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Showing posts from 2016

Day 146 Using Ohana in Education

Source:  I donʻt know how to cite this. Just look for it on youtube. What is Sacred:  Jason Momoa talks about what is sacred in his own life, how he learns from his children, his mother, his wife, and how he creates the education that his children need. Connections to Current/Future Work: Aside from this being a beautiful man, let's really just talk about how we reach out to the lessons that students come with from their own ohana and honor that as sacred in our own curriculum.

Day 145 Writing to Tell a Story

Source:  Meyer, M. (2014). Hoea ea: Land education and food sovereignty in Hawaii. Environmental Education Research 20 :1, pp. 98-101.  What is Sacred: I really hate writing. I am struggling to finish an overdue article and the word count is SOOOOO long for me. I write poems. My dissertation was under 75 pages and they accepted it and published it. So when I keep getting told that I need to publish articles, ugh. I just want to teach. But this short article by Manu Meyer gives me a little more hope. It is a very short article that tells the story of the work that her colleagues do. Her job is just to put her name on it and tell the story.  Maybe I can do that. Just tell the story. Can I do it in poetry form? Connection to Current/Future Work: Write, dammit. 

Day 144 The Mask You Live In

It's the end of fall semester, my grades are in. This normally means that I need to start reading again. What happened to my daily reading? I got caught up in all the other things I needed to do like battle traffic, go observe lessons, grade papers, sleep. So this is my day to start it up again and I just spent an hour and a half watching this. It was time well spent. Source:  Siebel Newsom, J. (Producer, Director). (2015). The mask you live in  [Motion picture]. United States: The Representation Project.  What is Sacred: This documentary is currently streaming on Netflix. This documentary follows young men and boys as they struggle to navigate the hyper masculinity that is American society. It talks about how to raise a "healthier" generation of young men. The consequences of not doing so will continue to create a society where we outlive our children.  Connections to Current/Future Work: I definitely want to use this as one of my film study piec

Day 137 Recognize the Invisible Students and Love Them

This video has been on the Facebook feed and it is shocking and disturbing. For me, it just explained my lens in a very dramatic way. It helps me to explain to my student teachers  why I bring up certain students in a middle/secondary classroom. Even if my students felt like they did a great job, and they almost always do a great job in this journey, I notice the invisible students that seem to fly under the radar. I point out the students in their classrooms that I want them to notice too.  I don't know how to explain it. Just watch the video and stop reading this. I watched it and could not keep my eyes off of the blond boy with the headphones. He kept catching my eye. I lost track of the main character. There needs to be more of us in education who hone in on those students, and love them fierce.

Day 129 Holographic Epistemology

Source: Meyer, M. (2013). Holographic epistemology: Native common sense. China Media Research 9 (2), pp. 94-101.  What is Sacred: First, Manulani Aluli Meyer is my mentor. She helped me to formulate my masters thesis at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo before she left to do work in Aotearoa. The fact that we are both at the University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu at this time cannot be circumstance or chance. Therefore, I continue to work with her and I continue to learn with her as part of my own journey toward conscientization (Friere). She is one who speaks in prophecy so it is not always simple to interpret, but this article keeps giving me pause. My understanding is right at the edge. Perhaps I need to first break down my mis-understandings before I can move to connection.  The title is holographic epistemology. As an English teacher who is really a poor reader, I always need to break things down into familiar terms. In other words, I need to make "maps" of languag

Day 111 Creating a Circle of Mana Wahine

Source: Friedman, A. (2016, October 28). Can't find a mentor? Look to your peers. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/cant-find-a-mentor-look-to-your-peers.html What is Sacred: This article is really about the lack of older female mentors, which is not necessarily true in education, but true in other careers. The author's point, though, is to look for peers and create your own what I call mana wahine circle, also known as critical friends.  Her advice:  get vulnerable recognize that some problems are generation-specific amplify each other (amen) find your peers in other fields recommend each other play a long game (peer mentoring is about mutual investment in the long run) Connections to My Current/Future Work: It's not really a connection, just a confirmation of what I knew. Also, that as I get older and have more years in my own career, I need to remember that I need to invest in people that follow, which I try t

