The Snowy Day

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judi ceme terpercayaI was born eight years after Ezra Jack Keats first published The Snowy Day, which won the Caldecott Award in 1963. Today, that book is hailed as a landmark in children’s literature because of its simple, unassuming portrayal of a black child, named Peter, who goes out to play in the snow. The book is approaching its 50th anniversary, and has been featured in a number of news articles lately. Keats died in 1983, but a foundation named after him continues to promote his work, children’s literature in general, and libraries and teaching. In fact, this is the 24th year that the Ezra Jack Keats Foundation has awarded mini-grants to teachers and librarians (http://www.ezra-jack-keats.org/news/minigrant-program/).

I loved that book as a child. I don’t recall if I was at all aware of the fact that Peter’s skin color was significant. I grew up in a working class neighborhood just on the outskirts of New Haven, with black as well as white families. Later, my Catholic high school was mostly Irish and Italian Catholics (I was both) and African-Americans. All boys. And my father, in particular, always had a lot of black acquaintances from childhood. He and his nine siblings (or at least the first five of them!) grew up in a housing project called Brookside that had been made up of mostly Irish immigrants but at the time of his childhood was becoming increasingly African-American. So maybe at that age I was unaware of the significance.

I do recall, however, enjoying the fact that Peter was playing in the snow in an urban landscape that was familiar to me. There were sidewalks and apartment buildings and lamp posts and traffic signals. This was not the bucolic winter landscape I saw in most children’s stories. This looked like my neighborhood, off of State Street, where my friends and I could walk past the apartment buildings on our way to the A&P or East Rock Market, which still had wide board wooden floors from the previous century, and where my friend Gary’s mother worked the cash register.

Coincidentally, having just this weekend read about the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Snowy Day, it snowed Monday night (Martin Luther King Day, no less), and we woke to a 90 minute delay. I had watched the snowfall late at night with the porch light on, a jazz station tuned in on my laptop, and a glass of sangria left over from a dinner party we hosted on Sunday. My kids woke up full of excitement for the first real snow of the winter. I said to them, “If you want to play in the snow, go do it now while we have a 90 minute school delay, because by the time you get home this evening it will be almost dark and this snow will likely have turned to slush.”

Both kids were excited. Elsa, who just turned five, asked if she could put her snow clothes on right over her footed pajamas, and was elated when I told her yes. Cormac, who’s eight, just got new snow pants for Christmas, and so this was his first opportunity to try them out.

We just moved to this new place in Storrs last month. We are in a much less urban environment than when we were in Windham, but we also have children on our street here, which we did not in the old house. Our next door neighbors are colleagues of mine, and their youngest boy is only about ten months older than Cormac. I called and invited him to come over and sled in our yard before school. Not only was he excited to come join my kids, as it turns out, I ended up bringing him to school because the delay had caused some morning conflicts for his folks.

The three bundled up kids played in the snow for about three-quarters of an hour, till they got too wet and cold. I watched out the back windows as they sledded down the slight decline in our backyard, and when they disappeared from sight, I re-located them in the adjacent woods beneath some tall pines, shaking the snow from the low branches onto one another’s heads. When they came in, I threw all their stuff into the drier to be warm and toasty for school, and I made hot chocolate with marshmallows for them while they played upstairs till it was time to leave for school.

When I was reading about The Snowy Day in the Courant, Elsa noticed the cover art that accompanied the article, and said, “Hey, we have that book!” Cormac looked up to see what she was pointing at, and said, “Yeah, you used to read that to me when I was little. I loved that book.” So do I.

Football, Literature, And Murder

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ceme online terbaikFriends and acquaintances are often surprised to learn that I played football in high school. I guess I just don’t seem the type, somehow, but I did. I was a very mediocre linebacker on a very good football team that won three conference championships and lost two state championships in my four years there. My senior year, our team was ranked fifteenth in New England.

