So I started Cymbeline with the 8th grade class today. I posted a request for suggestions yesterday, but the answer was staring right back at me from the post itself. Show the students the Taming of the Shrew video that the 11th grade students made.

We did a basic K/W/L activity on Shakespeare and the teacher was so impressed by her students’ prior knowledge that she decided to let the students choose the play. But they didn’t really know very many plays, though one student remarked that Romeo and Juliet was “so played out.”

I showed them the Shrew video, and invited them to discuss at their tables how they would do the project differently. They came up with some great ideas, and earnest critiques of the project. They also decided that they wanted to do The Taming of the Shrew. Yeah, because Romeo and Juliet is “so played out.”

We discussed some other plays, including As You Like It and Othello, which seemed to be strong contenders. One of the students asked about Cymbeline, and the teacher gave a brief description of the opening situation with Imogen, Cymbeline, Posthumous, Cloten, and the wicked Queen. I talked about how Iachimo bet Postumous that he could seduce his wife. The teacher described with some detail how Iachimo was able to “win” his bet, as it slowly dawned on me why we don’t teach this play. Still, it’s Shakespeare, and we’re totally going to get away with it. I described the beheading of Cloten, and now all the students want to do Cymbeline.

So we ended up where we started on the play, but at least the students now have ownership of the choice. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it.

UPDATE: The project has been completed.

I’m starting to work with a new 8th grade class tomorrow on Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Ultimately, we’re planning to do a video mockumentary – kind of like a fake reality show set in the world of the play. I did a similar project with 11th grade students on The Taming of the Shrew and it was very successful.

Cymbeline is a play I think is underrated, and I’m thrilled the teacher chose this play. But I’ve never taught it before!

Any suggestions?

I worked with junior high school students on haiku poetry today.

Actually, I’ve been doing quite a bit of haiku lately, as it’s part of our poetry unit. It’s an easy form for the kids to write, though their free verse poetry is so much more compelling.

Do you have a favorite haiku? Neither do I.

Frankly, I think haiku is lost to the ear of the English speaker. Haiku is a Japanese language form, and it doesn’t translate well into English. The 5-7-5 pattern of syllables sounds different in Japanese, which uses a largely consistent consonant-vowel syllable construction.

English speakers don’t hear syllable counts; we hear stress patterns and rhyme schemes. Take the wildly popular limerick. There’s no syllable counting in limericks. A limerick has a stress pattern of 3,3,2,2,3 with a matching rhyme scheme. Two limericks could have a radically different syllable count and still sound correct.

Generally there are two unstressed syllables per stressed syllable, but even that’s flexible. In fact, we could take out all of the unstressed syllables and it would still kind of sound like a limerick:

Man From France
Did Quick Dance.
Asked Why,
Would Cry
“Ants In Pants!”

But if the stress pattern or rhyme scheme were different, we wouldn’t accept it as a good limerick. On the other hand, if a haiku were a syllable or two off in either direction, we’d agree it wasn’t a haiku, but our ear wouldn’t hear the problem.

Anyway, I’m still going to teach haiku, but that needed to be said.

I gave a workshop today on incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into literacy instruction to improve student writing in the one-to-one classroom. A one-to-one classroom is one in which every student has a laptop with Internet access. That means that each learner has the ability to interact personally with a dynamic network of learners, both within the classroom and in the larger community.

This workshop was done in the shadow of a short-sighted article in the New York Times that dealt only with the problems of the one-to-one classroom, and none of the potential.

What these educators seem to be missing is that this is the world our students are living in right now. Case in point: FanFiction.net. This is a website where people can go and post original fan fiction. Thousands of our students are there right now, posting original stories, getting feedback from peers, and revising their work to make it more effective. Nobody’s asking them to do this; but there they are, using 21rst century tools to hone their writing skills. And if these are the skills we want students to learn in school, how can we not take advantage of every opportunity to bring the same tools into the classroom?

Anyway, I usually enjoy these workshops, but I was sick all day, so I was eager to come home, take some cold medicine, and go to sleep.

In my sleep, I had a dream that I was in France, around the turn of the nineteenth century. It was just after the Revolution, but before Napoleon was installed as Emperor. My guide was showing me around, and – in typical dream-like anachronistic fashion – he wanted me to see his radio. There was an earpiece and a microphone, both in the style of the period (if you can imagine what that would look like).

