Today’s Guest Blogger is Crystal Farrell, a National Board Certified Teacher, who currently teaches AP English Language and Pre-IB English II Honors at Celebration High School in Celebration, Florida. She also leads online discussion communities for teachers of AP Language and AP Literature in her school district.

Surprisingly enough, when I began to teach students about arrangement, specifically the patterns of development, I was the only one excited. Can you imagine? There I was, discussing classification, process analysis, and exemplification, my eyes gleaming with glee and twinkling with tenacity; there were my students, watching me discuss classification, process analysis, and exemplification, their eyes deadening with disinterest and glowering with gloom. They tried to be polite and feign curiosity, but I could see they just weren’t that into the patterns of development.

My teacher heart was in the right place. I knew that if I could help my students see the connection between pattern and purpose, they could improve their reading comprehension. More importantly, I knew if I could teach them how to incorporate these patterns effectively in their own writing, we’d have a great chance of going beyond the five paragraph model. I also knew, though, if I wanted to meet these worthwhile objectives, I had to change the way I taught this concept.

This past school year, I devised a different method, one which focused more on student involvement. To start, students read Chapter One in The Language of Composition (TLC). They took Cornell notes on the patterns of development and examples of each, so that everyone would have a basic understanding from which to start and something to quickly refer to later as necessary. I chose this section of the book because the textbook writers linked the patterns to purpose, so the students saw that when reading, they could identify a pattern in order to better understand the purpose of a text, an invaluable skill on the close reading question and multiple choice section of the AP Exam.

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What do Carlos Mencia, Jonathan Swift, and SpongeBob SquarePants have in common? Before I read eight days worth of student responses to question three of the 2010 free response AP English Language exam, I would have said “nothing.” But I have been enlightened.

The argument question this year required students to support, argue with, or qualify Alain de Botton’s position that humorists serve a “vital function” in society. In his book, Status Anxiety, de Botton suggests that humorists aim to “convey with impunity messages that might be dangerous or impossible to state directly.” As the prompt included in a parenthetical “cartoonists, stand-up comics, satirical writers, hosts of television programs, etc.,” some students predictably went through the list and tried to include one of each in their support. This approach tended to result in a disjointed essay.

The more papers I read, the more I discovered that a unified approach produced a better essay. For example, discussing the power of satire, and clearly supporting the essay with examples of satirical writing coupled with fully developed explanations of how the satire performed a “vital role” in society tended to earn an upper level score if the essay was structured and explained well. Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and “A Modest Proposal” were frequently cited, and the better essays discussed the unpopular messages that the respective examples delivered to their particular audiences. Thomas Nast’s cartoons criticizing Boss Tweed provided powerful support for excellent essayists. How the evidence supported the student’s position on the vital role in society that the humorist plays – this was a key quality in the higher scoring essays. Again, and as usual, too many students were unclear about details. You have to know something to write a good essay, as we so often hear ourselves telling our students! The better essayists were those who knew specific details about Nast and Swift.

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Today’s Guest Blogger is Andrea (Ann) Burnett, whose eleven-year teaching career has taken her from Denver’s Contemporary Learning Academy alternative high school to Cape Coral, Florida’s Ida S. Baker High School, an “A” school where she teaches AP English Language and English Honors classes and sponsors the Coexist Club.

Grading essays…fun, right?  Thinking about them every waking moment.  Carrying them around with you both physically and mentally.  Spending hours upon hours editing them.  They literally take over your life!  You trust that your painstaking work will pay off; that your students will appreciate and learn from your labors.  You nervously hand back the essays and wait for your students to thank you for all of the effort that you put into making them better writers.  For neglecting your own children, pets, spouses, homes, and health to help them in their struggle to write well.

The students flip to the last page, search for the grade, dismiss the comments, and ask, “Why did you GIVE me that grade?”  You sigh, knowing that it’s already time to assign the next essay.  It makes you think twice about assigning essays, doesn’t it?

