Teaching Tools: English, Language, and Expression

The teaching aids for reading and writing has come a long way since the simple vocabulary drill programs were introduced. But in many cases, the programs that most useful to teachers lock schools into proprietary tracks that force yearly subscriptions to be renewed over and over again for little more than cosmetic effect.

In this post, I want to enumerate a number of open source alternative applications that cash-strapped teachers and schools can consider.

Digital Comic Strips

Digital comic strips satisfy a whole range of student interests - creating their own short narratives (micro-stories), writing dialog (how does what one character respond to another), and so on. All of this is reading and writing fundamentals with a whole lot of creativity sprinkled in.

The first program is called strip generator and it allows students to add pre-defined characters to comic strip panels and add their own dialog. I've used it in this blog on a number of occasions and its both easy to learn and fun to use.

Another program that's web-based is from ReadWriteThink. And it allows students to choose fixed numbers of panels, drag and drop characters, word balloons and objects into the panels and print out their cartoons. This program is considerably more constrained and elementary than Strip Generator but nonetheless useful.

Open Source Screenwriting Application

I recently discovered Celtx, a program that is intended to be used by professional screenwriters and movie producers. It offers the ability to create storyboards, comics, and more. It has a set of very useful videos to introduce teachers and students to what's available.

It goes without saying that this program is a high school and college level application (this doesn't preclude gifted teachers and students in lower grades giving it a go).

Now, this is a rich product suite that has school pricing options that can be purchased. However, the beauty of this product is that every student can download a free version at home and it works on Windows, OSX, and Linux!

The other feature that English teachers in particular will like is that the characters that students write into their stories can be assigned voices that will play back the dialog. This is often a critically missing component of writing - that is, hearing what your writing sounds like.

Are Word Processors Creating Writer's Schlock?

Virginia Hefferman, writing in this week's New York Times Magazine in an article titled, An Interface of One’s Own, asks some serious questions. And these questions must be taken seriously by all educational institutions concerned about creative writing.

After lo this lifetime of servitude, I intend to break free. I seek a writing program that understands me. Goodbye to Word’s prim rulers, its officious yardsticks, its self-serious formatting toolbar with cryptic abbreviations (ComicSansMS?) and trinkety icons. Goodbye to glitches, bipolar paragraph breaks and 400 options for making overly colorful charts.

Goodbye, especially, to the mean, white and narrow page — which is hardly the intoxicating mental expanse Kerouac and Cather must have enjoyed. With Word, I always feel as if I’m taking an essay test.

So I have come to admire Steven Poole, author of books on video games and language, who trumpets a new radicalism on stevenpoole.net. He has purged his life of Word entirely, and he says he feels great. He had nothing to lose but his chains.

Our redeemer is Scrivener, the independently produced word-processing program of the aspiring novelist Keith Blount, a Londoner who taught himself code and graphic design and marketing, just to create a software that jibes with the way writers think. As its name makes plain, Scrivener takes our side; it roots for the writer and not for the final product — the stubborn Word. The happy, broad-minded, process-friendly Scrivener software encourages note-taking and outlining and restructuring and promises all the exhilaration of a productive desk: “a ring-binder, a scrapbook, a corkboard, an outliner and text editor all rolled into one.”

Ring, scrap and cork sound like fun, a Montessori playroom. But read on — and download the free trial — and being a Scrivener-empowered scrivener comes to seem like life’s greatest role. Scriveners, unlike Word-slaves, have florid psychologies, esoteric requirements and arcane desires. They’re artists. They’re historians. With needs. Scrivener is “aimed at writers of all kinds — novelists, journalists, academics, screenwriters, playwrights — who need to refer to various research documents and have access to different organizational tools whilst aiming to create a finished piece of text.”

That “whilst”! It alone makes me feel like writing.

Scrivener, then, is one of us, at home in the writer’s jumpy emotional and procedural universe. Consider its desktop icon. It greets you without Word’s back-slanted, subliterate “W” — speeding nervously to the finish line — but with an open-minded yin-yang adorned with quotation marks. Unlike so many twerpy little applications, the Scrivener icon eschews that ubiquitous Curaçao blue. Neither is it slightly rounded like some squishy teething toy. Instead, it shines and stands upright like a domino, which makes you think of a brisk “click” instead of a software “blurp.” It’s also black and white, like words on a page.

