Yes, that’s our guy George and he is good with that gun, too good.  We get to watch him, step by step for almost every minute of the two hour flick, The American.  He is usually on his own, walking down lovely Italian streets, sleeping, eating in small bistros, looking over his shoulder, always.  He looks good, he lives in great places and we get to journey with him but his journey is that of a hit man.

In the opening scene, in a lovely cabin in the woods of Sweden, as the snow falls he shares a cabin with a gorgeous woman-friend, but their walk the next morning forces them back into the world and we are off balance with the George Clooney we usually love.  We can still love him but this is not our George.  This is George Clooney taking advantage of his star power to take on a role that will challenge him as an actor.  I appreciated his work but will others?  Hmmmm…. Maybe the Indie, foreign film audience- the audience who has patience to watch a character in his silence: walking the streets, eating, living on his own looking over his shoulder.

I am still thinking about this unglamorous picture of a hitman.

Great work George!  Thumbs up from me for your Mr. Butterfly.

Aunt Ida wasn’t my aunt by blood and I haven’t seen her in years, but like anyone who spent any time with her, it was clear that a blood connection was totally unnecessary to feel her warmth and compassion.

As a kid, I spent all my summers at my grandfather’s bungalow colony, Oakwood Cottages, just 7 miles outside our town and for some of those summer we were joined by  my cousin Howie’s family and members of his clan on his father’s side so I got to know his aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins very well.  It was exciting to get to know a clan because I didn’t have  a family clan.  My dad had one sister and my mom’s sister Gilda was the only one living in the United States. so it was exciting to watch and get to know this one.

Over time, Ida became the heart and center of this family.  For Passover, Chanukah, and Purim, Ida’s apartment in Brooklyn was the destination for her brother, sister their kids partners and then the next generation.

It’s been years since I’ve seen Ida, but I remember her kindness to me, but more important, what she meant to my cousin Howie and this family.  It was remarkable to be with everyone yesterday, supporting my cousins and their grown children and the clan beyond blood.

It was a hot day and a long car trip to Brooklyn for the funeral and then to Farmingdale, Long Island for the burial and then back home again but I’m so glad I was present to pay my respects for a life well lived. Ida had a room filled with family aching with loss.  Even in the heat of the day, as she stood at the burial spot no one moved to leave.  Lingering together, I wondered can this family find a new center?

Check out more Slices at Two Writing Teachers

Finished and inspired!
I am back Twittering with an National Writing Project community created in the month of July during annual Summer Institutes and at an NWP retreat in Austin, Texas.

As I was twittering around last week, I came to a  conversation about The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller.  I clicked around for  a few reviews and downloaded it to my iPad library and started reading last week on my gym’s Ellipse.  Once I began, I couldn’t stop thinking about how I supported my 8th graders as life-long readers  and what I might do now if I had still  a classroom to transform.

I might not have a classroom these days, but I do have a network of teachers to share the book with and what great timing, as teachers return to their schools open to new ideas.

I have The Book Whisperer to recommend.

In the early chapters Donalyn takes us through her initial efforts to pass on her passion for reading to her students through the traditional method of creating a novel unit packet for the whole class for a book she loves.  It bombs!  Donalyn, in shock, returns  to her drawing board, dipping into mentors like Lucy Calkins, Nancy Atwell and gradually lights turn on and slowly she revamps her approach to reading, moving to personal choice and a requirement of 40 books read for the year and as she moves she is willing to take us with her on this powerful journey of discovery.

And why am I not surprised that she is  a Writing Project Teacher Consultant from Texas!

As I finished her book yesterday, I wished we were meeting together to continue the conversation.  What happens next?  How does she move the rest of her school community along with her, if that’s possible? How did her work with the writing project inform her radical movement?

I wonder, who else is reading along with me???

Here’s some of her links:

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/book_whisperer/

http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2507

Just recently a Twitter buddy  mentioned the Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller  and I was interested, very interested.  There’s a lot of good whispering out there, remember the Horse Whisperer, and the Dog Whisperer?  A book whisperer, how perfect.

