I never stop thinking about literacy... even when vacation planing

For the past couple days I have been in planning mode for our Costa Rica trip a month from now. My husband and I tend to enjoy the planning the trip almost as much as the vacation itself. We go to the library and check out a giant stack of guidebooks to get an overall feel for a place. We check out DVDs at the library or watch videos on YouTube to actually see the place in real life, not just in our minds. Finally, once we have purchased our tickets, we scour TripAdvisor to find just the right hotels and activities.

Step one of trip planning: check out a ridiculous amount of guidebooks at the library

When I read through reviews on TripAdvisor, I have a system. I am incredibly dubious of superlative and overly negative reviews, due to fear of business paying people to write glowing reviews (or rival businesses paying for poor reviews). Just do a Google search of "TripAdvisor fake reviews" and see all the articles that pop up about being able to tell whether a review is fake. What I look for instead are reviews that offer practical advice that aren't steeped in hyperbole.

For example, I was reading through reviews of the Mystica Lodge and Retreats, which looks stunning. On the surface, this appears to be a place I would love to stay. But after reading one user's review that said despite the lovely setting, it was 1.5-2 hours away from any activities near the Arenal volcano and the hotel doesn't organize tours, I immediately knew this wasn't the place for us, at least not for the kind of vacation my husband and I like, which is to always be seeing and doing things. We figure we can lounge around at home all we want. On vacation we want to see the world, not sit around on a beach and have someone bring us drinks. So once I subtracted the emotion out of the user review, I looked at the practical advice the reviewer gave and made a decision to keep looking. 

As I have been processing this information today, I started to think about the inordinate amount of time and energy secondary English teachers spend in class teaching literary analysis, which is a helpful and sophisticated skill, don't get me wrong, but given the fact that literary analysis is what American students seem to spend most of their time doing in English class, it makes me wonder how many practical literacy skills we are failing to provide for our students in the name of the "because that's the way we've always done it" model of education.

Learning to decipher reviews on any kind of user-generated website, be it TripAdvisor, Yelp, or even Amazon, is a literacy skill that I don't think many teachers have even considered as something to teach, but given how much time humans now spend in online spaces, this is something we need to consider over the traditional model of high school English, which is: read a book, listen to the teacher's interpretation of what it means, then regurgitate some stuff she said in class, and finally turn it into an "analysis" essay.

But as I continue to seek out a hotel that will provide my husband and me with just the right amount of adventure opportunities in a great location near the Arenal volcano, I am also thinking about ways to take this learning and translate it into the classroom. Because contrary to popular belief, we don't turn off our teacher brains in June, July, and August. If anything, this is a time for us to reflect and reprocess, to figure out all the things we can change and do better for next year. So even though I'm only a few days into summer vacation, I'm still and constantly thinking of my students. And I wouldn't have it any other way.

Slice of Life is brought to you by Two Writing Teachers

5 things I loved about last week

 It's so easy to get overwhelmed and allow a sense of hopelessness take over when you're a teacher. The work just never seems to be finished. So in the spirit of Colby Sharp and Elisabeth Ellington, I'm going to focus on some of the amazing things that happened this past week.


1. Students owning their learning
My 8th graders are writing a reflective essay for their midterms and I'm having them use the comments feature in Google Docs to point out the skill-type things they learned like grammar, 6+1 Traits, etc. and in one period they pointed out to me things they had learned that I forgot to list on the requirements blog post or texts we had shared as a class. Apparently I missed an opportunity to create this assignment collaboratively since they were offering me things that I needed to add to the midterm. Note to self for the final exam.


2. Reading Epiphanies
I am going to pat myself on the back and say that I have been on my game as a writing teacher this year. But because I only teach writing, I haven't done so well motivating my students to read this semester. I want them to see the value of self-selected reading because I firmly believe it makes you a better writer, but having my classroom in a computer lab that is taking up precious bookshelf space (as well as precious space in my students' heads as to what they could be doing once they finish their work), I haven't been able to find a way to make books a part of our daily literacy diet.

Many of my students have said, "If books were actually about things I WANT to read then I would read them." A lot of them think that books aren't written with their issues in mind and clearly I haven't done a good job of communicating that there are lots of books out there for them. So I have decided that over Christmas break, I am going to reorganize my classroom library so that it is more appealing to my mature 8th grade readers. Clearly I am still in my 6th grade mindset and I need to move past that and appeal to my more mature readers.


3. But really, students are begging for books. I just need to pay better attention to their pleas.
To go along with #2, I have also been slacking on my read aloud this year. Students were so involved with NaNoWriMo for the month of November that we didn't read anything at all from Natalie Lloyd's A Snicker of Magic, and as December rolled around, we got busy doing things like preparing for midterms and having frank conversations about race through the lens of what is happening in Ferguson as well as the watermelon joke heard round the world at the National Book Awards that I lost track of our shared reading experience.

But on Friday, through the fervor of working on midterms, I mentioned that next week we would get back into the swing of our read aloud, when an unlikely student, one who rarely speaks and I often question his engagement said, "But you could just read to us for five minutes." Clearly I have been shirking my "literacy is everyone's job" responsibilities this semester.


4. Reason # I've-Lost-Count that I love Literati Bookstore
Last week, Literati posted this picture on their social media sites with the following description:

Since he was accidentally left behind at our store, Teddy has been acclimating to his new life. He alphabetizes books and keeps our typewriter filled with fresh paper. But he's secretly hoping for a holiday miracle to be reunited with his person. He asked me to put up one more post, just in case someone recognizes him.



I mean, how can you NOT want to shop at a bookstore like that?




5. Baby grand pianos have lots of practical uses. A Christmas tree stand, for example.

Is this not the perfect vehicle for a small Christmas tree and a place to put gifts? And I love even more that I don't have to move furniture around.

As you have probably surmised, I am still quite smitten with Tori, the baby grand. I love that now when I come downstairs, this is what greets me instead of a cluttered dining room table.

















What did you love about last week?