Implementation Plan

Implementation Plan

Looking towards August...
Above all else, I will have my students write more. I anticipate drawing heavily upon Kelly Gallagher’s book Teaching Adolescent Writers: developing a nuanced, multidimensional writer’s notebook; writing more with my students, which draws my thoughts to the idea of more emphasis placed upon instruction rather than grading; emphasizing purpose and audience more with student writing; introducing conferencing more into my classroom.

Gallagher’s writer’s notebook is outstanding. He has students divide it into multiple sections that I want to use: writing mini-lessons, grammar, spelling demons, and writing. I want to use all of these and introduce vocabulary as well as sentence structure.

Although I have wrote in front of my students and also provided models, oftentimes I make the error of writing on my own and presenting a finished version, which is not effective, whereas writing with my students and showing the process I work through is more effective.

In the past I have had students create writer’s logs with every finished piece of writing: purpose, audience, reflection. Unfortunately I moved away from that, and I will return. Furthermore, I will emphasize the notion of purpose an audience, drawing upon examples Gallagher provides. I also will try to have their writing reach greater audiences.

This past year I had writing conferences with my AP students outside of class; they were effective. I need to find a way to have conferences in my classroom. I also want to use some of Gallagher’s assessment strategies to promote efficiency.

Aside from Gallagher, I want to use blogs further in my classroom as a place of publication. I want to make portfolios a more significant part of the process, and I anticipate blogs will help with this. I also want parents to see their child’s work on blogs.

An area that I want to devote more attention to is sentence structure/fluency via sentence combining. This is something I want to use across grade levels. Additionally, I want to capitalize on what I learned from my peers about improving writing via the Carnegie studies. Presently, I envision using more structured note taking strategies as well as student models.

I have made a slew of notes about ideas that were sparked directly through conversation, reading or writing. Above all else, I want to have my students write more, grow more as writers, value their writing more, believe in their writing more, and recognize the beauty and power in their words.

Plus, I want to read and discuss much more

Writing Next: Sentence Combining Strategy

Sentence Combining: A Tool to Improve Student Writing

According to the Carnegie report, Writing Next, sentence combining is the sixth most effective approach to improving writing, with a .50 effect size. The notion of sentence combining is really quite straight forward: it is taking simple sentences and combining them into more complex sentences. What is particularly noteworthy from the study is that sentence combining is more effective then traditional rote grammar strategies. Furthermore, the study found that the strategy is almost equally effective with students who are weak writers.

Through research I came across a wealth of websites, though I focused on those I could apply in a high school classroom. They range from worksheets, examining professional writer examples, applying to compositions, and incorporating vocabulary and prescripted sentence structures. The following are websites and books I visited:

http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Journals/CNP/0261-august08/NP0261Sentence.pdf This source from NCTE looks at sentence combining actvities.

http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:0F1is7fnzL8J:english.sxu.edu/musgrove/write_prog/lessons.doc+sentence+combining+lessons&hl=en&gl=us&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESgblvOa0XHfsDQZ_NqgFRNttrckLJ-rRvZa_qT9zbCdL9N4zs6kwNjHj4LYQ9LxbWt_lRawynn8BwhVNrelVGIUvEVctmSPIMfdyC0O11Rx-jDOEXT5cIajxD2aCZ87w7PdsPWc&sig=AHIEtbSlr8VcZxgGer3bG7yrJN9iqiHBWQ&pli=1 This lengthy site is a college level document with many sentence combining exercises.

http://grammar.about.com/od/tests/a/introsc.htm This about.com site provides a clearing house of sites on the topic of sentence combining.

http://www.mshogue.com/AP/vocab_09.pdf This PDF comes from a renowned AP Lit & Language teacher who combines vocabulary and sentence structures to improve writing.

http://jonsenglishsite.info/Sentenccombnew.htm This little gem provides 12 units that teachers can use to work through sentence combining with their students.

Longknive, Ann Ph.D. & Sullivan, K. D. The Art of Styling Sentences. Haupage, NY. Barron’s Educational Services. 2002. Print. This is a fairly complex book that focuses on teaching students twenty different sentence patterns (how many of us can name all 20?).

