welcome

Lawrence A. Baines

From Chapter 6

Requirements for becoming a funeral director far surpass requirements for being a teacher through Teach for America. The education of a funeral director requires:

• Longer study of specialized content (12-24 months for funeral director; 5 weeks for Teach for America),

• More field experience (12-24 months for funeral directors; 0 for Teach for America),

• More stringent internship requirements (12-24 months for funeral directors; 0 for Teach for America).

Obviously, the job of a funeral director involves the acquisition of specialized knowledge and extensive experience working in the field prior to full-time employment.

In comparison, the profession of teaching requires no specialized knowledge and no experience prior to full-time employment?

My fervent, outrageous hope is that, one day, the expectations for teaching the living will exceed those for handling the dead.

Book available now through Amazon, Rowman & Littlefield website, and other booksellers.

Useful websites:

http://www.academicearth.org/

http://videolectures.net/

http://www.youtube.com/education

http://www.aldaily.com/

http://www.ted.org

http://www.teacherquality.info

http://btownerrant.com/

http://commoncoreliterature.com

One of the principal functions of school is to teach children how to behave in groups. The reason for this is that you cannot have a democratic, indeed, civilized, community life unless people have learned how to participate in a disciplined way as part of a group. School has never been about individualized learning. It has always been about how to learn and how to behave as part of a community.

Neil Postman

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Published in 2010

You know Mike, the guy who groans upon entering your classroom, whose favorite sitting position is “head on desk,” who mutters epithets to himself whenever you announce a new assignment, whose potential is not evident in the nine zeros logged since the last grading period.

You are also familiar with Michelle, the girl who rolls her eyes when your assignments seem to fall short of expectations, who reads an entire novel the first day she gets her hands on it, who seems to attain a 99 average without even trying.

And, of course, there are Felipe and Sanaa, who struggle to understand the fundamentals of their new language; who hesitate to participate in class activities; who remain mostly mute, aloof, and unengaged.

The edgy 40+ lessons of GOING BOHEMIAN: Teaching Writing Like You Mean It
will help you teach writing effectively to students like Mike, Michelle, Felipe, and Sanaa. Although you might be skeptical of a book on composition with Bohemian in the title, the techniques have proven effective in some of the most challenging classrooms in America.

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"A Future of Fewer Words," from THE FUTURIST, March/April 2012

The reverberations of the shift from words as the dominant mode of communication to image-based media are becoming apparent. As we click more and write less, the retreat of polysyllabic words, particularly words with complex or subtle meanings, seems inevitable.

The rich vocabulary in books occurs in the exposition, not the dialogue. When a book is adapted for film, a video game, or a television series, the exposition is translated into images, so the more complex language never reaches the ears of the audience.

Media associated with the print world (books, magazines, newspapers) are the repositories of sophisticated language, so as individuals read less, they will have less exposure to sophisticated language.

Losing polysyllabic words will mean a corresponding loss of eloquence and precision. Today, many of the most widely read texts emanate from blogs and social networking sites, such as Facebook. Authors of these sites may be non-readers who have little knowledge of effective writing and may have never developed an ear for language.

From "Multisensory Writing," a presentation at NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) in 2011

The quiet classroom where students rarely speak or write unless it is expressly pressed on them by fiat is the antithesis of the kind of interactive, multisensory environment that adolescents live and breathe outside of school.

The dichotomy is jarring—from arduous drill and chill in school to noisy, fun, exciting games and movies outside of school. Teaching reading and writing through formula, memorization, and workbooks might have been effective once upon a time. However, let us finally admit that these sedentary, abstract, sensory-deprived approaches may be less than optimal today.

Even though traditional methods still have a place in a teacher’s toolkit, they do not address the contemporary student’s shift away from print and toward film, television, video games, and newer forms of electronic media.

The bottom line is that students are reading less and plugging in more. How can a teacher who wants to develop students’ literacy teach students who do not read, hate to write, are reluctant to think, and find it difficult to speak intelligibly?

One of the most striking commonalities among the sets of standards developed by professional organizations independently over the past 20 years is the primacy given to literacy.