Borderland

update 2/27/06: Edited the URL to my students’ writing project so it points to a new domain I set up for them.

It’s been challenging ’round here the last several days with temperatures in the minus 40’s and predicted to get colder for several more days. Negative temperatures are not unusual this far north, and even the minus 40’s aren’t unexpected. Minus 40 degrees, though, is a kind of a benchmark for cold weather. It’s interesting to note that -40 degrees is the same temperature on both the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales.

Ice Fog
There are a few interesting things about weather this cold. For starters, you need a block heater and an oil pan heater, a battery blanket, and any other kind of heater you can plug into the truck engine. One thing that happens is that your tires go out of round when the vehicle is parked for several hours. When you get the rig going, you go bump, bump, bump, bump for a while until the tires “round out.” Ice fog forms in low-lying populated areas. Cold air has a very limited capacity to hold moisture, so all of the water vapor that comes from chimneys and tail pipes turns to fog and makes navigation in the car (when you can get it running) dicey. Visibility is estimated at Zero at the moment.

In the staff room today I mentioned a little demonstration I did with my students. We took a cup of water, hot from the microwave, outside, and threw it into the minus 40 degree air. None of the teachers had tried this. They all made predictions. I made a video with my little Canon A60 from the porch of my house 2 winters ago (It isn’t foggy on cold days out in the country where I live.) If you’re curious, you can see what happens at -38 degrees below zero. I’ve never tried posting a video, and there might be a better way to do it. If anyone has suggestions, please let me know.

Schoolishness
The town doesn’t shut down. It limps a little bit, but you’d never know it. We just work harder to cover the basics, and we groan when stuff starts to break. All of the technology we depend on is operating outside its design limits. Kids at school today were asking me if it ever gets too cold for school. I told them it doesn’t. The only day I remember school has been canceled because of cold was in 1992 when the ice fog got real thick and the buses stopped running (Don’t forget, I’m old. So I know about these things). It feels good to have a warm building to look out of even when you can’t see very far through the frozen fog. But we haven’t been able to send the kids out to recess for several days. It would be OK if everyone wore ALL of their warm clothes, but it would take the whole recess period to dress and undress. Missing recess is a hardship for elementary schools. Everyone spends the whole day together, and some of us are not always charming, I’ll admit.

We’re branching out, though. My classroom has a web presence now. My students have a web space to publish in, and we’re all excited. They haven’t all contributed yet, but some of them are really pumped, and they are busy writing at every opportunity. I wouldn’t say they’re blogging, because they aren’t reading other blogs, or expressing opinions, or doing “connected” kinds of things. They seem to be mostly interested in writing what I call kid fiction. Many of them want to use dialog, and tell stories with characters. I don’t think they’ve had a lot of experience writing for fun, and I’m letting them follow their instincts in a writers workshop structure. A few of them are leaving comments on one another’s pieces, and that is a power that I predict will become increasingly meaningful. I’ll be interested to see how their perceptions change over the rest of the year. I told them they could use “internet ID’s” for names, and they had a lot of fun choosing them. Parents signed releases for them to use their names, but I thought this might give them an added level of anonymity.

I have the attention of my school district on this because I requested district server space for the project, and they tell me they’re working on it, though I’ve waited now for several months. So I went ahead and hosted the project on the domain I use for Borderland. This “community writing project” is called Tell the Raven. I’ve used a Drupal configuration that allows me to moderate all of their writing and any comments that are posted. I plan to document the project details on the project itself, but so far I’ve only just begun to find my way around Drupal. I like the user management features because there’s a minimum of clicking around for me to see what’s going on. And I particularly like the fact that the kids can edit their own stuff, and when they do that, it gets kicked back into moderation. I’m using categories to organize their material, which will include reports, personal “blog-style” narratives, and fiction. There’s a book module that will work a little bit like a wiki, with versioning control that archives previous versions. I plan to have them post project-related material that we’ll organize into books.

A couple of days ago someone asked me what would happen with this project next year. This is an interesting question because it indicates a sincere desire on their part to have and maintain this expressive outlet. I told them that all of their writing would stay there for a long long time, and that my feeling was that they could keep publishing there until I didn’t have time to manage it. This is a problem that exists because I’m the only teacher at the school who understands anything about this. Part of the reason I want the site on a district server is to make it easy for other teachers to jump in as well. I’ve only showed it to a couple of folks. They look at it as something interesting, but technical and outside their grasp. Until this type of student publishing is recognized and legitimized by the school district administration, it will remain isolated and on project status for students. I can’t imagine how I’d be able to manage students who want to continue contributing after the year is over. But on the other hand, if I had a couple of strong and motivated writers who were willing to help out, an interesting community of practice might develop.

To reach back up to the top of this post and try to tie the whole thing together, which may be reaching too far, I’ll say that the climate for student online publishing here is cool and a little bit bumpy right now as I get things rolling. This is not unexpected, though, and there isn’t any resistance even though the path forward is foggy and unclear.

All kinds of basic computer skills are going to be taught. Today, for instance, the kids had to learn how to run two applications at once so they could copy and paste text from the web into a word-processing document that they can use for notes about a research topic. Last week I taught them about copy and paste. Most of them know very little about using a computer to do anything beyond clicking and scrolling. But we are warmed-up and rolling, making our way through that frozen fog. It’ll be summer before we know it, and we have a long way to go.