These days, I still subscribe to Sports Illustrated as well as to the English Journal and Poets and Writers. I watch Sports Center at the gym on the elliptical trainer and watch games late at night after I make myself stop working.

During the playoff games this past weekend, I noticed that my friends on Facebook seemed pretty evenly divided between being engaged in the playoffs or offended by the undue attention a couple of sporting events were getting in the media and on Facebook. A lot of my more artsy friends, for lack of a better descriptor, found the football frenzy annoying.

I suppose football just doesn’t have the literary credibility or literary tradition that, say, baseball does. Not that baseball players are all that literary themselves, but baseball certainly has a rich literary tradition. Think of The Natural by Bernard Malamud, Shoeless Joe by F. P. Kinsella, Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof, The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn, or Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam, just to name a few. These are not just good reads. Some are borderline classics. The Natural was on the sophomore curriculum at the school where I used to teach.

Football has George Plimpton’s Paper Lion, published in 1963, and the lesser known follow up, Mad Ducks and Bears, published in 1971. If you can name another good work of literature about football, please let me know. The only other strong connection I can think of between literature and football is Jack Kerouac, who spurned a scholarship to play football at Boston College to argue with the football coach at Columbia, spend most of his time riding the bench, and then break a leg. (I read an interesting article once about how Kerouac and Ken Kesey, who wrestled, were crucial figures in the cultural transition from the hyper-masculine literary culture of Ernest Hemingway to the more feminized literary culture of the 1960’s. But that’s for another blog post).

Anyway, I couldn’t help but think about the irony of the fact that football is so un-literary, and yet one of the four teams in the conference playoffs, the Baltimore Ravens, was named for a work of literature, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” This happened in 1996 when Art Modell proposed moving the Cleveland Browns from Cleveland to Baltimore. The Browns were charter members of the AAFL in 1946, which became part of the American Football Conference in 1960. The outcry of the fan base when Modell proposed a move, on the team’s fiftieth anniversary no less, was so great that a very unusual deal was struck that allowed Modell to relocate the team providing the NFL committed itself to replacing the team with a new team, and Modell vacated the team name, its history, and its records. Modell agreed to this unusual arrangement, and found himself with a nameless team. A fan contest was put in place to name the new team in Baltimore, and the three finalist names were Marauders, Americans, and Ravens. In a selesai go-round, Ravens won with more than 33,000 votes.

Most of you reading this probably know that Poe spent much of his life in Baltimore, died under odd circumstances in Baltimore, and is buried in Baltimore, where since as early as the 1930s, two or more generations of a family have maintained a mysterious yearly vigil of bringing three roses and a half-filled bottle of cognac to his grave on the anniversary of his birth. (The first written account of this visit is in a 1950 newspaper article, but apocryphal stories say visits may have begun as much as two decades earlier). This year was the third year in a row that no visitor attended, bring a mysterious end to a mysterious tradition.

What struck me as odd and interesting watching the AFC playoff game this past Sunday was that the Ravens were playing the New England Patriots, who were charter members of the AFL, but from 1960 till 1970 were known as the Boston Patriots. This was interesting to me because Poe, despite his association with Baltimore, was actually born in Boston in 1809, and even published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston in 1827. And rather than use his name, Poe published the work as merely, “A Bostonian.”

So the Patriots’ victory over the Ravens, their sixth in seven meetings over the years, struck me as a blow for the more literary town of Boston against a team whose name is likely lost upon a collection of players best known for linebacker and alleged murderer Ray Lewis. Lewis was originally charged with murder following a party at a nightclub after the Ravens won Super Bowl XXXIV in 2000. Ultimately, Lewis was convicted merely of obstruction of justice, even though the allegedly blood-splattered suit he wore on the night of the murders has never been found and no other suspects have ever been identified. Now that is a mystery worthy of the eminent Bostonian author.

Sorry For The Cynicism, But ...