To create art, you need peace and quiet. Not only does Scrivener save like a maniac so you needn’t bother, you also get to drop the curtain on life’s prosaic demands with a feature that makes its users swoon: full screen. When you’re working on a Scrivener opus, you’re not surrounded by teetering stacks of Firefox windows showing old Google searches or Citibank reports of suspicious activity. Life’s daily cares slip into the shadows. What emerges instead is one pristine and welcoming scroll: Your clean and focused mind.

Manufacturing Predators - One Teacher at a Time

The real crime in Guilford is the conspiracy to destroy an English teacher's life.
The real crime in Guilford is making kids feel dirty for reading.
The real crime in Guilford is making kids hate reading near their parents.
The real crime in Guilford is that a teacher was intimidated into resigning.
The real crime in Guilford is that the person who has lost his life, reputation and good-fortune is still being hunted by predators.

Mom let the cat out of the bag... a comment posted by annoyedparent at THEBEAT says,

I can related to the way you must have felt to think that you 13 yro daughter’s teacher is some kind of predator, you must have been scared. Felt the need to protect you kids, I get it. I know that I am often very protective of my own middle school age daughter, but you crossed the line.

I don’t know for sure but from what I can tell in the news and this thread, I don’t think this teacher was a threat to your girl and you going to the police was over the line. You made what is already a difficult job, teaching, just too much for someone… and they threw in the towel.

Shame on you.

How hard would it have been to at least talk to the guy?

And I feel bad for your girl, at a new school, everyone hates her because her parents flew off the handle and got a popular teacher fired, oh and I forgot to mention that she is 13 …er 14 Isn’t that an age where she would be looking for approval from her peers?

Yeah. This isn't about a graphic novel folks, this is about a parent who was rebuffed by school officials and conveniently escalated that rejection into a concern that this teacher might be a "predator" because she had no proof that he wasn't.

In my book, a false accusation that can destroy a person is a hate crime as pernicious and nefarious as the parade of ethnic, racial, and religious bigotries already recognized. This case is no different and needs to be investigated by the Feds.

Public schools are endowed by the citizens of this country with a sacred trust that they will act in the best interests of children entrusted to them. Implicit in that trust relationship is the understanding that the act of learning is an everyday exercise in heroicism by both teacher and student. Learning takes both people into unknown territories No one is perfect and no one is expected to be. And learning is sometimes a cold, unexpected awakening into adulthood.

All public schools must imprint the idea in students that students have a right to say, no. No to things that upset them. No to things beyond their maturity level. But they have an obligation to try and they have an obligation to keep up to the best of their ability.

And parents can respectfully say no as well.

But just because you say no does not make the material or the idea or the conversation obscene, criminal, or untoward per se.

From the Ten Commandments;

16 You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour.

From the Police Code of Ethics;

I will never act officiously or permit personal feelings, prejudices, animosities, or friendships to influence my decisions. With no compromise for crime and with relentless prosecution of criminals, I will enforce the law courteously and appropriately without fear or favor, malice or ill-will, never employing unnecessary force or violence, and never accepting gratuities.

If the police in Guilford due to stealthy or well-known manipulation of police resources have helped stage a scenario that this teacher is somehow under suspicion of being a sexual predator based solely on hysterical imaginings then they need to be held accountable. Pursuing criminals is one thing. Manufacturing criminal intent from systematic manipulation of the process is another.

Writing a Screenplay

Many English teachers are using automated screenplay writing applications as a part of their writing curriculum. This site, How To Write A Screenplay, offers online tutorials as to how to create your own.

This site, screenwriting.com, is a comprehensive inventory of software and resources worth your evaluation.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

I just finished reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

Every high school English class should be reading this novel at some point of their schooling. Today, it is a more important novel than 1984 or Brave New World and it is a more literate piece than many of the classics still being recycled through the current English curriculum.

