Paragraph Six
Paragraph Six - The Golden Thread Through a Can of Spam
Let’s pick up the string from last week’s blog post, and see where it leads, then. DaVinci’s exhortation to “realize that everything connects to everything else” is surely the answer to the problem of students who “set about forgetting” (as Sancho Panza put it) what they have learned. I made the claim that making the connections will lead us along the golden thread to the pedagogical version of Blake’s “Heaven’s gate” as opposed to the...
Paragraph Six: Flashes, Specks and Connections
Yes, I’m still hung up on the Zeigarnik effect. I feel its weight on my shoulders every day in the schools. What is our work coming to? A flash of light that fades almost before it’s lit in the short term memory of the students, or the building of a pattern that will serve the students for a lifetime?
Walt Whitman has a line in his poem “There Was a Child Went Forth” (also cited in my third blog post) that reads...
Paragraph Six - Take a Swing. Beat the Odds.
Two blog posts ago I laid out a short-term plan. I said I would contend with the dragon of standardized testing, brandishing a story and three items of research in my attack. I lied. I am going to wield three items of research and two stories, one just off the press. First, the third item of research. (See the first two in previous blogs.) Don’t yawn. It’s research I’ve used to take down the monster dozens of times. It often comes in the form of...
Paragraph Six - Second Grade Empiricism and the Zeigarnik Effect
I was able to get back to Tom McMurrer’s second grade classroom this week, at last, and catch up on progress there. They did it! The little folks wrote letters to each other and took a walk to the post office. Because it was the chaotic holiday season, the workers couldn’t show them around, but the young correspondents did post their letters, and not a single hand lost to those alligator-jawed post boxes. Even better, as foretold, the letters arrived at their homes, full of...
Paragraph Six - Testing - Do Not Disturb
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race,” exclaims Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In my last blog, I suggested we let the question, “What is school?” guide us through the next decade. Following my own suggestion, ready to define the nature of education at every pass, I sallied forth to encounter for the umpteenth time the...
Paragraph Six - Students' Questions and Planning for Surprises
Update on “The Question that Fed My Writing Unit.” You noticed the title change, didn’t you? From “The Question that Ate My Writing Unit” to “The Question that Fed My Writing Unit?” I may be jumping the gun, but my hope is only growing that teacher Tom McMurrer’s second grade writing unit on letter writing is becoming more meaningful in response to the students’ unexpected questions: (“Where do you get a stamp?” “What happens...
Paragraph Six - Living with Questions
Promised update on The Question that Ate My Writing Unit: Tom McMurrer, the second grade teacher at PS 124 whose unit was in peril, has decided to contact the United States Postal Service to see if he can organize a class trip to answer the students’ questions. We have trepidation. What if the recession has caused the USPS to cut back its...
Paragraph Six - The Question of Questions
Last blog post, I settled on the piñata as a metaphor for how big ideas work in the classroom. You whack it hard enough, and out bursts a hailstorm of essential and guiding questions.
Essential questions are the crown jewels of the curriculum. They dazzle us with their value and beauty at the front of the classroom, posted above blackboards (or whiteboards, or smartboards.) They are a constant point of reference during the year’s, the unit’s, the week’s, the day’s lessons. They inspire and...
