My parents e-mailed us this YouTube video this morning, which made me laugh at the thought that I had once found this show funny:
Rob’s parents sent us a sweet, thoughtful card with an invitation to treat ourselves to lunch.
We’re planning a very quiet celebration after a very long day: the first day of school for Rob and the first day of orientation for me. Why, oh why, did two teachers choose to get married in late August?!
Anyway, here’s to seven more — or seventy times seven — whichever comes last.
Sitting in a circle, fourteen teachers speak our names in rhythm with quarter notes: Lau-ra. Blue. James. Blue. There is nervousness, laughing; one tries to show off and flops, another gains confidence after a timid first attempt. We are teachers, so playing the student’s role forces them out of our element.
This week I was privileged to be able to assist Michiko Yurko at a workshop of Music Mind Games, the cooperative theory games I use in my piano lessons with great success. During our orientation, I took great interest in this list of answers to the common question, “Why games?”
It’s easy to hold students’ attention with a game; everyone loves them.
Students relax and learn faster. As Michiko said, “When their minds are open, you can stuff all kinds of things in.”
Memory training happens naturally. As a musician, you need to have an excellent memory, one that serves you even in a chaotic situation.
Students learn to work together cooperatively. There are lots of implications here for careers, religion, and even personal relationships!
Students feel progress and a sense of accomplishment, whether or not they win.
Students are empowered to learn rather than to be taught.
Students are happy to repeat games, which is fundamental to learning. Every teacher would love to phasing herself out, looking on while students work on their own; playing games enables her to do that.
Games engage multiple learning strengths; visual, oral, kinesthetic.
Games are adaptable to different ages as well as different subjects.
Games create a manageable sequence of skills.
Games allow teachers to personally relate to each student – instead of thinking about a class, you’re thinking about a person.
Games allow teachers to evaluate comprehension and track progress without testing. Students learn from each other, and teachers learn from their students.
Games are fun for teachers, too!
As I took notes and listened to her talk, I realized these were all things I was aiming for in classroom teaching, too. Why can’t I play grammar games with my literature classes, or brainstorming games with the budding authors in Creative Writing? I suppose because it would take a lot more work than the traditional methods. Maybe I can come up with just a few for this year. Any ideas?
[The rookie writer] may feel, as the gray-haired scribes of the day continue to take up space and consume oxugen in the increasingly small room of the print world, that the elderly have the edge, with their established names and already secured honors. How we did adore and envy them . . . we imagined them aswim in a heavenly refulgence, as joyful and immutable in their exalted condition as angels forever singing.
Now that I am their age — indeed, older than a number of them got to be — I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity. You are not yet typecast. You can take a distant, cold view of the entire literary scene. You are full of your material — your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation — when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news.
He goes on to talk about what it’s like to be an old writer, and about aging in general — he knew whereof he spake, as he died just a few months after this article was published. The golden years are as fascinating as they are unknown to me, but I can only hope and pray that I can someday write with half the gravity and elegance he seems to command at the drop of a hat. I suppose, to use a clumsily mixed metaphor, that the grass is always greener on the other side of the generation gap.
These next few posts will probably be a little scattered. I’m digging through the mammoth pile of papers I accumulated last year (I do not exaggerate — it’s the size of a third-grader) and finding lots of interesting things.
The first comes from a youth event Rob and I orchestrated several years ago. We would love to be more involved with the youth program, but time is always the problem. This particular instance was a bit of an anomaly; I’d just read Unhooked and was desperate to do something for the girls in my parish who, while maybe not as extreme as the subject of Laura Stepp’s investigation, definitely needed help. We decided to separate into boys and girls, with three leaders each — one dating, one single and one married — and give the kids a chance to talk.
I’m not sure what happened behind the guys’ door, but the girls had a good discussion. We started by having them all write questions or problems down — what were they most struggling with? What did they want to talk about? These neat little squares are what I discovered today, folded up in the bottom of my inbox:
Finding / Demanding respect from a guy all the time.
How do you know when your ready to date some-one!
When people don’t understand what you feel like.
Do you think birth control is considered abortion?
There is this guy I know that has “gone out” with most of the girls in our group (which is pretty big) but they don’t really do anything. I think it’s kind of pointless!
You can never be in charge of a relationship.
Finding a guy that is actually truly INTERESTED, in more than sex.
Nobody ever confides in you.
Why do you even have to “like” guys at all. It’s annoying!
While some of them made me laugh and some made me sigh, they all made me very grateful to be an adult. I wouldn’t go back to high school for anything.
If you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?); for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel, knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.
Perhaps. But there’s a big difference between incorrectly citing a quotation or idea and brazenly appropriating whole passages, as in the shocking anecdote that opens the article. Besides, isn’t the very act of hanging out in someone’s house, without knowing their rules, a moral problem? If you waltz right by the pile of shoes in the entryway and keep yours on because you think you should be able to do what you’re used to doing in your own house, you’re probably the same kind of person who asks to see a friend’s paper and lifts a few paragraphs because you would be willing to do the same for her. That’s not the right way to live, and boy, does it complicate the life of an English teacher!
I remember my first and most traumatic plagiarism experience as if it were yesterday. In my first year of teaching, I read two papers that were almost exactly the same (especially absurd for an opinion paper) with only a word changed here and there. We summoned both students to the vice-principal’s office and questioned them separately. Each broke down in tears. I felt sorry for them, but still angry, mostly out of pride: how dumb did they think I was?!
Maybe Fish’s argument is over my head (it wouldn’t be the first time.) But I have always agreed with Baba, of the Kite Runner, who says:
“There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft . . . When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal a wife’s right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. When you cheat, you steal the right to fairness . . . There is no act more wretched than stealing.”
Emily started teaching and tutoring while she was still in high school, and made it her full-time job in college. She's now in grad school working toward a teaching degree, as well as teaching for several different organizations and age groups in Baltimore. Somehow, she thinks that these experiences give her the right to some rather strong opinions.