Day 104 Neuroplasticity

Source:  Wilson, D. & Conyers, M. (2016, November 8). "The teenage brain is wired to learn - so make sure your students know it." Edutopia   special series . Retrieved at  https://www.edutopia.org/article/teenage-brain-is-wired-to-learn-donna-wilson-marcus-conyers What is Sacred: I love the word neuroplasticity. It is future-focused, flexible, plastic, stretchy. I see synapses firing off rather than dead connections. It gives me hope in dark days because the concept of neuroplasticity means that our adolescent students have the capacity to change the structure and function of the brain through learning! That is POWERFUL and it is the impetus for us as teachers of middle-level and high school students to not sink into apathy, anger and quiet surrender. We must continue to teach with love and rage without which there is no hope (Friere).  Here's the important messages that the authors want us to relay to our adolescent students:  They have the capacity to

Day 103: Protecting the Bottom Dogs

Source: Kamenetz, A. (2016, September 19). Sixth grade is tough; it helps to be 'top dog.' nprEd . Retrieved from  http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/09/19/494232646/sixth-grade-is-tough-it-helps-to-be-top-dog?utm_source=npr_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20160925&utm_campaign=NPREd&utm_term=NPR_Ed What is Sacred: This is a review and commentary on a much larger study published in the American Educational Research journal by Schwartz, A., Steifel, L., and Rothbart, M. The study uses a very large data set (n=9,000 students in 500 schools) to study the effects of top dog/bottom dog status on bullying, safety in school, belonging and academic achievement. What they are looking at is the effect on 6th graders of being a top dog in a K-8 school versus a bottom dog in a 6-12 school. The results are that 6th graders report less bullying, feel safer in school and achieve better in K-8 schools. I had an issue with the Kamenetz article, feelin

An open letter to my Boy 3, Tom Kalamapono

These young men are Pono'I and Pono B. My son is on the left. He is a freshman at Reed College in Oregon and I just saw a post on Instagram that he is feeling homesick. As a mother of a Native Hawaiian boy, this is alarming to me. The statistics on our Native Hawaiian students who get into universities or community colleges is pretty good. We can get them in. But the percentage of Native Hawaiian students who drop out after their freshman year is atrocious. We have about a 60% drop out rate after their freshman year. So this is just my letter to him. Dear Pono, I just got a newsletter in my inbox from Reed and I was drawn to the article written by Mylion Trulove, your Dean of Admission. He is the one that called and invited you and talked us through the process.  This is what I found out. There were 5,705 applicants (including you) who applied. Maybe for some this was not their first choice, but I know that Reed was your first choice. They accepted 357 of you. I th

Day 83: The Homework Dilemma

Source:   Kauffman, G. (2016, August 23). Should second-graders get homework? Maybe not, says Texas teacher. The Christian Science Monitor.  Retrieved from  http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2016/0823/Should-second-graders-get-homework-Maybe-not-says-Texas-teacher What is Sacred: This elementary teacher is saying no to homework in a video to parents that has gone viral . Basically, the only homework her students will be bringing home are the things that they do not finish in class. Radical? No. Notable? Yes. Connections to Current/Future Work: Here is the thing about secondary teachers. Our content is our god. Our content, compared to all other content areas, is the most important content IN THE WORLD. I raise my hand as one of the guilty ones who gave my students half an hour of reading every night and defended it up and down because - "hey math teacher, don't complain to me that students in your class can't read. Research shows that students read be

