Monday, March 31, 2008

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








4 comments:

Mr. B-G said...

Nice sentiments here Bruce. I dig the photo too.

Miguel Guhlin (@mGuhlin) said...

Bruce, I lost your blog for awhile but have rediscovered it as I sought my "writing roots."

I'm adding Throughlines to my EduWrite blog's list. EduWrite has 0 readers, but I hope you'll keep writing in ThroughLines.

Miguel Guhlin
Around the Cornert - mguhlin.net
EduWrite - http://eduwrite.blogspot.com

LJK said...

I know what you mean about reading being solitary. Whenever I read a book, I feel like I'm diving into it, so deep I can't even see the surface sometimes. It's a great feeling, but I feel like I am able to understand the text better when I can bounce ideas off of other people. When I discuss literature in class, I can build off of my classmates and they can build off of me.

I didn't know you had just been tagged by a meme, but I tagged you in another one. My response is on my blog (where I linked to you). Check out the discussion over at Clay's site (Beyond School). He did the meme too.

Bruce Schauble said...

Thanks, Miguel. You've got one more reader over at eduwrite. I'll try to keep up with you.

And Lindsea, I'll get over to the new meme asap. Peace.

- RBS