Killgallon, Don. Sentence Composing for High School. Portsmouth, NH. Heinemann. 1998 Print. Numerous sites have referenced Killgallon in my research. This book provides a clear, straightforward way to implement sentence combining.

Sestina

I wrote this sestina about a month ago, but I thought I would put it up here if anyone wanted to provide feedback to improve it.

With time and distance, I fear what I remember is broken:

fragments of thoughts and truths are only short stories,

fiction, that slithers into the ether of silence.

It is as though the shards of memory are a weight

I cannot grasp ahold of and embrace like my father,

who would wake each Saturday and drink coffee

while he made pancakes in the shapes of animals. The scent of his coffee

woke me from the anchor of sleep, the innocence of dreaming broken,

and I would exhale the memory of it, and descend the stairs to my father,

who patiently waited for me to tell a story,

any story, but my younger brother and I could hardly wait

for the pancakes, our groggy babble interrupting his morning silence,

but he would only smile and tell a story that broke his silence.

They were tales of bears and baboons whispered between sips of coffee,

whichever animal we wished for he would ease the weight

of the badder into the skillet, careful not to offer it broken,

and then poured syrup and spread butter like the setting of a story

he would not tell because I was only a boy, and he a young father.

Only years later would I consider what he never told me about his father,

who filled the house with roaring silence.

What was it like for him to grow up in a house devoid of stories

shared at the kitchen table over a cup of coffee,

or told on camping trips beneath a moon broken

by clouds and lightning? I can only imagine the weight

of memory that both deepens and lessens each year, of no longer waiting

for his father’s approval that he never received. What kind of father

only offers steel eyed stares and a broken

narrative of disappointment and frustrating silence?

A father who only sucks the butts of Chesterfields and scalding black coffee

instead of offering a fantasy world of stories

made in animal pancakes. It is no wonder my father shares few of these stories.

Memories that hung like the weight

of the world on his shoulders as he woke early each Saturday, drank his coffee,

and made his two sons breakfast. He could never ask his father

how to raise two sons in a world without silence,

how to ensure that the memory of childhood is not broken.

We are all broken in some way, yet bound by stories

that defy the silence. Each day I wait

for another chance to see my father and with him share a cup of coffee.

Memoir

In Grangemont, Idaho manmade structures were few and far between: a one-room school house sat at the epicenter of a community defined by a road and a dumpster. My family fell into the ladder category.

This isn’t to say that we were dirty, terribly impoverished, or found some odd affinity with the waste of others. We were four plus one: mother, father, two sons and a dog. We were a new beginning: recently moved to this quiet little mountain enclave in Central Idaho where community potlucks and cross country skiing at recess were the norm. Our connection to the dumpster was geographical. We lived in a small cabin that stood on a hill, our driveway traversing the hill from the dumpster.

The dumpster was an odd convening point for our half of the community. It sat at the end of Grangemont Road, which was dotted by the trailers of my neighbors, and it was not different from your standard dumpster: a mottled blue and rust colored, weathered, dented, and generally billowing with garbage. It was where I waited for the school bus with the few classmates I had. We would throw rocks at the dumpster, cringe from the scent of rotting who knew what, and marvel at what our neighbors disposed when seated in the bus. It was also where I learned about responsibility and death.

When my classmates and I made the left turn onto the road in the bus, we always perked up. Some because it meant an opportunity to flee the carsick inducing bumps, others bounded towards cookies and milk, while a handful lumbered towards a list of chores. I always looked forward to my dog, Tucker, a purebred Australian Shepherd that never tired, who greeted me with barks and licks, imploring me to take him off his chain so that we could run together. Yet, as a collective, we all perked up at the chance to see Bud. And occasionally we would.

Bud was an older man. As a boy, I thought he was ancient. I thought he was so old he had died and come back to life. He must have been a retired logger by the jeans he always wore, held up with dull red suspenders, as well as the flannel shirts. I assume he was bald, though I wasn’t sure because he always wore a an old felt hat, dirty with age and use. But his clothes were only a distraction from what drew my attention. Bud had been badly burned at some point in his life. His skin looked reptilian, drawn so taut against his face, his eyes distorted and without brows. And at seven years old, I thought Bud was some sort of lizardman, a mythical creature created in the depths of the dumpster, born of man, lizard and fire.

