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This site is devoted to providing information, thoughts, and resources for parents seeking to support their children’s development as strong readers and writers. Check out the pages to learn about the individual school-year tutoring or summer skill-development I can provide, and read the blog for my thoughts on reading, writing and parenting teens.

Announcing… Teach Better is out on Amazon

I’m excited to announce that my book, Teach Better: Building Literacy Skills in the Writing Classroom, went live on Amazon last week. While the book is written for writers teaching groups of students, what really informed the content is one-on-one tutoring.

Teachers plan curriculum, design assignments, and respond to students, all with students’ best interests in mind. This doesn’t always mean, however, that what they are doing helps students learn. Working at a tutoring center, sitting with individual students and helping them understand their teachers’ assignments, or comments, has helped me understand what tends to work, or not, for individual students.

A classroom teacher, while confronted several times a week with an audience of students, can forget it, or remain insulated from that audience, while planning and working at home.

Tutors sit with one student at a time, and while it is possible, it is much harder not to really see and attempt to understand that particular student’s struggle.

In my book, I give examples of well-meaning mistakes, in the areas of curriculum planning, assignment design, feedback, and grading. I hope the book will find teachers and start a conversation on how to best work with students on the complicated process of teaching writing.

Summer reading (and annotating)

My daughter, an eager freshman entering high school, has already completed her summer reading. After three weeks of devouring books she chose, she was ready. We read over her assignment, she told me what she thought she was meant to do, and I let her choose from a handful of post its. She selected small blue and yellow ones, made a goal for herself to be done in a week, and was. But after day two, the complaints about annotating began.

My son, excited about doing nothing after his first job, intense sports camps, and travel, is eager to spend a few weeks without plans. When I asked him about his summer reading assignment, he told me he still had plenty of time, though I believe I heard a question mark in his voice. We do have the book, which isn’t formidably long, and he’s someone who knows where he is in relation to clock/calendar time–he gets to places at the stated hour, he works ahead–so I’m not too concerned about a last-minute, less-than-pleasant push to the finish line. “But do you think I’ll have to annotate?” he asked, somewhat ominously at the end of our conversation.

Both my kids enjoy reading but neither enjoys annotating. They complain that it makes reading less fun, that it takes too long, that it pulls you out of the dream world of the book, making you constantly aware that what you are reading is for school. I sympathize. One of the main reasons I read is to become lost in another world and all that that implies: interiority, forgetting time and place, feeling the total pleasure of story, characters, new ideas and information. I don’t want more than what I’m being given, and I don’t want to be particularly aware–of myself, the process, the purpose. Annotating, frankly, pretty much wrecks that.

When my daughter and I first discussed her reading plan, I suggested she try either to read the whole book fast, say over the course of two or three days, and then go back and annotate, while it was still fresh in her mind. Or, to read her chunk of pages every day, and then at the end of the reading time, to flip back and put in her post its. That way she could have her pleasure and satisfy the goals of the teacher. When she emerged after the first day, I asked how it had gone and she told me she’d annotated as she read, as usual. Why? Because it was easier that way.

As a teacher, I understand the importance of annotating, I assign it, and I teach a variety of ways to do it. When I teach tutors, I stress the importance of working with students on reading skills. I give the tutors situations: a student comes in with this article/essay/novel and has to read it and annotate it, how can you help her do that productively? The tutors themselves are for the most part graduate students who plan to go into teaching, and they are good students, and they themselves annotate, at least they say they do. But they find these scenarios very challenging, resorting to the largely ineffective practice of telling the student what to do.

In a perfect world, a person reads many texts, and out of those texts, a few interest the reader enough to want to understand them better: their content, structure, style. The reader then rereads, and as he does, he is moved to mark the text, to, in essence, notice what he notices. Thus he becomes aware of his own reactions, begins to wonder why he is having these reactions, and then enters an intellectual conversation with the text and the author of the text. And while it was the initial pleasure in, and interest in, the text, this second stage of the process is fundamentally different from the first. It is conscious, purposeful, and academic.

As teachers given certain time constraints and goals, we are forced to push our students along, to collapse the above process and get them to do two things at once. I would never argue that annotating takes the pleasure out of reading in general–that is, future reading, that forcing students into a perhaps prematurely aware state is harming them as readers. In fact, the opposite should be true, that the habits of mind that annotating makes conscious become unconscious again, and that they can happen on a subterranean level, that the next novel one reads, one can enter the dream but occasionally break from it, willingly, to notice certain aspects of style, for example. I remember last year, after my son read (and annotated) a short story multiple times, that he found new pleasure in some of the sentences. He’d sort of returned to a primary pleasure, but this time it was more informed, and he could share it.

If a kid reads ten books over the course of the summer, having to annotate one of them is really not that bad. Another argument in the case for reading a lot, and reading for pleasure. So before he reads his school book, I’ll get my son to squeeze in another book or two for pleasure.

