Anne Dalke's blog

Reflect here on what's working, and what needs working on, both for you as an individual learner and for the class as a learning community. What might you do differently, and what can we do, to to improve y/our learning?

Welcome!  This forum is a space for Parkway West  High School students and Bryn Mawr College students to create dialogue and explore ideas about education, social class, opportunity, and our futures.

Please use it to reflect on our shared visit:

• what ideas or issues stood out to you from our conversation?
• What surprised you and piqued your curiosity? 
• What would you like to explore further? 

Here we all are, anticipating.....

...are now accessible from this page. A number of you had tagged them to appear here, in this forum, but I thought they were sorta clogging things up/slowing down the conversation, so I re-tagged them to appear over there. Please feel free to go read and comment on one another's explorations--there's lots of interesting stuff going on over there!

Full episodes of "What Females Want" and "What Males Will Do"
(the Nature videos Kaye has asked us to watch for our discussion on Tuesday night)
are available on-line @
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/what-females-want/video-full-episode/5371/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/what-males-will-do/video-full-episode/5374/

A propos of Kaye's questions @ the end of class on Tuesday, about the complexities of passing --
What information do we use to categorize people/events or to make judgments? 
What information do we let pass? --see this morning's NYTimes article, The Freedom to Choose Your Pronoun:
“These teens are fighting the idea that your equipment defines what it means for you to be a boy or girl. They are saying: ‘You don’t know me by looking at me. Assume nothing’ ”.... some of the new adjectives young people use to describe themselves: “bi-curious,” “heteroflexible,” “polyamorous” and even “wiggly.”

She visits

The door is open to the warm fall night.
A figure comes in, on little cat feet.
Whoosh-- and up the stairs.
We laugh.

She returns, circles.
We reach out, pet her.
The classroom: home.

Jody and I  have been fiddling with the syllabus this weekend.

For Tuesday, please read the essay by Pedro Noguera. We will not have time to talk through the Massey and Denton study of residential segregation, so have moved that into the category of optional/additional reading (in other words, you can let that one go...)

Please do bring bell hooks back to class with you, though; we are not done w/ her yet (and we suspect she is not quite done with us, either!).

When you post on Serendip tonight, please answer our general question about whether education levels the playing field by focusing on a specific dimension of the problem. You might want to talk about your reactions to the spoken word video of kai davis, for example; or the claim by bell hooks that decorum and censoring undermine the democratic exchange of ideas in the classroom; or her assertion that the academic work process is essentially antagonistic to the working class, or....??

Looking forward to our further conversation, both on-line and in-person--
Anne (for me and Jody)

So: Jody and I participate in a "creativity group." Tonight, when we were asked to collaborate, with a partner, in writing a poem, or drawing a picture, or....

So: here's a Serendip story....