I never saw Bud anywhere but the dumpster, notably because whenever I did see him he was in the dumpster. His mythical status elevated by the long wooden staff with a sharp nail jutting out, which he drove into cans and emptied into a burlap sack he slung over his shoulder. I would watch through the bus window in a state of wonderment. On the one hand, I saw him sifting through the bags and imagined that he fed off of the rotting fruit peels and steak hunks lurking within. After eating his fill, he would fill his sack with what remained, taking it home to his progeny of half lizard half humans. Yet, beneath this fantastic, a kernel of understanding existed, knowing his purpose was simply practical. Yet I never asked him. How could I possibly ask a lizardman anything? Once the bus stopped at the dumpster, I would descend the stairs and run towards our cabin, fearful of Bud, fearful of what I didn’t know.

I asked my father why Bud was a lizardman who dove in the dumpster one day when I arrived home. He looked at me and chuckled. “Son, Bud’s no lizardman. He was burned in the war. He’s a good man. A poor man, but a good man. He recycles the cans for money.” How did my father know Bud was not a lizardman? How did he know about the war, and how much money he made? But I did not ask these questions. My father was a man of few words. He had spoken. There was nothing more to say.

The dumpster was the community dumpster. It housed not only the garbage my family and our neighbors produced, but the garbage of those who lived on the other road, Rudo Road. At the base of Rudo Road lived one of my classmates, Kristy Shepherdson. Her father was Sheriff Shepherdson. Along with being the sheriff, he was also a cattle farmer and dairyman. My family got our milk from the Shepherdson’s each week. My mother made butter out of cream, and my brother and I drank rich glass fulls each morning. At school I played tetherball with Kristy; our family occasionally rode horses with hers. My mother would ski to their house from our cabin in the winter. Our families were friends.

During the winter, their cows were limited in the range they could access. Sheriff Shepherdson would clear a small ring and fence it off for the dairy cows to exercise. They would lumber about, aimlessly as I could see, chomping on hay. Sometimes Kristy and I would watch while our parents drank coffee inside. I would grow bored quickly, but Kristy could have watched her cows all day long.

On a winter afternoon, returning on the bus from school, I eagerly waited for the wheels to come to a stop so that I could see Tucker. With the fresh snow, we would build snowmen, me in my bibs and moonboots, he running and returning, running and returning, running and returning. But when I got home, Tucker was not waiting. His chain lay broken. My seven year old legs froze. Where was my dog?

I went inside the cabin and my mother told me he had broken loose earlier in the afternoon. “But why, Mom?” I wailed. “Where could he be?” She shook her head, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know, son.” I raced outside shouting his name over and over. I searched until dark.

My father drove our car into town each day, and I knew he would be home shortly after dark, so I went inside to wait for him, to wait to further search for Tucker. As foreign and strange as Bud seemed to me, nothing seemed as real as Tucker. His black and white fur was mottled with grey and brown, but it was his eyes that I can still see. One was a deep calm brown, the other, a fiery blue, gemlike, turquoise. On winter nights we would lay in front of the fire, me with a book, he as my pillow, my blanket, my friend. On summer days, we would run through the forest, he the partner in the fantasy world I created. Now he was gone.

The phone rang not long after I returned inside. It was the Shepherdsons. They had Tucker. And then my dad came home.

Relieved, I anxiously waited for my father to go pick up Tucker, I was not allowed to go. “Son, you need to stay home. This is final.”

I will never know what was said between my father and Sheriff Shepherdson, what they agreed upon or what went through my father’s thoughts as he came home. At the time I didn’t care. I only cared that my dog was safe.

When Tucker and my father arrived, my dog bounded up the steps, through the door and licked me while wagging his tail. My father followed. He sat me down.

“Son, Tucker has been herding the cows. They can’t hold up in the winter. He’ll run them to death.”

I didn’t understand.

“Why would he do that, Dad?”

I stared into my father’s eyes for an answer. Why would my dog break his chain, run five miles, to herd our friends’ cows? It didn’t make sense.

My mother, always a lover of animals, spoke up. “It’s in his blood. He can’t help it. It’s what he knows how to do without even knowing.”