Day 82: Teaching in Your Own Community

Source:  Will, M. (2016, August 18). Teacher diversity gap not easily closed, report warns. [Web log]. Teaching Now . Retrieved from http://goo.gl/p9yJT4 What is Sacred: This article is a review of a report by the Brookings Institution  on High hopes and harsh realities The real challenges to building a diverse workforce. In a nutshell, the gap between what the students look like and what the teachers look like (racial mix/identity/culture) is not only out of sync, but even up to 2060, based on the predictions for African American and Hispanic students, the gap will continue at its current pace. Connections to Current/Future Work: I have been meeting with a lot of possible mentor teachers this past week, as well as having a meeting at Nanakuli High with a teacher interested in starting a teacher academy. After 23 years of teaching in my own community and ingraining myself in the life of that community, I moved to somewhere that is not my community to do this work. Funny thin

Day 102: The Art of the Personal Essay

Source: Ahmed, R. (2016, September 15). Typecast as a terrorist. The Guardian . Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/15/riz-ahmed-typecast-as-a-terrorist What is Sacred: Riz Ahmed is a British actor who gained some accolades in his documentary film Road to Guantanemo . He writes about his "otherness" and the common lessons he has learned from trying to get through the international airports as well as from trying to break into the American film industry not as another "Paki," but as a regular bloke.  It turned out that there was no clear pathway for an actor of colour in the UK to go to stage three – to play “just a bloke”. Producers all said they wanted to work with me, but they had nothing I could feasibly act in. The stories that needed to be told in the multicultural mid-2000s were about the all-white mid-1700s, it seemed. I heard rumours that the Promised Land was not in Britain at all, but in Hollywood. The reason for t

Day 74 Furniture, Floors, and Walls as Game Changers

     I wish I took more pictures of my classroom when I was teaching. I would have been able to use that as a reflection of my thinking. What I know after all these years is that if my seats were in tombstone rows, it was the beginning of end of the year (aka testing season and alphabetical memorizing names and training students on my classroom procedures season). If I was in quads, it's facilitation of collaboration season, and if they were in a large U or debate rows, we are performing, fishbowling, sitting on the carpet in the middle or doing independent work. This short article shares one teacher's use of tables, floors, and walls in his high school Spanish classroom. What is Sacred: I think it is always sacred when working teachers take the time to write about their process. Teachers like to learn from teachers. They like to hear about what is working for other practitioners. They like to hear confirmation of what they are already doing in print. I like Jo

Day 73: Not What I'm Looking For

Source:  Aseron, J, Greymorning, S.N., Miller, A. & Wilde, S. (2013). Cultural safety circles and indigenou peoplesʻ perspectives: Inclusive practices for participation in higher education. Contemporary Issues in Education Research , 6 (4), 409-416. What is Sacred: The title is sacred. I had high hopes that I found my answer.  Not quite. So here is what is sacred. The abstract, especially,  The application of Cultural Safety Circles can help provide a collective space where definitions for cultural and educational exchange can take place and be identified. It is through this application that a discussion is presented on how the inherent issue of cultural safety, as it pertains to participation in higher education, can be explored to a deeper understanding. Like the movie trailers that put their best stuff in the trailers and when you go to the movie, you are disappointed that the best thing about the movie was the trailer, you know that feeling. Yeah. Co

Day 72: Attendance

Source:  Foster, L. (2016, August 5). Builidng community with attendance questions. (Web log). Retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/blog/building-community-with-attendance-questions-lizanne-foster What is Sacred: I guess I chose to read this because the picture of the Native American boarding schools kind of haunt me and I just wrote about the NMAI. We have the same type of pictures, but I also focused on being present and not absent, which then led me to this attendance article on the Edutopia  blog. This article is about using attendance as a community builder and a way to create a safe environment for students to really learn. This teacher uses an attendance question to create an open space for sharing. It is not connected to curriculum and there are no right or wrong answers. What got me excited was the focus on the word attend. When we trace back the meaning of attend  through Old French ( atendre ) to its Latin root ( attendere ), we can see that when we attend,

