Winter/Spring

In the fall, teachers and students return to school hopeful and full of new ideas.  Winter semester is different.  Christmas has passed, so has New Year's Day.  The first semester is finished, and students have completed an entire round of exams and state tests.  The days are short, and the nights are long and cold.  All eyes are turned toward Easter and June, both of which seem a long way off.

Winter requires something more from us than fall.  Winter demands commitment.  Students have to know that they want to finish the school year, that they want to pass all their classes.  They have to commit to making good grades quickly so that when spring and warmth arrive they can slack off a little and enjoy the change in seasons.  Teachers also have to know what they want.  They have to know that despite the mid-year blues their students deserve their full attention and that success in the coming months is just as important as it was when the school year began.

For those of us in the 1 to 1 Initiative, this winter semester demands special commitment.  We teachers know what mistakes we made in the fall; we remember the lessons that failed because of problems with technology, the disruptions and interruptions the laptops sometimes created in class.  We remember our own fear as we tried to incorporate new technology into our curriculum, the fear that we would make mistakes and that the students would find us stupid or incompetent. 

Regardless of these problems, all of us in the 1 to 1 Initiative have renewed our commitment to the program.  We know there will be missteps, but we also know that there will be successes.  We know too that what we are doing matters.  Working with technology and exploring the ways it can impact education has a tremendous effect on preparing students for the future.  Colleges are increasingly using technology to deliver curriculum and assess student learning.  Helping our students prepare for those experiences is one of the best things we teachers can do.

I hope that the students can join us in this commitment to the future.  Competition for colleges and jobs is increasing, as are the consequences for academic failure.  Gone are the days when a student might drop out of high school and go to work in a factory or low-level construction or agricultural job.  Most of those jobs are gone, and the ones that haven't disappeared rarely pay a living wage.  We must prepare well for the challenges ahead, and commiting to success this winter is good first step in that preparation.

Why Gilgamesh?

Students must wonder why teachers choose the literary works they include in their classes.  Selections such as The Odyssey, Siddhartha, or Great Expectations, must seem foreign and strange to many teenagers.  These books depict characters whose lives are far removed from the world we live in now; their language, their surroundings, their interests, and their pursuits must seem archaic and exotic, perhaps even irrelevant to adolescents.  Yet any good literature teacher will tell their students that these books speak as forcefully today as they did when they were written.  Indeed, one measure of a great book is its longevity and universality, how well it speaks throughout the years to different readers, from different cultures.

Of all the books teachers might have included in the 1 to 1 curriculum, The Epic of Gilgamesh, must seem one of the most far-removed and exotic.  5,000 years old, conceived in a culture so old it had vanished by the time the Hebrews wrote the The Old Testament, Gilgamesh appears at first glance to have little to say to readers today.  The characters in the work are weird and mysterious.  They speak in grand, fantastic phrases, and they commit acts that can potentially confuse modern readers.  Yet, the 1 to 1 teachers chose this work because we believe that it continues to speak forcefully.  If anything, its themes of death and friendship, its exploration of Gilgamesh's fears and aspirations, have special meaning for a culture like our own, struggling with issues of aging and death and relationships.

Gilgamesh's journey is one of arrogance, recklessness, desperation, and finally acceptance.  He is a tyrant to his people, using them as he wishes for his selfish amusement.  His decisions to kill Humbaba and to destroy the Bull of Heaven imperil himself and others.  After Enkidu dies, he goes on a wild  search for immortality, running from illness and death, refusing his place among mortals.  The goddess of wine, Siduri, sees his foolishness, and encourages him to live in the present, to enjoy life, and to become the father and husband he was meant to be.  If anything, she is telling him to grow up, to accept his fate, to live his life.

The issues raised in Gilgamesh, arrogance, recklessness, death, aging, despair --  are issues that continue to confront us.  Each year, Americans spend billions to extend lives by a few weeks or months.  We avoid end-of-life issues, and usually when death does take a loved one we speak in terms of  'passing' or 'passing on,' skirting that word death.  Like Gilgamesh, many of us sacrifice our lives in search of the impossible.  Like him, we let our faces become weary and our bodies and spirits depleted while we chase after fame or eternal youth.  Meanwhile, we spend millions on psychologists who give us the same advice Siduri gave Gilgamesh -- accept yourself and live in the present moment, grow up and take responsibility for your own life, and, like Gilgamesh, we stubbornly ignore this advice pursuing our perceived self-interests at all costs.

To some extent, each of us has experienced what Gilgamesh experiences in the epic.  We lose control, we long for friendship, we seek adventures, we fear death and the unknown.  Perhaps it helps us to see that our struggles are not unique, that we are not the first to experience fear and longing, that for thousands of years humans have sought the same ends we seek and made the same mistakes we make.

