Graduation rates might be increasing

The nation’s high school graduation rate, which declined in the latter part of the 20th century, may have hit bottom and begun to rise, according to a report to be issued Tuesday by a nonprofit group founded by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. (Sam Dillon at the New York Times) 


To read more about the report, click the above.

A terrific reading resource

Since 1956, IRA has been a nonprofit, global network of individuals and institutions committed to worldwide literacy. More than 70,000 members strong, the Association supports literacy professionals through a wide range of resources, advocacy efforts, volunteerism, and professional development activities. Our members promote high levels of literacy for all by:


* Improving the quality of reading instruction
* Disseminating research and information about reading
* Encouraging the lifetime reading habit

(from the International Reading Association website)

IRA's website is rich with resources, including Reading Radio. Here's some information about it, again from IRA's website.IRA Reading Radio airs monthly on the BAM! Radio Network, a radio website for the education community. In each installment, IRA interviews an expert on a key topic relating to reading education.

This month's broadcast is about response to intervention. To listen, click here.

Pilgrim and Turkey for Thanksgiving!

Some things just need to be seen... thanks to Kelsey Peterson and Joe Kalka for being so willing and capable (and funny!)






Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

Must-read book on reading

Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy 6-12 is a book grounded in relationships and built on connections—between generations of learning theorists starting with Lev Vygotsky and extending to George Hillocks and Michael Smith; between learning theory and the innovative practice of that theory in secondary English classrooms; and between teachers and learners engaged in two-way learning in collaborative classrooms.( Marean Jordan at NWP website)

Strategic Reading offers a rich array of resources and tools to help both new and experienced teachers work toward the visionary goal of guiding adolescent readers to engagement, competence, and independence. Although the book provides many concrete classroom-based techniques, as well as stories and figures to illustrate them, its primary focus is not on strategies. Rather, it develops an argument—grounded in theory and supported by extended examples of classroom practice—that "reading and writing should create new meaning, connections, and relationships. Reading and writing, like all effective learning is dialectical and social, and makes use of past and present materials to reach into the future" (52). (again.....from the NWP website)

Click on either of the hyperlinked paragraphs above to learn more.

Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy 6-12
Written by Jeffrey D. Wihelm, Tanya N. Baker, and Julie Dube. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2001. 254 pages.

Common standards movement

Two treats in one week for common-standards gazers: Idaho becomes the 43rd state to adopt the common standards. But it's provisional, folks; this one still has to go to the state legislature before becoming final.
The board of education adopted the standards on Nov. 17, according to Idaho Department of Education spokeswoman Melissa McGrath. The board first considered them in August, and took the final vote last week after a public comment period in October. Now the standards have to be considered and approved by the education committee of at least one chamber of the legislature, which doesn't reconvene until January, McGrath said. (Catherine Gewertz at Curriculum Matters)

Click the above text to learn more.

Barb Beach reads Sidney Poitier

     Barb Beach, retired GFC Spanish teacher (although she spent several years at Valley Middle School and a couple teaching at some other high school in Grand Forks) was so excited to have the opportunity to be able to share her favorite book with students.  The Measure of a Man, noted actor Sidney Poitier's autobiography, includes incredible stories of Poitier's poverty growing up in the Bahamas to being kicked out of his first casting call, while sharing Poitier's views on life and how later generations have life much more complicated in some respects.
      In one of the selections read, Poitier's mother threw Sidney into the ocean to teach him how to swim. As his mother watched, motionless, Sidney thrashed and struggled and finally went under the water.  His father then reached down, pulled him up, and handed him to his mother--who threw him back into the ocean again and again until she was confident he knew how to swim!

Heidi Czerwiec's Poetic Equation

"There's not a lot of math in poetry, and I wanted to do something about that."  Looking at a crime scene photo from the 1930s showing a man in the middle of a fall to his death, Heidi Czerwiec saw the parabola of the movement and created the most interesting of the poems she shared with last week's Tuesday session of Literary Lunches. Blending philosophy with geometry while adding in the lyricism found in her other readings, Czerwiec demonstrated how poetry could be created anywhere.   The implications for poetry in other academic disciplines are intriguing!

An associate professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UND as well as the Director of the UND Writer's Conference, Czerwiec shared other contemporary poets and discussed how students could become published themselves.