“Son, we can’t let this happen again. If it does, we’ll have to put Tucker down,” my father asserted.

Again, I froze. “It won’t, Dad, I whispered.” Then I crawled down to the floor and made my dog promise, promise never to run cows again.

For a couple weeks, Tucker kept his end of the bargain, as did I. I never let him out of my sight, and he spent more time indoors, but occasionally, he had to be chained outside. We had bought a new chain, a stronger one, and we drove the stake further into the ground. But it could not hold him, it seemed nothing could, whatever ran in his blood could not be bound.

Early one morning, we woke to the sound of the phone ringing. It was the Shepherdsons. They had Tucker. I looked outside: the stake pulled from the earth. He had run their cows again. This time too far. The Shepherdson’s beloved milking cow, the same cow which we drank milk from, the same cow that was pregnant lay dead. Run to exhaustion, over and over, Tucker had herded her into the fence till she collapsed.

When my father returned with Tucker, he told me to say goodbye to him. I held my dog, cried, and told my father I would never speak to him again if he put my dog down.

“Son, there is nothing else we can do.” I looked at him through blinding tears, trying to communicate a new promise, another chance, pleading with him for mercy. What I saw were tears in his eyes too, and what I heard was something of a refrain, “Son, there is nothing else we can do.”

Somehow, I left for school and spent the day in a daze. I didn’t wonder what would happen because I knew what would happen. My father was a man of his word. He never told me what he felt or what he thought after I left for school that day. He never told me how he coaxed Tucker to the dumpster, or what he said to him before he put him down. He never told me about the weight of lifting his body into the dumpster, nor the weight he felt days later, weeks later, years later. Yet, nearly thirty years removed, I imagine that he pulled Tucker into his arms and whispered that he understood and begged Tucker that he would understand too.

When I returned from school that day, I did not perk up at the chance to see Bud. I could not let my eyes glance towards the dumpster. Though there was the possibility of the lizardman emerging, I knew that amidst the black plastic bags was one black plastic bag that held Tucker. And in that moment, Bud no longer seemed fantastic or mythical, he simply seemed sad and poor, a man who had to do what he had to to get by. Just as my father had to do what he had to do.

Book Review

Teaching Adolescent Writers

by Kelly Gallagher

Teachers’ time is precious. Rarely do we have the opportunity to sit down and read a book for pleasure let alone something that will improve our craft. However, teachers of writing can, should, and need to read Kelly Gallagher’s Teaching Adolescent Writing.

This is not some dry, philosophical rumination on the merits of writing. No, Gallagher establishes that there is a “literacy stampede” taking place in the modern world. Essentially, individuals living in the modern world are inundated with the written word and they have a choice: have the stampe overrun them or run with the bulls, meaning people have to write and they have to write a lot, twice as much as they already are doing.

Building on this premise of a literacy stampede, Gallagher provides a way to not be overrun in the stampede. His book is divided into seven chapters and a series of appendicies. The chapters provide a practical way to implement nearly an entire writing curriculum (he provides a layout for his writing prompts for the entire first quarter, for example), and what he doesn’t provide in the way of the entire year, he provides ideas and guidance to approach writing as a whole.

Gallagher has over 160 students so writing teachers cannot revel in his ideas yet claim there is not enough time or too many students. He writes books and teaches more students than many others. Thankfully, he provides strategies for dealing with the paper load, the time load, the revision load, and the editing load, as well as loads of other ideas, notably twenty pages of appedicies that provide handouts to implement.

If this doesn’t provide the impetus to pick up and read or purchase this book, consider some of his strategies: establish a consistent time for students to write (Gallagher seems to have his students write from the time they walk in until the moment they exit, as well as after they exit), write with your students, use real world examples for students to see how to write, give students choice in their writing and avoid contrived “fake writing,” teach students how to identify their purpose and audience and then write considering both, and use assessment to drive student writing (this isn’t data crunching necessarily, it is concrete strategies to respond to student writing, conference with students and improve student writing).

Finishing the book, I had two responses: read it again and use it everyday in the coming school year. Gallagher exudes enthusiasm and insight for teaching writing. Every chapter provides a litany of practical tools to implement in creating a writing program or enhancing a writing program. His principles are simple and his examples are poignant. Read Teaching Adolescent Writing if you want to improve as a teacher of writing and you want your students to grow as writers.

