Today I Am Stealing

Frequently I throw larger vocabulary terms at my students, especially my honors classes, to see if they can pick up on them and start to use them. Some do. Most stare blankly, even when I provide an easy definition in context. They whine that I use words that are "too big;" they don't understand what I say. My general retort falls along the lines of reminding them that intelligence shines through vocabulary. Then I provide yet another definition or analogy or strategy that they can use to figure out what I've said. I then make a concerted effort to use the same word in multiple contexts throughout the remainder of the lesson, or sometimes even over the next few days.

Students, and the rest of humanity these days, are losing their overall command of a potent vocabulary. So I turned to an expert to find out if what I am modeling for the students and providing for my students is effective, or to investigate if I needed to ramp up what I do as a classroom teacher in order to satiate my need to fix a growing trend in shrinking student lexicons. (By the way, I'm not doing too poorly.)

So...as per the title of this post, I am taking from Laura Robb's book Vocabulary Is Comprehension (2014), which I have found to be practical and applicable for every grade level--even post graduate studies:

Ten Ways Students Can Expand Their Vocabularies

1.      Become a nonstop reader: Read e-books, print books, blogs, and online articles. The more you read, the greater your background knowledge and the more your vocabulary will grow. Through reading, you’ll meet words in diverse contexts and come to know their multiple meanings.

2.      Use new words or lose them: Include words in your conversations, text messages, IMs, and writing. Without use, new words you’ve learned just fade away into the land of forgetting.

3.      Develop curiosity about multiple meanings: When you meet a new word in one situation, take a few moments to consider its multiple meanings. Use an online dictionary or thesaurus to explore multiple meanings. Text a friend to see what he or she knows about the word.

4.      Bond with a dictionary: If you come across an unfamiliar word, jot it on scrap paper, and when you have a free moment, read about it on an online dictionary.

5.      Play vocabulary games: It’s easy to find word games online through Google. Play games with friends, siblings, parents, and on your own. While you’re having fun, you’ll learn new words and revisit old friends.

6.      Broaden your interests: Try to branch out and read beyond your interests and hobbies. Read online newspapers, take a virtual tour of a museum, castle, or city. Listen to music you love; then listen to other kinds of music. When you learn about a range of topics, you can enlarge your vocabulary.

7.      Ask questions: If someone uses a word or expression you don’t understand, ask that person to tell you about it.

8.      Talk: Talk to friends and family; use a video chat program such as iChat to talk online; have conversations with yourself. Make talk an important part of your day, and you’ll meet and learn new words that you will use as you communicate with others.

9.      Listen: Listen during a conversation, lesson, speech, sermon, newscast, play, movie, video; listen to the words others use to convey meaning and communicate ideas. Mull over ideas and words you’ve heard—new words, familiar words—and discover what listening has helped you learn.

10. Visualize words: You can picture, see on the screen of your mind, what you understand. Once you can use meaning and situations to picture new words, you’ll be able to use them when thinking, speaking, reading, and writing.

There is so much research about effective vocabulary and the benefits thereof, but I'm not going to blog about that. It would take a millennium to sift through all of it. I'm just going to stick with this list and invite everybody to expend their own (oral and written) phraseology.

(Picture taken from thelearningcoachonline.com)

My Trouble with Poetry

(Taken from http://theodysseyonline.com/montclair-state/easy-steps-overcome-writers-block/335202)

Lately, I’ve been reading Billy Collins’ Aimless Love, a collection of new and selected poems. Thumbing through, a poem or two a day, I came across one of my old friends: “The Trouble with Poetry” from the collection of the same title (2005). The trouble with poetry, I re-realized, is exactly what Mr. Collins says it is—it urges me to write poetry. It doesn’t have to be, nor will it ever be in most cases, good poetry. I haven’t really written a decent poem for a while. Some of you may question whether I’ve ever written a decent poem, but I digress. Last week I attended a literacy conference, which included a smattering of sessions on poetry, performance, and instruction by educator poets Georgia Heard and Brod Bagert. Interacting with them just sprayed lighter fluid onto my ardor to write poetry.

However, and I must add this however in here, the trouble with writing poetry for me right now is time. I have no time to watch out any window. Even across the hall from my classroom, the broad glass panes streaked with bird droppings and hard water stains fail to call to me. I have no time to invite the muses over for tea or for a cup o’ Joe or Jack or whatever it is they’re drinking these days. No dainties or doilies or even paper napkins holding store brand excuses for cookies and flavored sugar water in slightly smashed Styrofoam cups either.

Several weeks ago, Miss Lee, one of our math teachers, asked if I would write some examples of Pi-ku—a poem where each line corresponds syllables (or letters or words) with digits of pi—for “Pi(e) Day” last Monday (March 14). I jumped at the chance when she proposed the idea, but I couldn’t even eke out a semi-intelligent 3-1-4 poem by the deadline, let alone the twenty digits she initially asked for.

So this morning, I am making time in class, after reading the Collins poem aloud a few times with my students, to write about trouble. They are writing about the trouble with waking up first period, the trouble with Mr. Anson’s English class, the trouble with social media, the trouble with Donald Trump, and the trouble with girls. And I am writing about the trouble with poetry.

However, during the few precious minutes I steal each period, after attendance is taken and before students share their writing, I have not been able to complete any of the poems previously begun over past months. The ideas in my head repeatedly hit the snooze and demand “five more minutes” before waking. I’ve managed to stir up few scraps, a few images that remain clogged in my brain and resurface just often enough to remind me that the trap needs to be emptied, or at minimum, the filter needs to be changed.

Images of a cemetery with fall leaves and lichen creeping over the sandstone, along with an incomplete tribute to my father appear, as do words of a semi-formed piece pre-titled “Death Sucks,” which is a phrase I stole directly from Chris Thompson—to be perfectly honest for a moment—my friend and colleague whose ramblings about the run-ins with the reaper I jotted down and carried with me in a side pocket of my suit coat as I participated in more funerals in the past ten months than I have in a lifetime.

Maybe, if I ramble long enough, the tip of my pencil will burst into a little flame as I sit here in the metaphoric dark.