The Art of LanguageThe Art of Language

October 19October 19thth20122012

Washington State Washington State Language Arts CouncilLanguage Arts Council

@thinkcerca

• If U

English Teachers Rule!

We Need English Teachers More Than Ever

• Because we don’t have this• anymore.

If You Are Under 40

26 Letters and A Few Pieces of Punctuation

• Our Students• Our Economy• Our Democracy• Our Planet

Literacy Leadership & The Tower of Babel

Meet April

Teacher at George Washington School, Indianapolis• High performing teacher in a low performing district

Meet April

Teacher at George Washington School, Indianapolis• High performing teacher in a low performing district.

• Loves novels but struggles with English

• On track for college success and enjoys reading history

• Loves math and wants to be a doctor but struggles with reading

Meet Bart

Principal at Chavez School, Chicago• He uses small data to make big changes in student

outcomes.

Meet Bart

• Small data & big changes

• Bart has developed a “data wall” to track student progress

Principal at George Washington School, Indianapolis

Meet Jamie

Student at George Washington School, Indianapolis• What does it say? What does it mean? What does it

matter?

Meet Jamie

Student at George Washington School, Indianapolis• What does it say? What does it mean? What does it

matter? • Confused by teacher jargon in different classrooms

• Needs personalized help to get there

Free?

What is Mine To Do?: English Teacher Leadership

• Disciplinary Skills and Processes-Encourage colleagues to leave the front of their classrooms and let kids learn by practicing processes you’ve modeled. Think tandem bike, training wheels, and training wheels come off. It’s more fun when it is social.

• Purposeful Academic Language Development-Encourage colleagues to be purposeful in teaching their language and in sharing a common language so data is actionable.

• Think Entrepreneurially-Encourage colleagues to think entrepreneurially: solve the users problems, not the problems for which you have a solution and which you only wish your users thought they had.

• Strive to delight students.

“Ya Know” vs. Purposeful Academic Language

Development

Labor of Love

Poems are Hard to Read

• Unless you look for patterns and find variations

• Unless you pay attention to the small things

Poems are Hard to Read

• Poems are hard to read• Pictures are hard to see• Music is hard to hear• And people are hard to love

• But whether from brute need• Or divine energy• At last mind eye and ear• And the great sloth heart will move.

Perform First

• “Revenge”-Physicalize or draw the images

• Strategy: Using Accountable Performance to Help Students Discover Theme

• Process/Task: Physicalizing Imagery

The Human Voice is the Instrument for Which the Poem

was Composed• “Those Winter Sundays” Repeat

Physicalizing or Drawing, Highlight Repetition in Sounds of Words

• Strategy: Using Human Voice as Interpretive Instrument to Detect Theme and Tone

• Process-Looking for Relationships among Parts of the Whole by Thematizing Multiple Elements

Those Winter SundaysBY ROBERT HAYDEN

• Sundays too my father got up early• and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,• then with cracked hands that ached• from labor in the weekday weather made• banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

• I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.• When the rooms were warm, he’d call,• and slowly I would rise and dress,• fearing the chronic angers of that house,

• Speaking indifferently to him,• who had driven out the cold• and polished my good shoes as well.• What did I know, what did I know• of love’s austere and lonely offices?

“Let Evening Come” BY JANE KENYON

• Let the light of late afternoon

• shine through chinks in the barn, moving

• up the bales as the sun moves down.

• Let the cricket take up chafing

• as a woman takes up her needles

• and her yarn. Let evening come.

• Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

• in long grass. Let the stars appear

• and the moon disclose her silver horn.

• Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

• Let the wind die down. Let the shed

• go black inside. Let evening come.

• To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

• in the oats, to air in the lung

• let evening come.

Agency-Another Swiss Knife

• The sun rose.• Who is performing the action?• Upon whom or what is the action

performed?

Travelling through the Dark• Traveling through the dark I found a deer

• dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

• It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

• that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

• By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

• and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

• she had stiffened already, almost cold.

• I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

• My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

• her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,

• alive, still, never to be born.

• Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

• The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

• under the hood purred the steady engine.

• I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;

• around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

• I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—,

• then pushed her over the edge into the river.

Performance=>Analysis

• “They Flee From Me”• -Find the agents of action and trace

the change.• Play with the tone of the woman’s

question. Find at least 2 ways to ask her question out loud.

• -Is he a changed man?

“A Barred Owl” By Richard Wilbur: Language Arts Rule

QuickTime™ and aH.264 decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

eileen@thinkcerca.com