Virtual Particles

The poem "Virtual Particles" could be integrated into a Grade 11 physics course as a mentor text in an Energy and Society unit that explores nuclear fusion and nuclear fission.

Students could be asked to translate the poem into conventional scientific discourse, making connections with mathematical formulae related to half-life reactions and concepts of particle decay. A discussion of these "translated poems" could highlight the respective strengths and weakness of the two pieces, potential impediments to understanding in both English and Physics contexts, and the differences between students' translations in both structure and content. What words or phrases did they associate with a particular formula? Did the poem's structure influence the format or organization of their poem (were they sequential responses to the ideas raised in the poem or were they logical progressions through the material itself as it was taught)?

Students could also consider simple questions of value. Does the poem contribute anything meaningful to our discussion of nuclear physics? Could it be used as a memory aid in some way?

Finally, in lieu of a translation piece, students could be asked to respond to the poem in whatever manner or form they wished: mathematically, through the use of scientific discourse, through a response poem, etc.

Narrative in the Physics Classroom

David Booth's vision of enhanced literacy in Whatever Happened to Language Arts depends largely on guiding students to make connections between literary and historical narratives and their personal life stories. In some way, all the tales that “we” tell become a part of “us” both as a collective and as a collection of individuals. Students must be guided to “[find themselves] in story,” for“as personal storytellers … we learn from the stories of others and we take the truths out of these narratives .… our stories connect us to the others in our lives” (52). In order to reach students and create lasting, critical readers and thinkers, we must guide them to relate to, and to internalize, the narratives that we present to them.

Throughout my practicum placement in a university preparation grade 11 physics classroom and a university preparation grade 12 physics classroom, I attempted to explore the narratives that surround the discovery of certain fundamental principles of physics on both an individual level and on the level of the academic discipline itself.  The qualitative and subjective data that I collected through these explorations and student responses to them suggests that the use of narrative and framing techniques can connect abstract principles of the discipline to students' lived experiences, increasing students' immediate engagement in the classroom as well as their short and long term retention of information.

In one specific case, I introduced the concept of kinetic energy and couched its mathematical derivation in a narrative involving historical developments of cannons and the technological advances that improved their design. After having obtained the students' interest – based on a subjective assessment of their engagement in the class by monitoring levels of noise or “chatter,” inappropriate student-student interactions generally, and eye contact between myself and my students – I introduced an hypothetical narrative regarding cannon-based warfare. One side in the conflict had developed cannons that fired cannonballs of twice the mass, and the other side had developed cannonballs that could be fired with twice the velocity. As an impartial third party, we were tasked with determining who would win in such a conflict, all else being equal. Applying Kinematics, the work-energy theorem, and basic algebraic manipulations of established formulae, we then found that the latter group had the advantage.

In a second example, I then used the definition and formula related to kinetic energy in order to determine the energy that would be released by a collision between Earth and an actual Near Earth Object of a substantial mass, moving at a substantial speed. The value of energy released was so large that it had no significance in itself, so I related it to the Tsar bomb, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, by describing the energy released by its explosion – equivalent to the energy released by an explosion of a block of TNT approximately 320 m³, or as tall and as wide as the Eiffel Tower. The energy released by the collision between Earth and the Near Earth Object was almost five times that which was released by the Tsar Bomb's nuclear reaction. Several students approached me with questions regarding this example and tangentially related physics subjects. Not only had they absorbed the fundamental principles that I had sought to teach them, they had begun to make connections between the physics and their experience and background knowledge. As a

result, they appeared to enjoy the lesson and were eager participants in the ensuing problem-solving session and discussions.

The power of narrative that David Booth identifies can indeed be exploited in subjects other than English. Couching the principles of physics in narratives or real-life examples drawn from student experiences not only makes the material more relevant to them, it also generates engagement and in turn helps to curtail behavioral problems – an engaged student is less prone to act out. Given the ease with which Booth's theories related to narrative were applied in a physics classroom, I am eager for future opportunists to explore other strategies – that were originally intended for application in the limited context of an English course – in diverse and new settings.

Works Cited

Booth, David. Whatever Happened to Language Arts? Markham, Ontario: Pembroke Publishers Limited, 2009. Print.

Reflection on a Mentor Text

The article "Striped for Parts"(http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/parts.html) by Jennifer Kahn could be presented as a mentor text to a class of grade 11 or grade 12 biology students. While Kahn's text is outside my primary teachable domains, English and Physics, it integrate the hard sciences and the liberal arts, providing science students of any discipline with the opportunity to examine popular science writing and consider the differences in convention and style between it and true academic, scientific discourse.