As I began to read about a  young 6th grade  teacher’s passion for her own reading life and her commitment to share that passion with her students, I was remembering my experience with 8th graders, when I hoped that I might inspire lifelong readers as well.

Donalyn shares her early efforts to create great unit packets for novels she loved.  But she fell on deaf ears until she started reading the works of Nancy Atwell, Lucy Calkins and Ralph Fletcher.

And slowly she took her own stab at reforming her curriculum by moving to personal student reading  to fuel student passions.  Every student was required to read forty books by the end of a school year. Kids reading during lunchtime, on the bus, at home..and everywhere. Reading the early chapters on my gym’s Nordic Track, my time flew as I moved deeper and deeper into Donalyn’s shift.

It’s August and I started remembering what it was like to begin thinking about how a fresh new year with a fresh new group of  8th  graders could be different, better than ever before.   For a moment, I started thinking about how I might have taken Donalyn with me, as I transformed my classroom beyond monthly books of free reading. I remembered reading Randy Bomer during the my first summer with the Hudson Valley Writing Project and taking him along with me into my classroom.

I wasn’t surprised when I discovered that Donalyn was  a Teacher Consultant from the North Star of Texas Writing Project  and that Paul Oh, from the National Writing Project  had written and published an article about her  on the NWP website.

I’m not going back into a classroom in September, but I will share this book with the teachers I know and work with.

Has anyone read The Book Whisperer and been inspired by Donalyn Miller?

First of all, we didn’t go with high expectations.  There wasn’t anything else around, even though I would have been happy to see The Kids are All Right for a second time instead, Tuvia needed something fresh and he had fond memories of Jenn in The Break Up and I had vague memories of her performance in The Good Girl so we were agreed on The Switch.

Jenn plays opposite Jason Bateman and I love watching him on the screen, especially after  Juno, so we were off to the movies yesterday.

Aniston plays successful single woman Cassie just turning 40, who loves her best friend, Wally (Jason) but because he can’t commit, they remain best friends. Cassie is losing patience  and is ready, more than ready to be a mom.  Now this is a serious issue.  Many women  face it today and the decision to be artificially inseminated is also a serious contemporary issue.

Too bad this movie handles both issues in a silly way.

Wally is invited to Jenn’s insemination party.  Her donor simplistically  played by Patrick Wilson is the star of the evening with his loving wife in attendance, but they are in it for the money.

Wally is miserable and just can’t get it together to put a stop to the event. Instead he gets drunk and in the bathroom grabs the donor seed from off its candle lit perch and drops it by accident in his drunken stupor.  He refills it with his own,   and proceeds to forget about the whole thing for the next seven years while Cassie is away from his life and NYC raising her/his son.

After 7 years she returns with her boy and conveniently both Wally and Cassie are still single and then the movie really kicks into a romance we all knew was coming.

I know, I know, I’ve  shared a lot of the plot with you, but trust me, if you opt to see it, it still won’t matter.  I haven’t  told you anything you won’t figure out in the first 10 minutes of the film and Jason Bateman and his pint sized version are worth seeing, but if you can wait, see it when it comes to the small screen.  I don’t think it’s worth $20.00, a babysitter and a box of popcorn.

Saturday morning, 11:45:

We sat outside the main theater at the Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York,  patiently waiting to claim our usual seats (row F, Left A and B)  for an early performance of Cairo Time staring  Patricia Clarkson and,  as bonus for holding Film Buff memberships, we would treated to a post movie Q & A with  the director, Rubba Nadda and Patricia,  interviewed by New York Times reviewer,Janet Maslin.

Okay, the lights dim, no ads, just one or two interesting trailers of coming attractions and then we begin, transported to Cairo and that’s where we remain for the next hour and 28 minutes.

I can’t say that I’m ready to jump on a plane and explore Cairo for myself,but Tuvia’s ready.  I was satisfied to walk with Juliet (Patricia Clarkson) as she takes us with her on an adventure.  I have seen many of Clarkson’s movies, but this one marks her  debut as the movie’s main star  and as we watch I can’t help but pull away a bit, anticipating our rare opportunity to listen to her talk about the experience.

