overheard in the staff meeting

I'll admit that I was surprised to walk into a staff development session on math teaching a few months ago to hear it suggested that we begin math lessons by asking "What do you notice?  What do you wonder?"  I've talked for years about how poetry grows out of noticing and wondering, and while I've applied the Noticing and Wondering formula (which is anything but formulaic, once you get past the initial questions) to every other piece of curriculum in the classroom, I realize that I've been leaving math out.

You can watch the video that I found mind-changing at that staff development meeting here:

Our staff has met twice more to consider and discuss (only very briefly; seven minutes isn't near enough time for in-depth conversations) this approach to math education and to try to link it--of course--to the new Common Core Standards and to the Five Strands of Mathematical Proficiency, UCARE.  (Yes, I care about math; it just doesn't come as naturally to me!)

Earlier this week one of my colleagues shared, valuably, her experience with a less-is-more inquiry approach which begins with a lot of TIME.  To start, she has been offering her students plenty of time to sit and look at a new math concept, such as a fraction and its reduced version, in order to notice and wonder about the two numbers and their possible relationships.  Perhaps they attempt to represent their ideas on paper or whiteboards.

Once they have begun to have some ideas about what might be going on (and my favorite feature of  the "What do you notice?" launch is that everyone can notice, whether or not they have an inkling of what the end point or "correct answer" might be), the children have seven whole minutes to talk through their thoughts with a partner, to express their notions of the problem in words.  This is wait time with a capital W. 

My colleague spoke about her strong tendency to feel that this might be a waste of time, compared to simply teaching the class the logarithm for reducing fractions straightaway, and how she has had to persevere in permitting herself to allow time for ambiguity, for process.  She described observing the children's initial delving into what the problem might be, and how understanding comes in fits and starts that often begin with "flashes of maybeness." 

This is a feeling I know well, having been a child who struggled with math although I had a fairly good sense of "reasonable."  Now I know that not understanding place value until I was offered base 10 blocks in a Math for Teachers course at age 22 makes me a more effective and sympathetic teacher for children (unlike my own!) who need substantial time to reach true comprehension of math concepts.  I'm grateful for the lead toward honoring all those flashes of maybeness.

*****************

there's a ticklish
lifting
in your eyebrows
or ribs
a lightness
that zaps through
your backbone and lungs

a pause
a breath and then
flashes of maybeness
bubble your brain:
"that might--
it could--
what if--
hey, look!"

the eye in your mind opens wide
starts to see
and any day now
your mouth will catch up

Heidi Mordhorst 2012
all rights reserved


Many thanks to my colleague Stephanie Cromwell for giving me this week's poem, and to Joelle Thompson, the staff development teacher who has been leading these meetings.  The round-up this Poetry Friday is with Laura Purdie Salas (and her guest David Harrison) at writing the world for kids. 

what I like helps you figure out what you like

I've been thinking a lot about the essay I found earlier this week, "In Praise of Promiscuous Thinking," on Charles Bernstein’s Attack of the Difficult Poems and David Orr’s Beautiful and Pointless.  Both are books that, as essayist Joel Brouwer says, "have things to say about how to read poems in general, as opposed to this or that specific poem." Both are also books that I would never read, although of course I'm intensely interested in how good poems do what they do, in what makes a poem "good."

Why wouldn't I read them? Because I know what I like and what I don't, what combinations of words tingle the tips of my synapses (flowing all around into every sensory cell not to mention my spiritual human heart) and what combinations leave me flat, bored or even exasperated at the waste of perfectly good words. In other words, I don't need any help to figure out what is a good poem; it's a fairly black-and-white situation. (I think most kids who have any opinion would say the same thing.)

But wait! Didn't I read Brouwer's essay with the same tingling delight as a really great new poem? Why? What did I get out of it that made me want to share it? What has kept me thinking all week about it?

Oh. Heh. Brouwer writes illuminatingly about why he likes poems but doesn't like Poetry, and about his experiences of reading poetry criticism as well as poems, and about his reactions to these two books.  Because his whole point is that there is no point in telling people what to like or why, in reading his critique of poetry criticism, I'm free to decide how I agree, or disagree, or agree with reservations, or agree resoundingly, as with:

"By a lovable criticism, I mean a criticism that allows space for its readers’ imaginations without compromising its own convictions; which ventures its ideas rather than asserting them; which would rather start a conversation than end one; which not only speaks but also listens; which admits and embraces uncertainties. A lovable criticism is a criticism willing to make itself vulnerable, willing even to embarrass itself." *

In reading about another person's inexplicable personal preferences, exquisitely explained, I come to a renewed and refined understanding of my own inexplicable preferences, which leads me to want to try explaining them as exquisitely, in case what I like helps you figure out what you like.  It is a strange and ambiguous process--not very black-and-white but certainly not grey--which leads directly to my first rule of poetry teaching: "Share Only Poems That You Love," and its corollary: "Don't Expect Every Child To Love Them Like You Do."

With a new appreciation for the purpose of criticism, later this week I'm going to compare two zebra poems previously referenced here thanks to Andromeda:  one that I love and think is good, and one that I think is a waste of perfectly good words.  It'll be a good challenge for me, and maybe it will help someone else better understand what they like when it comes to poems.

The sweet and searing round-up is with Elaine at Wild Rose Reader today.

*This passage is enlightening as it is, but try substituting any number of  items in place of  "lovable criticism"--poem, teacher, spouse!

the same leaves over and over again!

Poetry Friday is at Wild Rose Reader today.

There must be as many leaf poems as there are leaves in our yard, but just as you can always find a leaf that seems like a miracle of colors, I keep finding another leaf poem to roll around in.

In my first grade class we talked about how this poem is the perfect combination of science fact and mystery. We talked about how poems are so often made of Noticing and Wondering and how Robert Frost must have been doing both when he wrote this. And I taught them how leather is made, and one little one asked, "Does the animal have to be dead?"

In Hardwood Groves

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up.
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world
I know that this is the way in ours.

~ Robert Frost