In a biology or interdiciplinary context, this text could be integrated into a unit of study on reading and writing in a scientific context. After several lessons in which students explored the concept of objectivity and the formal structure of both lab reports and scientific journal articles, I would introduce this text as a means of engaging students with high levels of English literacy who are creative or artistically oriented. In contrast to authors of academic journal articles, Kahn seeks both to inform and to entertain, and the grotesque nature of the text and its subject matter may interest students – particularly males. Given its relatively vibrant prose style, her work may also interest creative students who have not yet been exposed to the ways in which they can write on subjects related to science and technology while remaining unconstrained by many of the conventions of scientific discourse. Often these conventions render scientific writing stale and disaffecting, so the article could be introduced as a means to discuss techniques authors use to engage and capture the interest of their audiences.

However, the rejection of these conventions in popular science articles and the focus on entertaining rather than informative content comes at the cost of abandoning the principle of objectivity. Khan's emotionalism and sensationalism, while engaging, make evident her personal biases. The very purpose of scientific writing becomes lost in a pleasant haze of dynamism and snappy prose. Through an exploration of the article, students should become aware of the effects – both positive and negative – of a shit between academic and non-academic scientific discourse.

A possible lesson developed around this article might consist of:

1. Guided reading in which students read each paragraph and identify the central topic or argument.
2. Reflection on each segment of the article using BLM 4.3: Informational template
3. A systematic breakdown and discussion of the text, contrasting it with previously-discussed examples of scientific writing. Groups could consider topic prior a whole-class discussion, which would be organized based on a series of topics including:
   1. Reflection on the introduction to Kahn's article, its effect on readers, and the information that it relates to a reader.
   2. Word choice and use of language which in turn influences...
   3. … our sense of the author's emotional state or investment in the issues covered in the article (Guiding Questions: What words, phrases, or constructs would not appear in an actual scientific journal article and why? What do they tell us about the author or her views that would not otherwise be apparent?)
   4. The structure of the text as whole, which does not divide as easily into defined components such as abstract, introduction, results, analysis, conclusion, etc. as does a lab report or even a traditional scientific journal article with a logical progression.
4. Based on the results of the previous discussion, we would then assess the effects on style on the message and information conveyed in the article. Students should assess what has been gained and what has been lost in the shift from academic to popular scientific writing. Which do they enjoy? Which better serves its purpose(s) (which are different in the two contexts)?

Engagement Resources

The following list of resources addresses the reading a literature strand of the Ontario English Curriculum and it focuses on issues of student engagement. It has been divided into three categories: general advice and motivational strategies, articles and texts that are more directly applicable to a classroom setting, and theoretical explorations of the topic of disengagement.

Advice

Booth, D. (2009). Whatever Happened to Language Arts? Markham, Ontario: Pembroke Publishers.

Booth offers multiple strategies to address students' lack of motivation in the English classroom with emphasis on reading and engagement. The text provides a wealth of practical suggestions based on the author's classroom experiences with the integration of technology, alternate text forms, and multiple literacies.

Lapp, D. (2009). It’s All About the Book: Motivating Teens to Read. Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 52(7), 556-561.

Lapp's article consists of a case study on reading and student interest. Based on observations made in the classroom, she offers a reflection on student reading habits and the effectiveness of school book clubs.

McLean, C. D. (2007). Fifty Ways to Promote Teen Reading in Your School Library. Young Adult Library Services 6(1) (Fall), 8-10.

This point form list of suggestions for teachers and librarians may help educators and resource personnel – patently – promote reading.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2004). Me Read? No Way!: A practical guide to improving boys' literacy skills. Retrieved from

http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/document/brochure/meread/meread.pdf

The guide address the widening gender gap on literacy tests and university attendance, offering success strategies for educators and students in the English field.

Ontario Ministry of Education. (n.d.). Think Literacy: Cross-Curricular Approaches, Grades 7-12. Retrieved from

http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/studentsuccess/thinkliteracy/files/Reading.pdf

This resource outlines pre-reading, reading, and post-reading strategies, and suggests possible student-engagement technique in a cross-curricular context.

Resources

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2007). The Ontario Curriculum Grades 11 and 12, English.

Jessica L. S. (2012). The new dry land workout: Practical writing exercises for professional hockey players. Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory, Research and Education, 25(4), 187-195.

This article could be integrated into a classroom as a resource to engage male students in the act of reading itself while also challenging the cultural bias that incline them to view literacy as feminine in nature.

Klor, E. (2011). Serving Teen Parents: From Literacy to Life Skills. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC.

