A Great Assignment to Start the School Year….Write Letters to Our Next President

School is about to start for many teachers and students around the country.  The first question for most teachers is so “what am I going to do in the first few weeks of school to get the kids excited about learning?”  Well, here is a great idea to get the kids involved and excited.  The National Writing Project is sponsoring an essay writing campaign called Letters to Our Next President in collaboration with Google.   The purpose of this—to get kids excited about writing,facilitate peer editing, and help students get involved in the upcoming presidential race.

It is super easy way to get kids to write a persuasive letter and submit it because it is all done on Google Docs. No collecting essays, no going to the post office just at the deadline to mail them in….just have the kids do it on the computer and submit it.   The instructions are all on the National Writing Project website.  It is also exciting for the kids because they can use the latest in collaborative Web 2.0 technology which makes them feel empowered.

One great feature of this assignment (thanks to the Google Docs platform) is that kids can work both at home and at school on the assignment without worrying about emailing the document to themselves or carrying it on a disk or data stick. That is because it is on Google Docs (a free service) which is available anywhere in the world that the user has an Internet connection.  Also, this exciting assignment will get them involved in the upcoming presidential campaign as well as get them trained in 21st century skills.

Another great feature of this assignment is all the support from the National Writing Project, an amazing support group for teachers of writing in all disciplines.  It focuses on the core mission of improving the teaching of writing and improving the use of writing across the disciplines by offering high-quality professional development programs for educators in their service areas, at all grade levels, K–16 and across the curriculum

If you don’t know anything about Google Docs, it is an online word processing program that facilitates collaboration. Kids can peer edit and even collaborate online easily.  All the students have to do is to go to Docs.Google.com and sign up for a Google Account (which is different than an email address).  The Google Account just registers the students as users so that Google knows it isn’t some machine signing up for the account instead of a real person.No need to change your email address.  Make sure students use the same password they have for their email address or they will forget it.  Once they do that, then they go to Documents and to File and they are in.

For instructions on how to use Docs, the kids and teachers can watch this video which gives the viewer an idea of how to use Docs. If you are going to take students into a computer lab, I suggest that you tell kids to bring headphones so they can listen to the video without disturbing the other kids (they will love doing that!)  Or you can play it for the class as a whole.  In addition, here are some other support materials that will help you get started on the National Writing Project website. They even provide support for teachers who have questions by writing to letters2president@nwp.org

Next, teachers need to register their class by providing name, school name and contact information (super easy form) and brief list of the class or classes. Teachers need to sign up their classes by September 8, 2008.  One last but important thing: there is a parent/guardian permission form (PDF) that needs to be send home with the kids and returned to the teacher.  That’s it.

To publish the essays on a special Google site,  the teacher submits the essays on Docs which will then be posted on the public website to showcase the students’ work.  The NWP and Google provide teachers an easy way to submit.

To get started, check out this very helpful video for teachers that shows some of the ways Google Docs can save teachers time and can make writing fun for students. The video is short,  to the point, and shows practicing teachers and administrators talking about how it helped in the classroom.

This project gives students in English and Social Studies classes an opportunity to write a persuasive essay about a real life topic that matters to them….the upcoming Presidential race..   Google Docs even created a special template for this project which can be found on the site.  The National Writing Project has a wonderful list of resources designed to help teachers and students do research.

My  freshman English classes and my journalism classes will be introduced to this project on the third day of school (after all the required formalities).  They will spend the day in the computer lab getting acquainted with Docs and with the resources.   It should be an exciting beginning of the 2008-9 school year both of students and for me as a a teacher.

General Resources

• The League of Women Voters Provides information about the campaign issues, voter registration support, and a citizen’s guide to the electoral process.
• OneVote 2008 A teen-oriented guide to the election produced by ChannelOne.com, a youth news site.
• Rock the Vote Aims to motivate young voters through its content and visual style, which appeal to teens.
• Googlitics Contains links and lessons to help students participate and learn about American political elections with online tools from Google.

Resources for Teens About Issues in the News

• These websites provide information about current issues, news, and culture, aimed at a teen audience.
• NewsHour Extra A news source for teens that includes Student Voices — essays and editorials written by students
• .Pop+Politics Provides a forum for discussion and debate among young people about current politics and culture.
• WireTap The Webby-winning national news and culture magazine whose targeted audience is young people.Related Resource Topics
• Teaching Writing - General Resources on Teaching Writing

Another valuable way to find help is to go to this special link on Delicious that has some additional resources for the Letter to our Next President project: http://delicious.com/ElyseEA
You can also search on Delicious using these tags:

• finding student models
• rubrics and tools for persuasive writing
• teaching persuasive writing
• tips for better WOF pieces

More Resources for Teachers provided by the National Writing Project

The Writing Classroom as a Laboratory for Democracy

Getting Real: Authenticity in Writing Prom

The Five-Paragraph Theme Redux

Shortsighted plans for California education

The new year has brought bad news for education in California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has called for a 10 percent spending reduction and a cut of $4 billion from the state education budget. Unfortunately, it most likely will not be just California cutting the education budget. It is a sad to think that our country can spend almost a 150 billion dollars a year on a war, but cut funding to educate our own children.

