Hong Kong International School

I continue to play catch up with the blog.

After Sara and I presented at the literacy conference on Saturday and Sunday – we stayed over a couple days to work with the middle-schoolers who we had met back in September.

We test drove a couple of our lessons from our new resource coming out with Corwin this Fall and are happy to report they went down like  fresh Dim Sum. The teachers ate it up. plus we found some places where things could be tightened up and even a typo in one of the slides. (Nothing like a 7th grader as copy editor.)

The groups we worked with were fairly large – three classes at a time so we were not as nimble as we could have been. I explained it to the students as we being a cruise ship instead of a speed boat and that taking the twists and turns during the lesson we need to really concentrate or else we will lose precious time just moving about in the lesson.

Well the kids performed heroically and we got a whole bunch of work done – writing and practicing our public speaking skills. Sure every now and then we’d have a participant rowing in the wrong direction – but this was rare and easily corrected.

Kudos to the teachers and students at HKIS and special thanks to Clare – the 7th and 8th grade LA teacher who first suggested we visit to the powers that be.

Hope to see you guys and gals soon.

Lincoln and Guion Creek Middle Schools–Indianapolis

Spent two days in Indianapolis visiting the teachers and some students in Lincoln and Guion Creek Middle Schools. This was our second time to Guion at the behest of curriculum specialist extraordinaire Jennifer H. – over at Lincoln we were introduced to her equally capable colleague Tiffany C. We so enjoy our visits to these schools that we often cite their model as a stellar example for providing professional development for teaching writing  across the curriculum.

Each morning started with a session for all the teachers in the school and then we met in small groups of two to four with content area teacher. As session with science teachers, a session with math and then with social studies. At Guion we also went into the classroom and modeled one of the lessons we presented with real live students.

This was the perfect opportunity for us to test drive a couple of the lessons we will be having come out in a new publication with Corwin in the Fall. We work often with the language Arts departments of school – but getting the chance to work with other content area teachers really stretches us as instructors and consultants, giving us a different lens to project our lessons through. I even whipped out some root cause analysis exercises from my days as a quality engineer.

An added bonus to this trip was that our friend and partner in rhyme – Rebecca Kai Dotlidge – a resident Hoosier – was able to join us at Guion Creek and sit in on (and participate and add to) our lessons with the staff.

Thanks to Tiffany, Jennifer and the principles of both schools, Kurt and Dan for letting us work with their dedicated staff.

Singapore American School

Okay the jet lag is slowly wearing off like steam rising from a sidewalk as the remnants of a tropical cloud burst evaporates 137 miles north of the equator. The past month had been my and Sara’s third trip to Singapore in two years our second visit to Singapore American School in the same time. The little island nation macheted out of the jungle is becoming a second home to us.

It’s funny how sometimes folks back here in the States assume we are going to be holed up in grass huts and charging our iPads with a surplus diesel generator cantankerously poofing out black smoke rings. The easiest way for me to describe Singapore is imagine New York City – dip it in bleach – fix the entire infrastructure and update the architecture by a hundred years and you’d be getting close.

Speaking of sate of the art, our second stint at the Singapore American School (henceforth to be referred to as SAS) proved to be even better than our first – mainly because we knew our way around the school this time. Knowing and working with some of the same teachers as we did last year it felt more like stepping into the classroom after a long vacation. We all have those long distance friendships with folks that no matter how long the time intervals between meetings we just start right up again mid-sentence. That’s how we feel about SAS.

Thanks to the second invite from our friend Dr. Nancy Johnson, we have had the opportunity to really push ourselves as writers, teachers and education consultants. We are basically embedded into the 8^th grade classrooms for three weeks, working with each of the three duets of Reading and Language Arts teachers for a week. We begin each week with three hour and half assemblies for the entire eighth grade a hundred or so students in each session. We then would spend the rest of the week with one “side”. Each side has two teachers and a third of the students – A, B and C sides were respectively on the first, second and third floors. If you think this is a bit confusing – I won’t even go into the schedules which require a slide rule and a Home Depot paint chip chart to figure out.

All we had to do was stand in a room and wait for the kids to show up. It is such a luxury to have so much time with the classes. A lot of the time Sara and I get to see a class of kids once sometimes for less than an hour – here we worked with each group of kids twice apiece. Four hour and half sessions and an assembly to boot really gave us an opportunity to go deeper in our instruction and to build on what the other had worked on the day before.

