Letters from Lisa

My commute to work is about an hour and fifteen minutes. It’s longish, but has a distinct benefit: I get a LOT of reading in. This is one main reason why I haven’t become completely fed up with my commute, despite insufferable heat on the subway platforms during summer and frequent train delays due to construction and bad weather.

Here’s a sampling of what I’ve been reading lately.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. The premise is that all humans disappear from the Earth, leaving everything exactly the way it is right now. What happens to our houses, subway stations, nuclear power plants, landfills, and pets? (One of my favorite chapters, early in the book, describes in vivid detail the fate of New York City. Maybe not the book to be reading when you’re on the subway!) How might the environment recover from the depradations of industrial pollution, excess CO2 and non-biodegradable waste? This is the kind of book I love, since it brings in information from so many different angles - archaeology, biology, physics, evolution.

Spellbound: The Surprising Origins and Astonishing Secrets of English Spelling by James Essinger. I was very hopeful about this one, since I love books that are about the history of languages. So far, for me, it hasn’t tread any new ground at all, and that’s disappointing. (I’d recommend Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World instead.) I suspect I’d be enjoying it a lot more if I didn’t have any background in the subject. I also totally disagree with his assertion that people read mostly by looking at the shape of whole words rather than at individual letters - it oversimplifies the case dramatically and leads to erroneous assumptions about how to teach people to read. And with that…

Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz is THE book to read if you want to learn about how people learn to read (or don’t). I re-read it recently and though I’ve had many years experience teaching children with reading problems to read, I found it insightful and useful once again.

To be continued…

It’s been a busy summer. A very busy summer.

We ended school for the kids, attended the high school graduation, and then spent two days cleaning up. I wish I had photos of the grand landfill that formed outside the principal’s office - mountains of half-used notebooks, markers with and without caps, folders and more folders, magazine bins with labels taped to them, games with two pieces missing - some of which was outright thrown away, much of which was donated to camps and school summer programs. I joked that I was going “dumpster diving” in the pile as I carted away old 1 inch binders and permanent markers and plastic containers for the science lab.

They’re painting the hallways on the elementary floor this summer, redoing the carpets, installing cabinets above the lockers, reformatting the computers, replacing the hanging maps in some rooms, and replacing the desks in others - so people spent hours packing materials into boxes and labeling all the furniture with names and room numbers. We looked at the still-forming reading and math groups for next year and what books would have to be ordered for them.

Then it was Tuesday afternoon, and everybody started to leave. And I stayed.

Aside from July 4th, which was a national holiday, I’ve been at school every day since. I’ve been meeting with teachers about their curriculum for next year, putting together a guide that lays out what is to be covered at each level. When do kids first learn about the continents? When are they expected to write a paragraph? Who is going to be doing the clay landforms, the homeroom teacher or art teacher? Communication and coordination is hard work. It’s just as with any complex system - effort needs to be put in to maintain all of the moving parts and keep them coordinated, or the natural tendency is for different pieces to start slipping.

These are all questions that we’ve thought about before - actually, I gave out a scope and sequence for geography last year, but in talking to people now, I can see that it wasn’t always followed. These sorts of decisions can never be made by one person alone - especially when it’s not the person who’s going to be doing the actual work. One big push this year is going to be keeping everyone attuned to what everyone else is doing, both within the same level and between levels. And we’re going to be particularly working on writing, which is by far the toughest subject to coordinate.

I wasn’t originally going to be at school, doing this every day. I was originally going to come in a few times during the summer to work on the social studies curriculum with teachers, in keeping with my job as curriculum coordinator. I also asked if I could come in a day or two and work on the lower elementary science curriculum. Then, a few days into the post-school-year-session, I was offered the position of learning specialist. That converted me from a 10-month person with some extra days working over the summer to a 12-month person who gets three weeks of vacation over the summer. (So yes, I am still going to Spain.)

It’s been exciting and very, very busy. (I am also continuing to teach graduate school at night - in three more sessions we’re going to wrap up the July semester.) But in the midst of everything, I’ve had some time to read. More about my new books of choice in the next post.