Category Archives: reading

Making Change

blogging, reading

Fall has arrived. Mike Thayer welcomes it in this lovely, provocative piece.  I am welcoming it by making changes in my routines, at least one of which has been with me since 2000. And after just a day or two, not surprisingly, I am struggling a bit. The ultimate goal of the change is to become more active in my professional learning network by reading and writing publicly. There are some secondary personal goals as well but, for now, this is the one on which I am focusing.

The routine I am giving up was called Morning Pages and was an idea I borrowed from Julia Cameron. Three hand written pages first thing every morning. For nearly 14 years. I have piles of spiral bound notebooks tucked into boxes and bookshelves. These pages got me through some tough times, saw me through the transition from public school teacher to ed tech professional developer and, more recently, to part-time farmer. But I’ve had a sense for some time that they have run their course, served their purpose and now were often nothing more than an extended to do list, less about hopes and dreams and more about finances and dirty dishes.

Meanwhile, smart people were having even smarter conversations on the web, and I was missing them because once I finished the pages each morning, the world was waiting: dog walks, pig feeding, email, meetings, course checkins, reports, and so forth. The stuff of life that left me tired at the end of the day with little energy for sorting through social media for gems, reading longer articles and then facing the blank blog page to analyze and synthesize. Lately, I have ended up in Minecraft, building a house, exploring the terrain and learning to build things. It was fun but not getting me any closer to professional learning. I talk the talk of PLN to the educators I work with but I wasn’t walking the walk.

So, the plan is to do these things first the way I used to do the pages. Of any habit I have ever adopted, the pages stuck. I love writing by hand, I love journaling, and the pages were a way to come into the world slowly, pushing back the work and the stresses for just a little while. I am a fan of routines as they help us organize our lives but I also understand how they can become crutches. My pages helped me believe that I was writing even though they never saw public scrutiny.

I’m still not sure about this new habit. Honestly, yesterday I plunged right into work after only a few minutes of browsing Hootsuite and Feedly. I never even considered writing a blog entry. This morning obviously went a bit better. It is a chilly morning here at the farm, and Mike’s ode to Autumn inspired me to do my own reflection on change and the difficulties it can present. I am putting first things first, making sure my personal priorities don’t get lost in the daily fray.

It isn’t going to be easy…despite my ultimate success this morning, I somehow blanked on my user name for the blog and retrieving it meant ending up in email. I’ll admit to answering one or two. I am wondering about doing this work on a different device reserved strictly for reading and writing rather than working. Break the habits associated with the MacBook Air.

Plus, Tim Stahmer includes me on his blog roll and I want to live up to his expectations 😉

 

Happy Birthday, Wendell Berry

books, leadership, reading,

I just finished reading Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, which I bought, along with Farming: A Handbook, on a recent pilgrimage to City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. I followed up with A World Lost, one of Berry’s Port William books. If I had to name one person who most inspires me, I believe it would be Berry. I have only been farming for a few years but I understand his love of the land and how it has informed both his politics and his philosophy. Berry turned 80 today.

In this paragraph from his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, Berry gives homage to others who have shaped his ideas:

As many hunters, farmers, ecologists, and poets have understood, Nature (and here we capitalize her name) is the impartial mother of all creatures, unpredictable, never entirely revealed, not my mother or your mother, but nonetheless our mother. If we are observant and respectful of her, she gives good instruction. As Albert Howard, Wes Jackson, and others have carefully understood, she can give us the right patterns and standards for agriculture. If we ignore or offend her, she enforces her will with punishment. She is always trying to tell us that we are not so superior or independent or alone or autonomous as we may think. She tells us in the voice of Edmund Spenser that she is of all creatures “the equall mother, / And knittest each to each, as brother unto brother.”7 Nearly three and a half centuries later, we hear her saying about the same thing in the voice of Aldo Leopold: “In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

I’ve been curating web resources related to Berry. Some great videos of him speaking and the terrific interview by Bill Moyers last fall.

Lessons in Leadership

leadership, reading

My leadership mentor is Warren Bennis. One of my most highlighted and tagged books is On Becoming a Leader. I was excited to read his memoir, Still Surprised: A Memoir of Life and Leadership. He tells his story honestly, including both his triumphs and his mistakes, both personal and professional. As with any memoir, there seems to be a lot of name dropping but this is a man who was a pivotal figure in many important movements in the mid-20th century so it was interesting to see who he knew.

Bennis encourages leaders to cultivate emotional wisdom that includes empathy, respect and insight in dealing with others. Listening is an important practice.

I feel that I am less a creative thinker than a creative listener. Listening is an art, a demanding one that requires you to damp down your own ego and make yourself fully available to someone else. As listener, you must stop performing and only attend and process. If you listen closely enough, you can hear what the speaker really means, whatever the words. And paying undivided, respectful attention inevitably makes you more empathic, one of the most important and most undervalued leadership skills.