It’s also easy to look good when working with such dedicated teachers – Nancy, Brian and Brian, Erin, Scott, Rebecca and Betsy all embraced and improved our classroom work encouraging us to go ahead and stretch our ideas. I know we leave SAS better teachers for the experience.

Mylan Park–West Virginia–turkeys welcome.

Sara and I have just returned from a two day visit to Mylan Park Elementary School on the outskirts of Morgantown, West Virginia.

We came at the behest and hard work of Sara’s college roommate Suzanne Smart whose last name is very apropos. She’s got to be a pretty sharp cookie – she brought us in didn't she?

We spent our first day conducting some teacher workshops in the library in the morning followed by a couple assemblies with the students in the afternoon. The second day we lead some writing workshops in the classroom. The students were some of the  most eager to learn that we have come across and we are hoping that this is just the first of multiple visits we make to this great community.

A cornerstone for families in this area is The Shack – a community center extraordinaire where Suzanne functions as one of the big wigs. It was through this organization that Suzanne was able to put together the logistics to get Sara and me into the school.

After our visit in the school we  had the pleasure of headlining a family literacy night which included a lasagna dinner and a gymnasium populated by free range toddlers. The day before when we swung by the center to get a lay of the land in anticipation of the literacy night we surprised some of the kids we had seen in the school as they played basketball. They were bug eyed excited to to see the visiting authors outside of the confines of school walls. One mohawked fourth grader exclaimed incredulously “What are YOU doing out here!.” as if the visiting authors are stored in the principles closet between appearances.

Well, thankfully we were allowed to roam free during our stay in the Morgantown area – not too unlike the flocks of turkey we saw wandering the hills on the way to school. I hope we manage to migrate back sometime soon.

Hong Kong International School - good things come to those who wait.

An eighth grade class at HKIS

The hills of Hong Kong would give San Francisco a run for their money. The cab drive from the Cosmopolitan Hotel up to Hong Kong International School  should come with a disclaimer for those with heart conditions as the drivers careen through the curves like a video of a waterside ride being played in reverse.

The view from the faculty lounge - not too hard to get used to.

I met Clare P. (a 7 and 8 teacher at HKIS) a couple years back while Sara and I were presenting at the EARCOS conference and we have been corresponding for the last three years conspiring a way for Sara and me to visit HKIS. Well with our trip to Kuala Lumpur everything fell into place for a quick two day stay. This was Sara and my second trip to the city but our first to this school, a couple years back we worked at the Canadian School of Hong Kong which was great and we had heard nothing but good reports on HKIS so we were so happy to finally be connecting.

Well we couldn't be more satisfied with finally getting our ducks in a row. The teachers and students couldn't have been more receptive. All the great reviews we had received about the school were well founded. We managed to see the whole middle school plus wedge in a couple teacher workshops and the enthusiasm and appreciation we felt were unparallelled. It's fun to work hard when one gets such positive reinforcement. (the goodies and coffee in the teachers lounge didn't hurt either.)

Even a broken leg didn't stop this customer from writing.

The only regret we had for this drive by visit was that it seemed too short. Well to our happy surprise that just may be remedied as well. Before we even finished our second day we were working with the curriculum specialists on getting us back THIS school year. I don't want to jinx those machinations - but it's looking pretty good for a February encore - cross your fingers and fasten your seat belt we may be climbing those hills again sooner than expected!

International School of Kuala Lumpur

Well, our first overseas adventure for this school year is in the books. Thanks to the International School of Kuala Lumpur and the Hong Kong International School - (more on HKIS later).

It's not very often we arrive at a school library our first day to survey damage done by a civet cat that dropped through the ceiling tiles and ran amok amongst the stacks of books - but that is how our week in the Malaysian capital started.

Now things certainly got better from there - of course that all depends on one's perspective the fact that a wild animal was running around the library before we got there is a positive in my book. Jason, the middle school librarian, told me during a fire drill, while we were hanging out in the parking lot waiting for the all clear, about the time a particularly heavy rain washed a twelve foot long python into the grounds from the forest adjacent to the school.

