Reading Roll: January-March 2016

Antipodes edited by Margaret Bradstock

I picked this up at the ETA Conference last year. It's a poetry collection that puts the emphasis on indigenous voices and perspectives, and I'd recommend it as a good Stage 5 level poetry text for anyone interested in doing some Australian and/or Aboriginal poetry with their English class.

Skim by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki

The debut graphic novel from two Japanese-Canadian cousins; Skim explores teenage alienation, sexuality, marginalisation, and mental health with a wry, slightly askew sense of wit and a uniquely evocative style of illustration. I liked this enough to immediately go and buy another graphic novel by the same creative team.

Russian Olive to Red King by Kathryn Immonen and Stuart Immonen

This was recommended on AV Club as one of the best graphic novels of 2015 but I found it a bit disappointing. It deals with a dysfunctional relationship and a very real sense of loss, and it's extremely understated in its approach to plot and characterisation. A little too understated, if you know what I mean. I guess I just also found it a bit too self-consciously artsy.

Blue is the Warmest Colour by Julie Maroh

A lesbian bildungsroman that has made a lot of 'best graphic novels' lists since its release in 2010. I liked how realistically drawn the characters were, and Maroh has a deft grasp of non-linear storytelling that suits the themes she explores. Recommended.

Maps of Time by David Christian

I already wrote a bit about David Christian's groundbreaking treatise on history here. All I'll add is that this ambitious recontextualisation of history rocked my world.

American Holocaust by David E. Stannard

I read this as research for teaching the Spain and the Aztec Empire Case Study for Extension History. It's a very affecting and highly polemic history of the tragedy that was visited upon some 100 million Amerindian peoples by European invaders and settlers. Stannard makes an engaging and convincing case for the repositioning of the term 'holocaust' as something that should equally apply to genocides that rival or eclipse the one that took place during WWII.

Clay by Melissa Harrison

Clay is an interesting text that has been recently added to the HSC Advanced English Prescriptions list for Elective 2: Representing People and Places. I'm not really intending to teach it, I just picked up the novel because I liked the cover (yeah, I'm that superficial). It turned out to be a great book. It's very much a study of people and place so it fits the Elective well. It's also very beautifully written, such is Melissa Harrison's combination of her professional photographer's eye with her handling of the English language.

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy

Woah. Blood Meridian is an extremely intense historical novel that follows the mythic exploits of the Glanton Gang, an immoral collection of scalp-hunters who operated during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s. For the most part McCarthy's spare and relentlessly bleak story takes place through the eyes of 'The Kid', an uneducated young man who falls in with the gang. The Kid's polar opposite is an unforgettable villain called The Judge, a figure with biblical qualities who comes across as a cross between Charles Darwin, Colonel Kurtz and Satan himself. I don't know if enjoy is the right word for how I feel about this novel, but it's certainly incredibly engaging and memorable. 

Alex and Ada Volumes 1-3 by Sarah Vaughn and Jonathan Luna

This snappy three-volume mini-series from Image comics was recommended to me by my friend Kira. It explores themes of artificial intelligence and the human condition in a tightly-plotted and well-characterised fashion that would lend itself very well to a cinematic translation. 

Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling

Mindy Kaling is great, isn't she? She does her best here to avoid the pitfalls of being pigeonholed as the voice of a whole generation of marginalised young women. For the most part this memoir is fast-moving, engaging and funny.

The Bodysurfers by Robert Drewe

A collection of short stories from one of Australia's most celebrated writers, The Bodysurfers weaves in and out of the lives of a few barely connected characters who are characterised in relation to the beach. Drewe presents a darkly humourous but disaffected vision of post-war Australia and the role that beach culture plays in the ongoing development (or stagnation) of our national character.

The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis

I picked this one up on a whim. As far as high concept stuff goes, I don't think it really succeeds in what it sets out to do. Davis has a unique take on a Dystopian/coming-of-age genre mash-up (which is an achievement in itself) but he doesn't really follow through with any explanations, opting instead for an obscure kind of dramatic irony that left me feeling dissatisfied.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

I've read this a few times before and have just read it again because I'm teaching it to my Year 11 Advanced English class this term. It's still a perfect novella no matter how many times I read it.