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bandar ceme terpercayaDid anyone read Governor Malloy’s latest tawaran for educational reform? Quite a mixed bag. Looks like he’s out to eliminate certification requirements as well as tenure. If he and Stefan Pryor get their way, superintendents will be able to run their schools like the private boarding school my wife worked at when we were first married. Half the faculty was 22 and fresh from school. They were smart kids but had no idea how to teach, and the turnover was incredible. One trustee actually floated a tawaran to house the ingusan faculty in a college style dorm where they could party, thinking that this would retain them. But of course they were cheap. Room and board were provided, lousy as it was, but salaries were around $10,000 a year. I know this was almost twenty years ago now, but even twenty years ago I started at $30,000 in a district where salaries were modest, at best.

All these proposals are in the name of eliminating the red tape that prevents superintendents and boards of education from hiring the best, most talented people out there. Now I’m sure most of us can think of a situation or two when someone talented was entangled in some certification red tape. My wife had a teacher a few years ago who just couldn’t pass the math portion of the Praxis I, who actually got such test anxiety that she once vomited on the keyboard at the test site, and this prevented her from getting certified. The super at the time supported her and did everything he could to emergency certify her and retain her as long as possible, but ultimately the state called his hand and she had to be let go. She landed on her feet in a community college, but the district lost a talented teacher over a test that was irrelevant to her subject area. But let’s face it, this is not what Malloy is really opening the doors to. He wants districts to be able to hire people who aren’t certified, just as the elimination of tenure isn’t really about empowering superintendents to fire poor performing teachers. It’s about empowering boards of finance to eliminate the highest paid teachers. And if they successfully tie job performance to student performance on standardized tests, then the only thing one has to do to get rid of veteran teachers is assign them the lowest performing kids, set them up for failure by giving them kids with a history of failure. It’s that easy, isn’t it?

Sorry for my cynicism, but honestly, even if Malloy and Pryor aren’t thinking these things, we all know there are administrators and board members and local politicians who are, who are just drooling at the prospect of replacing the teachers at the top of the pay scale with a bunch of new, young, uncertified teachers who don’t have to be paid peanuts.

The only thing I liked in Malloy’s latest iteration of his plan to save education by scapegoating the teachers is his tawaran to improve continuing education programs by replacing “generic continuing education programs presented in large auditoriums” with “high-quality programs … tailored to a teacher's particular needs.” Now that would be wonderful—if he can manage it. I remember when I got my first job, and my mother, a veteran elementary school teacher, sent me a sign that read, “When I die, I hope I die during an in-service aktivitas so that the transition from life to death will be seamless.” I put that up in the faculty room at my new school. Everyone laughed, but most had seen it before.

Professional development was never meant to be this way. When the educational enhancement acts were passed almost thirty years ago now, no one intended for us all to be packed into the auditorium for some generic, canned program, or for the offerings to change with every shift of the educational wind, or to be held captive to another lecture on blood-born pathogens, or to have our principals tell us to meet as a department or team and ‘come up with something.’ Me, I get calls all the time to provide PD, but ninety percent ask me to help them raise their CMT or CAPT scores. That’s not really PD. Typically, I ask to talk to the teachers, use the discussion as a sort of diagnostic, and then I propose something I think will be useful. And I assure the direktur that it WILL help scores, however indirectly. Which isn’t a lie, really, but it takes some persuasion. Often the direktur seems overwhelmed, underfunded, and at a loss. They, too, are under such pressure to raise scores. They’re just desperate.

Can Malloy and Pryor eliminate this mess? I’ll tell you one thing, it will cost more to provide “high quality programs tailored to a teacher’s particular needs” than it does to provide something canned and generic. Somehow I see this cost getting passed onto us. We’ll be required to get this new Master Educator Certificate to stay employed and at the top of our district’s pay scale, but we’ll have to pay for the coursework ourselves. Just watch.