The Individual in Tutoring: The Check-in Warm-up

Yesterday, when I worked with my student M, a tall, sun-burned, teenage surfer, we began, as we do most every time, with a check-in. We do this using writing exercises, freewrites, clusters, lists, or a combination thereof. I always write with him.

Yesterday, we both made a list of twenty things that we had experienced over the previous week, we chose three best and two worst, and then we focused one of those to write about for three minutes. Because M is a kid with a lot in his head but a habit for putting as few words as possible on the page, writing rather than talking, and writing in using exercises that allow for choice, is a good way to increase fluency on the page.

M. wrote about the movie he’d seen with his family. He wrote that he liked it and how much he liked it and that it was maybe even one of the best movies he’d ever seen. He really liked it. He wrote a lot of words, more than he usually did before the three minute timer went off. In fact, he finished another two sentences after time.

When I read what he wrote, I praised him on the quantity. I told him I had not yet see this movie that he liked so much, and was wondering if I should. From what he had written, I said, I wasn’t yet sure if I would like it. I got that he had a strong positive opinion about it, but I didn’t know what it was about, who was in it, what the action was, or really why he liked it. He laughed. He’s an easy-going, super smart kid, who could talk to me about the content of the movie while also understanding what I was leading toward in terms of his writing. He is always willing to go along with what for him is probably a form of mild torture: writing for most of the entire time we work together.

I told him I was now going to act as his scribe. I asked my questions about the movie again, one at at a time, starting with the least analytical (What happened?) and as he answered, I wrote down every word he said in the way he said it. Who were the main characters? Which of those characters would he most want to have with him in a dangerous situation? Why? He barely had to pause to think. He could remember everything, and when prompted, could explain the reasons these people or actions appealed to him.

When we finished, I told him I knew now that I’d wait for the movie to come out in DVD, and then I would watch it with my son, who liked that kind of action-packed drama. I also showed him how much more he had to say then what he had written, emphasized that the words I had written were his words, and explained that they could find their way onto the page more and more through his own hand rather than mine.

This is the kind of activity, which took only about fifteen minutes, that can build a foundation of trust and skills, and slowly change a person’s attitude about writing and themselves as writers. In the classroom, even a classroom with a smaller number of students, I would have found it impossible to be as focused on M, to lead him through a number of steps, some of which were more general, some of which could only come out of what I had learned and was continuing to learn about his strengths and weaknesses, and some of which had to be perfectly related to the content he chose, and the actual sentences he did or did not put on the page.

Writing takes skill, and it takes a toolbox of strategies, but ultimately it is about communicating something to another person, and in a one-on-one session, communication drives the work in a tangible and satisfying way.

“Parents, children, and the search for identity”

I stole the title for this post from the subtitle of a fantastic book I’m reading, Far From the Tree, by Andrew Solomon. Yes, it is thick. Yes, the print is small. But I learned so much just from reading the first chapter that I’m recommending it to everyone.

Solomon’s nonfiction book takes a look at families composed of children and parents who are, in some fundamental aspect of identity, very different from each other. He has chapters about families with children who are deaf, children who are prodigies, children who are transgender. Solomon is gay, and in the first chapter, he discusses this very personal difference from his parents as a way to introduce conceptual frameworks about identity formation in such families.

He explains two ways that children develop identities, vertically and horizontally, that were new to me. Vertical identities are identities that are, in a sense, passed down through families. So if your child has a vertical identity trait, it is something that is familiar to you and that you are comfortable with. Horizontal identity formation is necessary for a child when that child, for whatever reason, does not share an important aspect of his identity with his parents–for Solomon that trait is being gay.

I will do his complicated topic and nuanced perspective an injustice if I continue to describe it here. If you’re looking for a fascinating book to read this summer, one that tells stories of lives that are very different from your own, while still, I believe, because I felt this while reading the first chapter, illuminating aspects of your own life, then read Far From the Tree. Click here for the New York Times review.

The summer before the dreaded high school applications, San Francisco style

While I’m thinking about transitioning my daughter to high school and looking at colleges with my son, many parents of graduating 7th graders in the wonderful and peculiar city of San Francisco are already dreading the high school application process. Everyone always tells you it’s going to be okay; your kid will get into high school. But that’s like skipping to the last chapter of a book when what you’re worried about is all the chapters before that.

For some kids, it makes sense to prepare over the summer.

Of course, all kids should be reading, reading, reading, for pleasure. Isn’t that what summers are for? Reading is also the best vocabulary builder because words are encountered as parts of sentences and paragraphs, that is, in context, in their natural environment. When we learn words this way, while we might not be able to spout a definition, we have an intuitive sense of what the words means, which we adjust each time we experience it again. Most vocabulary tests are multiple choice so recognizing the right answer is enough. I love that the Harry Potter series includes very high level vocabulary!

