A Muster of Faux Classroom Crows

More than just someone to watch over our accolades and team pictures.  (10/11/13)

Over the past five(!) years, I have purchased an artificial crow/raven to adorn my classroom each year. (Yes, crows and raven are NOT the same, but as birds, the two possess enough superficial similarities that I use the names synonymously--fortunately I am not an ornithology teacher.) At the conclusion of each school year, I remove them from the shelves, screens and unused, ancient tech around the room until the following August at which time they will each return to (slightly) different locations.

The crow chick perched on the 

deer skull is a recent addition. When 

it's previous perch, this was taken, 

the mounted television was removed, 

the small crow moved around before 

settling there. (9/1/15)

The first faux crow found it's way into our classroom in the same way most English literature teachers acquire them, as a prop for an October reading of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." In each successive year, however,  I have continued to acquire a new one during the Halloween decoration sales at local party supply stores. Nowadays, Halloween decorations are on sale in mid-August (along with Thanksgiving things!), hence this year's pre-school-purchase.

A morbid, and astute, reader may presuppose that the presence of a murder (or muster) suggests something "bad" is going to happen in this room. Though in Medieval time ravens would tend to congregate on the battlefield to feast on the corpses of the fallen, that depressing intention is not what's behind this style choice--at least not intentionally. Each new school year the presence of the artificial ravens in the classroom elicits a now familiar question from new students: "What's with all the birds/crows/ravens?"

As ours is an English classroom, I like to have some literature-based responses to the question of "why", ranging from the familiar to the esoteric (with secret hopes that during the course of our time together, the unusual will become more familiar). Just a few responses with a literary bent that I may offer during varying points int eh school year include:

As fate would have it, this freebie
poster was received in my school
mail today! (9/1/15)

• "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe: Most students are at least vaguely familiar with the poem if for no other reason than it's pop culture references in many a comedic television aside. For some, even those who've "read" it, the symbolism of the raven is often not so clear. Given the poem's close association with Halloween, they do understand it to be somehow dark or evil. Morbid, right?
• Did you know that good ol' Willy Shakes refers to the raven more often than to any other bird? In a number of William Shakespeare's works such as Othello and Macbeth (a play we will work with during the school year), the black bird makes an appearance. For example in Lady Macbeth's speech in Act I Scene V of Macbeth: "The Raven himself is hoarse/That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan/Under my battlements...".
• With any luck, we will be reading some excerpts from Keith Baines' translation of Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur this year, whcih allows for this connection: in Celtic mythology, ravens are often associated with warfare and the battleground (especially in Irish mythology). In Welsh mythology, ravens figure as the army of King Arthur's knight Owain. King Arthur's messianic return is an aspect of the legend of King Arthur, the mythical 6th-century British king. One recurrent aspect of Arthurian literature was the notion that he would one day return in the role of a messiah to save his people. Other less common concepts include the idea that Arthur was absent leading the Wild Hunt, or that he had been turned into a crow or raven.



Someone has to use the
ancient overhead--why not a
Raven? (10/11/13)

• A Feast for Crows by George R. R. Martin is the fourth of seven planned novels in the epic fantasy "A Song of Ice and Fire" series of novels. The words "crow" and "raven" play multiple roles throughout the series. The most obvious for those who have never read the books or seen the HBO show is the historical one suggested above: A Feast for Crows clearly suggests (though no surprise to fans) that this book will have a hefty headcount of dead to be eaten.  Also, in the Fire and Ice mythology, a "Crow" is the name given to those men who serve on the Wall, the immense ice structure which separates the northern border of the Seven Kingdoms from the lands beyond. Men of the Watch dress entirely in black, giving rise to the nickname "crows"--which is what the Free Folk commonly call them. Finally, characters uses ravens as messenger birds throughout the series. Additionally, the Three-eyed raven appears in Bran Stark's dreams to guide him on a quest. Interesting side note, I had not previously realized: The first name "Bram" is derived from a convergence of two separate etymological sources, one being an abbreviation of "Abraham", but the other being the Gaelic word "bran", meaning "raven". That Martin guy is clever!
• In the past my students and I have read and analyzed J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937), a novel chock full of inetersting tidbits about archettypes and etymology. This was also news to me, but really cool: Roäc is the leader of the Ravens of the Lonely Mountain. Roäc was the son of Carc, and as such "a descendant of those [ravens] that had remained on the hill even after Smaug had driven out their old allies, the Dwarves". Roäc is likely an onomatopoeic name. (Source: Tolkien Gateway)