This book is a masterpiece. The story of a man and a boy describing their journey in a post-apocalyptic world describes no cause, no nation, and promotes no agenda. Readers will have to think about the consequences of destroying civilization.

It is readable by just about anyone who can read rudimentary English. McCarthy is a genius in composing vignettes that are breathtakingly straightforward, expressive, and visionary.

The suspense of the story is gripping and this is the first book that I've read in a long time that has made me want to drop everything else to read more.

Teachers who want to kick start a real conversation about life, responsibility, and survival should seriously put this book on the must-read list.

School 2.0 - Periodic English Literature Via Email

I came across a very interesting website the other day called dailylit.com. It is a repository of free, public domain books of literature. There's nothing really new in that.

What distinguishes dailylit from other sites is that it emails the reader a chapter of the desired text one day at a time. For example, if you're an English teacher who wants the class to read Moby Dick in chapters, you can ask students to subscribe and then pick the frequency of that chapters will arrive in their emails.

It's a very nice idea that will save money on text books, innovate learning, and broaden our teacher's ability to teach difficult subject matter.

Ultra-short Stories

Wired magazine recently wrote a piece on the six word short story. That's right six words. Samples from famous authors are included and surprising the stories inspire all kinds of compelling emotions.

This looks like a wonderful class competition or assignment.

Check it out.

How Will Our English Teachers Deal with Osamatives?

It looks as though English words no longer have traditional meanings. A John Oliver investigative report has discovered the devious plot to introduce Osamatives to the English language.

Do English Departments feel safe?

An Open Source Dictionary from Merriam-Webster

For english language lovers, here's an opportunity to add new words to the dictionary and define them. For young people who speak inventively this a very interesting place to lookup slang and specialized hybrid words and even contribute to their definition.

Ashford Democrats send the State a message

At the recent Democratic Town Committee meeting, State House Representative Mike Cardin updated the committee on legislative news from the State Capitol - emminent domain, identity theft, and more. However, the conversation soon turned to job creation and tax relief for small towns.

A recent Face the State program discussed CT's economy in unflattering terms.

...a new study warns that other states are growing much faster, and Connecticut is losing ground, in many key areas that affect business development and job creation.

The legislature should pay urgent heed to this discussion. The issue of tax relief for small town Connecticut is not far behind in importance.

Massachsetts is facing a similar situation and here is what Romney recently suggested,

Underlining the challenge, Romney said leaders of one technology firm in Massachusetts anticipated that 90 percent of its skilled labor would be in Asia in 10 years. He also pointed to statistics that show the United States graduating only 4,400 mathematics and science PhDs each year compared with 24,900 math and science PhDs for greater Asia.

"China and India have a population a multiple of ours. They have natural resources. There is no reason they can't emerge as the superpower. The only way we can preserve that role for ourselves is through innovation. It's erroneous that we do high-level work here and send low-level work abroad. When our market is no longer the largest market in the world, the idea that we're going to be innovating and they're going to be copying is erroneous," Romney said.

In response to the looming crisis, Romney pointed to some specific problems and proposed some remedies. He said we must close the educational achievement gap between racial groups in the United States. "The education gap is the civil rights issue of our age." He also said all U.S. students must raise their standing compared with students in other industrialized countries. According to one study, U. S. students rank 25th out of 41 industrial nations. "Fewer and fewer are performing at the top level," he said.

He suggested paying teachers a $5,000 bonus for teaching Advanced Placement courses, as well as giving the top third of teachers a $5,000 bonus. He also suggested a bonus for teachers that teach in troubled school districts. Romney also favored giving secondary school students laptop computers.

He pointed to some educational achievements in Massachusetts, where fourth graders ranked first in the country in math and English. He also noted that Massachusetts students ranking in the top fourth of their class can attend state institutions tuition-free under a scholarship program he supported.

"I want to make sure that Massachusetts remains competitive." Speaking of the nation, he said, "I want the center of technology and innovation to remain here. I am overwhelmingly optimistic about our ability to rise to the occasion."

Connecticut needs to wake up.

I also want to thank Mike for sending a warm congratulations letter on my election to Region 19. I hope not to let anyone down.