BROADWAY - A WICKEDLY GOOD TIME!

If I were rich, I would make a point of seeing as many Broadway shows as humanly possible. I wouldn't think twice about paying $150 for a great ticket, and if I wanted to, I would see the same show over and over again.

Wicked, one of the best things on Broadway, has been playing at the Gershwin Theater for about five years or so. Yesterday, we took a busload of LHS students to see a show they will never forget. Never before have I seen such a talented cast create such magnificence on stage. Never before have I seen lighting become such a magical entity, complementing a show about what happened before Dorothy's house fell on the Wicked Witch of the East.

We had a fantastic time meandering around Times Square before the show. Several of the kids encountered the Naked Cowboy. If you want to know more, then you need to ask them!

Most exhilarating for me was to see Nicole Parker, an actress/comediene I've long admired from Mad TV, star as the green Elphaba.





Nicole Parker
(signing autographs)
and yours truly - feeling the magic!

Doc Gibbs Visits L.H.S.

"He listens well who takes notes." Dante Aligheri

I took notes during an awesome assembly featuring Doc Gibbs and his talented percussionist ensemble. These fine musicians from Philly gave us a sampling of various African instruments, the likes of which I had never encountered. Some sounded eerily electronic, but they weren't. No special effects or fancy digital mixing here!

Doc Gibbs - Percussionist Extraordinaire

I was most impressed by the instruments that sounded like dogs barking and monkeys chattering. Another instrument, called "the rain stick" sounded just like puddles being pelted by thousands of rain drops.

One notable instrument called the kalimba was likened to a Gameboy by Doc Gibbs. He at first called it a hand piano played by the thumbs, then mentioned that it is often used by travelers who need something to do as they hike from village to village.

Kalimba - The "Hand Piano" - I want one!

I enjoyed the improvised "Trip to Lindenwold" arrangement. The four musicians wove wonderful sounds together using panderos (Brazilian skin drums), the Ghanana gankoqui, spring drums and a host of other lively instruments, many of which were gourds covered with beads.

My Students - The Rappers!

Part of the plan for my Julius Caesar unit required that my ENG 10 students realize that there is a musicality in Shakespeare's work that resembles so much of what goes into hip-hop music. Shakespeare's plays bristle with puns, irony, tricky word play, playful and acrobatic language, metaphors, the works! One final project option required that the students, by collaborating or working individually, create a poem or rap that interprets an incident or a plot line from the play. The final product needed to use rhymed or unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Over the long President's Day weekend, three students worked magic. John Suppa, Booshon Warrington, and Kyle Thompson composed and performed a rap that blew me away. It is a hip-hop version of Antony's eulogy for Caesar. They killed it (no pun intended) , and I had to share it with my wife and father, both of whom were deeply impressed.

It makes me so proud to have my students do something that I could never do, to exceed my expectations through sheer creativity and persistence, to come up with something so original that it garners praise from strangers.

If you want the MP3, just email me and I'll be happy to share.

Wisdom From Criminal Minds

I don't watch a lot of TV because I'm too lazy to hunt through the infinite number of channels to find something worthwhile, but every now and then the "boob tube" (this archaic term for a TV dates me) throws something wise my way and it sticks to my brain.

As Criminal Minds began last night, one of the characters quoted Einstein: "I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn."

Heavens knows I remember so little of my high school lessons from back in the early Eighties, but I do remember the teachers who turned me on to knowledge. Mr. Pratt, Mrs. Fish, Mr. Wray, and Mr. Brooks made me feel comfortable and inquisitive. Of course teachers need to be well prepared and lesson plans need to be rigorous and relevant, but Einstein states that really effective teaching transcends this stuff. It corresponds with my mantra that I want my students to become their own best teachers.

I hope my students attack their research paper topics with real zeal, and become our resident experts about whatever they chose to study for the next month or so.

The Start of Research Papers

Today, students of the Senior Project Seminar, you will officially start your research papers. I want you to enjoy the process instead of it feeling like root canal. The premise is simple - prove something about your project's topic and make sure the subject is not too broad nor too narrow. The final paper will be six pages long and, you guessed it, Times New Roman, 12 point, double spaced font with one inch borders all around.

First thing's first. You need a thesis that will guide your research. How does one find a great thesis? Let's say we have a friend named Fred, who has a project focused on culinary arts. He just can't say, "I'm going to prove something about restaurants." The subject needs to be narrower.

Let's try him saying, "I'm going to write about Mexican restaurants," because he likes eating and preparing Mexican food, and he has visited most of the Mexican restaurants in the area. Alas, this is no good because this isn't a statement proving anything.