In other words, in The Epic of Gilgamesh, we see ourselves,  and this element too is an essential part of good literature -- it teaches us about ourselves.  In the lives of characters who are fully drawn and vividly evoked we discover new aspects of our own lives, viewing them from different perspectives.  Such was the hope of the English teachers in choosing the epic for the 1 to 1 Initiative -- that in Gilgamesh's strange and outlandish journeys we might see our own hopes and fears, our own successes and failures, played out in a way that captures our imaginations. 

Foundations

Our first unit in the 1 to 1 Initiative is called Foundations.  In Civics and Economics the students are learning about the founding of democracy in America, and in the English II classes they are exploring the writing process and the world's first epic, Gilgamesh, the foundations of writing and of literature.  The students will also write a This I Believe essay based on NPR's This I Believe series. In this assignment the students examine the foundations of their belief systems and their core values, which of course form the foundation of who the students are.

One definition for foundation in the American Heritage Dictionary is "the basis on which a thing stands, is founded, or is supported."  The word seems to derive ultimately from the Latin word fundus, which means "the bottom."  The foundation, then, of our lives would be that which lies at the "bottom" of our lives, that ground on which the stories of our lives have been built.  It is indeed appropriate that we begin our work with the 1 to 1 Initiative in this unit on Foundations, for these first two to three weeks are indeed the platform on which we will construct the remainder of the semester.

In the study of civics in America, most questions usually point back somehow towards the founding of the country.  One obvious example of this would be the current controversy swirling around the mosque and Islamic community center to be built near the site of The World Trade Center, ground zero for 9-11.  Separation of church and state, freedom of religion, and the role of popular opinion are all central to our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and this controversy particularly reverberates in a nation which was originally peopled by numerous settlers seeking religious freedom, evoking both our fears and our aspirations.

Likewise, in writing, the writing process itself lies at the heart of composition.  Every message, every text, regardless of its form, is a result of the writing process.  In some way or another, the author thought about what he or she wanted to write and began writing it.  When possible, most writers, whether they are professionals working on the next bestseller or students writing a timed essay, want to revise their writing, to make it better, more readable, more effective. Thus, whether we take a particular piece to publication, somehow or another the writing process has been involved in the composition.

Gilgamesh is also foundational.  Since it is the world's oldest epic, it is the ground on which world literature has been built, and its themes of friendship, mortality, and struggle are just as meaningful today as they were 5,000 years ago when the epic was written.  At first brazen and reckless, once he loses his best friend the hero Gilgamesh becomes terrified of the prospect of his own death.  Death renders the world meaningless to him, and he goes in search of immortality.  Death continues to frighten us, and we struggle with it just as Gilgamesh struggled with it, longing, as did he, for a way out of growing old and dying.

As we work through this first unit, I hope the students take a little time to seriously consider the idea of "foundations." I hope they ask themselves what their foundations are and how they came to build their lives on the values that support them.  I also hope that the theme provides us with a unifying idea that can support the material we need to cover and the processes we will learn.  After all, any structure is only as sound as its foundation.

Happy New Year

I have always loved the beginning of school.  Summer is giving way to the cool air and warm colors of fall; the days are growing shorter, and the sunlight is growing deeper and more golden as shadows slowly begin to lengthen.  I look forward to Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving.  I cast off the heat and weariness of late summer, and I step a little lighter, and my attitude shines just a little brighter.

I love the beginning of school because anything seems possible.  The missed homework assignments, the bungled tests, the sloppy, last-minute compositions from the year before are behind us.  Students have new teachers, and teachers new students.  For the teachers, the year ahead seems a time of renewal, a time to try new ideas, to make new resolutions, to explore new techniques.  For students, the year promises success.  They will do their homework on time, they will pay attention in class, they will be tolerant and patient with their peers.  They will balance athletics, work, school, clubs, boyfriends, and girlfriends in ways that seemed impossible last year.  The year ahead is a blank slate and all of us feel that we can write a new story on that slate.

For those of us involved in the 1 to 1 Initiative at New Bern High School, this year holds particular promise.  We are all of us, teachers and students, proceeding into uncharted territories.  The sophomore class of 2010 will forever be the first full class at New Bern High School to receive laptops for use at school and at home.  The teachers of these students, myself included, will be the first teachers at New Bern High School to attempt to fully correlate technology with core, academic classes.  It's as if the year ahead is a cleared field into which we will all step and work and play, composing there our stories for this year.

Yes, I love the beginning of a new school year, and I love the fall, but I know too that every year, as both a teacher and a student, I have encountered obstacles I could never have predicted.  I have experienced successes and failures, undertakings that worked, and projects that didn't.  The same will be true for all of us this year, but I do encourage everyone involved in the 1 to 1 Initiative to hold onto the hope we feel as school begins.  Let us be patient with each other, let us learn from each other, and let us be willing to take risks and every once in a while to experience failure.