Well, I’ve got the solution.  After going from a class load of 40 students to upwards of 150, I had to figure out a way to keep writing relevant, while also maintaining a life beyond school.  I came up with a strategy to use class time to edit, score and make written and verbal comments on student essays, while keeping the entire class engaged in the process.  Since using this strategy, my students’ SAT, ACT, and state achievement test’s writing AND reading scores have gone way up.  With each essay, the caliber of writing excels, and by the second half of the year, student essays are unique, engaging, and analytical.  And most rewarding, my students always come back to thank me, even the ones that I never thought in a million years would!

Throughout the process, I constantly remind students how much they’ll appreciate this later, that I’m doing this for them, and that they will have an easier time next year, in college or tech. school, and in their future careers.  I really “sell” it at first, and then they begin to own it once they start to see results.  I use this process for all writing assignments, including research papers and timed essays.

Before the first essay

• Set a tone of respect within the classroom; the objective is to grow as writers; we’re all in this together; every student will read their own essays aloud
• Discuss Writing Don’ts Handout
• Review the writing rubric (possibly use Color Mark strategy)
• Review model essays and scores/grades
• Practice scoring essays and giving constructive feedback

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I have to admit that I’m on the fence when it comes to getting myself an e-book.

On the one hand, there is an enormous appeal in the convenience of reading a book review or having a friend recommend something and instantly downloading it—of having my entire personal library stored on a device the size of a trade paperback. Yet, while I’m an eager user of fun new technology, I’m rarely an early adopter because I’d rather wait for the developers to work out the bugs before frustrating me with them, and to develop more user-friendly features. Plus, in time these gadgets usually come down in price. Until then, I bide my time and read what those early adopters have to say about the products and their markets before making up my mind.

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Nicholas Carr is making news today, thanks to his new book The Shallows. You might remember Carr from his groundbreaking article, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, in the Atlantic. Carr’s new book argues that the constant multitasking engendered by the Internet and hyperlinked learning are not only a detriment to higher cognition and true understanding, but have an actual neurological impact on our brains, even adult brains.

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting interview with him in which he argues that

Studies pretty clearly show that when our attention is divided, it becomes much more difficult to transfer information from our short-term memory, which is just the very temporary store, to our long-term memory, which is the seat of understanding.

Carr’s new book also prompted today’s Op-Ed by David Brooks in the New York Times, where he makes a really strong case for the positive cognitive effects of simply reading books. Citing a study in which students were given twelve books to take home with them over summer vacation, he writes:

They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.

Further, for those who believe in the value of literacy narratives, Brooks contends:

It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.

That affirmation of the importance of reading should warm the cockles of every English teacher’s heart.

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology in the classroom recently. Ironic, in some ways. In a year when my school has worked to surge ahead in its technology use, I’ve been out of the classroom for the last ten months, and largely computerless for the past few weeks as I’ve moved house and waited for my internet service to be established.

But a cluster of recent articles about the impact of technology in the classroom–particularly in English and the humanities, where reading is central–and discussions on the AP English listserv have prompted me to examine my own philosophies and attitudes toward teaching with technology.

So I think I will do a short series about three topics I’ve given some thought to recently, starting with:

• e-books and e-readers and the engagement of readers with text
• the use of Wikipedia for research
• cellphones in schools

I might think of some other points along the way. In the meantime, here is some of the thought-provoking reading that provoked my thinking:

• “Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader” — New York Times, May 28
• “NH professor pushes for return to slow reading” — Washington Post, June 17
• “Are Classroom Gadgets Worth the Money?” — Change.org, June 17
• “Shiny New Ed 2.0 Video with Gratuitous Sex and Violence” — Beyond School, June 17
• “Bring on the learning revolution!” — Sir Ken Robinson on TED.com, May 2010

I’ve always considered myself a digital native, and in may ways incorporate technology into my teaching practice and embrace it in my everyday life. I tend to be enthusiastic about the potential for technology in the classroom, but sometimes find the logistics of implementing my ideas or the learning curves of my students, other teachers, or even myself an impediment to seeing that potential become reality.

As I hash out some of these ideas in this blog, I’d be curious to hear from readers about their own attitudes, philosophies and experiences regarding the place that emerging technologies have in their lives and their teaching. What are some of your reactions to the ideas presented in the items I linked to above?