As a classroom teacher, I spend time teaching students how to allocate their time and prioritize. I also teach them that the same holds true for their spending habits; they need to prioritize and plan for the future. Somehow this wisdom is missing from the federal and state levels as our leaders spend recklessly today and fail to plan for our basic needs now and for tomorrow. Cutting the budget in a state that serves 6.5 million students is shortsighted. While it is admirable that Schwarzenegger is trying to balance the budget, he should not be doing it at the expense of education.

Poor education leads to higher crime rates and higher long term costs for prisons and prisoners. The increase in cost of corrections outpaced the cost of health, education, or natural resources, according to State Prison Expenditure report from 2001, seven years ago. In 2001, states spent $38.2 billion to maintain the states correctional systems. You can imagine what they are spending today.

“Nationally, FY 2006 general fund corrections spending grew 10 percent above FY 2005 levels. This was the fastest growing category of the four spending areas that NCSL tracks in its State Budget Actions reports and well above what policymakers expected: they had budgeted corrections to grow 4.1 percent,” according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The question I have for legislators and decision makers is the following: wouldn’t it be better for all of us if we spent more on education than on correcting adult criminal behavior?

Which of our presidential candidates will prioritize spending so that the education of our children will improve and correctional costs will go down?

What will it take for Schwarzenegger to see that his proposed education budget cuts are misguided?

The principal is the key to a good school

It comes as no surprise to me that an important study by Advocates for Children and Youth, a Baltimore-based nonprofit has found that principals are the keys to good schools. Anyone who would have asked teachers would have gotten that answer long ago.

“We believe the principal is key to leading a school to success. … It’s a matter of paying now or paying later. The cost is so much smaller if we pay now,” said Terrylynn Tyrell, the education director for Advocates for Children and Youth.

The principal sets the tone for the school starting with day one of the school year. He/she also sets the tone for support for the teacher. If a teacher does not feel supported or cannot get help when needed, then it directly impacts the teacher in the classroom. As a classroom teacher, I can tell you that is true. I have been lucky for for most of my teaching years in that I have had supportive principals. As a journalism teacher whose students might write articles that are critical of the administration having a supportive principal who is supportive of First Amendment rights is the key for me. When I first started teaching, years ago I did not have a supportive principal. It was in San Carlos, CA at a school that is now closed. My students wrote an article about teenage problems with their parents and I was reprimanded for that. I was told to “control those students” which, of course, impacted my program and the students feelings of independence and creativity.

New teachers in particular need administrative support with everything from classroom management to classroom supplies. I noticed in a NY Times articles that 50 schools got failing grades I am not surprised when the article said that the principals were being removed as a first step. We as a country need to find good administrators, pay them well, and then give them the support they need to work with the teachers. Education is a community effort and involves parents, administrators, and teachers. No one group can do it alone. We all need to work together. Hillary Clinton said it well in her book It Takes a Village: and Other Lessons Children Teach Us.

A new way of reading books

Last week I brought the Kindle into class. If you haven’t heard about it or seen pictures of it, you might want to check it out on Amazon. It is a wireless reading tablet that holds hundreds of books at once. My students gathered round like I was handing out candy. Everyone got a chance to try it out and the general consensus was that it is a “cool device” for reading books. Most of them said they would probably read more if they had a gadget like that. It isn’t cheap at $400 plus $9.99 for each book download, but considering the latest statistics released by the National Endowment for the Arts that shows that nearly 20% of 17-year-olds are non-readers, it makes you wonder whether a tablet like that would make a difference and encourage students to read more.
Even adults are reading fiction books less, according to the same study. It looks like adult readers of fiction dropped about 10% since 1982. I find that my students in journalism actually read magazine, newspapers and news websites and all the non-fiction books I assign. They prefer reading non-fiction books. It is interesting that most high schools do not include non-fiction in any of the English curriculum. A good question is why not? Perhaps if students got into the habit of reading what they enjoy, they would be more willing to be readers as adults.

