Textbooks and Sex: A Reading List for College Students, Future College Students, and the People Who Love Them

As my students (and my own child) make their decisions and plans for college, I thought it would be helpful to have some resources to help prepare. Going to college can feel overwhelming not only to newly minted college students but to their families as well.

Here are some articles to guide all of us on our paths from high school to college:

Here is a great packing list for college. It is not tailored for everyone, but use it to start a list that works for you.

Counseling Today reported about a study that says that many high school students, though academically ready for college, are not emotionally prepared. Here is a summary of what that study found. Think about discussing these issues as a family. Parents sometimes need some help in this area as well. Here is a letter to new parents that helps them get ready.

You should never pay full price for textbooks. There are many sites that sell textbooks for less. Hackcollege describes many of them.  Here is a site that compares these different sources. All you do is put in the ISBN number and comparison shop – and save money! Lifehacker also had a good article on saving money on textbooks that is worth a read.

There is a huge difference between going to high school and going to college. The expectations and schedule mean that many students need to develop much more discipline and new strategies to cope. Here is an article outlining some study tips.

Finding a major can be a big issue in college. Here is an article that describes the Hedgehog Concept to help identify a good career path. I am still a big fan of Richard Bolles’ What Color is Your Parachute as a way to explore possible interests, passions, and careers.

With or without a clear focus, registering for classes can be challenging. Hackcollege provides some ideas for how to get into classes that are already full.

The social scene on campus is as critical to the college experience as academics. However, it is fraught with challenges. Parents worry about their children’s wellbeing on campus. How do can students prepare for the prevalence of drugs and alcohol? What do we do to prevent our children from becoming victims (or perpetrators) of sexual violence? The Washington Post has a series of articles on these issues that I highly recommend. Here are five safety tips for students spelled out very clearly. Finally, NPR reported on some programs that teach students to proactively prevent sexual violence.

Students are always looking for internships and jobs. Here is a list of fifteen stories to prepare for a job or internship interview.

Did you know that, if college students go into certain fields, their college loans may be forgiven? This is certainly worth a little research and consideration when choosing a major.

Preparing for college can be overwhelming. Talking to friends and experts, speaking candidly with family, and utilizing your resources can make it more manageable.  If you have other good articles, please put the links in the comments section.

Finally, enjoy this process! It is a chance to plan and problem solve as a family. The preparations for college are an opportunity to get a good start on the bridge between childhood and adulthood. Whether this is an open discussion of finances and college costs, a laundry lesson, or agreeing about how much contact is enough, the college process opens up new discussions and can deepen and strengthen family relationships. Good luck! 

The Tale Tapes Turn Ten

It was often the worst of times. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities was the bear of Freshman English. Kids struggled. I struggled. It was long, complex, dense, and difficult.

In the winter of 2006, I had been teaching the novel for more than a decade. I had developed techniques that helped students understand and even come to love this very challenging novel. I always started on the second chapter and saved that famous opening for after they got to know Lucie, her father, Jarvis Lorry, and Miss Pross (but had not yet met Charles or Sydney). Breaking the plot into it smaller bite sized pieces made the story easier to follow. I enlarged the pages and put them on butcher-block paper so that we could reread together and share our annotations. It was work, but it worked.

The most important strategy was reading aloud. When we read together, we could ask questions, make connections, and use both our eyes and our ears. The lights went on the most when I read aloud and stopped every few sentences to explore and explain.

However, if we did this with the entire book, second semester would end in late July. The book was too long to read aloud in its entirety. So I chose carefully. I picked the most confusing chapters to read together. But it wasn’t enough.

When I finished my grades for first semester in the winter of 2006, I tried an experiment. I sat in front of my computer and began to record Dickens’ classic and include the type of comments and guidance that I used when we read aloud in class. I called these audio annotations.

If I had known the scale of this experiment then, I would have given up immediately. Since then, I have considered recording some of Shakespeare’s plays, Frankenstein, and a few other texts and never been able to climb that mountain again. I don’t know if I ever will. My ignorance of the scale of this project made it possible.

Two months before my students would even purchase the book, I sat in front of my computer, picked up a microphone, and started reading and explaining. I recorded the audio in iMovie because I didn’t know how to use anything else. I then converted it to mp3 format using a different program.  Many times I had to rerecord parts when the phone rang, I messed up, or one of my children can running into the room. It took a long time.

I would record when I had free time at home. Often, this was when my children were sleeping or otherwise occupied. After listening to the Tale recordings, my students always ask if someone in my house plays the clarinet. No, I told them, that was a beginning violinist! Others asked why I was typing as I talked. That wasn’t me, I tell them. My child was doing homework on the computer behind me. I took advantage of whatever free time I had.