Because so much of what the liberal arts (and especially English) teaches is intangible, we are constantly having to defend its usefulness to students and to the world. So, it’s interesting that two different defenses of the liberal arts have surfaced in the last 24 hours.

The first came from Steve Jobs yesterday as he gave the keynote address introducing the latest and greatest iPhone. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

“Jobs wraps up by showing an Apple standby, the image of a street sign that shows the intersection of ‘Technology’ and ‘Liberal Arts’ streets.

‘We’re not just a tech company, even though we invent some of the highest technology products in the world,’ he said. ‘It’s the marriage of that plus the humanities and the liberal arts that distinguishes Apple.’”

In other speeches, he has credited the liberal arts for making Apple machines stylish, fun, and intuitive–and we all know the ad campaigns are Pavlovian works of art.

In a somewhat related op-ed in the New York Times today, David Brooks makes the case that the liberal arts are extraordinarily valuable because they help us understand each other. This breaks down in two ways, the tangible:

Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.

And the intangible, or what he calls “The Big Shaggy”:

Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

The Big Shaggy seems to be his stand-in for human passion, whim, and any other non-rational, id-fueled behavior. When we’re reading literature and puzzling over characters and motivations, it’s The Big Shaggy that we are wrestling with. And when we plop down twice as much money for a MacBook Pro because it is sexy yet secure, sophisticated yet surprisingly simple…well, you can thank the liberal arts for that too.

Today’s guest blogger is Mary-Grace Gannon, who currently teaches AP English Language and freshman English at Xavier High School in New York City. In her 17 years of teaching, she has taught at all levels from elementary to middle to high school. She is also a reader for the AP Language exam.

A recent Washington Post article reports that Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory University, is the Democrats’ new hire in Washington. It will be his job to revamp the party’s rhetoric to appeal to the emotions of their listeners, or as Westen says, “one side appeals to people emotionally, the other side appeals to people through twelve point plans.” Or, as the Washington Post article states:

Democrats should not talk about ‘the environment,’ ‘the unemployed’ or ‘the uninsured.’ Instead, they should replace those phrases with ones that have more appeal to voters, such as ‘the air we breathe and the water we drink,’ ‘people who’ve lost their jobs’ and ‘people who used to have insurance.’

In his book, The Political Brain, Westen analyzes the effect of language on the electorate by comparing the “vision[s] of mind” that each of the major political parties subscribes to – and why the Democrats, with their “dispassionate” approach, have been losing rhetorical ground to the Republicans for so many years. By appealing to the emotions of the electorate, Westen posits, the GOP is more often successful in motivating them to vote.

In the AP English Language classroom, Westen’s ideas are an interesting real-world application of the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. In one of Westen’s videos on YouTube, there is an intriguing piece (4:13) about the power of tapping into a subconscious “network of associations.” His PowerPoint chart (6:32) illustrates the subconscious connections at work in the experiment he performs on the audience. As a follow up, students might listen to the opening of Sarah Palin’s keynote speech at the Tea Party Convention in February and draw a network of associations as Westen does in his demonstration. Within the first minute and a half of Palin’s speech, she has already planted in the minds of her audience several key words, phrases, and images connected to patriotism, spirituality, freedom, disenfranchisement, and revolution – all before she even attempts to talk about any issues or politics. Thus, just as Westen does with his audience, Palin primes her audience to subconsciously connect their feelings about God, country, and responsibility with the points she will make in her speech about America and politics today. She primes her audience with a ‘vision of mind’ that her party espouses – one that taps into the American sense of patriotism, responsibility, love of freedom, and desire for belonging.

Westen’s points about why the GOP is successful and how Democrats lose policy battles (5:48 – two minutes) is a strong opening for the following activity in which students can help the Democratic Party rework their language and unify their approach. Students can continue watching the remaining five minutes of Westen’s talk on their own if they would like more clarification and explication.

A party’s national convention is a prime opportunity for speaking from a unified “vision of mind.” With Westen’s observations in mind, students might go to the videos from the Democratic National Convention in 2008 and choose several speeches to observe how the party misses the mark. Upon study, students might note that some speakers do try to make connections to a vision of family, love of country, but some do it better than others.

