Meme: Passion Quilt

Mr. B-G tagged me about two weeks ago for the passion quilt meme, but I was offline for a while and am now just getting around to it.

THE RULES:

Post a picture or create your own image that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about
Give your picture a short title
Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt”
Link back to this blog entry
Include links to 5 people in your professional learning network

So here's mine:

Literature Circles

There is a primary level of engagement that comes with reading any quality text. But that level of engagement comes with one primary built-in limitation: it's solitary. Of course I love to read, and I hope that one day my students will derive as much enjoyment and enrichment from reading as I have been able to do during my lifetime. But probably most of the reading I do is isolating: it puts my in a world by myself, so much so that I am often oblivious to what is going on around me, a fact that my family sometimes has found at times found quaintly amusing and at other times downright annoying.

But there are other satisfactions to reading as well, and one of them is to be able to share your thoughts about a common text with other readers. That's the beauty of a classroom. The experience of shared reading makes possible another, second level of engagement: participation in a community of discourse. Of course I wish for my students to be readers. But beyond that, I wish for them to experience and learn to value the time that we spend together, helping one another to ask better questions, come up with better answers, go broad and deep, wending our way to the heart of the matter.

(I took this picture of my students engaged in exactly this process during the summer 2007 session of sophomore English. I hope they remember those hours with as much aloha as I do.)



Doing my part to keep the meme going, I'm going to tag

Chris Watson
Bud Hunt
Doug Belshaw
Louann Reid
Chris Lehmann