Well our visit didn't include any other run ins with wildlife excluding of course - middle and high schoolers - who were squeezed with the deft of a serpentine constrictor into our schedule by high school librarian extraordinaire, Nancy Woodward. Sara and I managed to see just about every student in the upper school during our visit. We ran some writing clinics - that's the new nomenclature we're using for our workshops. We work on specific skills  similar to the way one would work on a particular aspect of a sport in preparation for a real game. Just as one might spend an afternoon honing their putting  in preparation for playing golf or repeating corner kick after corner kick with the hope of scoring a world cup goal someday - we may be working on imagery, metaphor, summation, story structure, characterization etc.This way our lessons can be plugged into any writing curriculum that is already in place or provide some insight to students who may not be benefiting from a formal writing instruction. Sara and I believe that one can better decipher the strategies used in literature read once one has practiced these same strategies in their own writing.

Nancy scheduled an evening performance for students and parents which included interpretive dance to some of Sara's work - a chamber orchestra, an a capella choir, and a very talented singer songwriter from the 11th grade along with Sara and me performing some of our pieces.

And to top everything off - the school put us up in an absolutely luxurious hotel suite - in fact when we walked in Sara said, "Oh, this can't be for us!" it was that nice.

Thank you ISKL for helping us to start our year right!

The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round

To get to the International School of Beijing from the Lido (pronounced lee-doo) Hotel, where Sara and I are staying during our visit to the city, we take a bus that picks us up at 7:10am. We wait across the street from our hotel with a dozen or so other teachers including our librarian hostess Nadine,  Starbucks coffees in hand.

Okay, I want to take a little aside here, crossing the street is an accomplishment in itself here in Beijing. In retail one may have heard the adage the customer is always right – in Beijing traffic, the motorist is always top dog – no matter what. Zebra crossings, walk signs, crutches, sudden appearances of deities hold no sway with the Beijingalings behind the wheels of their automobiles. A pedestrian might as well be made from a wisp of smoke as far as they are concerned – make eye contact with one of these drivers and you might as well paint a bull's-eye on your chest. just sayin’…

Anyway, we successfully crossed the street three mornings in a row in order to work with the middle-schoolers. We ran workshops on memoir, metaphor and imagery with the 6, 7 and 8th graders in some very well equipped mini auditoriums with embarrassingly large banners announcing our presence in the school outside the doorways. Even though most of the groups consisted of double classes and the students were writing in their laps we couldn’t have asked for a more successful visit.

The best part was in the evening when I was checking my e-mail after our first day at ISB and I began receiving messages from some of the 8th graders I had worked with during the day. Attached were copies of their writings from the workshops and it was obvious that they had been working on the pieces after the workshop was over. Believe it or not this is the first time I have received so many samples from kids I have worked with so quickly – I don’t care if they probably were getting extra credit for sending hem – it really made my day. (I even forgive the one girl who attached her work as a pdf that ate up half my cell data allowance.)

It’s always a leap of faith by the folks who put their neck on the line to bring a couple crackpot poets from thousands of miles away to infiltrate their classrooms and Sara and I so appreciate their willingness to take the risk. Hopefully, we made them look as good as their students made us look.

Lanier Elementary - Dallas, Texas

Sara and I did a quick trip to Texas at the end of last week to visit Sidney Lanier Elementary School in Dallas. We visited classrooms and also worked with the teachers in a PD session after school. This was all made possible by the energetic and smart school reading specialist Kia - who I first met last year at a conference I was speaking at in San Antonio - and her principle Mrs. Peraza.

Here's a short video from our visit.

Canadian International School Hong Kong

Like everything in Hong Kong the Canadian International School reaches for the sky.  At ten stories tall the building is an apt metaphor for the high goals set by the students and staff. The campus clings to the edge of one of islands many hills resting atop pylons driven deep into the bedrock and affording quite a picturesque view of the harbor below.

Sara and I started our week off with an assembly and then did classroom workshops with grades five through ten. This school is wired. Every student has  laptop and digital literacy is practiced with a gusto. But, this did not stop the kids from producing some great work the old fashioned paper and pencil way when we got to work in our sessions.

We wrote definition poems, memoirs, worked on imagery, metaphor and editing. I especially liked the eighty minute periods which gave us a bit more time than usual to work a bit deep with the kids.

Deep thinking was definitely something the students here are used to. Primary grades curriculum doesn’t break out into subject areas until sixth grade. Before that all the content areas are taught within an all encompassing theme. I’m not really doing the idea justice here – but it sure looks like it works.

Suffice it to say – we had another wonderful international school experience – extra special thanks to Joanne, Tanya, Myrna, Matt and Stephanie for making us feel so welcomed during our stay. Seeya next time!