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Who has the time? That’s the question I’ve always asked about book groups. I mean, I read for a living, right? But about a year ago, an especially persuasive friend would not take no for an answer – and I’ve been thanking her ever since. Recently, we read The Line by Olga Grushin (Putnam 2010), a novel built around a historical incident she explains in a note at the end: “In 1962, the celebrated Russian composer Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky accepted a Soviet invitation to visit his former country—his first trip to his native land after half a century of absence. . . . The line for tickets began a year before the performance and evolved into a unique and complex social system, with people working together and taking turns standing in line. . . . Although The Line is set in a fictionalized version of Soviet Russia, its central premise is inspired by this historical episode.” I can highly recommend this novel as well as Grushin’s first one, The Dream Life of Sukhanov for your own summer reading, but the teachers in my book group agree that The Line could make a terrific contemporary addition to an AP English course.

Currently living in the Washington, D.C. area with her husband and two children, Grushin was born in the Soviet Union in 1971, moved to Prague when she was five, returned to Moscow in 1981, and in 1989 entered Emory University, where she was the first Soviet citizen to graduate with a B.A. Her debut novel was well received, winning the 2007 New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award and being a finalist for the England’s Orange Award for New Writers. Her website has a wealth of information about her and her work: www.olgagrushin.com.

The Line, set in 1962, focuses primarily on three generations of one family who have different relationships and responses to the promise of “the line” that they see and eventually join. Each has a different reason for hoping that the end of this yearlong line will bring some relief from the repressiveness and stagnation of the Soviet Union. (Grushin has written that the novel combines the eras of Stalin’s 1930s, Khrushchev’s 1950s and 1960s, and Brezhnev’s ’70s.)  Once it is revealed that tickets to a concert by the fictionalized Igor Selinksy are the reason for the line, each of these four characters as well as a host of fascinating others has some motivation for wanting and waiting for a change, whatever it might be.

Responses in my book group reflected the reviews this new novel has received. Jonathan Yardley called it “a remarkable novel” (Washington Post, 28 March 2010), and praised Grushin’s characterization: “Every one of her characters—by the end the cast is large—comes fully to life and reveals depths the reader at first does not sense.” New York Times critic Elif Batuman (18 April 2010) agreed with Yardley that the lyrical and metaphoric writing is impressive, though he found that “Grushin’s flair for external descriptions can become a liability. The visible surfaces of people and things are depicted so virtuosically and prolifically that they sometimes impede the actual story­telling.”  In my book group, we admired Grushin’s writing for the most part, yet the stream-of-consciousness narratives can become a bit confusing.

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With the exam almost here, President Obama may have provided a good opportunity for a high interest last-minute exercise or a follow-up to Wednesday’s exam. During the past few weeks, he has delivered two commencement addresses: one at the University of Michigan, a second last weekend at Hampton University. (Follow links for full text. Videos embedded below.) Regardless of your or your students’ political preferences, these two speeches highlight the importance of audience: the speaker is the same, the occasion is the same, but the audience is different. It’s true, of course, that both audiences are 2010 graduates primed to embark on careers or graduate education, and both face a job market and an economy that is, at best, uncertain. The key difference, however, is the mission of the school from which the students are graduating: one is a large state university and the other an Historically Black Institution.  The Washington Post called the Hampton commencement speech “a more traditional address than the broad critique he delivered eight days ago on the role of government, political parties and the media at the University of Michigan” (Scott Wilson, 10 May 2010). I’m not quite sure what “traditional” means in this context – though the tradition of commencement speeches might be a good research subject for students – but having a look at the two speeches side-by-side reveals a speaker tailoring his remarks to his audience. I’ve made a few comments about what strikes me right off the bat, enough to get you and your students started, but my observations here are just a starting point. Indeed, this whole activity could be a work in progress, one that you can build on by adding President Obama’s next commencement address at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He is also slated to address the graduates of Kalamazoo Central high School in June. (It’s probably worth nothing that two of his choices are in Michigan, a state facing one of the most challenging economic recoveries. We might call that exigence…)

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