More Fool Me by Stephen Fry

This is the third of Stephen Fry's memoirs. I haven't read his other memoirs but that didn't seem to matter because he spends the first third of the book recapping the events of his other books. The best bits are when he digresses and becomes un-self-conscious enough to just go with all the unrelated tangents that organically grow out of his narrative. The entire later half of the book is rubbish though; a verbatim reprint of his actual journals from the early '90s, which are much more dull and repetitive than one might imagine.

Headhunters by Jo Nesbo

This is probably my favourite thing that I've read so far this year. Scandinavian crime novelist Nesbo presents a new twist on the crime fiction genre by mixing cut-throat corporate shenanigans with the grimy underbelly of art theft, and then mixing it all together with a cat-and-mouse game of sexual insecurity and revenge. His writing style is minimalist but very effective and I was hooked from start to finish.

The True History of the Blackadder by J. E. Roberts

I love the TV series Blackadder and am tragic enough about it to actually enjoy finding out all the behind-the-scenes stuff, however, Roberts spends too many pages talking about stuff that has nothing to do with Blackadder. If I'd wanted an in-depth history of the Cambridge Footlights comedians then I'd read a book on that. 

A Chinese Life by Li Kunwu and P. Otie

I bought this as research material for a Year 10 History unit on China that I wrote last year, and this year I finally got around to reading the graphic novel in its entirety. Li Kunwu's autobiographical account of the Cultural Revolution simultaneously illuminated and confused my understanding of China's incredibly complex modern history. It made me want to know more about the subject, much more, and it succeeded in changing my understanding of the Chinese perspective of itself and the rest of the world. 

Dark Rain by Mat Johnson and Simone Gane

A short but satisfying action-thriller that plays out a thrilling heist-scenario against the backdrop of post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. If there are any one-shot graphic novels out there that would make a great film, then this is it. Johnson does an expert job of balancing themes of American class inequality with effective characterisation, humour, and excitement.

Big History and Me

You'll have to bear with me if you're already familiar with all of this because, as six months ago (thanks to my introduction via Jonathon Dallimore), I have become quite tragically in love with the historiographical approach that has been endearingly dubbed 'Big History'. 

I read Maps of Time by David Christian and just as the Foreword promised (with some apparent degree of hyperbole), it blew my mind in sufficient manner. I'm not about to say, "Let's abandon all other historical approaches" but the whole idea of looking at history in the broadest possible context spoke to me. I guess it appealed to the part of me that resents the seemingly undefeatable presence of Eurocentrism that has sculpted the world's history 'canon'. Christian's view is one that combines scientific disciplines with philosophy and history to determine universal patterns that apply to both humanity and the growth of celestial objects.

At first, I found the idea of establishing similarities between the formation of stars and the formation of human civilisations a bit... tenuous and pointlessly esoteric. But I stuck with it! And after I read about these things in much more detail it all became more enlightening, and made me think of human history in a completely different way; which was the whole point.

As I read Maps of Time, which is Christian's bible for the 'Big History' approach to history, I made some notes.

These notes became hideously extensive.

Like, 47 A4 pages of notes.

When I was done, I knew that I couldn't just hand these notes over to my Extension History students. It was too long. I did, however, come to a much better understanding of the concepts by taking these notes, so I don't regret it. I'd do it again!

I thought I could still use these notes for this blog, so I'll be going to go through the concepts of the book in a few separate blogs in the future.

I'll leave you with this quote from one of the book's two appendices.

"Being complex creatures ourselves, we know from personal experience how hard it is climb the down escalator, to work against the universal slide into disorder, so we are inevitably fascinated by other entities that appear to do the same thing. Thus this theme - the achievement of order despite, and perhaps with the aid of, the second law of thermodynamics [entropy] - is woven through all parts of the story told here. The endless waltz of chaos and complexity provides one of this book's unifying ideas".

For more about Big History, go to the Big History Project online.

For more about 

Extending Stage 4 Students in English

Blueback, a novel that I highly recommend for Year 7 students - it's both easy to read and possesses depth of language/ideas.

In addition to my role as classroom teacher, I also work at my school as the Gifted and Talented Co-ordinator. This has predominantly meant the implementation of a class-sized pull-out program for identified gifted students (more on this at a future date), however, before I got to that point I piloted an experimental phase in which individual students with potential giftedness were targeted. At the time (2 years ago), I was teaching a mixed-ability Year 7 English class. There were two students in particular in this class who showed classic signs of advanced ability and I wanted to give them a meaningful opportunity to use and stretch this ability. 