Three Needle Haikus

Baby needles sway,

inhaling breath and dance that

neither stops nor starts.

Yellowing in light

darkening to India

each needle invites.

Juvenile needles-

like your golden strands against

my face-wisp in time.

Bio Sketch: Gael Moto

Bury Them Back

For the community of Deering the arrival of sewers was cause for celebration-adults lined the berms of the burgeoning trenches while children ran about in a fantasy world of archaeological pursuit, and so it was for Gael Moto, a teacher, a mother, a subsistence housewife. “I hung the floor lamp out the window at night and watched as they excavated bodies from the trench being dug for the sewer. What some see as a horror, I see as a part of culture, and if you stick around long enough, you realize why a culture was developed.”

Gael Moto, affectionately dubbed Ma Moto by the members of her community, has taught in public schools throughout Alaskan Native villages since 1989. Presently residing on the Central Kenai Peninsula in Ninilchick, Gael commutes throughout the Peninsula to fulfill substitute teaching assignments out of survival and passion. Economic survival. Child and culture passion. It is a passion born out of connection to each child, to find similarities between herself, the child and the content. It is a simple equation, yet it is a principle that Gael not only espouses, she lives. “I can’t know a place until I live there-I get to know the people while living with the people.”

For Gael this motto has led her into many communities, many stories. Her story begins in upstate New York where she grew up with a mother who taught through fear, a fear deep seated, a fear that only those who have had to hide something can understand. A fear rooted in new beginnings and the oppression that so often accompanies those new beginnings. Gael’s mother hid the Iroquois blood that ran in her veins that she passed to Gael, and who Gael has passed along to her own son. Yet in a defiance that mirrors Gael’s own, her mother taught her to stay connected to the native communities in the places she lived. On family road trips, her mother always insisted that her father stop at roadside Indian museums where Gael would lose herself in the possibility of the past.

It wasn’t until her mother handed a tattered family genealogy to her in recent years that Gael realized the family stops were not simply exercises in cultural awareness, they were a diligent communion with her past. It is fitting that she would learn about her past through words, as she considers herself a translator of culture. Though not the originator, Gael recalled Samuel Parker, a descendent who arrived on the Mayflower; his descendants, Gael’s family, were taken captive during the French and Indian wars, and later adopted by the Iroquois people. According to Gael, this adoption exceeded the bounds of adoption papers: “It was a transmutation of blood, a magical blood transfiguration.”

“After a period of time, the question arose: ‘what do we do with these artifacts? The elders said, ‘bury them back,’ and they knew. But as they continued to dig, they found the remains of a civilization that dated back to the 700s, a civilization most likely from Tibet. Regardless of where, ancient ivory death masks were unearthed, which were worth three quarters of a million dollars. Once money became involved, a whole new celebration ensued, though much less fantastic. Battles ensued as everyone found a connection to the remains, elders began to die, and the battles turned to all out interfamily warfare. Still, the remaining elders repeated the refrain, ‘bury them back’. And they knew.

Gael found love with a man named Jim Jim Moto, an Inupiat man whose grandfather was Japanese, in an oasis of ice. In their marriage she also committed herself to his family and community, a marriage more committed than their own, which ended in 1995. Still she maintains her vows to the family and community.

The isolation created out of geography and a patriarchal culture left Gael fragile, yet she was so embedded in the community that she “loved so deeply, but could not escape.” As time progressed, her emotions and self-esteem seemed to ice over, retreating ever further from the surface. Yet her son, Utuq, saved her. Gael recognized that children in the village are so often lost. Seeing a lack of options, a lack of responsibility, and a disconnect from the past, she feared for his future. Rather than remain trapped in fear and isolation, Gael and her son left behind family and community five years ago in a move that culminated in Ninilchik.

Already, Gael has sought to find connections, as a teacher in Ninilchik and throughout the Peninsula. “As teachers we try to find similarities, I try to find connections. I try to whittle it down to the bones so that they can then begin to start adding the flesh. Above all else, I try to remember what an experience was like through their eyes.”

The elders knew the people, they knew the traditions, they knew what was right-"bury them back.”