More ESEA?

If you're getting an early start on crafting your 2011 State of the Union drinking game, you may want to include these words: "education," "college," "ESEA," and "reauthorization."

Melody Barnes, who leads President Barack Obama's Domestic Policy Council, told an audience at an Education Week event today in Washington that President Obama is going to make reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act a "top" priority in the new year. And he wants both Democrats and Republicans on board. (Alyson Klein at Education Week) (The today is November 12, 2010)

Click on the above hyperlinked text to learn more.

Teens still read for pleasure

Teens read for pleasure, even in the digital age.
That's how it looks in a Rockville library, where 14-year-old Olivia Smith is propped in a comfy chair, deep into a Japanese novel genre called manga. She has been reading on the computer for an hour, and later, when she texts her friends, she will still be turning pages between messages. "I'm sort of a bookworm," she said. (Donna St. George at The Washington Post)

So how does reading look in the digital age? What are students reading? Click the above excerpted text to learn more.

Free voluntary reading: possibly the best way to improve reading

Free voluntary reading (FVR) is not only conducive to reading motivation, it actually works better than direct instruction. Fifty-one out of 54 students using FVR did as well or better on reading tests than students given traditional skill-based reading instruction (Krashen, 2004). In fact, young people who read have better comprehension, research tells us, and they write better, spell better, improve their grammar, and increase their vocabulary. (Carol Gordon at School Library Journal)

Here is the citation for the article referenced in the above excerpt:
Krashen, S. D. (2004). The power of reading: Insights from the research. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited Inc.

Primary source resource

The National Humanities Center Toolbox Library host eight collections of primary source documents and images. The collections are categorized by eras in US History. Each document and image in the collections is accompanied by discussion questions and or a reading guide. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

Click here to go to The National Humanities Center Toolbox Library.

Click here to visit Free Technology for Teachers.

Avid reader shares engaging writing

Retired Grand Forks Central teacher and football coach Mike Berg shared something at yesterday's session of Literary Lunches that he thought not everybody knows about him.

"I am huge into reading," Berg said and then added, "There's never a book very far from me."

Berg read excerpts from Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, a non-fiction book about a group of smoke jumpers, those who parachute into otherwise inaccessible areas to fight fires. Mostly he read about a fire in Mann Gulch, Montana in August 1949, a fire that claimed that lives of 13 of the 16 men who jumped into the area to fight off its flames. Those men died  in less than an hour. (Mann Gulch is near the Missouri River very close to where Lewis and Clark camped.)

One of the excerpts followed the three survivors, Rumsey, Sallee and Dodge, and what they dealt with on the ground during that fire fight: tremendous flames and injuries in tough, almost impossible to navigate conditions.

Berg said of the book, "It's held my attention," something which he added has been the case with others to whom he's recommended the book.

Local playwright remembers her youth in writing

Kathy Coudle-King wrote the first short story that's part of her book, Wannabe, for a UND Writers Conference open mic. Then, the summer just after the 1997 flood, she wrote more, early in the morning each day, making herself assignments to write about the first's for the characters in the novel. At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, she read an excerpt from that novel, Kissing 101, a sort of primer on kissing delivered by the young girls of the work.

The girls King hung out with when she was growing up in Cuban-American neighborhood in New Jersey served as the models for the characters in the novel, though she said in novel the characters are about 25 percent non-fiction and 75 percent fiction.  These girls, King said, sort of raised one another, because their parents worked long hours. As a result, those girls, "grew up very, very fast."

She said of the girls she hung out with, "We started out at strong girls, but as we grew up, I watched the girls lose their voices. It took them a long time to get their voices back again."

Still, King, typically a playwright, said, "I never set out to write a novel..."

King, who teaches writing and Women's Studies at UND, has a BFA in playwrighting from NYU and an MA in English from UND.

Education news resource

We live in a rapidly changing world, which requires us to learn and adapt on an ongoing basis. Having been nudged, dragged, prompted and coached on my own path from Luddite to a tech competent and tech curious Baby Boomer, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it is that scares us and inhibits us about mastering the various new technologies we encounter. (Bill Williams on technology at The Washington Post)

The above comes from The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post, a terrific resource for news about education. To learn more about this resource, click here.