Aiken to be in South Carolina again.

Spent a couple days last week in Aiken South Carolina, a town about an hour’s drive from Columbia. This part of the state has become a return location for Sara and me the last three years.  We were there on behest of a couple teachers who caught our shtick at the Midlands Writing Project up in Lexington NC this past summer.

Now the National Writing Project is a really cool program. Basically  the idea behind the program is that if one wants to teach writing one should be a writer. Pretty novel (no pun intended) approach eh? Time after time after being completely blown away by the enthusiasm and rigor of a classroom teacher I am working with I find out that they are Writing Project alum.

Such was the case of the folks who brought us in to work with the kids at a couple of Aiken’s Elementary Schools. Beth and Sue were our hostesses with the mostesses during our two day stay. Here’s an article in the local paper that chronicles our visit.

We sure look forward to our next visit to the Columbia SC area  – especially since we found Little Pigs BBQ . Food that good and abundant can’t be legal north of the Mason-Dixon.

Here are some pics from our visit – they’ve been a bit stylized for use in future PowerPoint presentations.

JFK High School Warren Ohio

When I first realized that I was booked into JFK High on the first day back from Christmas vacation I figured the day would be shot by kids unable to switch gears from the sleep late and eating goodies mode to the back in a desk mode.

 

I couldn’t have been more wrong. I had a wonderful visit with the students and teachers, meeting with grades seven through eleven. I was invited by a parent teacher alliance called Artcetera who are responsible for bringing all sorts of extra curricular events to the school. I might quibble a bit with the word extra here though. The folks I met from this organization all knew that adding a little extra creativity to the school day is a very integral part of a successful curriculum.

Extra special thanks to Judi and Brian for bringing me in and for their hard work seeing that their students are exposed and participate in the practicality of the arts. Thanks to Judi for the snapshots in this post as well and good luck on the poetry slam they are holding at the end of this month.

NCTE Conference 2010

Just back from the National Conference of Teachers of English conference which was held in Orlando at Disneyworld’s Coronado Convention Center. Several thousand teachers, librarians, reading specialists, authors and publishers descended upon the house that Mickey built for a week of keynotes, break out sessions, cocktail parties and side trips to the magic Kingdom.

Sara and I were there to attend sessions and to speak about our new book HIGH DEFINITION. We were good citizens – trying to travel self contained so as not to cost our publisher extra dough for projector and sound equipment rental by bringing our own equipment. We were set for the fifty or so folks we expected in our session. Lucky thing we decided to scope out our room the night before our presentation – seems NCTE had put us into a ballroom that seated over 300 folks!

We quickly became friends with Dave – the grand king daddy of all things audio visual for the conference and lucky for us, a friend of our publisher’s school secretary equivalent (you know, the person who is really in charge of everything) Lori. So the next day ignoring a minor hiccup by an uncooperative word document we gave a pretty good session to a packed ballroom!

We did manage to sneak off one of the days and visit the Magic Kingdom – my first trip back to this particular park in over 35 years where we did the roller coaster Space Mountain, the Splash Mountain ride, some inscrutable thing featuring the cartoon character Stitch which we still don’t really know what it was supposed to be about and the Haunted mansion. I remember how high tech and impressive the mansion was those many years ago and now – sadly it seemed a bit dated. Special effects that were uncanny when i was 12 years old were now, rather humdrum.

Finally, we stayed after the official conference to attend ALAN The Assembly on Literature for Adolescents. Which is like speed dating for authors and educators – two to three authors sit up on a dais for half hour long panels where they talk about their latest books and teachers listen and then cue up in lines in the back of the ballroom to have these books signed by the attending authors. Sara and I along with our poetry pal, Alan Wolfe popped up a couple times in between these panel sessions and performed some of our poems thanks to an invitation from Dr. Jim Blasingame – Pooh-Bah of the organization and a performing cowboy poet himself.

We also got to hang out with a bunch of really cool teachers who we have got to know over the years – mostly friends Sara made during the years she worked and learned with literacy expert Janet Allen. Christine, Kelli, Anne, Beth, LeeAnn, our poetry slam compatriot Elizabeth, our new buddy Jack Gantos, Orlando native Charles Waters, Boyds Mills Press, Heinemann and a whole slew of folks far too many to mention made this one of our best NCTEs ever.

So to paraphrase an animated insect, “Sometimes wishes really do come true.”