Like good literature, I like to allow for a number of possible interpretations. For this particular artificial classroom muster, I choose to leave just "what" they mean, ambiguous, though surely those students who fail to put forth energy and effort will see them as circling their the fading life of their individual grades, and others will see them as delivers of a message of growth and learning that will allow them to reach new heights.

A panoramic view of a classroom surrounded by faux crows circa October 2013.

Courtyard Calls

Blue Jay on branches. (12/5/13)

Yesterday morning during class I had our classroom window slightly ajar (despite the protestations of a few students--it was after all almost 40°F out!). While entering attendance into the computer, I heard the familiar "jeer-jeer-jeer" of the Blue Jay just outside the window. Seizing the moment, I quickly took some photos of the two birds who briefly flitted about the trees and grass before heading over the wall of the courtyard. It has been so quiet this school year in the courtyard, almost any aviary chatter has been worth taking--though the occasional Mourning doves that peck about the pebbles in the early morning hours have been unusually quiet...

Blue Jay surveying the area. (12/5/13)

High School Courtyard Birding

An adult male American Robin (Turdus migratorius) relaxing among leaves
in the school courtyard. (11/5/13)

Two days ago, I became acutely aware that our feathered friends had begun returning to the school courtyard with a degree of regularity. Maybe it was the unusually warm temperatures. maybe they were simply seeking refuge in the enclosed courtyard from heavy winds. At nay rate, after a September and October with little birdsong or calls of any sort to speak of, things have picked up considerably since November begin. It was nice to have the occasional guest appearance by a Blue Jay during class, and to hear the sparrows playing in the overgrown bushes on the first floor. (All pictures posted here were taken from my second story classroom window.)

Such a beautiful Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) ... if only he'd come closer! (11/5/13)

Yet another adult male American Robin, this one hanging by
the unmaintained artificial watering hole. (11/5/13)

Idiom Fun: Hot As A What?!

Plastic bracelets from yesteryear; well, 2006 anyway. (9/15/13)

As a teacher in the upstate New York suburb of Greece, New York, and even furthermore a teacher at Greece Athena High School, most folks outside the region have a sense of where I live either by our presumed proximity to Buffalo (it's not that close) or as the school where the autistic student scored "all those threes" in 2006. While Jason McElwain's ESPY Award winning performance (and the incredible circumstances that made the story noteworthy in the first place) continues to be well documented, this post is about a little known corner of the "J-Mac"-verse that I was recently reminded of.

Upon returning from our most recent summer break, I was pleased to find that someone had anonymously gifted me with a unique present. While Jason and I have coached together the past few years (not basketball, but the high school sport that he earned his first athletic recognition as a student-athlete: cross-country running) I had only been part of the Athena school community for a few short months when the "J-Mac" story struck. I had just begun teaching on the building's third floor, which was at that point a separate (other than by name and location) middle school program. I wasn't at the game and I really didn't even get "it." At first.

In the days following the national exposure of his story, all types of t-shirts and memorabilia became common in the school halls, most notably two items with competing J-Macisms: a t-shirt imploring folks to "Stay Focused!" and black and gold (the school's colors) with a secondary phrase which for many outside the Greece community has been lost to the sands of time, "Hot as a Pistol!"

The anonymous gift I received at the start of this school year was an unwrapped black wristband which on one side was impressed in bold gold lettering "Greece Athena Trojans." On the opposing side was the phrase "Hot as a Pistol!" with an illustration of a basketball right of the lettering and a small handgun to the left. You read correctly: a small handgun.

