Success Story: Marius "Mimi" Kothor

Via Mary Ann Zehr at Education Week, I came across the story of Marius "Mimi" Kothor, who arrived in the U.S. as a refugee from her native Togo at age 10 and is about to graduate with honors from high school. If you're looking for a pick-me-up, this should do the trick.

I like these comments from Zehr:

What's interesting to me about the story is how it took a very long time—until high school—for Kothor to find her educational stride. More than a year after her arrival, Ellingwood said she was shy and seemed depressed and some teachers suspected she had a learning disability. Over time, she was able to catch up with her peers and excelled as a student. She didn't have a learning disability.

What struck me was the influence of Lyne Ellingwood, an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher assigned to Mimi. Ellingwood refused to believe that there was something wrong with Mimi that hindered her learning, as others asserted.

Ellingwood, meanwhile, took Mimi's education personally. She enrolled her in special weekend English clinics at Nazareth College, found a way to make payments and drove the little girl to her intensive lessons.

Mimi had two things that all struggling students need: a tireless advocate and plenty of time. You will enjoy the news story and Ms. Zehr's blog post, with a lengthy comment by Ellingwood herself.

The Scripps National Spelling Bee: You Are Dumber Than a Fifth Grader

Kavya Shivshankar, a 13-year-old girl from Kansas, won the 2009 Scripps Spelling Bee last week, becoming the seventh Indian-American student to win the competition in the last ten years. CBS News won't let me embed their video of an interview with Ms. Shivshankar, but you can click here to watch it.

Balu Natarajan, the 1985 National Spelling Bee chamption, tells NPR that spelling competitors today seem far more "deliberate" and "scientific" than the competitors of his era. When asked why so many Americans of Indian descent seem to win the competition, he says it is mostly a matter of hard work, but adds:

"There certainly is some contribution from other entities. There is a foundation called the North South Foundation that serves the South Asian community and they have been holding spelling bees since 1993. It initially started as a means of raising funds for kids who needed education in India and that has turned into quite the training and breeding ground. There are a lot of kids who have done well in those contests who have then gone on to the national competition and some of them have gone on to win."

Let's hope the difficulty of Scripps Spelling Bee words can be taken as a sign of our society's overall literacy: Natarajan won in 1985 by spelling milieu; Shivshankar had to spell laodicean this year.

Bonus: My all-time favorite Scripps Spelling Bee Moment. A clutch performance if there ever was one!

(Picture: Spelling Bee Trophy by "litlnemo" on Flickr. CC This is not the Scripps trophy, but the Seattle Spelling Bee prize from 1979.)

Exploring Curriki

Anna at Literacy is Priceless is urging her readers to try out the Curriki Scavenger Hunt.
That's a little too structured for me, but I have been meaning for some time to check this site out, so I thought I'd poke around the site for a few minutes and share what I found.

About Curriki
Curriki derives its name from the words "curriculum" and "wiki," the latter being the software that is changing the way the internet is used by allowing more "readers" to become "writers." Wikipedia is perhaps the archetypal wiki site. Curriki is a non-profit corporation started by Sun Microsystems with a stated goal of supporting "the development and free distribution of world-class educational materials to anyone who needs them."

My Mission
My goal is to find an activity I can use during my next lesson with Alexi, a strikingly bright and entirely uninterested student that I work with two days a week. I've been working with him on recognizing main ideas in pieces of writing. He will talk to me without end about how little he cares for school; I figure he might as well be able to construct a proper argument for it. (Alexi is pseudonym).

Results
It takes me less than five minutes to create a free account. I click the "Find" link on the left sidebar and choose the Advanced Search option, which allows you to specify the subject, grade level, language, etc. I type in "main idea" and check a few boxes and, within seconds, I am looking at this big unit on persuasive writing contributed by Andrea Chen.

On her profile page, I learn that Ms. Chen is a High School English teacher at the New Orleans Charter for Science and Math High School. This looks like a well-thought out unit plan. The massive block of text is a little daunting, though that isn't Ms. Chen's fault. Curriki ought to allow contributors to split these up into smaller segments.

But I have already found plenty of things I can use, such the "Vocabulary: Discussing the Art of Persuasion" lesson plan, which you can find by scrolling down about two screens into the unit. I can download the whole document and use it as I see fit. Thanks, Andrea!

Featured Resources
Curriki submissions can be rated and commented on by users, and some of the top rated materials are featured here. Just glancing at these, I find the following:

• A great little poem to help students remember subtraction rules. By April Eckert
• Mr. Harpine's Article Reaction Assignment. This looks like a good way to get students used to the process of writing about what they read. I might change a few things, so I download it to modify later.
• A very thoughtfully-designed unit on Teaching Satire in High School designed by Sarah Lorntson from Mahtomedi, Minnesota.