Suppose after more thinking, Fred recalls a magazine article he read about how Mexican restaurants started exploding onto the American scene in the 1980's. On his way to school he watches how a new Mexican restaurant is being built where a Pizza Hut once stood. Now we're onto something as he refines his thesis as follows: Mexican cuisine has become immensely popular in the United States for a variety of reasons. Fred is not sure why this is the case, but he is absolutely determined to figure out the reasons. If Fred can find more evidence - from both primary and secondary sources - to back up this claim, then he has a live one!

STUDENTS OF SENIOR PROJECT SEMINAR, YOUR TASK IS TO FIND A WORKABLE THESIS BY MONDAY'S CLASS TIME. YOU WILL PRESENT YOUR THESIS DURING OUR CIRCLE TIME. - A strong, workable thesis will be worth 20 points.

How do you know if your thesis is a good one?

- It must be neither too broad nor too narrow.

- It must be provable.

- You must be able to provide a few articles from reliable sources that back up your thesis (newspapers, magazines, trustworthy websites, etc.)

Check out an excellent web site that we will visit regularly during the process. It does a nice job defining a thesis.

http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/545/01/

If you have questions, ask, ask, ask.

And of course, the fascinating stuff you find about your project could be fodder for blogs:)

Start Blogging Today!

Esteemed colleagues:
Thank you for attending our presentation about blogging.

Here are three great reasons for teachers to start blogging:

1. Blogging allows us to effortlessly create our own web site, easily visited by students and staff.

2. Blogging complements and enhances the learning community you already have in the classroom.

3. Blogging enables us to model constructive, proper digital communication for students.

4. You can archive and share great articles and information that get you fired up! The following got me thinking:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/06/books/06games.html?ref=books

HERE'S HOW TO GET STARTED. IT TAKES LESS THAN FIVE MINUTES TO START YOUR BLOG. JUST CLICK THE LINK.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnploFsS_tY

Finally, here's food for thought if you're thinking of the legal ramifications of what you put on the web. http://www.eff.org/issues/bloggers/legal

And of course, students need to be told and retold that blogging is a public forum and they need to be mindful about posting images that could haunt them years from now. They also need to know that displaying private information is a big no-no.

Flip the Switch and Just Do It!

Everyone needs to look up to someone, even adults like me. My rabbi is incredibly erudite, articulate, and compassionate, and I admire him tremendously. Much of what he says makes sense and his sermons rock. He wrote something in his last sermon that's been on my mind lately:

A study was done not too long ago on the effectiveness of self-help groups. There are so many around and they have so many participants, but do they work? The answer: Sometimes. Who do they really help?

Participants in the survey of self-help groups essentially broke down into two distinct groups - Those who, after six months, said their lives had been changed and those who six months later felt they were the same person they were before the course. What made the difference? The people in the first group implemented the changes that they learned in the self-help course within 36 hours of first hearing the suggestions. Those who waited longer than that felt minimal long-term change, if any.

The message seems pretty straightforward: Everyone has moments of inspiration but if the inspiration is going to make a difference you must act on it right away. This may seem impulsive, but I prefer to see it as hearing Gd's call. If your inspiration is helping to bring out the best in you, run with it. (Conversely, if your inspiration is counter-productive or hurtful, you are mislabeling it as "inspiration".)

I have a number of students who spend a lot of time thinking about how to best improve their lives, but they spend lots of time spinning their proverbial wheels. If I can somehow convince them take the initiative and just act immediately after a "light bulb moment," perhaps they will encounter success. For example, many students do their homework erratically or not at all. What approach can I take to get them to Flip the Switch, and make the permanent change for the better?

A no brainer?

Imagine a world where English teachers issue novels to students along with providing the audio book. Would this move inspire reluctant readers to follow along with the assigned chunks of reading? Would proficient readers be able to take their appreciation for literature to the next level if they pinball back and forth between reading the novel and listening to it? Or would the opposite happen?

Would kids ditch the magic of reading altogether if they could simply listen to the novel? As it is, we teachers generally agree that kids dump too many hours into TV watching and cruising the Internet. Reading well is a key component to being successful in college and beyond, and I cringe at the idea of kids "taking the easy way out," simply listening to the book instead of grappling with nuances and intricacies of the on paper (or on a screen). Ms. Ryan has a great sign on her door that says , "READERS ARE LEADERS," and it is so true. Look at President Obama! Look at our scientists, intellectuals, and movers and shakes in practically every field! Would we be dumbing down the curriculum by offering audio with every novel?

How would we teachers help students deal with reading passages on the SAT and HSPA if kids were fed a steady diet of audio?

