The Scores of Summer

Two local teams won their state title last week in baseball. The strategy in baseball fascinates me--steals, sacrifice flies, the suicide squeeze--ever since I sat down to watch Boston beat New York in 2004 in the ALCS when they were down 3 games to 0 and down by a lot in the 7th inning. They won the game, and I kept watching until they won the World Series, taking credit for it, of course. I didn't work with my kids on baseball, and they didn't end up playing it for long.

Parents are amazing. As I worked in the garden this week, I listened to a neighborhood dad working with his kids on one of the many sports they practice in their back yard. The junior high daughter is trying out for a travel soccer team 70 miles away. An Iranian family in the neighborhood works on high level math every day during the summer. Kids are on hockey teams, in orchestras, swim teams, and go to wrestling and band camps. One family I know is sending their daughter to a medical camp in Houston to shadow different medical professionals. All of these activities, and others like vacations and computers provide opportunites for literacy development. And even finding toads!

In his new book Outliers Malcolm Gladwell discusses JHU sociologist Karl Alexander's discovery about kids reading scores in the summer based on socioeconomic class. There was a lot of similarity in growth except for what happens between the end of one school year and the beginning of the next where the scores increase for weathy kids by 15 points and the poorer kids' scores dropped by 5 points. The literacy environment makes a difference.

What can be done about this?

Check this out: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39writing.htm

Responding to Writing

Not only do we do a lot of "norming" by reading students' papers together and discussing it at my work at our community college, I am also involved in reading students' papers in my doctoral studies and discussing them. As it turns out, these students are actually teachers! But it is the same process--the professor and other graduate students read and discuss a student's paper and through the discussion we come to terms with how we are each responding. We learn from one another in the reading and responding. Here is an article that we are discussing.
http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2868
Most of you are probably on break from responding to student writing! Enjoy!

Conflicting Assumptions about Literacies

This week I interviewed a high school student on his Internet use. I think college teachers are making a lot of assumptions about what kids know.
1. This student only looks at the "first page" of the website and is pretty sure that everything he needs is there. He does not go to links.
2. This student almost exclusively uses Wikipedia because it comes first in a Google search; in his mind, first is best.
3. High schools block almost everything, but Wikipedia is not blocked. Thus, they have fewer choices to make.
Knowing these points, and interviewing other students, will help me with incoming college freshman. The Leu et al article on the following website, argues for the idea of framing the Internet as a literacy issue.
http://www.aera.net/publications/Default.aspx?menu_id=38&id=7886

One of my roles as a High School Liaison is to understand the differences between English educators at the high school, community college, and university and to try to help bridge those differences. This is important for high school teachers so they will better understand what their students might face; for university teachers, so they know what students are bringing with them to college and to better prepare future teachers; and for community college teachers who are in the middle. As an interviewer of prospective community college faculty, I think this article does an excellent job of explaining what community college faculty face, which is not always understood by university faculty. http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/05/2009052901c.htm

What differences have you noticed?

P.S. As I was finishing up this post, a recent GVSU graduate and former student of mine excitedly called me from Houston to tell me that she just got a teaching job at a diverse elementary school. Congratulations, Ali!

Teen Transition

The transition from high school to college is amazing. How do kids do it? Those of us who teach college freshman don't think about this challenge enough. In Tim Clydesdale's observations in The First Year Out: Understanding American Teens After High School, several points stand out:

1. Seniors and college freshman are so focused on "daily life management" that they are not, for now, interested in larger social, cultural, political issues. Teachers might need to "let go of" the expectation of these students having "worldly curiosity" (p. 201). Instead sophomores and juniors in both high school and college, might be more apt to consider their community or global context.

2. Teachers of college freshman underestimate what students can learn and should raise standard/upgrade expectations. Students expect college to be hard.

3. Teachers should begin with what students want to learn (engage interest, connect it to bodies of knowledge, and apply knowledge, p. 203). For example, Clydesdale teaches sociology, and he decided to teach research on relationships because that is a big part of their "daily life management" and he covers the introduction of the field later in the semester.

4. Teachers "overestimate" what students can "meaningful integrate on their own" (p. 40). This one needs further explanation.

What are your observations?