It's worth noting that these were the sort of students who would not initially present as gifted upon first impression but, after extensive diagnostic testing, I felt that I had confirmed that their potential had gone unrecognised. Before I could create a larger program that would cater to students such as these and, indeed, develop a system of testing that would establish levels of giftedness amongst their entire cohort, it would be necessary to pilot a smaller program of increased support that would prove the validity of specifically catering for gifted students. 

So now we get to the real point of this blog entry, extending these two Year 7 students with activities based on the current topic that was running during class-time. In line with the requisite academic research, I decided that the work had to be:

• Relevant to what was being studied. 
• Not a simple case of 'extra' work.
• The kind of work that would challenge these students enough to allow them to devote the same amount of quality time that any other student would spend on core activities back in the mixed classroom. 

Anything less would risk student disengagement, the same sort of thing that led to these kids 'flying under the radar' in the first place.   

The topic in question back in 2014 was a novel study of Tim Winton's beautiful ecological story Blueback. The resource I've attached below was designed to be used by tutors who had been assigned to the targeted students, but, really, it can be used in any context.

In Stage 4, annotating texts is probably something that most students would not be completely comfortable with. I usually introduce it to Year 9 students, which put me in mind of using it with gifted Year 7s as it would be a step-up for them. The style of annotation featured in the resource makes use of a few higher order skills:

• The annotating of techniques is a form of attribute-listing that requires students to taxonomise information in their heads.
• The second part of the activity, in which students identify their own techniques, contains elements of backwards-engineering. 
• Explicitly teaching the skill of annotating equips gifted students with a method that they can use to design their own systems for note-taking.

I've resisted explaining the actual mechanics of the resource in any great detail because it's all on the sheet below. If you have any specific activities that you like to use to extend junior students, please feel free to drop me a comment below - I'm always on the look-out for more ideas!

Resource: Extending Stage 4 Students in English

Society in 1930s Stalinist Russia

The HSC Modern History National Study for Russia and the Soviet Union can pose a challenge for Modern History teachers due to the sheer breadth of content that begs to be covered. Aside from the best essay responses on the subject revealing a broad and in-depth contextual knowledge of Bolshevik Russia, it's also a fact that any half-interested History teacher will find it difficult to resist the magnetic pull of Stalinist Russia's more fascinating asides. 

For example, Stalin's second wife Nadezhda was 17 years old when she married the 43 year old Joseph Stalin. And as if that wasn't creepy enough, she was the daughter of one of Stalin's friends and Stalin had known her since she was 4! 

Of course, this is largely irrelevant if your student is faced with an essay question about collectivisation and Stalin's attempts to close the industrial gap between the USSR and the rest of the developed world. But how can we ignore the juicier bits of Russian history when it helps engage our students with the wider narrative surrounding the madness of Stalin's Soviet Union? 

My weakness with this topic is, undoubtedly, the 1930s. I tend to spend the larger slice of time teaching students about the Bolshevik consolidation of power in the 1920s and the move towards the Five Year Plans. The part that I have more trouble disseminating is the various aspects of living in Stalin's totalitarian regime - there just seems to be so much to cover, and I get so fascinated by each and every facet of this intense society that it becomes a bit of a Hobson's choice trying to work out the ones that should make up the narrative that's taught to the students. 

In addition to this challenge, I have to be careful not to ignore the skills-based part of the course. It's very appealing sometimes to just stick to the content and travel through the narrative but Year 12 students need to be able to sit down at the end of the year and write a series of essays in the pressure-cooker that is the HSC. It's sometimes assumed that Modern History students are au fait with structuring essays because the subject is so academic, however, as I've probably mentioned elsewhere on this blog, my Modern History classes tend to range from students who do Advanced English to those who do English Studies. With that in mind, I need to ensure that I'm teaching enough of the skills to support all of my students in being able to communicate what they've learned. 

This means teaching one of the key Super Six Comprehension strategies; summarising. It's easy to associate the Super Six with just primary school and Stages 4 and 5, but it can be dangerous to assume that Stage 6 students are experts at comprehension. Because, well, they often aren't. 

It's never too late to teach literacy.

Here's a resource on society in 1930s USSR: Stalin's Russia. 

And a graphic organiser to go with it: Graphic Organiser for Russian Society.