Juliet, a lovely woman arrives ahead of her husband, Mark, anticipating a wonderful three-week vacation in Cairo as he finishes up his  official UN work in nearby Gaza, but at the airport she is met with a change in  plans. Mark’s former colleague, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), greets her with news that her husband is delayed and that  he will escort her to her hotel.

She is thrown off and we begin to get to know Juliet in her silences. We watch her for a good part of the movie dealing with this  news as a single, older woman in a very foreign city. She is without stable internet access and that further isolates her from her work and her grown kids back home. Her hotel is luxurious but it pales to the excitement of the street, but as a woman on her own she is unused to walking in the crowded streets followed by flocks of men and she logically reaches out to Tareq for help.  We are ready to meet Tareq in the comfort of his male cafe, dressed in traditional garb  now that we have been given the precious time necessary  to get to know Juliet in all her uncomfortable silence.

Tareq is as unique and as interesting as Juliet and as they get to know each other, we are walking right behind them, sharing their moments in Cairo.

As the movie concludes with Mark’s inevitable but abrupt arrival Juliet is forced to change her direction. We are with her and even as the credits start to roll we don’t want to leave her.  We want to know more!

The lights rise and we get to know more….

Janet Maslin introduces Rubba Nadda, writer-director of Cairo Time and lead, Patricia Clarkson. Rubba is a bubbly, 37 year old Arab-Canadian woman born of  Syrian-Palestinian parents and we now understand why this piece feels so authentic. We have a gifted young writer-director who is passionate about her words and about making them come alive on the screen.  She has taken a 5 year journey with her characters and understands them first-hand.  She and her sister have been able to  navigate their cast and crew around a city of 20 million people on a bare-bones budget and showcase great actors who signed on to a film without promise of big bucks but rather for a labor of love.

We leave the theater feeling fully treated to a meal and dessert with our greatest unspoken expectations met.

Sunday 4:30 Palisades Mall

We are ready for Eat, Pray, Love. Actually, I am more ready for it.  I’ve read the book and liked it a lot.  Not love, but strong like.  It’s a bit too  preachy in some spots,  but I took  the walk with Elizabeth Gilbert  on her path to self-awareness and it felt authentic.  I’m curious as to whether or not Julia Roberts and  her big budget Hollywood team led by Ryan Murphy director/screenwriter will  do with her work justice.  Gilbert  was not  a part of  screenwriting team and I always wonder why that doesn’t automatically happen.  Oh well, it’s hard to move away from Cairo Time and its total authenticity, but we do. I do.  Tuvia is just along for the ride, to keep me company, I’m sure.

The movie begins like the book. Liz (Julia) is moving away from her marriage and ends it to the surprise and disappointment of her husband. Further,after a brief affair  she decides to take off for a year for her life in New York to find her true self, deciding on three countries to explore.

She eats, really eats her way through Italy, with total abandon piling on the pounds as she learns Italian and develops  a great circle of friends to share her life and meals with.   I can’t tell if Julia really gained any weight but she is wearing looser clothes. I am with her during this first part of movie as I was with Gilbert as I read the book but now we move to India for part 2 of the travel odyssey.

Liz arrives at her guru’s ashram. So far, so good. The filming is on location and it’s a powerful shift from the lushness of Italy.  She meets up with Richard, a Texan yoga  played wonderfully by Richard Jenkins who calls her Groceries and uses his screen time to hit his character out of the park  and honestly,I’m believing Julia  too.  Richard takes her up to his favorite spot at the ashram and shares his ghosts with her, challenging her to deal with her own and she begins to leave behind her guilt at having walked out her marriage…

but she doesn’t go all the way. We don’t see her struggle.  I have the book’s narrative in my head to fill in the blanks, but for Tuvia the movie begins to feel superficial and inauthentic. Choices have been made and we move abruptly on to location #3, Bali and as much as  I’m ready to see Liz get to the love part it’s too soon.

