Workshops on new topics in literacy classrooms

Graphic Novels in the Classroom - Teaching to Students, Not the Test

This workshop will focus on using graphic novels to develop writing skills and provide another lens into literature.

Negotiating It ALL - a Comprehensive Inquiry Approach

This demonstration will present how inquiry-based classrooms can guide unit design from questioning to reading to writing about literature.

Conferencing for the Purpose of Revision

This workshop will demonstrate how to hold revision conferences that are short, purposeful and effective while other students are engaged in meaningful activity.

A New and Improved Approach to Literature Circles

By incorporating many of the principles and strategies from Book Clubs, teachers can improve student participation and the level of discussion that is often a problem in Literature Circles. More…

Winner of the 2009 National Book Award for his best-selling novel “Let The Great World Spin”, Colum McCann will appear at Fairfield University for a reading and book-signing as part of University College’s The Inspired Writer: The Distinguished Author Series on Tuesday February 2, 2010 in the Barone Campus Center Oak Room at 7pm. His visit is free and open to the public.

“Let The Great World Spin” (Random House) weaves together a panoramic array of disparate stories and voices: an Irish monk, a hooker in the Bronx, a group of grieving mothers who lost their sons at war, a city judge, an alcoholic and the tightrope walker who obliquely binds them all together.

Inspired by Phillipe Petit’s infamous real-life tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in 1974. Let The Great World Spin” opens with this moment of unfathomable risk and beauty and from there spins together the lives of the searching and lonely people scattered below, 110 stories back down on the ground. More…

Linda Miller wrote a poem for Bob Wilson’s funeral, and she read it to the congregation that day.  For many of us that was a special moment because Linda had captured so well the person we knew and the perfect setting through which to remember him.

Visiting
(for R.W.)
He’s sitting there
on his wicker chair
high above the stream,
gaunt, goateed, bald head
bronzing in the sun.
Blue eyes aglow, he scolds
his pal Ogawa
for not holding Duffy at bay –
the dog’s mottled muscles
straining at his leash –
greets me (what’s up buttercup?)
talks of books, family, friends,
of chemo (oh, this mortal body!),s
his funeral, his wake.

We listen to the wind
swaying the birches below,
soft rush of falls,
Myosotis’s cold waters
now racing in the creek
beside his home,
through the village,
over the Catskill range
into the Hudson
and finally
to the sea.
Linda Miller

Two Poems Walk into a Bar
by Jack Powers

It’s not that I don’t want to talk,
but I’ve got nothing to say to you, Poetry.
Nothing, that is, that hasn’t been said.
The sonnets alone have covered love.
And death? Aren’t they all about death?
I guess I’m speaking now about loneliness,
but what do I have to complain about? No,
Poetry, talk to me instead. Let me feel what you’ve felt,
see what you – Laugh what you’ve laughed? Sure.
Two poems walk into a bar… And? Ouch! No. Poetry, listen:
two poems walk into a bar. They buy a round for the house,
play some pool, lead the bar in song. Later that night
under a cue ball moon, little poems are conceived
all over town. No one is lonely again.

More…

via The New York Times:

Connecticut’s schools are big underperformers. The gap between the educational performance of low-income and middle- and high-income pupils is the widest in the nation. Only one-third of poor and minority children in elementary schools meet the state’s goals for mastery of reading, writing and math.

The loss of manufacturing jobs, coupled with an achievement gap, is a recipe for perpetually worsening poverty.

As graduation rates go down, school ratings go up
New study shows the negative implications of No Child Left Behind

A new study by researchers at Rice University and the University of Texas-Austin finds that Texas’ public school accountability system, the model for the national No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), directly contributes to lower graduation rates. Each year Texas public high schools lose at least 135,000 youth prior to graduation — a disproportionate number of whom are African-American, Latino and English-as-a-second-language (ESL) students.
More…