I put on the earpiece and heard a radio host talking about John Locke. I repeated the last line of what he said to indicate to my guide that I could hear what was being played, and suddenly the voice said “Is someone there?” I froze for a moment, unsure if he was talking to me, and the voice said “I think someone’s there. What’s your name?” “My name is Bill,” I said, into what I now realized was a microphone. The voice responded, “Welcome, Bill.”

My guide said that there were similar radios in homes all over the country and anyone could participate. I was impressed, but a little nervous about being put on the spot. “This is my first time doing this,” I stammered, and the voice said “Well, I’m glad you’re here. We no longer depend on the government and its puppets to provide our radio content. This is the radio of the people, and we can say anything we want.”

And that’s when I realized that this guy wasn’t the host of the radio show. He was another guy like me with a microphone. And if more people joined up, we could have an extended conversation, and that would be the show. This would truly be a new paradigm.

I woke up, still woozy from the cold medication, but I rushed to the computer to record my dream. My subconscious mind had conflated the changes in Europe during the Enlightenment with the current evolution of Internet technologies. During the Enlightenment, people started to perceive government less as an absolutist top-down sovereign who rules by divine right, and more as a function of citizens who can actually take part in shaping their own polity. Right now, a similar transformation is taking place in the way we think about the Internet – less as a one-way, top-down source of information, and more as an interactive community of which we all can be a part. Nice analysis, subconscious mind!

As we think about these new technologies, and how they might reshape education, if not society as a whole, we should remember that they are more than just fun new toys. They are a revolution.

What are you reading right now?

I don’t mean right this second, because obviously you’re reading this blog. That’s because you’re one of the heroes.

But in general, what have you been reading lately? Is it something for work? For school? For pleasure? Professional development? Have you read it before, or is it something new? How did you hear about it?

Or do you “not have time” to read?

Right now, I’m reading The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker and Awakening the Heart: Exploring Poetry in Elementary and Middle School by Georgia Heard.

I’m reading The Blank Slate for pleasure, mostly because I just taught a lesson on nature vs. nurture for my education students, and I’ve lately become very interested in Pinker. So far, I’m really enjoying it. Pinker is a brilliant mind with an engaging writing style, writing on topics that meet where science intersects with politics. Great stuff!

I’m reading Awakening the Heart in anticipation of a poetry unit I’ll be facilitating in various junior high school classrooms in New York City after Spring Break. I’ve really just started the book, so perhaps I’ll have more to say on it anon.

What are you reading right now?

At work, we’re preparing to roll out our new unit on Civil Rights, and I’ve been catching up on all of those things I should have learned in school but, for whatever reason, didn’t. Today, I learned something new about Emmett Till.

What I knew was that Emmett Till was a fourteen-year-old African American child who was brutally murdered for the crime of whistling at a white woman in Mississippi in 1955. The two killers were acquitted by an all-white jury who either thought the killing was justified, or just couldn’t be bothered to care that it wasn’t.

What I learned today was that the two killers later gave a full confession to Look magazine, which published their account of the killing. The article is being used as a part of our Civil Rights unit, and is available on the PBS website.

I’m not going to quote from it; you really have to read the whole thing. Then, you have to click on the link at the top that says “Letters to the Editor” and read those, because they are even more chilling than the article, in terms of understanding what the times were like.

The cumulative effect of studying myriad injustices across several different civil rights movements in such a short period of time has been sobering. But the most staggering element of all of it is just how recently most of this happened. When you look at all of the injustices in the world today, it’s easy to forget how much progress we’ve actually made. So, it’s been both depressing and inspiring at the same time. I’m curious to see how the kids will take to it all.

By the way, the PBS website is the best website on the entire Internet. Just thought you’d like to know. For more on this story, you can visit their Emmett Till page. If you’re an educator, you’ll want to set aside a weekend to explore their Teacher Source. They also have a page for kids. And there’s much, much more worth checking out, whatever your particular interests may be.

I gave a full-day workshop today on the value of blogging in the literacy classroom for school-based literacy coaches and technology coaches from across the city, and I never once mentioned that I had my own blog. I don’t want to be annoying “Hey, you gotta read my blog” guy.

But if I never tell anyone about the blog, then who will come and watch my postings of grainy Animaniacs cartoons from the mid-’90’s?