Get your students to read through the resource and use the graphic organiser to summarise the various aspects of Soviet society under Stalin. The graphic organiser is fairly straight-forward and isn't particularly different to a series of comprehension questions, however, by arranging the information in this fashion students can get an idea on how to separate their ideas. It also acts as a scaffold towards hopefully engaging the kids in creating their own summaries of documents.

Pre-Contact Aboriginal History

Map sourced from https://ears2theground.wordpress.com/about/

A lot of stuff I've been posting lately has been related to more senior subjects, like Modern History or Stage 5 English, so I thought I'd reach back into my earlier years and put up something from when I taught Year 8 History.

Contact and Colonisation is a fascinating and significant area of History, and continuing research into Indigenous history means our perspective of Australia's deep cultural heritage is always developing. Getting Stage 4 students to engage with the Aboriginal side of our country's history is not only relevant but incredibly valuable in terms of teaching cross-cultural pride as an intrinsic part of the Australian identity. 

The PowerPoint below deals with pre-contact Indigenous history in Australia. It's a four-slide PPT accompanied by a sheet. I haven't taught it for a few years due to not having had a Year 8 History class, but I do recall that it was sufficient enough to fill an hour-length lesson with a mixed ability Stage 4 group.

It's a pretty self-explanatory PPT, just put it up on the screen and move through it with the students. The blue text represents the activities that the students need to do, and the sheet goes with the middle slide (there's a picture of the sheet on said slide). 

Pre-Contact Aboriginal History PPT

Different Perspectives sheet

I'd love to teach more in the way of pre-contact Aboriginal history but I sometimes find it hard to source material that's accessible to Stage 4 students. How do my fellow History teachers approach this area of history, especially since it's something that isn't tied so closely to written accounts?

English Textual Concepts Framework - What Is It?

With English, we can analyse EVERYTHING! Look at this great advertisement.

I will just say this first, up front - I love the English Textual Concepts. I want to turn them into a blanket and wrap myself up in them, or throw it all into a smoothie that I can drink every morning. The English Textual Concepts framework makes English into a clearer subject in terms of teaching and learning, crystallising a seemingly infinite subject area into 15 broad but separate concepts and 6 concurrent process. 

English can be a 'slippery' subject (Eva Gold's words, not mine!) so a solid framework on which we can hang the subject is manna from heaven for English teachers. That aforementioned slipperiness is reflected in everything from the blank look on a student's face when expected to respond to a question about their favourite TV show, to the discipline's extensive use of impenetrable holistic criteria to assess student work. It's in that moment when a kid finally cracks, and exasperatedly exclaims, "I hate English, sir, I don't get it!" or another student remarks, "What do we even need this for?" (that old chestnut!) 

I used to struggle with explaining to laymen what English was even about. It's tempting to sometimes say 'books' or 'reading and writing' because that's what most people see it as, but as any English teacher (sadly?) knows, books are a very small aspect of the subject. And in contrast, reading and writing is every teacher's job - literacy is a concern for all subject areas, not just English. With more experience under my belt, I now quickly tell students and parents, "English is about thinking". 

But whilst that is true, it's still a bit nebulous - slippery - for some folks to get their heads around. So that's where this English Textual Concepts framework comes in, transforming a difficult key learning learning area into something much more solid for everyone to get their heads around.

The framework is (in its most general terms) arranged into these domains:

Concepts

• Argument
• Author / Authority
• Character
• Code and Convention
• Context
• Figurative Language
• Genre
• Intertextuality
• Literary Value
• Narrative
• Representation
• Perspective
• Point of View
• Style
• Theme

Processes

• Engaging personally
• Engaging critically
• Understanding
• Connecting
• Experimenting
• Reflecting 

The concepts lend themselves to choice - as the teacher, you can look at a text and figure out which 2 to 4 concepts you'd like to concentrate on. The processes then sit alongside these - they're the skills that need to be taught in order for students to come to grips with the concepts. You could perhaps think of it in terms of the syllabus outcomes, with the concepts as your learn about outcomes and the processes as your learn to outcomes. But maybe that's oversimplifying a paradigm that has been constructed on its own terms as an entirely separate but complimentary framework. I guess there's a whole other blog in that discussion!

Here's a brief example of how the concepts can be used, with the poem She by Pedro Xisto:

That's the poem above. Neat, huh?