Klor offers advice and act ivies designed to train librarians to meet the needs of both teens in general and young parents. While the text is not designed as an aid for classroom teachers, it offers substantial practical advice for all educators who deal with issues related to teen literacy.

Swenor, K. (2006). A Teen Take on Reading: Results from the 2005 Teen Read Survey. Young Adult Library Services 4(4) (Summer), 42-44.

Some of the information contained in this resource may be of use to teachers who wish to better understand student reading practices based on the perspectives and experiences of actual teens.

Theory

Bouchamma, Y. (2014). Impact of Reading Strategy Use on Girls’ and Boys’ Achievement." Reading Psychology 35(4), 312-331.

This study explores the correlation between metacognitive skills and reading ability, concluding that addressing a marginalized component of the curriculum by requiring students to evaluate their reading and writing processes explicitly may have positive effects on their literacy development.

Harrison, B. (2010). Boys and Literature: Challenging Constructions of Masculinity. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies 45(2), 47-60.

Harrison suggests that teachers should create situations in which boys can explore definitions and conceptions of masculinity in order to address the cultural assumptions that may adversely affect male literacy.

Sample Essay on 1984

The following grade 12 essay is an example of level 3+ work. It could be used as an exemplar text in a classroom, allowing students to identify the weaknesses in research techniques, citation, and sentence construction that prevent a unique and engaging paper from meriting a level 4 or level 4+ mark.
 

English Students and the Value of Literature

Particularly skeptical English students should know that they are not alone in their rejection of literature; their conviction that it is valueless has precedent. 

I am personally invested not only in the discipline but in many of the forms and expressions of literature themselves. Postmodern efforts to destabilize texts a on structural level immediately concerns me given my classical background. Yet a willingness to challenge structures and reject received assumptions and values often characterizes the students for whom I will be responsible; revolution is, after all, a young man's game primarily.

Despite my belief in the value of literature and its forms -- as if the former could be defined apart from its instantiations and the conventions that have developed to distinguish them -- neither that which we call literature nor its myriad modes exist as pure platonic ideals. Literature, the novel, the poem in all its expressions both formal and informal, the play, and the short story did not always exist among the forms or as images in the mind of God. We created them. Once, there was no novel; we have, among others, Cervantes and his marvelous proto-novel about the man from la Mancha to thank for it -- and thank him we should in my view, though many an English student might disagree. Once, there was no literature whatsoever. There were no books, and the notion of recording information in textual form was seen by some to threaten our mental faculties and the strength of our memories, a concern that might be familiar to those of us who are old enough to remember a world in which information was not a google search away.

Skepticism regarding form and function -- from text, to book, to literature, to the novel -- is not new; rather it has defined, and may ever define, our discipline. Better men than I have assaulted literature, and better men than I have defended it, but the very fact that it has required constant defense legitimizes the concerns that many students express. Yet I cannot imagine that most young people are remotely aware of this fact. How often have they been told that English literature is inherently valuable, and that that received knowledge is unassailable gospel truth? How many bite their tongues while remaining convinced of nothing other than their instructors' mental inflexibility and dogmatism? At worst, how many grow to despise the act of reading in its entirety because no teacher ever gave them the opportunity to present and explore their objections to literature and the objections raised by even a few of their ideological forefathers?

As teachers, we should recognize the validity of students' positions, even those with which we fundamentally disagree, but with respect to those opinions, blind acceptance can easily be worse than de-legitimization. Raise a vigorous defense, rather than shying from the fight. Have students define literature's value or lack thereof and then introduce a range of material to demonstrate that a pervasive – perhaps even obsessive – concern with the validity of our discipline has in fact defined it since its inception. Justify the value of literature on a practical level by developing a unit around the issue, incorporating texts such as:

“In Defense of Literacy” by Wendell Berry https://docs.google.com/a/uottawa.ca/document/d/1KCtvcdoycXMCYSZGhUcdoyav9NQfl-K7f5w-_bcMsGU/edit?hl=en_GB

Percy Bysshe Shelley “A Defense of Poetry” (Which will allow for extensions into lessons on music and visual arts.)

George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language." (On the study of a vital and clear English discourse in order to protect us against malicious or weaponized language.)

The Defense of Poesy Sir Philip Sidney. A classic defense and early objections to literature's inferiority to history and philosophy. http://www.bartleby.com/27/1.html

If we truly believe that literature is valuable, we must show students that our faith is not without practical grounding. We owe the effort to those students whom we seek to best serve and we owe it to the discipline that -- I would hope -- we all love.

The Official Government of Ontario Document "Me Read?" explores the growing literacy gap between male and female students, offering some concrete data on early school leaving and university attendance rates and suggestions regarding boys' education.