Taking flight through reading

Former Grand Forks Central Diane Odegard told yesterday's group of students and teachers at Literary Lunches that  it's "always a delight" to read from The Flight of the Odegard, a book by Patrick A. McGuire about her late husband John D.Odegard, founder and dean of UND Aerospace at the University of North Dakota. 

Below is a bit of background on the UND Aerospace program. Click the text for more.

A department which began with only two donated aircraft and two faculty, the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences has grown into one of the nation’s most widely respected aerospace education programs under his leadership. During his career as an aerospace educator, Odegard’s reputation for leadership earned him industry respect and many honors.(from the Flight of the Odegard website)

Ms Odegard read a section that chronicles when her husband went to Rushford, Minnesota to help in the celebration of the new airport there. Rob Bunke, father of Jim Bunke, one of the early students in the aviation program, was responsible for the opening of the airport.

"Early students were so very close to John," she said.

McGuire interviewed some 165-175 people to write the book, including Ms. Odegard herself.

Here is an excerpt from the book. To read more of the excerpt, click the text. 

People will say about Odegard that when he walked into a room he instantly became the dominating presence. In a space as confined as a cockpit, that same mix of reputation and charisma could easily intimidate a student. One former student who knows that first hand is Diane Odegard, who took flying lessons from John and even accumulated some hours.

Resource for literacy education

About the Alliance: The Alliance for Excellent Education is a Washington, DC-based national policy and advocacy organization that works to improve national and federal policy so that all students can achieve at high academic levels and graduate from high school ready for success in college, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century. The Alliance focuses on America’s six million most at-risk secondary school students—those in the lowest achievement quartile—who are most likely to leave school without a diploma or to graduate unprepared for a productive future. (from the Alliance for Excellent Education website)


Click the above text to learn more.

The Alliance has published a number of important reports, among them Reading Next ,Writing Next and Writing to Read.

Reading and writing and thinking...

Engage your students in online literacy learning with these interactive tools that help them accomplish a variety of goals—from organizing their thoughts to learning about language—all while having fun. (from ReadWriteThink)

Here at ReadWriteThink, our mission is to provide educators, parents, and afterschool professionals with access to the highest quality practices in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials. (from ReadWriteThink)

ReadWriteThink has a number of interactive resources. Check out the above excerpts of linked text above to learn more.

A book that continues to be read

At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, Grand Forks Public Schools school board member Cynthia Shabb read from a text familiar to many Grand Forks Central students: The Giver. This Lois Lowry book follows Jonas as he learns about his new role in a community virtually devoid of choice, a community that is completely ruled by sameness.

Shabb, a former English teacher, read the section in which Jonas hears the rules that will govern his new role. She always read a section in which Jonas gets a memory of and experiences snow.

Lowry was at the Empire Theater Friday October 29, 2010 as part of the Greater Grand Forks Big Read. Her picture book, Crow Call, was selected for the Little Read component of this event, because it addresses war. (The Big Read book is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a book that focuses on the Vietnam War.) At Friday's event, Lowry recounted how she got the idea for The Giver.

The following, from a 2004 interview with Lowry, then 68, does the same.

Lowry, 68, got the idea for "The Giver" years ago when she was traveling regularly to visit her parents, who were in a nursing home. Her father was still in decent physical health, but his memory was failing. Her mother was very ill physically, but her memory was intact.

"I would travel home with that in my mind, and I began to think a lot about the concept of memory. When it was time for me to begin a new book, I began to create in my mind a place and a group of people who had somehow found the capacity to control memory," Lowry said. (Karen MacPherson at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online )

Unexpected Sparrow flies in

Jim Sparrow, Captain Jack Sparrow's "better looking brother," not only read at Friday's session of Literary Lunches, he also played guitar to a packed house (room 159). The younger Sparrow's reading selections were How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don't Change Diapers both written by Melinda Long and illustrated by David Shannon.

Sparrow was in full pirate regalia and had with him his trusty mate, a Martin guitar. And while he read, his ship "The Great Gatsby," was docked on the Red River near Applebee's. Sparrow also explained that his brother Jack is more well-known because of the trouble he gets into. Jim's relative anonymity is the product of his good behavior, including a dry ship.

Toward the end of the second lunch session, one of Sparrow's crew members showed up, a mate that suggested that the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham, is a cookbook.