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.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010, 4pm to 7pm

Dolan School of Business Dining Room, Fairfield University

A contribution of $5 will be welcome. RSVP by Wed. 1/27, CEU’s available.

“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.

McCann is the author of two collections of short stories and five novels including “Dancer” and “Zoli”. In 2003, McCann was named Esquire magazine’s “Writer of the Year” and he is the recipient of multiple awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. His short film “Everything in this Country Must” was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.

McCann”s fiction has been published in the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ and he has written for numerous national and international publications. In fall 2009, McCann was awarded a French Chevalier des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

Born in Dublin, McCann began his career as a journalist with The Irish Press. In the early 1980’s he rode a bicycle across North America and then worked as a wilderness guide in a program for juvenile delinquents in Texas. After a year and a half in Japan, he and his wife Alison moved to New York where they currently live with their three children, Isabella, John Michael and Christian.

McCann teaches at Hunter College in New York in the Creative Writing program.

Reservations for the signing are suggested and can be made by calling 203-254-4110.

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

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.

Jack Powers, CWP Fellow in 1986 and an active teacher/consultant ever since, has been named Poet of the Year by the New England Association of Teachers of English, an affiliate of NCTE.

Jack has been an inspiration for many writers – from youngsters in elementary and secondary schools in Connecticut to participants in all of the Institutes sponsored by CWP-Fairfield.

He remains the glue for his Writing Group that has been together since 1986!

Below are the poems that NEATE recognized as outstanding!!!! They reflect the wit, craft, insight and depth of vision that I and his many fans recognize as the heart and soul of Jack, a person we admire, respect and love

I Was Here

Rising out of the stone-strewn ebb tide estuary are rocks stacked,
a towering sight I’ve seen at every rocky beach I rode by this summer
saying no more than “I was here.” And no less. Like ground-smoothed

stones left on tombs. A calling card. Yet this one makes me stop,
get off my bike, climb down the seawall to get a closer look.
A foot-round base of smaller stones supports a long thin but solid stem

half-rock/half-cement – a sea wall remnant. On top, a brick balances
under a flat black stone – a pedestal with small stones stacked like a bird
from the road side or from another angle a delicate rickety bridge.

As I circle round, admiring this shrine to both memory and forgetting,
I think, for some reason, of my father, curled, thin and rasping,
in his hospital bed, his final breath one step ahead of the nursing home

and its waiting chair by the window. He dreamed of being a writer –
early boxing novels for teens gave way to PR releases
and corporate speeches and letters to friends and birthday poems

now lost or filed in some box or forgotten drawer. I am, I must confess,
as much monument to what he wasn’t as what he was, determined
to re-fashion, but made, I’ve learned, from the same found materials

evident in my son’s voice, my face in the mirror. Now I wish
I could take a photograph before this all is washed to sea. I resist the urge
to add a stone or freeze the moment. I bow my head to this unknown master

and leave his work to the tides and wind, to the kids and birds, the setting sun,
to gravity and even to the faint moon rising now ahead of the black, black night.

You don’t have to bomb Dresden to prove you can fly a plane.
– Warren Zevon

Amsterdam, Cracow, Budapest, Prague.
I trace your postcard postmarks –
faint waves across a woozy sea.
Each name lights up an image

from a grade school textbook.
On my morning drive, I practice being numb
unworried about your unscripted journey –
reckless, lonely, stubborn – but I concede.

You’ve made your point. When Kosovo
turns to Istanbul, Damascus, Tel Aviv,
I parse the difference between want
and need. I don’t know anymore,

I write back. You win.
You’re braver. Please. Come home.

Spittin’ Image

The first time I heard it was from a caricaturist in Provincetown.
Same thing without the pipe, he said when I, at five, followed my father
into the chair. My reactions ranged from flattered then to angry
at 14, to bewildered in ponytail and Fu Manchu at 20, to mildly amused
at 40 as I felt successful in my campaign to be the anti-him. And now
when he struggles to decipher a hotdog shack menu and asks
the same question again and again, I nod my head when the waitress says,
Must be your dad, as I help him on to the wobbly stool.

In Plain Air

Someday, I say, I’ll bring a camera
and stop each morning instead of barreling down Burr,
rocketing left on Black Rock and glancing only briefly
between the trees at the tumble of rocks that jut out into the reservoir.
Each day the light is different: the sun angled higher,
the mist clinging tighter, bluer to the water, my eyes a little blearier.
I cling to that scene in my head, but it slides away, away,
graying to blurry motes of memory by the time I park
and my head fills with day. I savor and forget.
Morning after morning, the birches whisper,
Slow down, until at some point counting up
seesaws to counting down.
From the black on black of mid-December
to the grey ice and snow of February to the slow
yellowing of late March, I will set up my tripod in the wood,
keep the frame the same and click, capturing my own Haystacks –
my study of light and shadow. But now I grasp
each glance like a pearl – brief, beautiful, gone.
Someday, I say, I’ll bring a camera.

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.

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.

By analyzing data from more than 271,000 students, the study found that 60 percent of African-American students, 75 percent of Latino students and 80 percent of ESL students did not graduate within five years. The researchers found an overall graduation rate of only 33 percent.

“High-stakes, test-based accountability doesn’t lead to school improvement or equitable educational possibilities,” said Linda McSpadden McNeil, director of the Center for Education at Rice University. “It leads to avoidable losses of students. Inherently the system creates a dilemma for principals: comply or educate. Unfortunately, we found that compliance means losing students.”

The study shows as schools came under the accountability system, which uses student test scores to rate schools and reward or discipline principals, massive numbers of students left the school system. The exit of low-achieving students created the appearance of rising test scores and of a narrowing of the achievement gap between white and minority students, thus increasing the schools’ ratings.

This study has serious implications for the nation’s schools under the NCLB law. It finds that the higher the stakes and the longer such an accountability system governs schools, the more school personnel view students not as children to educate but as potential liabilities or assets for their school’s performance indicators, their own careers or their school’s funding.

The study shows a strong relationship between the increasing number of dropouts and school’s rising accountability ratings, finding that:

• Losses of low-achieving students help raise school ratings under the accountability system.

• The accountability system allows principals to hold back students who are deemed at risk of reducing the school’s scores; many students retained this way end up dropping out.

• The test scores grouped by race single out the low-achieving students in these subgroups as potential liabilities to the school ratings, increasing incentives for school administrators to allow those students to quietly exit the system.

• The accountability system’s zero-tolerance rules for attendance and behavior, which put youth into the court system for minor offenses and absences, alienate students and increase the likelihood they will drop out.

The discrepancy between the official dropout rates, in the 2 to 3 percent range, and the actual rates can be attributed to the state’s method of counting, which does not include students who drop out of school for reasons such as pregnancy or incarceration or declare intent to take the GED sometime in the future.

The study analyzes student-level data of 271,000 students in one of Texas’ large urban districts over a seven-year period. It also includes analysis of the policy and its implementation, extensive observations in high schools in that district and interviews with students, teachers, administrators and students who left school without graduating.

The study has been published in the peer-reviewed policy journal “Educational Policy Analysis Archives” and is the first research to track the impact of high-stakes accountability on students, employing individual student-level data over a multiyear period. The executive summary is available at Rice University’s Center for Education, http://centerforeducation.rice.edu/. The study can be viewed at http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v16n3/.