The real Liz  takes her time to get to know the real women of Bali as she moves beyond the tourist stage into a deeper connection with the natives and finds her own rhythm as well.  She gets comfortable with  her Bali wiseman and her healer and  friend, Lani.  But there’s no time allowed during the  Hollywood filming for her personal exploration.  We need to get to the LOVE and sadly, as much as I love watching Javier Barden on the screen, his arrival is too abrupt and we don’t really get to see Liz come to her own epiphany.

So as I come to my last paragraph, I’m thinking about Juliet and her adventure with Tareq and wondering when we can get back to Cairo Time. And as for Eat, Pray, Love, I’m glad I have Gilbert’s version to fill in the movie blanks.

I  recently read a pair of articles in the   NY Times: Lesson Plan in Boston Schools:Don’t Go it Alone and Inexperienced Companies Chase U.S. School Funds and I’m thinking a lot about a conversation I had last week with my former student/friend Alison and her partner Sarah as I continue to dig into the latest wave in educational reform. After reading Diane Ravitch’s blistering attack in her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, against the federal approach to educational reform, the reality seems to support her work and my greatest fears.

Both young women, passionate and committed to teaching, began their careers  in at charter school led by a former teacher, who created a small community of young teachers who felt welcomed and supported.  As Alison, the theater/art teacher, prepared her students for a performance, her principal came to her with open arms offering her anything she needed. As her former director, I could relate to that need for administrative support and it was wonderful when a principal worked with you.

Both Sarah and Alison worked hard in their first years without a union behind them, but they were a part of a great community of teachers but when her first principal teacher left the school, he was replaced by a school manager, who rapidly destroyed the sense of community and demanded total control and obedience and the teacher and parent moral was destroyed with one fell blow and soon Alison was looking for a new job.  She found one in a public school in a tough section of Boston and without administrative and faculty support she was lost in an elective theater classroom. So it isn’t just Charter vs Public School in this educational war, but there’s a wind blowing through that’s creating serious insecurity in the teaching profession.

The Times articles support the need for educated administration and the need for teacher respect and support.  Teachers in the Boston public school system now can be moved from school to school each year at the whim of the system. So yes, there’s still some job security but under the pressure of  federal educational reform, the state’s Democratic Governor and legislature, to win Race to the Top funds sold our their teachers and their unions.

Now Alison will be teaching part-time in a small Catholic School in the fall and even though she has to suppliment her income with non-teaching part time jobs to she is looking forward to teaching art and directing theater because the school leadership and staff are welcoming her.  Sarah, a math teacher, has also left the charter school where they first met, for a brand new charter.  She will be making good money and so far the staff is just being hired so the jury is out as to how positive the experience will be.

In my 30 years,I spnet half my teaching career in a school with good to fair administrators and union leaders who didn’t care very much about education. They were working for teacher benefits.  But  the second half of my career was spent at Pearl River where serious teachers  led the union and worked cooperatively with some great, some good  and few fair administrators.  Our  staff was a good one.  Some great teachers, lots of good teachers, some fair and a few lazy ones.  The adminstrators were all former teachers and not managers. Many left a strong bond with the community and for the most part supported, the staff.

It was good to have a supportive administrator, colleagues on your wave length, and union leaders behind you.  As I think back to my teaching life, the world of my classroom was supported by the school community just outside the door.

Sadly, I worry that many dedicated teachers will be beaten down and forced to leave the profession or have to accept the will of the unedcated to keep their jobs. I’m worried.

If you check mine out you will notice that it’s filled with blogs. Yes, it does need weeding but I just keep adding more. What an eye-opener, discovering great blogs to read and leave commets on.

I used open my Google Reader and work from it. Lately, Facebook has taken its place.  That’s what I notice about using the web.  You change your online habits often but my heart on the web is my blog.

I did enjoy adding new blog links to my reader. I’m finding the online course approach great.  It’s fun to revisit the basics.

