Literacy Now

The word “thesis” comes from Late Latin and Greek, meaning “a putting or setting down.” Even though “thesis” is a noun, it has the sense of completing an action, such as putting or setting down a heavy brick. In other words, a thesis statement has weight. It is the foundation upon which the rest of the essay is built. Every paragraph in the essay should relate back to the topic as “put down” in thesis statement.

It’s no wonder, then, that so many students struggle with how to craft a strong thesis statement. But a simple analogy—a night at the movies—can help demystify the role of the thesis statement in an essay or paper.

Start by giving your class the following scenario:

It’s the weekend, and the latest batch of blockbusters awaits. Time to check the movie listings, call your friends, and get ready for two hours of air-conditioned fun and frolic. You decide to see Thor, a fantasy flick that Moviefone describes like this:

Exiled to Earth after his arrogance fans the flame of an ancient conflict, the Mighty Thor of Asgard discovers the meaning of humility when a powerful old foe dispatches a destructive force to crush humanity.

Although you don’t know much about this hero, you figure from Moviefone’s description that the movie is going to be somewhere between The Lord of the Rings and Clash of the Titans. There’s sure to be teeth-grinding revenge, superhuman feats of strength, and lots of swordplay.

But what if, 15 minutes into the show, Thor turns out to be an animated Disney movie, or worse, a Scandinavian film with subtitles?

You just spent ten dollars on a ticket, not to mention shelling out fifteen bucks for popcorn, M & M’s, and a Dr. Pepper. You got there early and scaled countless steps searching for the perfect seats. All for what? This isn’t the movie you were promised.

Now, help your students make the connection: Just like the blurb about Thor in Moviefone, the thesis statement gives the reader an expectation of what will happen. If that expectation is not met, there will be angry moviegoers. Likewise, if the thesis statement fails to inform the reader as to what the essay is about, or states one thing but delivers another, there will be disappointed readers.

The thesis statement also makes a promise to the reader. Tell students that it’s their job to give readers their money’s worth by developing each point as promised. This is more easily accomplished with a well-crafted thesis statement.

Remind students that they can tell a lot by the “Coming Attractions” of a movie: who the stars are, what time period the movie takes place, a general idea of the plot, whether it’s a comedy or thriller. In the same way, a thesis statement sets forth a plan—it gives a “preview” of the essay’s major points.

Moviefone promises that Thor will “fan the flame of an ancient foe,” and “dispatch… a destructive force to crush humanity.” Students may not have heard of the Norse god of thunder, but thanks to the well-written blurb, they sure won’t be expecting Bambi.

Michelle Y. Green is an award-winning children’s book author and an adjunct professor of English at Prince George’s Community College, Largo, Maryland.



Teaching Tips: Dancing with the StarTs

Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up: Cooperative Pre-Writing

Corus Entertainment’s Kids Can Press has announced an initiative designed to inform children about the world and to help the children in one devastated part of it—Haiti. Kids Can Press will donate 50% of its profits from the sales in North America of This Child, Every Child: A Book About the World’s Children to ONEXONE, a nonprofit foundation committed to improving the lives of children.The donation will be used to deliver books to children in Haiti and will be distributed in a variety of ways, including donations to libraries at two new schools: L’École Nouvelle Zoranje and L’École Nouvelle Royal Caribbean.

This Child, Every Child, shows kids what life is really like for children across the globe. Using the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as a template to compare and contrast kid’s experiences and opportunities, author David J. Smith introduces young readers to the world beyond their own borders and reveals the challenges children face in obtaining adequate food, clean water, health care, education, and more. Smith, a leader in international education and author of the bestselling book If the World Were a Village, felt compelled to share with young readers the dramatic and sobering facts about children around the world. “These issues are not light or easy, but they affect millions of children,” says Smith.

“David’s books are emblematic of what we’re committed to do with the CitizenKid collection in terms of providing a foundation for children and families to learn about the world, explains Lisa Lyons, president of Kids Can Press. In addition to donating part of the profits from the sale of This Child, Every Child, Corus Entertainment's flagship kids network YTV will be supporting the initiative in Canada by donating advertising time on-air as well as online at YTV.com.

To learn more about the partners in this project, visit the websites of Kids Can Press, Corus Entertainment Inc., and ONEXONE.

It’s important to me to create a classroom community where students’ voices are integral to learning; this theme has appeared over and over in the literature I’ve been reading for my doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction, especially in the works of Geneva Gay, James Banks, and Christine Sleeter. And, because I strive to be a culturally responsive educator, much of what I do with my Kindergarten students centers on honoring their voices and giving more individualized focus to what they have to say.

I recently started a new format for writing that allows students to use conversation with a peer as a pre-writing planning strategy. You can easily implement this cooperative learning structure before writing tasks—and you’ll quickly discover it is eliminates the recurrent grumbles of “I don’t know what to write.” Additionally, it makes student voice an integral part of the writing process, which results in highly engaged students who are more prepared and excited to sit down and write.

Just before your students begin an independent writing task, use the Stand Up, Hand Up, Pair Up cooperative learning structure to help students find partners: First, all students stand up with one hand in the air as if ready to give someone a high five. Then each student should find someone else with their hand up and high five each other in order to form a partnership.