The story that resonated with me, however, was of moving to SUNY-Buffalo as provost. He had been brought in to change the university. However, like many change agents, he failed to get to know the culture and community that he had been asked to change. His work there was essentially a failure. At one point, he describes driving with his colleagues in an expensive sports car, realizing only in hindsight: “The three of us might just as well have carried signs that read CLUELESS, ELITIST OUT-OF-TOWNER.” He goes on to provide the lesson he learned: “Every leader, to be effective, must simultaneously adhere to the symbols of change and revision and the symbols of tradition and stability.”

I have somehow gotten embroiled in a local battle where my outsider status is something of a hindrance. The community has some real divisions and without realizing what I was doing, I got involved with the wrong side. They are good people who have done good work but, it seems, they have done so without involving the surrounding the community so they are often viewed with suspicion by others and accused of only working with a select few. But they showed up with kids at the farm and I saw a way to work with young people again so I dove in.

The questions I ponder now are about the next steps. I have reached out to the other side but been mostly rebuffed. Have I lost the opportunity to be either a peacemaker or a change agent? How can I respect the traditions while also pushing to bring unity to this divided community? For now, I am pondering before acting any further. What would Warren do?

Gamifying My Reading Practice

books, gaming, reading

I am a book collector and avid reader. I ran a reading workshop for many years in my middle school classroom to both introduce my students to reading and to work my reading time into my day. Since 2005, I have tracked my reading at LibraryThing. I generally don’t have a reading plan past the next one or two books and these are often the ones on the newest pile or that I can get immediately on my ereader. But my shelves are filled with lots of unread books that I’ve collected over the years and one of my goals this year is to read some of them rather than continuing to buy new ones whether analog or digital.

Couple that with a desire to get more involved with online community, and I’ve begun to gamify my reading practice.

I did this by joining the 75 Books a Year Challenge Group. One of the perks is that it includes suggested challenges that help direct you to specific books using a wide range of criteria from book covers to characters to topics. Last month, I read one challenge book. The Red Tent was a book I shared with the LibraryThing user with whom I share the most books. I’ve had Anita Diamant’s retelling of the Old Testament story of Jacob and his family on the shelf for a long time. I’ve always meant to read it but somehow it never called to me. The challenge encouraged me in a way that nothing else has.  I finished on the last day of the month, determined to meet the goal and add “completed” to the challenge page.

This month, I signed up for four challenges and am meeting all of them by reading books that I already own. Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin is going to be the biggest challenge as it is a long book: the challenge was to read a chunkster. LibraryThing provides stats about your reading including average pages. The challenge requires that you choose a book that is higher than your average by at least 50 points. At close to 751 pages of text (you can’t count the appendices and bibliography which, in Team of Rivals, get you to almost 1,000 pages!), this book is far above my average of about 300 pages. I’ve already started, and it is wonderfully readable as it describes Lincoln and four of his main rivals who also came to work with him. My plan is a chapter a day, which leaves a few days at the end of the month in case I fall behind the pace.

I’m wondering how I would translate this to the classroom reading workshop. We did a little of it by having them read books with Accelerated Reader…sometimes I’d ask them to read a book at the high end of their score. And some of the students found it fun to take a quiz and earn points but others struggled just to find a book. Giving them some kind of guidelines, even if it that the title has to be red (I’m reading All the King’s Men to meet that challenge this month), can help get them to pull a book off the shelf that they would normally skip. Then, and this is the most essential point, they need time to read and it can’t just be on their own time. If we value it, we need to make time for it. 

 

More On Making Learning Relevant

learning, reading, testing, ,

Sometime after I posted the last entry on the relevance of Algebra, I was paging through a book catalog and it seemed like each page had at least one book that focused on how and why literature mattered. Here are just a few of the titles:

I haven’t ordered any of them. I’ve already read Moby Dick and W.H. Auden and spent a lot of time teaching children Shakespeare. At some point I realized I was trying to turn them into English majors, when what I really wanted to do was help them learn to love reading the way I did. If, eventually, they found Melville and Auden and the Bard, so much the better. But to force it upon them meant it only led to the inevitable question of why they needed to read it in the first place.

It is an interesting side note that the authors of these books are writers who were probably English majors at some point in their lives so perhaps the lesson here is that, if you plan to become a writer, then reading literature is part of the career path.

And then there’s this blog entry from Edutopia just published today: Why Do We Need To Learn This? Allen Mendler offers strategies for answering the question that might diffuse the immediate situation but never gets to the heart of the answer which is that someone, somewhere decided that “this” was important for everyone to know and, as Mendler does point out, it is going to be on a high-stakes test:

Upon hearing the “When will I ever use this?” refrain, a high school teacher I work with tells her students, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what you want to be in your life. But if you give me a list of everything you plan to do and accomplish, I’ll do my best to let you know when we cover something that I think you might use.” When kids say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” her response is, “Exactly. You might need it next week, next year or never. But it is going to be on Friday’s test, not because I want to make you miserable, but because at the end of the year, it is going to be on the state test, and if you want to pass, you need to know it.”

So, you have to know it because I’m going to test it and later someone else is going to test it? I think this is probably the worst answer to the question but the most relevant in our high-stakes world and that just makes me sad.