My Favorite Reading Memory

   I've had a lot of great reading experiences.  A few come to mind immediately.  Catcher in the Rye in Costa Rica when I was in 8th grade (I thought the cover looked strangely plain. Also, the title confused me.)  Rabbit, Run in London in college (bought it at a book fair).  Ender's Game in high school and then later passing on the series to my youngest brother, who enjoyed it equally.

Delbarton's own Peter Dinkledge
plays Tyrion Lannister.

 
    But I don't think anything compares with reading the George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, Storm of Swords, Feast for Crows, and Dance with Dragons.  
     A few details about the series and myself.  These five books represent over 5,000 pages of reading.  And it's not fast.  The series contains hundreds of characters and traverses an enormous medieval-esque world.  It is an incredible achievement in prose and imagination--Martin has already been called "America's Tolkien" by Time magazine.  They took me nearly the entire summer, and I was taking four graduate classes to boot.  It was a lot of time.

Yes, it's also a TV show.  But read the books!
Credit: HBO

   
     I could go on about what makes the series so great.  I'm not normally into fantasy--I never read the Tolkien or Harry Potter books.  But there's something immensely real and complicated with the series.  Heroes die.  The reader is forced to empathize with the villains.  It's complex.  It has multiple point of views.  And I like that, because life is complex.  Something you'll find out this year: I'm not a big fan of black and white (see Captain Ahab).

    But it's more than that.  Reading is not just about appreciating craft or story.  Reading is a personal, active, physical event.  A read does not happen in a vacuum.  It happens to a person in time and space.  Going through a story, creating scenes and characters in your head, thinking of connections to your own life, to other books--this is the essence of reading.  It's personal.  It's an experience.  Reading a good novel is not reading your history homework.  It's not reading facebook updates.  And that's what makes it great.

   See, my parents split up in June.  And this summer, I just needed this series.  I needed to spend hours and hours creating a world that was different than my own.  To be there, around my fiancee and my friends, but not there.  To have something that I know that I could turn to.  I doubt I'll ever spend this much time reading one set of books again.  But it was important to me this summer.

   And here's the biggest thing for me: some teachers or parents might tell you that spending that all those hours reading was a waste of time.  I mean, I spent hours and hours on these five immense novels, and what do I have to show for it?  But for me, this summer, reading was its own reward.
   I hope all of you, all of my students someday get to this point with their reading lives.  Read.  Just to read.

Guilt

Why is guilt so powerful?  In The Scarlet Letter it wreaks physical, emotional, and spiritual havoc on Dimmesdale.  Let's examine ways we see guilt work in our day to day lives.

It's the books, stupid!

Carville keeps the Clinton staff on track
photo credit: kipbot.com

      Hopefully, all of my students know enough about contemporary American history to know about "It's the economy stupid!"

      Bill Clinton was trying to keep things in perspective during his first presidential run.  He knew that while Bush and the GOP were trying to make the election about a number of different things (taxes, defense, etc.), what Americans really cared about, and still care about, is jobs and the economy.  James Carville, a young politico at the time, now a famous pundit, put it up in the war room to keep everyone on track.

      I have been inundated by similar distraction lately, and I want to get myself on track.  My distraction has taken the form of the following, amazing, game-changing items.  I highly recommend them, if you have the means...

   Number 1: Motorola's Droid X.  I am now as cool as my students.  It's a slight improvement over my old flip phone with a broken casing and no battery life.  It takes HD video.  The display is absurd.  I can upload pictures directly to the web.  I am constantly connected to both my e-mail accounts, twitter, facebook, and every piece of information in the world.  Disclaimer: battery life is very poor.

photo credit: wired.com

    Number 2: A new Samsung netbook.  This I really like.  It's exactly what I need: portability, the internet.   I'm really committing to "the cloud" so a piece of hardware that gives me access to that is perfect.  It's not going to run Fallout 3, but that's probably better for me and my students.

photo credit: slashgear.com

   Number 3: An HD Flip Cam.  Lots of applications, especially for school.  I'm thinking about recording some lectures/discussions, putting them on the wiki.  It's great for personal use too.  Portable, easy to use.  A great tool.

photo credit: focalpoint-studios.net

   So where does "It's the Economy, Stupid," and "Pee Herman's Technological Playground" meet?  Glad you asked.

   During the break I've also been reading a wonderful, startling, captivating book called The Book Thief.  No spoilers, but it's set in Nazi Germany, it's narrated by the Grim Reaper, and it's stylistically fascinating.