I'm not sure if audio books would cause catastrophic harm. Here are my top eight reasons for making the audio book option more accessible:
1. Nearly every student has access to a listening device of some sort.
2. Students can multi-task if they chose, and do their English homework while cleaning or working out.
3. I have had great experiences with audio books, namely The Count of Monte Cristo and The Book Thief - two books I wouldn't have finished if I stuck to the straight text.
4. A couple kids in my class admitted that since they listened to The Kite Runner, in tandem with reading it, they liked it much more and remembered details they would have otherwise missed.
5. Kids who have never been read to properly as children can now have a skilled voice actor read great literature to them.
6. English as a Second Language learners need to hear the words properly pronounced.
7. Kids afraid of being laughed at for having a book in their hands will look cool listening to the audio book. Nobody will suspect them of preferring The Great Gatsby over Kanye's latest album.
8. Making copies of the audio book for educational use won't cost a dime.

Progress With The Seminar

Lately, as I read the newspaper (yes, I still read the newsPAPER as well as the online versions), I patrol for articles that my seminar students might find interesting. For example, Enrique is pursuing food, so I "dished-up" an food review by the Inquirer critic Craig Leban. Since fashion is Turquoise's passion, I adorned one of my comments responses with an article about Barbie and fashion from the magazine section of the paper. Other students have received articles related to civil engineering, smart prosthetics, cochlear implants, and rehabilitating our oceans. (If you are reading this blog gentle students, and you're wondering why Mr. Abrams hasn't sent you an article link, just you wait. I started doing this recently)

I haven't set a deadline for the research paper yet because, gasp, I want the students for now to get into the habit of blogging and journaling on a daily basis. Most of what they reflect about should have to do with their project theme, along with personal and professional development stuff.

For the next week, class, I want you to start concretizing a research paper topic that is narrow, but not too narrow, and provable, and I hope that deliberately looking at newspapers and magazines will "prime the pump." One article could be the beginning of several weeks of invigorating research. Save the articles in a folder - you may print them out or keep them in a SAFE digital place (U Drive). Make sure you have the author's name, the date of the article, and the name of the publication.

Hit the public libraries and our own library to find books related to your topic! Keep thinking, collecting, making the connections, and making yourselves smart!

Vocabulary that Sticks! There is no "n" between the "i" and the "c."

Vocabulary and all of its incarnations are my passion. I remember as a boy how I would flip through a thesaurus and be enchanted by all the different synonyms for different words. Why say "dog" when I could use jewels like hound, pooch, canine, mutt, cur, and bitch?

When I first started teaching, I would give my class a canned list of SAT-style vocabulary words - words which came from chipper worksheets that I dutifully copied, and I expected the students to know how to define them at the end of the week, perhaps even use them in sensible ways. Of course, I used them in context as best I could, but at the end of the week, it was "pump and dump" on the quizzes, then the words would be abandoned. They didn't stick.

Today I have the Smartboard, a magical tool that has enabled me to take vocabulary study several levels higher. First, the students find "Words in the Wild." From reading newspapers and magazines, they bring me cool, advanced words that they have never used before. Most of the time, these words would fit on any SAT study list.

Next we define the words and understand the part of speech for each words.

Now I'll tell the students to create a complex or compound sentence that clearly uses the word in context. And the kicker...

I've modeled for students how to find an online image that portrays the word.




Today, I invited students to put their fingers on the Smartboard, and smiled as they attacked the creative, open-endedness of it all. As a class we made slides that featured the word, it's definition, a great sentence featuring the word in context, and an image that conjures the word. The sky is the limit!

I like this approach because I made it up after synthesize my best practices and what I've seen other teachers do. While it probably makes more work for me- no matching or fill in's at the end of the week - I hope the students get more our of it and learn to love and use vocabulary in creative ways.

I wonder what the character "V," the word lover extraordinaire, from the movie V for Vendetta would say? Visciously vital vocabualy victoriously vaunts over other versions!

Do full moons make students and teachers nuts?

Are lunatics really influenced by lunar occurrences?

Is it an old wife's tale that some people get very agitated during the times of a full moon? Can the moon really affect our moods? As a teacher, I've really started thinking about it because we work in relatively small locations jam-packed with humanity, like few other places, and yes, there was a full moon last night like I've never seen.

Today I've noticed a palpable frenzied energy field in the hallways that didn't exist last week. Some of the kids seem much more rammy, and the loud students really shout and yell.

Should I be sensitive to the rhythms of the moon in planning my lessons?

Want to read more? Check out the link! http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124301&page=1

IS TECHNOLOGY MAKING US DUMB AND LAZY?

