Rounding the Corner to See 'Here's Where We At: Basquiat' Took Me By Surprise: End of the Semester, Already?

I didn't see it coming.

The last class, that is, where I am finished leading the charges, right before they do presentations and attend workshops for their final projects. It's hard for me to believe that midway this semester we all had to jump online (even if I did have potential ZOOM class listed on my syllabi for most dates in the spring because of speaking engagements and conflicts. I wanted students to know that there might be dates that we wouldn't be meeting face-to-face and have to be online).

Um, who would have guessed it would become mandated for almost half the semester? When I saw it was a last class for me, I asked, "Where we at?" which invoked Basquiat, so I chose that as my theme for the evening (all to the joy of Ish-iat, the child prodigy who is making art down the street). Basquiat's art served as the evening's backdrop.

In The Literate Learner: Developing Readers in Middle and Secondary Schools, content area teaches read about best practices for teaching reading, interview adolescent readers, and design reading instruction that marries the research and what they learn from youth. My gig is this: research is good and all, but the best way to figure out what one should do next as a reading teacher is to get to know the kids. Hence, I assigned an adolescent interview and an analysis of what the kids told  them. From there, they act like doctors, and using other course readings justify a redesign of three specific reading lessons they can offer that addresses the reading habits reported to them by the teen They have to include the play-by-play, the resources, the supplemental materials, the hand-outs, the questions, and the pacing. They also have to justify every choice they make. It's one of my favorite courses to teach because I took to heart that listening to youth is best practice when I did my doctoral research at Syracuse.

With my promotion of EALs and students with disabilities, too, I also engaged students with a series of reading activities to remind them that English is very difficult. We did a few slides before building up to Gerard Nolst Trenité's "The Chaos" poem and we watched some of Harry Baker's Spoken Word pieces, including "Paper People" (see below).

Why? We're all in this alphabet soup together trying to find meaning and understanding and knowledge and safety and hope and wonder and aid and entertainment. Accessing this at its core is a language issue, and English is not easy. I want my AP Lang/AP English teachers to realize what they do is brilliant, but so is the every day work of TESOL educator offering first words to a student and special education teachers who work one-one-one addressing the needs of their students.

All language is miraculous and helping others to fall in love with it is the greatest career an individual can have. The best teachers are artists. The best communicators (performers/writers/dreamers) are those that see the magic in words. Building lifelong readers is a promotion of language: its complexities, its variations, its annoyances, the sounds, and the clever ways we can rearrange it to showcase its beauty.