Photo Credit: thebooksmugglers.com

A quick excerpt.  Death writes about the holocaust:

Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born.  I even kissed a few weary, poisoned cheeks.  I listened to their last, gasping cries.  Their vanishing words.  I watched their love visions and freed them from their fear.

...

They were French, they were Jews, and they were you.

  Books like The Book Thief are why I love teaching.  A book that is so wonderful and terrible.  So beautiful and scary.

   A book should make you 10 years old.  It should make you wonder without shame or cynicism.  The Book Thief put me back to my childhood, trying to make sense of the world while staring through the glow-in-the-dark stars of my bunk bed.    

   Trust me, English class is about the books.  It's about experiencing a group of thoughts and words that stir something in you that is both transient and timeless.  It's about reading something that changes you.

   Technology and education is important to me.  Keeping my classroom  relevant is a priority.  Creating an educational environment that is about learning how to succeed tomorrow, and not yesterday, is critical.  Teaching a 16-17 year old in a way that makes him comfortable (rather than me), is a no-brainer. To do all of this, you need tools.    

   But, this is a reminder to myself.  And to you.  It's not the gadgets.  It's not being able to check my twitter (though communicating with Peter King and Laurie Halse Anderson is pretty cool).

 It's about the books, stupid.  It's always been about the books.  It always will be.

  I love Angry Birds, but it won't stir the soul...

Search for word frequency in over 5.2 million books? That looks marginally interesting...

This is the most amazing thing ever

Google Labs created a device that allows you to about 5.2 million digitized books for a single word in less than a second.  Let's go over that again, 5.2 million digitized books, less than a second.

Why is this important?  Well, let's say, like I did in college, you're studying the use of the word "monomania" in American culture.  You'd get an image like this:



Monomania is a term that became extremely popular extremely fast.  Invented in the 1820s, it grew in popularity with the reform of insanity and the creation of the asylum in the 1830s.  Panic in the lead up to the Civil War represents the pinnacle of fears regarding monomania.  

Let's say you're looking to compare the major sports in American culture for the last 200 years?



Baseball is a more published term than football?  Soccer is more written about than hockey?  No one cares about lacrosse?

What if you're interested in Melville studies:



Anything interesting here?  How about nobody talked about Melville until 60 years AFTER he wrote Moby-Dick?  Does his peak in popularity in the middle of WWII have to do with fears regarding dictators and the end of the world?  Is the book more popular than the author?


This is a cool toy, but what's the lesson here?

  You have resources regarding search and information that no one could have imagined 20 years ago.  Become fluent in these resources and you will find success. 

  Someone once said that knowledge is power.  That's wrong. The ability to find the right knowledge is power.  

Why this class is important and other thoughts on metacogntion



MC Escher: Metacognition
andrew.cmu.edu



  Quick vocab lesson to start: "metacognition."  Metacognition means to think about thinking.  Sounds like a very academic, stupid term.  I know the many times that I've heard it used by teachers/smart people, it's one of those cliches that mean nothing and make you seem observant.



  So why start with metacognition?  Because I am constantly thinking about your (my students, you young powerful learners) learning, your thinking.  And I think about my thinking about your thinking.  That's a lot of meta, a lot of cognition.

  I don't always come to the right conclusions.  I've had lots of bad ideas, missteps, poor lines of reasoning.  But I am thinking.  I think at home, I think at work, I think while I should probably be doing other things.  There are some drawbacks to that.  My classroom is not safe.  It's not as stable as some others.

  But I think the basic premise that teachers should be engaged in constant metacognition, constant evaluation of their classroom, of their teaching style, of their tools, their rapport with their kids, their curriculum, the books they teach, everything they do, is THE MOST CRITICAL trait in good teaching.



Evolution?
amorphia-apparel.com



   Look at other competitive fields.  In business, innovation is critical.  In coaching, teams are constantly trying to find the new best way.  In medicine, research is constantly being performed.  Animals evolve.  Things change.  

 



   Wherever you are in your life, whether you are a student, a teacher, a businessman, an entrepeneur, you better surround yourself with people who are constantly evaluating what they do.  You better be around people who are searching for new, ideas.  You better be hard on yourself.  You better question everything.  You better be willing to try 4 new things and be ok with 3 of them don't work.  Because that's progress.  That's learning. 

  That's what blogging is.  It can be trivial.  It can be informal.  It is not a 5 paragraph essay.  But blogging allows you to "teach yourself what to think."  It allows you to understand yourself, your mind, through writing.  Metacognition...dude...think about it.