Responses to Atwell and Peterson

Atwell's narrative suggests that our task as teachers in general, and English specifically, is to provide students with materials that are accessible and connected to their life experiences while requiring them to produce work that has practical value, yet her evolution as a teacher, and the progression of her strategies, exceed such relatively simple requirements – demands of relevance that teacher education training and my practicum experience have emphasized.

As I have been taught thus far, we are to design tasks that provide choice in products and procedure – as Atwell found with her student, Jeff, allowing options in which one component of the final product could be a visual text could help to support certain students' learning and trigger the evolution of their writing process. Similarly, to generate engagement we attempt to design tasks that mirror real world situations, creating assignments that are practical and applicable to the students' past experiences and present and future needs.

Yet according to Atwell, even assignments that allow for student choice in a traditional sense only provide a different set of constraints. Her rather radical conjunction of the two aforementioned principles – allowing students free reign in their choice of products based on their individual interests and needs – is highly discomforting to me personally. Ceding that level of power to students is a daunting prospect. Even as a student, I would have found her approach immediately terrifying, as I craved structure and strict guidelines. It is difficult to believe that no student in her class responded to her proposal that her class develop individual writing ideas for real world audiences with a resounding “No,” as I would have done (Atwell, 1998, p. 13). Peterson echoes and addresses this concern with his suggestion that teachers should provide students with free choice regarding from and limitations based on content area, as “students appreciate having some parameters set on their writing” (Peterson, 2008, p. 4). Such an approach may provide sufficient structure to account for the learning needs of the students whom I have identified.

Nonetheless, Atwell's realization that the traditional choices provided to students are in fact far too constrictive still represents a remarkable challenge to all teachers, let alone those who prefer relatively structured teaching environments. In order to generate effective writing tasks, the familiar demands to facilitate and allow for student choice and to connect their products to real experiences must be expanded and joined.

Atwell's attempts to write alongside her students, and the lack of success she found during the exercise, represent a similar challenge to the way in which we structure our writing tasks and the demands of production that we place on students (Atwell, 1998, p. 11). Her inability to compose vibrant pieces of work in response to the assignments that she provided for her students – the reduction of an art form to an assembly line production – attests to the artificiality of the assignments that we often provide and illustrates the danger of failing to properly consider the effects and the challenges of the work that we require students to complete. We can demand that students write a great deal, but if they produce dull and dead works, they may not truly learn the craft and the art no matter how many writing assignments they complete. They may not truly grow.

As for Peterson's article, given the practices of evaluation laid out in this university's Curriculum Design course, I was somewhat surprised by the suggestion that teachers should assess both students' content-area knowledge and their writing ability. According to the principles of assessment established in that context, teachers should not take into account students' facility with the English language when determining a grade for an unrelated subject, even though we must address their ability to communicate information. We should not allow students' strengths or weaknesses in literacy to influence the content-specific grade that we assign to their work. Though my associate teacher assessed work based on achievement chart categories of Knowledge, Inquiry, Making Connections, and Communication – assigning marks based on students' use of scientific conventions and proper English – the practical impact of communication marks on final grades was ultimately insignificant given that the relative weight of the other three assessment categories was substantially greater than that of Communication. His gesture towards assessment merely indicated an area of possible improvement to students, rather than influencing their grades. Though my experience has been limited, thus far both theory and observed practice have inclined me to eschew the evaluation of students' writing skills. I will admit, however, that as a student of English literature who has been dismayed by students' apparent illiteracy throughout my practicum experience, I am troubled by the apparent failings of the current system and the effects of the practices that I have observed.    

On Accademic Writing

As I never went through high-school, I was never formally trained to write in anything other than an academic context; my education focused on reading almost to the exclusion of writing up until CEGEP, at which point teachers both guided and constrained us with repeated explanations, drills, and work sessions that emphasized the universality and inflexibility of the essay format. Prior to entering university, I found that I had rarely enjoyed the writing process, largely due to the regimented structure of the four paragraph essay.

As I progressed through my undergraduate and graduate degrees, however, I came to appreciate the academic essay as the principal method of communication in my field, capable of expressing a level of vitality in form and prose that I never would have anticipated based on my prior studies. Though the process – and, indeed, the liberty – of composing academic work became pleasurable, the changes that I observed in the form of written discourse also brought with them new frustrations. Postmodernist discourse dominated much of material that I was responsible for reading and some of the responses that were expected to that material. Were I to offer a particularly uncharitable assessment of the experience, I would say that for some time it seemed as if the fundamental purpose of writing seemed to become lost – like many readers – in a sea of deliberate obscurantism.