Beyond my appreciation for the many great athletic accomplishments of our school's current and past student-athlete's, I am also a member of the English department, and as such, enjoy the wordplay of interesting (if not necessarily well-turned) idiom. The choice of that particular idiom on a celebratory bracelet such as this to be sold in a school is unusual, especially given its use of a phrase that reflects gun use and includes firearm imagery. The fact that a bracelet with this idiom was distributed at all  recalls "gentler" times(?) when fire arms idioms were not seen in such poor light. Of course, in our current climate, given the horrendous spate of national gun violence tragedies in school settings, a bracelet such as this would never see the light of day.

So just where does the phrase "hot as a pistol" come from? All idioms come from somewhere after all...

Most assuredly, Jason innocently used the phrase to reflect how "on target" he was on the basketball court that evening. He did after all make successive three point shots. Country legend George Jones once famously sang the Gary Lee Gentry lyrics that "Lord, she was 'hotter than a two dollar pistol'" which has a very different connotation. In both cases being "hot as a pistol" is a decidedly positive state to be in. The irony here is that in the past being "hot as a pistol", two dollar or otherwise, was actually not a good thing.

I would imagine that initially the idiom was intended to reflect the poor quality of an inexpensive (two dollar) pistol. Being "cheap" (and small), an inexpensive pistol is likely to yield significantly higher chamber pressures (hotter) than a more costly counterpart. Additionally, a cheap firearm is made of lesser quality materials, and will heat up quickly when fired; cheap metal doesn't conduct heat as well as heavier, more expensive metal. Being hot as pistol may have been a phrase turned to suggest something that, when used, was revealed to be of a lesser quality.

More modern translations, however, are more in line with J-Mac's intent. One online slang dictionary defines a "pistol" as "a person who is bright, quick, or energetic," for example in phrases such as hot as a pistol. Interestingly this new detonation of the noun pistol does dissipate the gun connotation from the phrase making it somewhat less insensitive. Of course, the gun graphic beside the quote on the bracelet reinforces the less desirable connotation, reinforcing the original (less positive) gun motif.  

Also lost to time is the side note, confirmed on Wikipedia, that Jason's Speech/Language Pathologist throughout high school, who was in attendance that night, later assisted him in "coin(ing) alternative language expressions to his now-famous 'hot as a pistol' phrase." One can only guess at what additional phrases were never given credence by making their way onto tee shirts and bracelets, but thankfully, the hot as an idiom has done nothing the diminish the overwhelmingly inspirational message of McElwain's feat.

The fantastic good news is, that either in the past or present, that amazing Youtube footage, and the cultural icon it led to, has not lost its very positive connotation.

Jason McElwain (J-Mac) and I coaching at the 2012 Section V X-C Championship.

Sources:
http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-152405.html
http://dictionary.reference.com/idioms/pistol
J-Mac's ESPN story

Why Flash Rhetoric Cards?

As a teacher, I realize each June that there is always something I can do to improve upon the quality of my instruction. Often these epiphanies do not result from personal reflection, but from the responses students give me on the blind surveys I periodically ask them to complete. The purpose of these surveys is to help me do a better job helping them, and this often has to do with tweaking existing processes or procedures so that they are more effective.

For many years now, I have required my Advanced Placement Language and Composition students to maintain a deck of flashcards which I call "Rhetoric Cards." This is by no means an original idea of mine, except that (at least initially) some students resist the task as they deem it elementary--at least in the context of a high school English class (his practice is very familiar to them in their foreign language studies). Once they poo-poo this strategy, I remind them that the purpose of the cards is not to promote the rote memorization of every vocabulary word but to have a tactile resource for relevant Tier 3 terminology at their disposal when reading or analysing text that they can go through. Given the thousand possible rhetoric terms that may turn up on the exam, I have chosen to focus on 100-120 that are most likely to occur or that (minimally) provide them the best opportunity to eliminate possible answer on multiple choice questions.

In my classes, we use the Rhetoric Deck as a tool for learning important Tier 3 terms. Tier 3 vocabulary consists of low-frequency words that occur in specific domains. Domains include subjects in school, hobbies, occupations, geographic regions, technology, weather, etc. Generally these terms and concepts are introduced when a specific need arises, such as learning "amino acid" during a chemistry lesson, or "litotes" in the study of rhetoric. Some common examples of the terms I required students to define and "card" during summer (in concert with reading Thank You for Arguing by Jay Heinrichs) include antithesis, tautology and decorum.