Anyway, today I attended some Professional Learning on the English Textual Concepts and this concrete poem by Pedro Xisto was used as an example by Ann Small of a potential text for Year 9 poetry. It's a poem that works quite well with looking at the concept of Code and Convention.

"Codes and conventions are prisms through which we interpret the world and ascertain our place in it". Well, yes, of course - but getting more specific, Code and Convention is about structure. At a Kindergarten level you start out looking at morphemes and letters, then as the students develop through primary school to secondary they look at:

• Verbal, visual and digital signs.
• Sentences and pictures
• Paragraphs, conversations, films, novels, genres... (whole texts, and whole meta-texts)

It's grammar. If you've been following this blog you'll know how truly fond I am of grammar. I feel very pleased that the concept of Code and Convention allows us to focus on this in an English context. 

 

Looking at this odd three-letter poem, we can address it in terms of Code and Convention quite easily. What interpretations can students come up with while looking at this poem? What do the letters represent? What conventions of layout are used and how does this influence meaning? Is there repetition of a letter? Is contrast used? What about the relative size of letters? Where are they placed?

In other words:

- At the letter level, what is being said? 

- As a picture, what does it represent?

- As a text, what is the message, and how do you interpret what the composer is saying?

I had never seen this poem before today but I can tell you now, I think it would be really fun to do with a class. Firstly, as analysis using the concept of Code and Convention, and then, secondly (as suggested by presenter Ann Small), a creative activity where students come up with their own concrete poem in the same style - followed by a written explanation of what they're trying to say in their poem.

It's fabulous. 

The USSR: Collectivisation Source Analysis

Propaganda poster showing the fist of Soviet Russia smiting the greedy Kulak (rich peasant). Kulaks were the enemy of collectivisation, and a ready scapegoat on which Stalin could blame the peasantry's many woes.

I'm right in the midst of teaching the Modern History National Study, Option G: Russia and the Soviet Union (damn, that name is so catchy) and have been chatting to my students about Stalin's Five Year Plans and the process of collectivisation. 

I've come to realise that it's worth spending at least a few lessons approaching collectivisation from a few different angles. In one lesson we did a role-play activity in which students moved through the stages of Marxist society - from feudalism/capitalism to socialism, and from socialism to collectivisation (adapted from a great activity by one of my colleagues, Ashlee Horton). 

In a more recent lesson, I gave the class some sources about collectivisation so they could practice their source analysis. In previous posts I talked about taking a more grammar-based approach to source analysis - here and here - and described the way text chain identification can assist students in building their ability to decode unfamiliar words in order to increase their content-specific vocabulary. 

Let's not beat around the bush, HSC Modern History is a difficult subject. And whilst Modern History is the sort of course that rewards students who work hard, read regularly, and have no major issues writing essays, it's also a course that attracts a diverse array of students with a variety of learning styles that don't necessarily encompass those skills. For some of these students, who may also be undertaking the non-ATAR English Studies course, extra support is needed to scaffold the skills section of Modern History. Conceptual approaches like OCMAP or COMBAT can elicit some great analysis from many students, but taking a grammar-based approach can help open the process up to students who need something else. 

The first source in the sheet below is a speech from Joseph Stalin about his motivations behind thrusting the Soviet Union into a brave new world of super-farms. Students start out by identifying some text chains in the source. A text chain is a string of connected words in a text that mean the same thing. Finding and linking these synonyms allows students to build their vocabulary in relation to the content, scaffolding the reading process in order to dissuade them from disengagement before they attempt whole-text analysis.

You can start this out by modelling one or two text chains on the board. Pick a word out, such as "slow down", and join it to "put a check on" and then "reduced". Students can then do this with any number of words in the text, building up their understanding of the whole source by creating meaning within and across sentences.

The next couple of questions then follow on from this understanding to get the students engaging with the content and the reasons for Stalin's choice of language. For teachers looking (or needing) to differentiate their work more substantially due to the presence of students with a wide range of learning abilities, this grammatical approach provides an alternative way-in for any kids struggling to get to grips with the usual methods for analysing historical sources.

After the Stalin speech there are some tables about production and collectivisation in 1930s USSR, and an activity where this information needs to be converted into a graph. I like this sort of stuff because it's a legitimately useful way to use numeracy skills in Modern History, and it can make the learning more concrete for those students who are more mathematically-minded. 

Anyway, the activities are all below on the sheet.

Resource:


A Source on Collectivisation