Day 71 We Did Not Just Survive

Source:  Atalay, S. (2006). No sense of the struggle: Creating a context for survivance at the NMAI. The American India Quarterly, 30 (3,4), 597-618. What is Sacred: NMAI is the National Museum of the American Indian, one of our nation's free Smithsonian museums and my favorite place to grab lunch when in DC. It is a beautiful building at the end of the mall but I just flit in and out and don't read too closely. It feels like I am walking on graves sometimes. This article is a loving critique of the NMAI from an Indigenous archeologist and focuses on the gaps in the story, specifically around survivance, versus just colonization and survival. Survivance is defined by Gerald Vizenor as "more than survival, more than endurance or mere response; the stories of survivance are an active presence. . .The native stories of survivance are successive and natural estates; survivance is an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimry" (15). Read his stor

Day 70: Learning Value of Pokemon Go

Source:  Doran, L. & Davis, M.R. (2016, August 2). Educators weigh learning value of Pokemon Go. Education Week.  Retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2016/08/03/educators-weigh-learning-value-of-pokemon-go.html What is Sacred: I don't know about sacred, but what I know for sure is that Pokemon Go has taken over my household. I am a proud non-user, however, my son and my husband will suddenly yell out, hey there's a (insert Pokemon name here) in the garage, etc. When my husband wants me to go to the store with him, it means that I need to co-pilot by spinning the icon at Poke stops. So as a long time educator in middle and secondary, even if I do not play, I need to be able to understand the trends and memes and quickly incorporate this into the classroom as part of the curriculum as well as part of creating relationships, so I was interested in hearing what other educators had to say. Connection to Current/Future Work: I'm thinking that this de

Day 69: The Skills That Must Be Taught

Source:  Kamentz, A. (2016, August 2). 3 things people can do in the classroom that robots can't. nprEd . Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/02/479187579/3-things-people-can-do-in-the-classroom-that-robots-cant What is Sacred: A 2013 study from Oxford University famously estimated that  47 percent of all jobs  are in danger of automation. And earlier this year, the World Economic Forum said  5 million jobs might be gone  in just the next four years. These changes create a huge challenge for schools and teachers. But there are also some intriguing indicators of the way forward. Kamentz puts it this way, the skills that must be taught, those skills that make us "unautomatable" in our work is the ability to: Give a hug, solve a mystery, tell a story. Hug: empathy, collaboration, communication and leadership skills Mystery: generating questions, curiosity, problem solving Story: finding what's relevant, applying values, ethics, orals to

Day 52 Retrieval Practice

Source: Gonzalez, J. (2017, September 24). Retrieval practice: The most powerful learning strategy you're not using. [weblog]. Retrieved from:  https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/retrieval-practice/ What is Sacred: Retrieval practice is just the art of recalling information without having it in front of  you (like rote memorization via flashcards). That is not what is sacred. What is sacred is that research backs up retrieval practice as the best practice over other study methods like review lectures, study guides and (my favorite) re-reading.  Connections to Current/Future Work: My practicum students that are in the semester before their student teaching are really preparing their reflections on their lesson to answer the following questions: what did your students learn? how do you know? Taken in a traditional context, these questions put out an expectation that every lesson will end with some kind of formal assessment (read paper and pencil quiz of all

Day 51: Irony

I spent so much time trying to find the right mentor text to bring to students when we talked about irony. I used to use "The Necklace" by Guy de Maupassant but the language was difficult even for my 10th graders. I could have used the adolescent irony which is just dripping with sarcasm, but I didn't want that either. If I were in the classroom again, however, these two videos are what I would use. The first is Clive James reading his poem "Japanese Maple" about his soon demise and the metaphor of living to see the maple unfurl before he dies. Well on his "death bed," he ended his very long marriage because of a long affair by him, and then he did not die. This is the 5 years later interview where he has outlasted that maple tree that his daughter gave him. Irony with joy. Living the best life posthumously. This is the kind of irony I want them to get.