Conclusion
I get the feeling I could get delightfully lost looking through Curriki lesson plans and units. This is already a phenomenal resource, and I am very hopeful about what sites like this will do for education as they evolve. Not long ago, lesson plans were shared only in books and seminars and by word of mouth. Curriki allows teachers to conduct searches for resources, keep and modify them, discuss them with others, and add their own. Hallelujah!

I will keep you posted on my use of Curriki as I learn more. Please let me know if you have had success with Curriki or another site of its kind.

If you like this, check out Read Write Think, another great online lesson plan finder.

TED Talks for Teachers

A person can find their way to TED.com and stay for hours and hours. TED stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, and it was started in 1984 as a conference that brought people in those fields together. In the years since, it has become a symposium for all kinds of great ideas. The site features hundreds of "talks," presentations by great thinkers and experts in all kinds of fields.

Take a look at three great examples, and let me know if you find other great ones (and you will).

Jay Walker on the world's English Mania
"Mathematics is the language of science, music is the language of emotion, and now English is becoming the language of problem solving."




David Merrill Demos Siftables
"One of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people instructions. All I have to say is, 'Make words' and they know exactly what to do."



Ken Robinson Says Schools Kill Creativity
"My contention is the creativity now in education is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."

Clippings:5.26.09

The New York Times says the economic downturn is putting new stress on libraries.

Class sets of the comic book, "Barack the Barbarian: Quest for the Treasure of Stimuli #1" are available for pre-order.

Writing on the I.N.K. blog, children's writer David Elliott calls into question the line between fiction and nonfiction in this amusing memoir.

At the MacMillan Dictionary Blog, Gwyenth Fox says maybe we should just do away with apostrophes.

The English Business Letter Generator exemplifies the Internet's capacity for automation.

And David Warlick discusses The 21st Century Skills Incentive Fund Act.

(Picture: "Ann Arbor Library: Pittsfield Branch" by jhoweaa - CC.)

The Best So Far - 3 Months & 16 Days of Literacy Log

Welcome to Literacy Log! I took a little break for finals week and memorial day, but I'm ready to resume the literacy-related awesomeness. This week, I'm going to be adding new strategies, web resources, and perhaps some of my own teaching stories. I thought I'd start off with some of Literacy Log's Highlights so far.

• Wordle is Amazing. Pretty much everyone who knows me has heard me extoll the virtues of Wordle.net, a site that lets you make visualizations of text. Here's my favorite way to use it in the classroom so far.
• 826 Valencia - A Community-Based Literacy Solution. Pulitzer Prize-winner Dave Eggers shows off his ingenious strategy to provide opportunities for one-on-one writing help to students. If you don't love this video, I'll eat my hat!
  
• Word Ahead Vocabulary Videos. This one seems to have gotten the best response so far. This is a great web resource for vocabulary building.
  
• Clay Burell - Literacy Redefined. Burell writes a thought-provoking blog on the Change.org network. Here, I discuss a couple of his posts that call into question the conventional definition of literacy using the brilliant Muhammed Ali as an example.
  

Amazing Ads on Google: 5.26.09

I am a Google addict, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. Like millions of others, I started using using Google's search engine years ago, converted my email to Gmail in recent years, and have since become a regular user of Google Documents, Google Calendar, and Google Maps. Oh, and Google's Blogger, which I use to write this blog.

Google makes it's living off of advertisements, but I try to ignore them. Ads on Google pages are nondescript and small. They are also targeted specifically at the user. I find this a bit disconcerting, but the immense utility and coolness of Google's software makes it well worth the discomfort.

I have also discovered that these ads can be strange, hilarious, and revealing. So, this is the beginning of an untitled (for now) series wherein I will post the best ads I see as I'm using Gmail. This is not necessarily literacy-related in any way, but I think these ads can tell us a lot about ourselves. Or perhaps they say something about me, to whom they are targeted. I kind of hope not...

5.26.09

Pick Up Girls at Work
5 Things to do in 10 Minutes. Make Her Want You Instantly.
DavidDeAngelo.com/PickUpLines

What Is Your Self-Worth?
Learn to Connect With Your Inner Voice, Discover your Self-Worth? www.WhatisYourSelfWorth.com

Wake Up and Think
Take Your Life to The Next Level. Lessons from The American Monk.
www.TheAmericanMonk.com

Twitegy: Twitter Strategy
World's only Twitter-only Agency Social Media Marketing Done Right
www.Twitegy.com

And my personal favorite, which appeared beside an email from my fiance, Katie...
Katie Photos
Find Katie Couric Leg Photos at Great Prices.
www.Pronto.com