Bonnie

Stacey and Ruth are two young, innovative and passionate teachers who met during a course/conference (I’m not sure), but they live over 500 miles away from each other but they can share a blog easily on the web.  Here they offer daily posts about what they do with their students, what they find on other blogs, what they read and what they offer for teachers.

I met them through my friend Kevin, who maintains  an amazing blog that I would suggest.  I don’t see it on Shelley’s list: Kevin’s Meandering Mind.

Anyway, Stacy and Ruth offer an annual Slice of Life Challenge for the Month of March. I joined on a few years ago and wrote a slice of my life every day in March and linked my post to their blog and then I read blogs of other slicers and left comments.  Other slicers then did the same for me and over the month I got to know a group of bloggers, teachers mostly.  After that first March of slicing with the group of 10-15 regulars, I continued to post a Slice weekly, on Tuesdays, Mondays as well for a year as well- Memoir Mondays. It was great to write regularly, post, read and comment.  Many Slicers from that first March marathon continue to write and post and visit my blog and I return the visit.

Last November Stacey and Ruth and I met for breakfast during the November NWP/NCTE conferences in Philly and you know, our virtual connection was as real as meeting face-to-face. So yes, I am a blogger and proud of it!

* What do you notice about the genre of blog writing in general?

The world of blogging is eye-opening.  You have to do it, to get a sense of its value. Just recently I overheard a conversation about blogging from teachers who don’t blog and for them, blogging was My Space, with all the misunderstandings and fears of the web: drunken photos, silly writing.  For me the world of blogging is for serious writers and educators.  I have been away from twitter for a few months and recently, I clicked back into my account when I started getting to know my iPad and I started reading treats from the educational community I participate in and found wonderful educational resources again.  Yes, the web is filled with lots to learn.  Reading comes first as I click around the world of the web.

As I was reading around the blogs created by K12 Learning, I realized that I hadn’t responded to any specific articles on blogging so I clicked from Claire’s blog to Steve Hardagan’s article on blogging and read it again. I can shake my head, agreeing with everything he writes about the web:

http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/03/web-20-is-future-of-education.html

A New Publishing Revolution.

Everything Is Becoming Participative: I review movies, I comment on articles… I create multimodal pieces and share them.  I turn around and do the same for others.

The Age of Collaborator: Is there anything better than that?  I am working with great blogger/teachers on an online writing anthology.

An Explosion of Innovation.

And the article continues until we reach the end and here’s the best thing:

I’m particularly appreciative of all who devote their lives to education, and I hope this post has given you some food for thought. May I invite you to respond? Steve H.

* How is blog reading different from other types of reading? How is it similar?

I have been reading on a Kindle since they were introduced and I know read on an iPad and love the move.  So I am more than happy to read on the web as well. Sure I have a great library of books but I don’t read a book often anymore and my love of reading posts offers me something different as well.  I read lots of blog writers, mostly educators but I read political blogs- Politicol arrives every few hours in my email and I keep up to date.  I read Diane Ravitch’s tweets and her blog to keep updated on the educational reform issues that matter to me as an educator.

Reading on the web is now and again the comment element allows you to contribute your ideas to important conversations.

How is blog writing different from other types of writing? How is it similar?

We are all very busy and I think bloggers are sensitive about that.  Posts are revised and tightened. Bloggers realize that the web audience wants to read, comment and move on. I think that can be disturbing to writers who crave time for writing, revising, reflecting- the writing process and blogging is probably not the medium for that, although I often write a post early in the day and then return to it for a revision but it is a different medium. Comments are usually supportive and short. But I enjoy a well-written post and I take time to write a comment that reflects that.  I always leave a comment to support the writer.

* How does commenting contribute to the writing and meaning-making?

Commenting is a crucial key.  I read, I write, I comment and that makes my reading and writing public.
* How can blogging facilitate learning?

I learn from many web communities around the world.  That’s amazing!

Okay, now I need to get moving: coffee, exercise, guitar but I will be back.

I have to check in with my team. Team???? Are you out there?