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.