amy loves books

my son's addition to the cultural lexicon

"I feel like PC in a Mac advertisement."

coming late to the Jane Austen tea party

It's looking like this may be the summer of Jane. I am really digging the Jane.

I do, however, think there should be a drinking game wherein all dear readers must drink a shot of hot tea each time someone arches an expressive brow. Double shots when it is inquisitive.

learning to read in 100 easy lessons

His coach sought me out. His coach who attended the same high school I graduated from, in a different state, almost two decades ago. He was worried about his player, because he suspected the boy could not read.

I referred him for testing, and was told that the six-foot plus, eleventh grade young man was reading on the level of a fourth grader. A fourth grader. This is the same level my own son read on when he was tested in kindergarten.

And this kid's story is not new or unique. There are dozens of kids just like him. I've taught plenty of kids that could not really read. They read well enough to not be illiterate. They function, albeit with severly limited options. They tend to talk back, come to class stoned, ditch school, cuss out administrators, cheat, plagirize, lost textbooks, and scrape by. The girls seem almost predestined to get pregnant.

This kid, however, is different. He comes to me for tutorial religiously. I've done what was suggested and tried to teach him coping strategies. We've worked on getting him to pass his writing test. I've been told that it's too late to try to re-teach actual reading, and, after all, I am not a reading teacher, but I have done what I can.

Last week I realized that the problem is that he never learned phonics. My first inclination was to suspect a learning disability of some sort, but after spending hours with him and watching him work, I think the reality is much more complicated. I believe that he simply memorized sight words: lots and lots of sight words. When he sees a word that he memorized, he reads it - but he has no idea how letters combine to make words. I think he was very good at memorizing, unusually good, and that he was able to get away with simply memorizing for years. By the time texts got so complicated that sight reading did not work, they had stopped teaching phonics, and he was stuck.

Last week, he started to talk to me about reading, and about how it feels to not be able to read. He talked for about twenty minutes solid, telling me that he would lay in bed at night and pray that God would just let him learn how to read, and how his one goal was to stand in front of a class and read out loud, and how he wanted to teach little kids to read, and how he got angry at his cousin for getting in trouble when she was able to read anything you put in front of her.

I almost started to cry. I did start to pray. As he went on about his desire to read, about all the doors he knew reading would open, about all the ideas he can't write because he can't read, I prayed and what I prayed was that I would know how to teach him to read.

I can not imagine my life without books, without words. Hearing this young man articulate such a poignant desire to be able to do what I take for granted has haunted me to the bones. I do not know how to teach a child to read, but I swear that I am going to try my best to teach him phonics. If I can't do it, I will find someone who can.

He told me that he prays each night that he will be able to read. I have started praying too.

In the beginning there was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word is You. There is a Light that the Darkness has not, can not, will not overcome. Help this child learn to read, and in seeing the words, let him see You.

Please.

nobody here but us chickens

I can totally realte to them.

in which i discover an underground society

About a month ago, a co-worker I barely know took me to the side. Do you letterbox? she asked.

I told her that I had no idea what letterboxing was. Oh, she said. You would love it. It is so you. She went on to mention something about rubber stamps and the red flag went up. This was starting to sound like scrapbooking or something. She sounded like she may be an independant consultant. I was sensing that home parties and order forms may be involved, so I feigned polite disinterest. She told me to look it up on the internet, and I told her I would.

Well, it turns out that letterboxing is just about the coolest thing ever.

The basic idea of it is this:

All over the world, there are thousands of letterboxes hidden in public places. You know the park you go to near wherever your house is? There is probably a letterbox there.

A letterbox is a plastic container containing a blank travel journal and a rubber stamp. There are elaborate clues to help you find each box. To start letterboxing, you need a compass, a rubber stamp of your own, a blank journal of your own, and an ink pad. Using the clues, you hunt for a hidden box. When you find it, you leave your stamp in the book that came with the box, and you stamp an impression from the hidden stamp you found in your book.

It sounds a little complicated, and my family was not quite sure that this would work, but we armed ouselves with a compass and a map and headed into the woods on Saturday, looking for a box that had been hidden three years ago.

Sure enough, about a half a mile deep in the woods, under a bridge and hidden with twigs - we found our first letterbox. It was so cool.

You need to letterbox. Really. Join the underground.
Letterboxing North America

Teacher of the Year

Now I get a special parking place.

classroom blogging

I don't teach each class the same way, because each class is so different. One of the best things I ever started to do as a teacher was to complete extensive multiple intelligence inventories on my students each semester. It really helps my tailor the instruction to the students. This year, one of my second semester classes is made up of a good number of writers - something I have not experienced before now.

I've tried classroom blogging before, but it never really worked because there was a lack of interest and a lack of computer access that made setting up accounts difficult. Most of my kids did not have email, and then forgot their email account and password information daily. This time around, I set up a single class poetry blog, and everyone uses my password to log-in and post. It's risky, because, at any moment, one of them could figure out that they can go in and mess with other people's peotry - but so far, it's been working very well.

They have posted close to a hundred poems so far - ranging from poems about basketball, to very angst-filled tirades celbrating the "freaks" and condemning the "fakes", to actual sonnets written for actual students. They have used the blog to flirt.

The thing about teaching this particular class is that I get them. These kids remind me of me, and of friends I had - so much so that when one student gave me a note with a list of songs she thought I'd like, I actually owned all but one song on the list - and half of the list were songs I listened to in high school. I walk a line with them all the time, wondering how much it will be validating for them to feel like I understand them and how much it will FREAK THEM OUT to think that they too could grow up to be as horrifyingly normal as me.

back home

After three days in 85 degree, sunny weather, we have returned to an unseasonably cold Easter. We stayed in a Disney resort at Hilton Head, which gave the kids lots of opportunities to swim, do crafts, and catch things.
Some of the highlights of the trip were attending a Low County shrimp boil, and enjoying the salt water marsh.

I was actually able to read my book. It was quite lovely, even though I find that being a high school teacher has hindered my ability to read without noticing every SAT WORD!!! that pops up. And these Mr. Darcy books are full of SAT WORDS!!! Much is done with with alacrity.

visible pollen

after rain:

speechless

Oprah picked Cormac Mc Carthy's new book for her book club.