One Night as an Accidental English Teacher

Last night, after having dinner with some friends from dancing, my best friend Jenna and I ventured across Harvard Square from the Garage Mall to the Coop, otherwise known as the Harvard Coop Bookstore.

Down the center of the building there is a row of tables each stacked high with books. On either side of the tables are shelf displays each about as tall as a man, though much wider, and beyond those are walls lined with books from floor to ceiling. I like to be surrounded by books and I have spent many a night and many a weekend afternoon there.

The Coop is open and airy. But it seems a little too tidy. When I walk in there I feel almost as if I am in a museum. I miss the atmosphere of the Avenue Victor Hugo Bookstore, in which all the shelves were floor to ceiling and in between were aisles you could only shimmy down.

When we walked in, I hadn’t planned to teach a lesson on literature.

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Weekly Review: November 6th to November 12th

I have implemented the first stage of my strategy, using a feed reader to manage my feeds. Consolidating all of the different streams of information down so that I just have to deal with the one website each day has been a blessing. I am still tinkering with this aspect of the strategy: I am thinking of moving to an offline feed reader because I’m not sure how long Reader saves all the posts I highlight with a star.

I failed this week to implement the second stage of my strategy, writing a little bit of the Weekly Review each day instead of all at once. There is always tomorrow to begin the Weekly Review: November 13th to November 19th!

Want to Learn Poetry from Matthew Koslowski?

I am developing a one session course to introduce adults to reading poetry for pleasure. The tentative title is, “Bawdy&Body: An Introduction to Poetry for Adults.” If you live in eastern Massachusetts, or around here, and would be interested in attending such a course, contact me.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Who is Allowed to Speak?
• Beaker Would Have Trouble in Danvers High School
• Karen Armstrong on the Core of Religion
• Zero Tolerance
• Biased by Design
• Sleep Your Way to Happiness

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Weekly Review: October 9th to October 15th

Running a blog is a job in and of itself. Since starting this blog, my respect for journalists has grown because I have learned how much time it takes to craft a single post.

My essays are pure opinion pieces. I read a book, a poem, an essay, or a news article. Then I think about what I’ve read and then look at my world and see if its relevant, judge if I think others might enjoy reading about my interaction with that work.

And it takes me between two and four hours to write these essays.

Yet I’m hooked. I love writing here because I feel more alive because I am again engaging the world in ways that I haven’t since college. Each essays calls upon me to look at my world and analyze it and reflect upon it.

This is another great gift of literature.

And, yes, I call even bad newspaper essays literature.

These Things Caught My Eye

• Finger, Painting
• Do You Want Factory-Farmed Children?
• When the High Jump Becomes a Pole Vault
• Mommy, Am I Responsible Yet?
• Judging Motives to Evaluate Blame

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Children Left Behind: Statistics and Abstractions

In This Essay

“No Child Left Behind and the Spirit of Democratic Education”, Why School? by Mike Rose

Monday Metaphor: Growth, Learning with Impact by John Spencer

“Why Our Standards-Based Grading Sucks”, Learning with Impact by John Spencer

“MCAS scores fall shy of target”, Boston Globe, by James Vaznis

“Charter schools see more attrition”, Boston Globe by James Vaznis

“The next chapter on education reform”, Boston Globe by Gov. Deval Patrick

“Critical thinking? You need knowledge”, Boston Globe by Diane Ravitch

“These test-score jitters are a sign of high standards”, Boston Globe

Ideals and Realities

I had some great conversations about education and public policy with a friend. She would take the pragmatic side of the argument while I would take the idealistic side. While I would speak of sweeping visions of what education should be, she would want specific plans on implementation.

Our arguments usually ended with me saying that so much depended on implementation, that what I thought could really have a great impact, and her saying that no implementation would be perfect and I needed to get my head out of the clouds.

Implementing High Stakes Testing

Last week saw the publication of the test scores for the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. Part of the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, this standardized test fulfills the requirements of No Child Left Behind.

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On President Obama’s Address to Students

With all the controversy swirling around President Obama’s Address to Students, I was curious to see what he would say yesterday.

I wanted to form my own opinion of the address. I had avoided reading all of the advance press that I could. I knew there was talk of school boards voting to prevent its presentation in school; I knew conservative talking heads and shouting mouths had condemned the very idea without any advanced copy, had dismissed a political tradition; I knew there were parents who were thinking of keeping their children home as a boycott.

As much as I had anticipated the speech, I was disappointed by his speech. More than disappointed, in fact: the President’s speech made me angry.

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