It looks like the greatest influence on the young generation is television which leads to passivity. The average person watches four hours of television per day which is far more time that people spend on the Internet. This generation of young people is much more passive than previous generations. Could it be all the television watching? A suggestion for parents is to not only encourage their kids to read, but to read themselves instead of watching TV so they can be models of good behavior. Perhaps everyone can check out this new reading device–the Kindel– on Amazon,which so far has about 3-4 stars, to see whether it would encourage everyone in the house to be readers. Sony also makes one which sells for $100 less, but does not have access to as many book titles. If either of these gadgets can encourage people to read more, then they are definitely worth the money.

Remembering my first year of teaching

I had just graduated from UC Berkeley and was offered a teaching job with five preparations. It was in September and the school had too many students in a variety of subjects and so they needed a teacher for Senior English, Busines Math, Algebra I, Yearbook, and Business English. I was 22, inexperienced, and burdened with student loans. I also thought it sounded exciting so I accepted it.

Compared to my course load at Berkeley, teaching was much easier, even with five preparations. I had a great year. I loved the students right away even though I looked about the same age. Discipline was somewhat of a problem because of my age, but in the long run it helped me be a better teacher. What I learned was that students perform when they are happy and interested, not when they are coerced or policed. So I worked to make the classes exciting and fun and it worked. To this day, that is one of my main objectives: make the work interesting and relevant to the students’ lives. Then they will want to do it.

People often ask me what the transition is like if they want to change careers mid-stream. It isn’t easy but anyone who likes working with kids will find teaching rewarding and the career change worth it. It is more exciting and rewarding than, for example, a desk job or a sales job, but also can be much more stressful. Teaching 150 students per day (the average high school teacher load) is full of ups and downs every day. But learning not to get overly wrapped up in the problems and not to act like a policeman eliminates much of the stress. In the end, there is nothing more rewarding than having a student succeed in life and knowing that you made a difference.

Support Freedom of Expression for Student Publications

The First Amendment right—freedom of expression—seems to be limited for high school students on high school publications. 

Hazelwood School District et al. v. Kuhlmeier et al.,  (1988) is  a 1988 Supreme Court decision that said that public school student newspapers that have not been established as forums for free expression do not enjoy the same level of First Amendment protections.  Unfortunately, for many students today, that means the principal censors their articles prior to publication if they decide that article does not have a legitmate educational purpose.

This ruling plays out that student expression is limited and that advisors who allow “too much student expression” are removed from their positions.  In a country that values freedom of expression this is not a way to train students to be active participants in a democratic society.  Many wonder why this generation of students is uninvolved and apathetic.  This law is not the only contributing factor, but it is one of them. How excited are students to be on their school newspaper if they are constantly under the scrutiny of censorship?

What can be done today to help the student press?  Principals can reassess the standards by which they judge articles that don’t have a “legitimate educational purpose.” In California recently a principal deemed an article about a school knifing as “not educational” because he wanted to remove any negative publicity about the school.  Obviously, this is a misuse of the law, but the adviser for the paper is also threatened with losing her position if she does not obey.  Community members can help student publications by supporting freedom of expression and making sure that principals know the community values freedom of speech.

Why I Teach…

Teaching is a labor of love: it is time consuming, emotionally consuming, and poorly paid.  But I love it.   I am  lucky because I get along well with teenagers.  My own children have always said, “Mom, the reason you get along so well in class is because your sense of humor was arrested at the age of 18.”  That may be a stretch but there is some truth to it.  I really enjoy teenagers and I laugh at their jokes.    So why do I like teaching teenagers so much—- the group that most people avoid? I like them, because teenagers are the most creative, non-conventional age group around.  They don’t like to follow the rules, they question everything that is spoken or written, and they invent new ways to behave.   These behaviors give their parents, their teachers, and the community a major headache  Of course, they have to follow some rules or there is chaos, but in their non-conformity is innovation.  Think about all the tech inventions in the past thirty years: the Internet, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo just to name a few. Think about the ages of the inventors: in their teens and  twenties.   I find my students and their ideas fascinating.   I learn from my students.  Now that probably sounds corny to many of you, but it is true.  If adults would just listen more, they would learn quite a bit.  That is what I have discovered from 25 years of teaching. However, I can understand why so many people leave the profession after only three years.  There is little administrative support, large class sizes, and lots of complaining from parents, students, and the community. Also teachers are often asked to act like policemen in the classroom enforcing irrational school rules cooked up by frustrated administrators.  In today’s world it is even harder to be a teacher than it was before because everyone is watching. The No Child Left Behind laws have created more problems for teachers and schools.  The National Education Association asked Congress to reject the draft language for the new No Child Left Behind law NEA Rejects No Child Left Behind.   We as a nation should reexamine what we are asking teachers and administrators to do in the classroom.  Teachers need more support.   Check with your local schools and school boards to see what you can do to help.