We moved to Marietta from Oak Park Illinois in the spring of 2003, the last week of April to be precise.  My youngest daughter would graduate from 8th grade that year and she decided to matriculate to a local high school from a local middle school. We moved a lot and her experience told her that it was better to make the inevitable change quickly.  That change brought us to Mabry which proved to be a exciting and encouraging learning environment.  The movie award night was happening during one of our visits  as well as the French class trip video log to Canada. Seeing both these projects opened my eyes to the possibilities available to students in an open school environment.  In assigning relevant class projects the students were engaged and excited by the material. They learned standards, course requirements and finessed new technology  in a creative classroom setting.  Thanks to Dr. Tyson’s vision Mabry is a 21st century classroom. Unfortunately, it feeds into Lassiter High School which has a new administrator.  He does not share Dr. Tyson’s creative insight and is threatened by student expression.  For example he censored the school newspaper last year.  Each article had to be submitted to the administration for approval prior to publication.  The newspaper went from a monthly to a rarely published paper.  I worry about the frustration Mabry Middle Schoolers experience in this oppressive environment.  Dr Tyson open them to the possibility of so much more then they have now. Hopefully his message will spread throughout the system.

This weekend I explored the boundaries of you tube and discovered it ain’t as easy as I thought to post a video.  Last week I learned how to use my brand new digital camera when I filmed my husband’s band in concert. The video was shaky and it really needed a dedicated mike but the results pleased me, after all I managed to do it.  I uploaded the segment  onto my home pc, downloaded Microsoft Movie Maker and played with the raw materials.  Happily, the mouth movements and the vocals matched up.  The background noise overwhelms the vocals through most of the piece but hey its my first effort.  Even Spielberg had to start somewhere and I like the video quality.  Now that I had a video, I boldly entered the world of You Tube.  Signing up for  a membership wasn’t too difficult but successfully loading proved a time consuming challenge. The video was rejected for size; all submissions must be under 5 minutes and 100 mb.  Back to Movie Maker, I cut the piece into sections and returned to You tube and was rejected again because the file parameters were not compatible with the You Tube system.  Return to Movie Maker, poke at the problem and reapply to You Tube.  Success!  IT is online.  But the quality I saw when watching it through movie maker disappeared.  Why? The visual presentation appears grainy and blurry.  It is amazing that 12 year old kids master the skills to make a high quality product as exhibited on the Mabry Middle School site.  After struggling with the applications I developed a deeper appreciation of both the technique and artistry of classroom videos.  As for my video its not quite ready for a link here; I want to try and correct the blurry visuals first.

Another New York Times video and article.  Amazing Girls chronicles the lives of very successful young women attending Newton North High School in Newton Massachusetts. A very prestigious public high school, in an affluent community, Newton North’s curriculum rivals that of upper tier private schools. The students, who attend it, are under immense pressure to prove that they are the best of the best. Newton North is the opposite of Osborne High School in Cobb county to which my previous post referred. This article offers insight into the demands our new academic environment places upon students. Women make up a larger percentage of students attending college than ever before, some statics state women are over 56 per cent of the average campus.  The trickle down effect places a more demanding work load on high school women.  College admissions counselors in an effort to offer a balanced campus increasingly extend early acceptance letters to male applicants over instead of the female student.  Girls know that if they want to get in to their first choice school they must be better than good: they must be the best. High school becomes a pressure cooker where one must learn current course material, prepare for college placement tests,  volunteer and have extra curricular activities. Is society asking too much of these kids?

This semester I am taking English 3310 ~ Principles of Teaching Writing with Dr Levy. We have been exploring the writing process and practice the art of writing small. I discovered an interesting video on the NY Times website. Counting Words explores the extra challenge writing a college essay presents for the disadvantage student. These students remind me of kids I met while working at Osborne High School in Cobb County. Osborne was and may still be the worst performing secondary school in the county and the student population is under served by the system. A mixed population of minorities with a dash of poor whites, these kids do not look at college as a possibility, which is a shame. In the more upward ‘bound’ schools the cirriculum offers college prep programs and drills the requirements into the kids. Usually an english class will practice college essays and work shop the product with the group.If the school doesn’t provide the necessary prep work more affluent parents pay for additional classes outside of school.  The typical poor student does not have the money for this training.  Inspired to work in a school like Osborne I found the article and video on the times site very interesting. I did not add the video due to complication with the NY Times site but just click on the above link and scroll down to the video section. This article (and video) show writing small in classroom use. Instructors guide students in the writing of college essays by helping these kids what is important to them.  The groups distill the thoughts and ambitions of the young people down to an essence that will entice a college admission counselor.  It is a great example of what our studies in action.

On Sunday, I read an eclectic group of newspapers online. Well, to be honest, I read the papers online everyday but the Sunday papers have juicier content and more in depth coverage. Jan Freeman writes a column for The Boston Globe that discusses words, their meaning and usage. As a soon to be English teacher, I am a bit of a contradiction in that I am not incensed by errors in grammar. Sometimes I don’t even notice glaring mistakes in usage. Hey, I even make them myself, all the time. So I was taken aback by the umbrage and punitive attitude expressed by grammarian inquisitors in her recent column. She quoted writers to The Guardian, a British newspaper, on local disgust with American idiom and our destruction of the mother tongue. “Writers who cannot distinguish transitive from intransitive verbs deserve beheading,” said one excitable bloke. Beheading? Really that seems a bit extreme. Perhaps a boot camp that requires intensive sentence diagramming would be more appropriate. Like the Tibetan sand paintings, the sentences would be diagrammed in a loose sandy soil using pointed sticks and erased as soon as completed. The sentence and ’sentences’ could be endless.

This anger at language misuse is something I hear often in classes at Kennesaw. Not from the teachers who read our work and judge it, but from fellow students. As part of the course work for English Education, we study the teaching of language, particularly in the following courses:

English 2270, Language and Usage ~ the study grammar

English 3035 Introduction to Language and Linguistics ~ language acquisition

English 3310 Principles of Writing Instruction ~ teaching students to write

In each of these classes the course work challenges the misconceptions potential teachers have acquired during their own educational experiences. We learn about innate grammar, techniques that lead to better writing and reading skills and develop strategies to reach the most challenging pupils. After all the study and discussion there are still those who demand corrective and punitive response to grammar misusage. We should educate instead.