The year is new.  Let us step into it gladly, and let us try to maintain throughout the year the hope and promise we feel now, so that in the end we will have written some new and quite interesting stories.

Mr. Spence and Web 2.0 (Part Two)

Technology scares some adults;  it scares some teachers.  I don't know what frightens them, but for some I think it's failure.  Since they don't understand technology, they are afraid that when they use it they will somehow bungle the job and come off looking foolish.  Others fear the work that learning to use technology requires.  Learning to incorporate technology in classrooms requires much time and effort.  It also requires that teachers rethink their approach to curriculum.

I understand these fears.  I can remember watching Jonathan Bartels, a young teacher from Williamson and technical advisor for the Tar River Writers Project, doing a workshop on wikis. I felt lost.  Others in the class seemed to be following him, doing what he asked, but I was wrapped up all around myself, with no idea what I was doing.  Later, In the fall of 2009, when I received my first 1 to 1 grant from Craven County, I remember lying awake at night and wondering if I was competent enough to pull off instruction in a 1 to 1 classroom where every student had a laptop.  Yet I also knew that to reach my students and to engage them more completely in writing, I had to step past my fears and embrace technology.

So, progressing one day at a time, being willing to experiment and to go to others with questions, I slowly began to use Web 2.0 applications and other interactive technologies in my classes.  I used a mimio to turn my whiteboard into a smart board.  I began to use web sites to explore the cultures my students were studying, and I even allowed the students to use discussion forums to answer questions about literature that previously we would have discussed aloud in class.

In February, 2010, I took the plunge and helped write a grant to provide all of our sophomores at New Bern High School with laptops.  With my first grant I had seen how they could transform writing and reading into dynamic, collaborative exercises that both challenged and engaged the students.  I saw how they facilitated drafting and research and editing.  There was no turning back.  The fear I had felt earlier peeled away, and I became committed to the use of technology in the language arts classroom.

Actually, at this point, it would be disingenuous to claim that I had overcome my fears entirely, for, indeed, I continue to worry about how I will adapt to the challenges of utilizing technology, especially Web 2.0 applications, in my classroom.  But in my case conviction now outweighs fear, the conviction that the appropriate use of technology can make my classroom more exciting, more fun, and more engaging.  Where it leads, I'm not sure, but I'm willing to find out.
    

Mr Spence and Web 2.0 (Part One)

For a few years now I've heard the term Web 2.0, I didn't know what it meant. I thought it refered to a version of the internet.

I wasn't alone. Ask most people what web 2.0 is and you'll receive many answers, but rarely will they be correct. Like me, some will say that it's a version of the internet, or perhaps some will say that it is the internet. Many will simply look at you with a blank expression thinking, as I did, that this is something they ought to know.

But ask them if they use Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, or perhaps even Skype, and they will say, yes. These applications are all part of Web 2.0. So, like me, many people are participating in Web 2.0, but they don't know it.

According to Dan Froelich, technology fellow for the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, the term Web 2.0 originated in 2004 when Tim O'Reilly held the first Web 2.0 Conference.  While Web 2.0 may sound like a new version of the internet, Froelich notes that it actually refers to how developers and users work with the web.  The creator of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee,  notes that Web 1.0 was "read-only web" (Qtd. in Froelich).  In other words, users went to most Web 1.0 sources to obtain information, not to present it or share it with others.  Web 2.0 is "read and write use".  Users not only read information but create their own information and share it with others who can then comment on and often adapt that information to their own usage.  In short, with Web 2.0, users become participants, consumers become creators.

Once I understood this definition of Web 2.0, I could see that indeed I was using it already, even if all I was doing was going to YouTube, viewing a video, and commenting on it.  Apparently, many of us are using Web 2.0 whether we know what it is or not.  This thought comforted me, made me feel a little less intimidated by technology.

The challenge, then, is to learn to use Web 2.0 tools not only for entertainment or socializing but also for creating solutions to the many challenges facing us today.  For teachers and students, the challenge is learning how to use the tools to create a rigorous, engaging, and relevant learning experience that prepares us for the 21st Century.

For me, the journey seems to have just begun.  However, knowing what Web 2.0 is helps me know better what to expect along the way.

Welcome to the blog for Mr. Spence's classes

Hello everyone. I’m Mr. Spence, English teacher at New Bern High School in New Bern, North Carolina. This blog will serve as a place for me and my students to reflect on our experiences as readers, writers, and learners. It is also a place for us to reflect on ourselves as consumers and creators of technology as we move forward with our 1 to 1 Initiative. This blog also gives us a means to share with the world what we’re thinking. Writing and reading are ultimately communicative and collaborative efforts. When we share them, we give them more meaning; talking about a book, we understand it better; sharing a piece of writing, we experience it more intensely. Sharing our experiences as learners makes them more relevant, more significant. Let this blog, then, be a meeting place for all of us, a safe place, a place where we can grow as writers, readers, and learners in the 21st Century.