50 Mentor Text Across Antarctica

Grann, D. (2018, February 12 & 13). The white darkness: A solitary journey across Antarctica. New Yorker Magazine . Retrieved from here . What the New Yorker  does for me is to bring into my periphery vision these people and their stories that I would not know about if I had not picked up the article. What the New Yorker  does for me is gather the most beautifully talented writers to bring these people's lives to life in a way that has me crying and cheering and rushing through while slowing down to savor the adventure, the joy and the bittersweet loss of living a real life. I will remember Henry Worsley and his wife Joanne, his son Max and his daughter that he calls "Shrimp" although his children are both adults. These Brits, via an American magazine found their way to a small Pacific Island surrounded by our own blue Antarctica. These are the kinds of pieces that I want to use as mentor texts for my students. Even when I do not know how I would use it exce

Day 49: Reading Process

National Geographic's Short Film showcase highlights exceptional short videos created by filmmakers around the world. This one is of Manu Topic in the L'Arros river, French Pyrennees. Filmmaker Patrick Foch, cinematographer Benjamin Ziegler, music Yann Rouquet, sound design Christophe Girod. I am not sure how to reference this so I linked the article above. My connection, or "reading" on this and how I might use it: This is really about process, craft and balance which are key concepts we continue to try and push with our students going into student teaching: trust the process, hone your craft, find balance in your life which is the key to self care and thriving.

Day 48: Writing a Book Review without the Book

Source: Anderson, S. (2017, September 28). The mind of John McPhee.  The New York Times Magazine . Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/magazine/the-mind-of-john-mcphee.html?_r=0 What is Sacred: I am not as familiar with John McPhee's writing, but based on this article, I need to be. I think what sold me on reading his new book  Draft No. 4  is the description by Anderson that in McPhee is writer as craftsman rather than writer as artist. I think the more scientific I can get about teaching writing, the more I will get pieces with intentional voice and craft. I also appreciate writers that are able to take their research and create intimacy through a complex organizational structure that reveals the workings of a complex mind. Anderson describes it best with his sentence: "McPhee has built his career on such small detonations of knowledge." I guess what is sacred, then, is the ability to talk about craft and the ability to know about small topics i

Day 47: The quest for mentor texts

Source: Rybczynski, W. (1992, August). A good public building. The Atlantic Magazine , 84-87. What is Sacred: This article is about the opening of the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago. The author places the architecture of the building within the long history of architecture in Chicago, but I think the best 2 paragraphs are right at the end.  Most striking of all, the library makes not the slightest effort to entertain the people who use it. Too many of our public places (shopping malls, airports) are either selling us something or attempting to keep us amused. The Chicago library takes itself, and its users, seriously, and through an architecture that is calm and measured, it resolutely communicates this sense of purpose: that books and reading and knowledge are important (87). Connection to Current/Future Work: I am adding this to my curation site  as a mentor text for writing workshop. Use the last two paragraphs to talk about what descriptive writing looks

Day 46 Possible Mentor Text: A Man and His Cat

Day 46 is just a number. I am so far behind on my daily reading and then posting that I don't even know if I am in the right year. Still, when I make it, I will make it and no one will be the wiser. I am determined like that. Source:  Kreider, T. (2014, August 01). A man and his act. The New York Times , p. 1 Retrieved from https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/01/a-man-and-his-cat/ What is Sacred: Krieder's essay is just fun to read. I wanted to rush through because it was funny and self-deprecating and a love poem to his cat and their 19-year relationship. I wanted to stop reading because this was a man who talked about loss in a way that was not depressing or morbid. That is a sign of a good essay from one who is a slow reader. I have highlighted what is really good examples of humor in voice, but pulled out, it is out of context. Then, when I re read the whole piece, looking for that hilarious sound bite of a passage, I find other parts that when added