By the time my students started reading Tale in late March, I had recorded the entire first book and half of the second book. I was stunned at how listening to my recordings changed their understanding. The conversations and activities in class were of a totally different nature than they had been before. Students came in feeling confident. They had a much more clear comprehension of the plot, characters, and even some of the complexities of the text. It was amazing and transformative. And the recordings were still not completed!

I was struggling to keep up. By the time we were at the end of the second book, I was only a few days ahead of my students’ reading schedule. In one of my regular meetings with my department chair, I told her that I would stop my recordings at the end of the second book and let them read the final book without me.

“You can’t do that, “ she told me. “You are training readers. Your recordings are helping them to practice the skills that strong readers use.” So I kept on recording until I had completed the entire book. When it  was all in the can (so to speak), there were almost eighteen hours of recorded Tale teaching.

Something else shocked and surprised me. Students shared the recordings with their friends. Suddenly, students who were not in my class were listening to me. I remember walking down the hall and seeing a student wearing earphones point to his ears and then point to me! It was a little unnerving.

Eventually, the entire Freshman English team embraced the recordings. They became a primary way that we helped students navigate this most challenging work of literature. Students I did not know talked to me about them in the halls. Parents (including my colleagues) joked about hearing my voice coming out of their children’s bedrooms! This year’s class is the eleventh group to use the recordings.

Reading together is powerful. Reading and exploring literature together is even more so.

At the end of this month, my freshmen will ride up Shooter's Hill with Jarvis Lorry and Jerry Cruncher. They will put on their headphones and, instead of pop music or game sounds, they will hear a discussion of British literature. Ten years later, these recordings still work wonders! Recording Tale was a far far better thing than I have ever done. It is far better teaching technique than I have ever known.

Don’t Reply All Rant

Don’t hit reply all. Don’t! Don’t! Don’t!

I’d like to tell you to never use reply all, but there may be legitimate reasons to reply all even if I can’t think of any of them. So consider my thesis to be: don’t use reply all ever!

While there may be a few times when replying to all is appropriate, I hereby give you permission to mess up by failing to reply all rather than replying to all inappropriately, which is far more likely.

It is like using effect as a verb. There are times when it is correct, but this occurs so rarely that using affect all the time is far less likely to get you in trouble. Reply all has that effect (which is not using effect as a verb).

Reply to the sender of the email only. S/he is the person who started the conversation in the first place. If the sender asks a question of ten people and they all hit reply all, you now have ten emails – and a possible reply from the sender to make number eleven. Just what you want - more emails!

What if each person sent a reply back to the sender and the sender sent a summary? Instead of ten emails, you have one. One. Only one. One that it is relevant to you. Do I really need to know that you can’t make the meeting because your daughter is getting her ears pierced or you are bringing gluten free doughnuts?

I know that some people can’t help themselves. Some are using phones with buttons so small that they hit the wrong choice. Some still get confused by the options. Some don’t understand the difference between reply and reply all. Some really want me to know that their spouse has strep.

There is an easy solution to this problem: When sending an email to a group of people, put the addresses in the BCC field. BCC stands for blind carbon copy. This means that those who receive the email cannot see the list of recipients, no matter how long. Putting the recipient list in the BCC field not only protects their privacy but also makes the email easier to read because it will not have the long list of addresses at the beginning, which is especially nice for those reading it on tiny screens. It also prevents anyone from using this list for other purposes. I love that people feel free to share my email address with large numbers of strangers.

If the long list is in the BCC field, the only person who will receive a reply is the sender, no matter how befuddled the recipient may be. No one’s email is shared at all! Problem solved.

Don’t use reply all. When sending emails to groups, put the list in the BCC field. Yes, you can leave the TO or CC fields blank, it will still send.

I will have to compose myself to write about group text messages, but we'll save that for another time. 

End of rant.

We Are Not Who We Were

Have you ever had a conversation with a distant family member who sees you occasionally and you realize that this person doesn’t really know you? They see you as who you were years ago. Their mental image of you has not kept up with the times.

This is a typical point of contention in families: as children grow and change, their parents and the other adults in their lives struggle to keep up, especially when the changes happen so quickly. However, children aren’t the only ones who change; we all keep growing.

I look back at my first years as a teacher, and I shake my head. I am amazed that I made it through! I am embarrassed by my mistakes, and I wonder what took me so long to figure things out. Sometimes, I look back at last week in the classroom and feel the same way.

One of the appeals of throwback Thursday is this embarrassment. We see the old photos and we are shocked! Yes, that is me, but it looks nothing like I am now  - on the outside.