I tried to get both my kids to do some work in those giant SSAT test prep books. I pretty much failed the first time around with my son. The second time, I’d learned, and I had a kid with more test anxiety (and therefore more motivation to practice), so we were more successful. Over the course of the summer, my daughter worked through several tests on her own, and then we went over her answers, figuring out which strategies were working and which ones weren’t. This was particularly useful for the reading comprehension portions. I was able to help her see, by asking her about her process, which approaches were working and which weren’t. We wrote down the strategies that did work, and I helped her internalize them.

Not all kids need to do this, and it certainly shouldn’t be an all-consuming endeavor. I’m looking forward to pajama days, movie marathons, and getting my kids to cook me dinner!

What can be a challenge about entering high school

Since my daughter will join her brother in high school in the fall, I’m already thinking about the transition, what’s going to be easy for her, hard for her, what will be the same as, what will be different from, her brother.

She’s worried about where she’s going to sit for lunch, and if I were her, I’d be wondering the same thing. But as her parent, and a teacher, I’m thinking about academics, and what, if anything, I can get her to do over the summer to help prepare her.

Here’s what I remember that made my son’s second and third months (the first was like a honeymoon) difficult.

• He had never gotten letter grades so although he wanted them, they were a bit of a shock, especially when the grade didn’t seem to match the narrative comments, or his own expectations.
• He wasn’t skilled in following writing assignments, whether for English or Biology. We see this problem all the time at the tutoring center where I teach. Sometimes, the assignments aren’t clear; sometimes the student hasn’t learned the skill of analyzing, breaking the assignment down and using it as a guide and checklist.
• He had no practice going to teachers during the high school equivalent of their office hours, and avoided talking with them, especially when he wasn’t doing as well as he wanted to.
• He didn’t have a lot of practice studying for objective tests, so he didn’t have systems for reviewing, rehearsing, and applying things he was learning.

I sat with him through a number of evenings in October and November of that freshman year, but gradually he pushed me away, showed me he was managing on his own. Now he sometimes asks for help, but it is infrequent and has less to do with learning new skills than with having someone to run something by, an objective reader, a listener.

Because my kids are such different learners, I predict my daughter will have time management and focus issues, and we’ll need to add to our strategies for staying on task, for making deliberate plans for how to get the work done.

Now that I’ve written this post, though, I realize I need to relax, have a bit of a vacation from all this. I think I’ll look for some fun books to read over the summer instead!

Giving feedback on writing

Kids, especially teenagers, are often reluctant to show their writing to their parents.

But we parents want to see our kids’ work for any number of reasons: we want to get to know them better, we want to assess how they are doing, and we may also want to give advice on how they can write better. So when they dare to hand us a piece of paper or open the screen and turn it in our direction, we might silently read, assess, and then jump to the critical, telling them all the things we see that they can improve upon.

Put yourself in your kid’s shoes for a moment. Would you want to show someone a piece of writing, perhaps one that you’ve already revised a few times, or even turned in, or even turned in and gotten a grade on, and hear feedback on how it could be improved?

Probably not. And once this critical relationship is established, the writer, that is, your kid, may assume that that is always the purpose of the reading and become more reluctant, rightly, to show anything.

This can, however, be avoided if you are clear up front. Before you read, ask, “Is this something you want feedback on because you’re revising it, or do you just want me to tell you what I liked about it?”

Giving kids the choice makes them feel safe, and it’s good pedagogy. There’s only so much feedback any writer can take in at any one stage, and unless the writer wants or has to revise, it doesn’t make sense to give critical feedback. (Besides, feedback is much more effective when given in a prioritized way, but I’ll write about that another time.)

Even when your child chooses the no feedback route, you’re going to notice things that could be improved. Hold your tongue. Focus on enjoying the piece and learning something, whether about the content, or your child, or how to build trust.

The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green

I read The Fault in Our Stars this summer, and yes, I cried, but, because readers know from the beginning that the main character and the boy she falls for have cancer, well… I expected to cry.

A lot of teens are reading and passing around this book, but interestingly, it’s one of the competitors, and today’s winner, in The Tournament of Books, my favorite place to get insight into this year’s novels for adults. I was really surprised to see Green’s book on the list, up against Louise Erdrich’s The Round House no less.

Check out the judging, but also the commentary, which you’ll find as you scroll down. I found what John Warner has to say about teens feeling like they need to be awesome all the time instead of just human really interesting.

What will college look like for our kids?

Thomas Friedman has an interesting opinion piece in today’s New York Times about the growing interest in, and importance of MOOCs, or massive open online courses.

The conclusion that he draws about the effect of, essentially, the pressure of MOOCs on the traditional residency model of college, is that the way we measure the outcome of an education is changing. He writes that we are shifting the focus from grades/institutions to competencies, that is, what a person can actually do as a result of an education.

This is an interesting thing to think about as our kids move toward college, and Friedman is making a direct comparison between the free courses and the cost (and value) of an increasingly high-priced, resident college education.

It’s hard for me to argue with the idea that competency is more important than a grade or prestige, but it does make me wonder how competency is measured. And what about the less measurable outcomes of a college education like open-mindedness?

I have not yet really checked into MOOCs. Maybe I should sign up for a course and take it?