconsistencies, the logical structure of text, or how ideas are interconnected (DiVesta, Hayward, & Orlando 1979; Owings, Peterson, Bransford, Morris, & Stein, 1980); and less sensitive to semantic and syntactic cues in text (Irakson & Miller, 1978).

Generally speaking, poor readers are not as flexible as skilled readers in adapting their reading processes to the demands of the task or capitalizing on the structure inherent in texts. Consequently, their ability to write clearly or understand complex subject matter across the content areas is inhibited. Inexperienced adolescent readers need opportunities and instructional support to read many and diverse types of texts in order to gain experience, build fluency, and develop a range as readers. Through extensive reading of a range of texts, supported by strategy lessons and discussions, readers become familiar with written language structures and text features, develop their vocabularies, and read for meaning more efficiently and effectively. Conversations about their reading that focus on the strategies they use and their language knowledge help adolescents build confidence in their reading and become better readers.

Middle and high school English classes are an excellent place to move students to deeper understandings of texts and increase their ability to generate ideas and knowledge for their own uses and to meet scholastic challenges across the curriculum.

The literacy coach can play an essential role in assisting English teachers as they strive to

• bridge between adolescents’ rich literate backgrounds and school literacy
• work on schoolwide teams to teach literacy in each discipline as an essential way of learning in the disciplines
• recognize when students are not making meaning with text and provide appropriate, strategic assistance to read course content effectively
• facilitate student-initiated conversations regarding texts that are authentic and relevant to real life experiences
• create environments that allow students to engage in critical examinations of texts as they dissect, deconstruct, and reconstruct in an effort to engage in meaning making and comprehension processes

Literacy coaches know and assist English language arts teachers in understanding the text structures that students commonly encounter in literary text selections, including

• narrative text structure (e.g., asking students to retell or summarize stories, including important details pertaining to their events, setting, theme, and what the characters say and do; asking students to infer motives of characters and the causal relations among events)
• description or main idea and detail text structure (e.g., asking students to look for the topic, the main points, and supporting details, making notes in a wheel-andspoke diagram)
• comparison and contrast text structure (e.g., looking for signal words; asking students to record differences and similarities between people, places, or events in a Venn diagram)
• chronological/sequential text structure (e.g., looking for signal words; asking students to create a sequence chart of events)
• cause and effect text structure (e.g., looking for signal words; asking students to make predictions and determine relationships between events and the way characters behave)
• argument and evidence text structure (e.g., asking students to list the argument and the evidence to help them make their own judgments)
• combination of patterns (e.g., asking students to find several text structures in a language arts selection)

Literacy coaches assist English language arts teachers in matching instructional methods to the dominant pattern of text structure for any given reading (e.g., developing a timeline for a reading that is organized chronologically or completing a Venn diagram for a reading that is organized in a comparison/contrast pattern).

Literacy coaches know and model methods and strategies to assist English language arts teachers to engage students actively in learning, including asking students to express and defend the point of view of authors as well as develop and express an informed point of view of their own. Some examples of active learning strategies that promote student discussion and dialogue include role plays, think– pair–share, jigsaw, pair problem solving, fishbowl, and round robin strategies.

Literacy coaches know and model strategies for supporting students with the writing process and the characteristics of different types of expository and imaginative writing.

Literacy Strategies Deepen Students’ Thinking in English Language Arts Class

Before becoming a literacy coach in Boston, Chloe had taught English for 10 years at both the college and high school levels. In her work with a young English teacher at a Boston high school, Chloe was able to help the teacher develop ongoing book clubs and use reading strategies that connected one reading to another in order to deepen students’ thinking. The coach counted it as a real success when she observed students discussing the text and offering their ideas— with the teacher at the side, not at the center of the room directing the conversation. Another English teacher sought suggestions for ways to help students understand that there can be more than one interpretation of a text as long as it can be substantiated.

Chloe suggested working with the Roethke poem “My Papa’s Waltz” because it was short and accessible to students, and could be handled in one day. She and the teacher talked over how the poem could be interpreted as a nostalgic reverie about childhood or a lens on childhood abuse. Using a protocol adapted from Sheridan Blau’s The Literature Workshop, the coach helped to design an activity that asked students to:

1. Underline words or lines they found confusing, then write out questions.
2. Choose the most important line in the poem and write a paragraph about why.
3. Get together in groups of four to share problems they had with specific words and lines and work to clear them up.
4. Then share their paragraphs about the most important line they picked and discuss the similarities and differences in their perspectives.

Source:

Adapted from Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (2005). Coaches in the high school classroom: Studies in implementing high school reform (Prepared for Carnegie Corporation of New York). Providence, RI: Author. 

About Michael L. Umphrey
  Background

Michael L. Umphrey was Director of the Heritage Project from 1995-2006. Before that, he was a high school principal as well as a journalism, English, art and photography teacher. His writing on education has been published in such journals as Educational Leadership, Teacher Magazine, and Holistic Education Review. He has published two books of poetry: The Lit Window (Cleveland State University Poetry Center) and The Breaking Edge (University of Montana). Currently he teaches in Polson, Montana, on the south shore of Flathead Lake.

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