My epiphany around Rhetoric Card usage came when, last June, a few students suggested that the cards had a diminished value as the year progressed. While this can be seen as a positive (as students internalize the definition and application of the term/concept, they need the cards as a resource less), I was reminded that there are some students who never caught on to the task meaningfully in the first place. That is to say, some students failed in September to begin a deck and consequently never kept adding concepts and ideas as the class (and better students) progressed. In effort to maximize the potential value of this activity, I am committing this coming school year to insuring that I check them more frequently early on, and that as we move through the curriculum students and I physically interact with the cards more regularly through some term chunking and kinesthetic organizing.

Some interesting related articles:

• Are Flashcards an Effective Learning Tool? [Infographic]
• Highlighting Is a Waste of Time: The Best and Worst Learning Techniques by Annie Murphy Paul, TIME, January 9, 2013.

Catching Up in the Courtyard

Not quite the Garden of Earthly Delights, but a worthy natural distraction during a busy school day. (5/9/13)

Any number of times during the course of the school day I'll peek out the classroom window to see what aviary activity may be taking place. Any number of slight environmental factors (whether the lawn is cut, the state of the small artificial pond, if students are out there taking the course I affectionately call "Raking Class") can impact what may be gliding in for a rest. As the name would suggest, our school courtyard is an enclosed area that is somehow populated with any number of types of birds who find their way over the three story square building and onto this small patch of green.


Given the greenery of the courtyard, even the muted red of the Northern Cardinal stands out. (5/9/13)

Last week while teaching class I couldn't help but notice a small, brightly colored male Northern Cardinal briefly flitting around the courtyard at school. The bird captured in both images is the same one, though it's sharp color was much clearly captured in the one above. I am quick to notice colorful birds such as this one as they are not as common here as the more ubiquitous American Robin or the occasional .

Slightly different angle and lens results in more brightly captured red coat. (5/9/13)

In these pictures, the lawn is rather long (it was freshly cut a few days later) and and industrious American Robin can be seen in the images below collecting grass for nest building. I haven't had the opportunity to get down to ground zero to search for its location, but I suspect he is building for the summer. Robins are extremely common regionally, and this type of behavior in my backyard usually means a nest is going up in a nearby bush or soffet.

Just left of center, Robin looks for suitable building material (5/9/13)

The following day, (presumably) the same bird could be seen in roughly the same location scratching and pulling at dead grass and leaves. It occurs to me that any nest that is under construction may be taken down by school maintenance staff, or Raking Class, especially if any nest location is exposed. Reckon it's time to escape the "ivory tower" environs of my second story classroom and look around the courtyard for myself.

Robin certainly is enamored of that shadowy area just beneath the shrub's branches. (5/9/13)

Of Ducklings, Plastic Owls & Workplace Weirdness

Yesterday afternoon, a flurry of e-mails were sent in my school building, none of which (seemingly related to the business of education, but did (whether folks realized it or not) shed some light on where folks “stand.” If you’ll recall, last week I wrote briefly about the artificial pond outside my second story classroom window and the two ducks I observed floating therein. A day later (though I did not post about it) I noticed that there were some ducklings running around… apparently, someone had laid eggs which in turn had hatched.

This event precipitated the following “cold” e-mail to all staff:

Good Afternoon,

First let me say, this is not a joke, so please don't send back mean, sarcastic emails, no matter how much you may want too. (you know who are!!)

The crows in the courtyard have already eaten 6 baby ducks. There are 2 more mommy ducks sitting on nests with eggs close to hatching. We would like to see all of them survive.

If anyone has Owl statues, or something similar, please consider bringing them in and placing them in the courtyard to scare away the crows.

Thank you for any help you can give. (and no, I'm not nuts, I just like baby ducks).

The e-mail was signed by one of the unassuming professionals who work in the office, not one of the teachers. I felt it was a sincere plea… and in truth, who would such a small request “hurting”? Bottom line, while I was unlikely to bring an owl in, though I would if I had one, this person cared enough to open themselves up to ridicule, so why not leave it alone and let those who can (and want to) help do so?

Of course, this being the “real” world, things are never that simple…