Cindy wrote in her blog about how how her parents lament the fact that technology seems to spoil young people today, that somehow teens lose the ability to think when information is thrown right into their laps. As a teacher, I think about this all the time.
Yes, I remember having to get most of my knowledge from books and encyclopedias. My parents bought me a set of red covered Junior Britannicas, and I used them all through middle and high school. It took me TIME to find information. Today, I can get the answers to practically anything in seconds; an impossible amount of knowledge is a keystroke or two away.
Technology will dumb us down if we let it, I suppose. But I truly think that technology is a boon to education. My daughter who is in the 6th grade is very tech-savvy, and I know that if she were beamed back to 1979, right now, she would flourish and adapt, as many of my students would flourish.
It all boils down to work ethic and passion for education. Those students who have both, and leaven it with healthy doses of reading will always do well.

SATs and "The Top Dogs"

http://www.courierpostonline.com/article/20090205/NEWS01/902050350

I just stumbled across the above article in the Courier Post. It reported that Haddonfield, Moorestown, and Cherry Hill East have the highest SATs in tri-county area. Haddonfield weighs in at 1726, and Shawnee, Medford, and Eastern are in that elite club of the top ten. So what makes a school fortunate enough to be inhabited by so many over achievers who perform well on the be-all and end-all of standardized tests? Do these schools have better educational systems? Are their curricula more rigorous? Do they have better libraries and more extraordinary technology? Are the teachers more engaging and better trained? I honestly don't think so.

Our students at Lindenwold are every bit as intelligent and dynamic as the students at Moorestown or Cherry Hill. On this note, we can't rest until we inspire our students devour their studies with a kind of religious fervor, until they all become addicted to becoming their own best teachers, and even after this happens, we can't rest.

I keep thinking of Abraham Lincoln, and how he intrinsically revered education.

Recently, I've noticed more students focused on their studies. More seem to come to class prepared. There is more focus and I see more hands going up. Does the election of President Obama have anything to do with it? Is this the stuff that fuels the SAT scores that are catnip for admissions officers? What can I do as a teacher to help equalize those SAT scores? Am I being quixotic or am I for real?

How is Shakespeare Hip Hop?

Lately, I've been thinking about how to help my ENG 10 students realize that Shakespeare's work and hip-hop are one and the same. Hip hop embodies the artistic, and usually verbal, portrayal of raw human emotions (love, hate, anger, envy, passion) into stylish songs and raps that often have contageous beats. Hip-hop also employs puns, irony, rhyme, sarcasm, paralipsis, iambic pentameter, and drama to convey messages.



I found some nice clips from Youtube that back up my contention.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ec_pDV07pQg


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H2htG2bv20&feature=related

I don't mean to mar my blog with a direct quote from Wikepedia, but here goes:
Origin of the term of Hip Hop
Coinage of the term hip hop is often credited to Keith Cowboy, a rapper with Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five.[3] Though Lovebug Starski, Keith Cowboy, and DJ Hollywood used the term when the music was still known as disco rap, it is believed that Cowboy created the term while teasing a friend who had just joined the U.S. Army, by scat singing the words "hip/hop/hip/hop" in a way that mimicked the rhythmic cadence of marching soldiers.[3] Cowboy later worked the "hip hop" cadence into a part of his stage performance, which was quickly copied by other artists; for example the opening of the song "Rapper's Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang.

************************************************************

I hear big-time iambs in the following sequence of words:

hip/hop/hip/hop/hip/hop/hip/hop/hip/hop


Wait a second! Did I just write some iambic pentameter? Time to replace those hips and hops!

A Streetcar Named Desire gives me a lightbulb moment!

I had the pleasure to see A Streetcar Named Desire last night at the Walnut Street Theater, a Philadelphia institution that celebrates its 200th birthday today. Nearly every instant of the production pulsated with electricity, and this show pulled me in to the point where I felt both emotionally connected and repulsed by the characters.

Somewhere on the way home it hit me. There is another way to help solved the so called education crisis in this country...

Hire and train out-of-work actors to be teachers! Actors are inherently creative risk takers who need to be articulate. They need to work well on teams, improvise, and inspire - all skills required in a good teacher's repertoire. It seems to me that hundreds of thousands trained actors are waiting tables, and waiting for that big break that statistically will never come. Why not start a marketing campaign to recruit them and fast track their qualifications so that they can start teaching students who desperately need them?

The organization Teach for America recruits graduates from the best colleges to work in tough- to-fill schools. Why not go after the actors just as zealously? After all, there will always be talented people to play the gorilla-like Stanley Kowalski and the faded, tragic Blanche DuBois.