I meet former students who have grown up, sometimes way up, and I struggle to see the person I knew years ago. Of course, they have changed physically, and as we talk, I am amazed and delighted by the wonderful people they have become. The person I knew has transformed into someone better.

Often, I beat myself up over stupid things I have done in the past. Sometimes, I am that distant relative who can’t see the older me. Maybe I am in denial, refusing to see the present me.  Maybe I get stuck.

It is easier to hang on to the past, clinging to the idea that our identities are static.  I don’t want to have to keep relearning and changing my views. I want people to be like the characters in books. My favorite characters are always in those pages. I know exactly what they will do. They are comfortingly predictable. Real people don’t work that way.

The reverse is true as well: I don’t want to let go of the negative feelings I had toward people in my past. I want to believe they are the same as when they hurt me long, long ago. Sometimes, those nasty people are still nasty. Sometimes, they have also changed and they, too, are embarrassed by their pasts. We don’t have to forget the past, but we shouldn’t imprint it on the present.   

When we see people daily or even just a few times a month, we don’t notice the changes. We adjust in such small increments that we are fooled into thinking nothing has changed. When we see people only occasionally or merely connect through Facebook, Instagram, or email, we are really conversing more with an old photograph than an old friend.

When my students visit, I need to get to know them again. We share a powerful past, but we haven’t shared much recently. Social media may provide the information, but those old anchors stay put. We have to take a new photo.

We are not who we were. I am not the person, teacher, husband, father, son, brother, friend, or relative I was years (or months) ago –and there big changes ahead.

Don’t Move Final Exams – Remove Them

When I asked my son how his first final exam went, he shook his head and told me, “I am done with it. I don’t remember anything.” While I hope this is not entirely true; he will have the second semester of that class to deal with, it is true that the trivia on final exams leaves kids’ brains as rapidly as they leave the room.

I just finished reading Most Likely To Succeed, which makes the argument that our content-based educational system is obsolete. The authors, Tony Wager and Ted Dintersmith, describe an experiment run by the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, “When students returned after summer vacation, they were asked to retake the final exam they had completed three months earlier. Actually, it was a simplified version of the final, as the faculty eliminated any detailed questions that students shouldn’t be expected to remember a few months later. The results were stunning. When students took the final in June, the average grade was a B+ (87%); when the simplified test was taken in September, the average grade was an F (58%)” (Wagner and Dintersmith).

If the material in finals often doesn’t stick with students and is often irrelevant to anything they will do in the future, why do we make them memorize this minutia and regurgitate it back?

As I greeted students in the hall after my first final this year, and I asked them how they felt about their first test, many told me that their teacher had already graded it! The finals session had ended less than twenty minutes ago. It would take me a week to finish grading all the writing my students did! If a teacher doesn’t have to think to grade the test, how important can it be?  While there are ways to make multiple-choice tests meaningful, students are studying facts, words, and other bits of information that they could easily look up on the supercomputers in their pockets!

Many teachers finish the quarter with large unit or chapter tests the week before finals and then test on the same content on the final exam. Why test twice? Why beat up a kid with a ton of material on Thursday only to test again for even higher stakes the following Tuesday? How much learning happened in those four days? Did they go over the first test in the meantime? It is double jeopardy.

Many teachers are still using a percentage based grading system which makes the cost of making mistakes high. In our school, almost all finals count for twenty percent of the semester grade. In my experience as a parent and a teacher, finals don’t help students’ grades at all. Either the final simply strengthens what they were already earning, or it hurts their grades – and for kids on the grade bubble, finals frequently push their grades down. One test! One big long test (that will not stick with them) is what makes the difference!  

Should one seventy-five-minute test be equal to four weeks of class experience? Should it count as much? Can we put what is really important, relevant, and meaningful into it and then grade it in five minutes?

My finals are skill based. My freshmen read a story and then write about it. They demonstrate the skills we have been working on all year long. Although I call it a “final,” it doesn’t count for any more than any other assignment. I use a standard based evaluation system in which students’ grades are based on their ability to demonstrate specific skills. I look at their most recent work in each skill area to determine their proficiency and to guide what we need to study together.

Recently, my department chair asked what we thought about moving finals before winter break. Many schools are doing this so kids do not have homework over the vacation. My response was that moving finals solves nothing. It gives the appearance that we are addressing issues of student stress and meaningful assessment, but we are in fact shuffling shells.

We need to change what we teach and how we teach it. We need to make assessment (and school) meaningful and relevant. Finals are an archaic and problematic practice. Simply stating that colleges do them and we must prepare our students is inadequate justification. If colleges are doing something that is not pedagogically sound, that doesn’t mean we should follow. High schools and colleges need to get out of the nineteenth century. The well-being of our children depends on it!