Mandates And Bedeviling Details

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situs bandar cemeThis Sunday, the Courant ran an editorial by Philip Streifer, who is Superintendent of Schools in Bristol and Chairman of the Connecticut Association of Urban Superintendents. In this piece, Streifer calls for more communication and coordination between high schools and colleges in the development of high school curricula that prepare students to meet college expectations.

I agree with Streifer’s main point and, by and large, with his argument. His selesai conclusion, however, is that the state legislature needs to mandate such coordination. And while this may be so, there’s no attention given in the article to the complicated details of how this would look in practice. I’d also add that some existing state mandates interfere with the very goal of coordination, at least in perception.

First of all, who would be responsible at the university level for this coordination? At the high school level, this could be handled by a curriculum director (not that all schools have those, but at least there’s widespread precedent for such a position). But who would be responsible at the college level? I don’t think Streifer is suggesting that schools of education be responsible for this. For one thing, schools of education already have a great deal of communication with high schools in the form of clinical placements and student teachers, though this does not typically include curriculum development. Another thing is that specific departments—English, Math, Biology, etc—should be the ones in communication with high schools in order to develop discipline-specific curricula.

But right now, such positions don’t exist within university departments. At UConn, the closest we probably come is the Early College Experience program, but even then we’re talking about a specific course or two being offered in the high schools, not wholesale curriculum alignment. And even then it can be hard to find someone at the university to be the ECE coordinator. Regular faculty are disinclined to serve in this capacity because the time commitment takes away from their own scholarship and teaching. And faculty like me, who perform lots of service, professional development, and outreach, are in short supply. I can think of one Biology professor who, like me, was a high school teacher for a long time, and who does work with the ECE program. But would faculty like us be able to take on the load of working not just with a few schools offering one course, but the load of working with all Connecticut high schools on full scale curriculum revision and alignment? Of course not. It would require a tremendous investment in personnel at the university level, as well as a certain realignment of the culture of the university to make such positions integral to the academic lives of departments.

Other obstacles, as I said before, exist as a result of other state mandates, such as CAPT. For instance, a community college colleague and I went to a local public high school a couple years back and did a full day workshop on ‘college-level’ writing where we discussed expectations at our respective institutions. We talked about the academic essay, the importance of student inquiry, of drafting and revision, of avoiding formulaic approaches such as the five paragraph essay, and such. On the whole, the group of teachers was very receptive, but a core group of about four veteran teachers in the department felt strongly that such emphases would undermine their necessary efforts to prepare students for CAPT, as well as to prepare them for the writing required on other standardized forms of assessment, such as the SAT and AP tests. At one point, our discussion bordered on getting heated, and I had to walk away after telling one particularly vocal teacher that we were showing him what the expectations were at our colleges. I didn’t necessarily think that preparing students for these expectations was incompatible with or detrimental to preparation for CAPT, SAT, or AP tests, but if he felt so, then he simply had a choice to make.

I’ve run into similar if less vocal and hostile responses at other schools, too. And in the work I have done with the ECE jadwal doing site visits to schools, the tensions between ECE and AP emphases are particularly strong, and though that is one not truly caused by the State, it is one reinforced by many superintendents, principals and boards of education. The pressure to offer AP courses, as well as the temptation to chase after the money dangled by Project Opening Doors, lures many administrators away from the more sound, truly college-preparatory work done by the ECE program. If we were to mandate something even more comprehensive, could we break administrators and classroom teachers from their infatuation with multiple choice questions and timed, short-answer essays? And would this jeopardize the state’s plans for assessing teachers if there were no canned assessments to use as data?

I’ll state clearly that CAPT and AP don’t have to be incompatible with academic or college-level work, and that it is not only possible but worthwhile to have greater coordination between high schools and colleges, but any mandate to do so is going to need a great deal of creative planning and, sorry to say this, financial commitment. And then, after all, the biggest obstacle might be the attitudes of teachers and professors and the entrenched cultures of high schools and colleges.