Once everyone has a partner and partners are seated together, pose a question to serve as a writing prompt. I try to come up with questions that are relevant to my students’ lives and easy for them to answer such as, “Who do you love and why?” or “If you had one wish, what would you wish for?”

(If you teach older students who are developing more extensive writing skills, you could also ask them to talk about what part of the writing process they plan to focus on during their writing time—revising something they’ve already started, editing for spelling errors, or creating a best copy for publishing.)

Facilitating time for students to talk about their writing before they actually write engages them in a planning thought process and interactive dialogue about writing. Occasionally ask partners to share what they heard from their partners in a whole-group format; this emphasizes the importance of being good listeners and paying close attention to what their partners say.

Once you have provided students even just a few minutes to engage in conversations about writing with their partners and facilitated an opportunity for students to share with the whole group, let them begin their independent writing while their ideas are still fresh!

The inclusion of this cooperative learning structure prior to writing provides students with a platform to develop their unique voices and have time to share their ideas with classmates. It also helps them prepare what they will write once they begin to work independently.

The time used to implement this strategy is well invested because students are prepared to begin writing as soon as they sit down to work. By asking questions they can answer based on their personal experiences, preferences, and personalities, students feel validated—and are therefore more motivated to write.

Katie Toppel is a kindergarten teacher at Durham Elementary in Oregon as well as a doctoral student at Portland State University. She has experience teaching in a bilingual preschool program for migrant families, teaching first grade, and teaching special education at the Franconian International School in Erlangen Germany. She is currently interested in pursuing research to explore how the use of scripted reading curricula fits together with culturally responsive instruction.



Engage: Teaching Tips

A sixth-grader, playing FINAL FANTASY on his Xbox 360, knows it’s unfair if his best friend cheats. An eighth-grade girl feels violated if her younger sister steals her password and broadcasts personal information on Facebook. Yet, when it comes to cutting and pasting someone else’s words from the Internet, and using those words as their own, students don’t give it a second thought. In today’s viral environment, students fail to understand why lifting a paragraph—or an entire paper—is such a big deal. And the really bad news is: It’s not just happening in college and high school anymore.

“We have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t have an author,” says Teresa Fishman, the director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University, South Carolina. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”

Plagiarism is nothing new. Dating from 1621, the Latin word “plagiarus” means “kidnapper, seducer, or plunderer.” In a sense, a student who plagiarizes is kidnapping the words and ideas of another. Experts cite various reasons why young students cheat, among them—cheating is easy; chances are they’ll never get caught; if they’re caught, the punishment is not severe. Most agree that plagiarism is a problem that won’t go away, but that doesn’t mean that teachers and schools aren’t fighting back.

White Station Middle School in Memphis, Tennessee, has developed a Plagiarism/Cheating Policy that is used school wide. In simple terms, the document explains plagiarism as:

Directly copying, paraphrasing without proper citation, using and failing to properly credit, recycling previously submitted work, and using artwork or pictures without proper citation.

The policy also states the consequences of plagiarism, which range from a meeting with the principal, guidance counselor, and parents to a 1-3 day home suspension and being barred from honor societies. Students and parents must not only read and sign individual “honor” statements, each must hand write the policy on page two of the document.

In 2009, a middle school technology class in Julian Charter School, in Southern California, created PowerPoint presentations on plagiarism using royalty-free graphics. Students added voiceover to their projects and uploaded them to the Web using Voicethread software. Students participating in the project also satisfied their National Educational Technology Standards.

The number of middle schools using digital plagiarism detectors, such as Turnitin , is on the rise. But budget-strapped school districts and overburdened teachers can ill afford such luxury. But as a teacher, there are things you can do:

• Don’t assume students understand what plagiarism is. Consider including a unit on plagiarism in your English/language arts class.
• Develop a plagiarism policy and honor code with student input. Establish clear guidelines and consequences.
• Go on the offensive. If you suspect a student of plagiarism, confront him or her. Teacher ambivalence is one reason why students cheat. “Why do the work if there’s a good chance I’ll never get caught?”
• Use search engines to check suspicious passages in a student’s work. Let students know upfront that you will be “sampling” their work.
• Know your students’ voices. If a marginal student suddenly waxes poetic in his or her book report, don’t let it go unchallenged.

From bootleg videos to illegal music download, students see the lines of ethics and honesty blur like those of a pencil with a pink eraser. The more we as educators create a climate of integrity, the better learners our students will be.

[NOTE: For a kid-friendly article on plagiarism, including an “An Anti-Plagiarism Checklist,” visit kidshealth.org.]

Michelle Y. Green is an award-winning children’s book author and an adjunct professor of English at Prince George’s Community College, Largo, Maryland.



THOR and the Thesis Statement

Pretend that you are going on a first date. You like the person and hope that the first date will lead to a positive long-term relationship. You spend hours getting ready, making sure that your clothes look good and that your hair is in place.

Your date knocks on the door and you open it. Before even saying hello, your date grabs you with both hands and attempts to thrust a tongue-jutting French kiss hard on your lips. You back off, aghast, as you realize that you do not know this person at all. You begin to wonder how you can opt out of this date and rid yourself of the maniacal French kisser.

The pressure of standards and accountability—initially at the state level, now with the Common Core—has turned some teachers into the academic equivalent of overly-aggressive, tongue-jutting, French kissers. Rather than try to interest students in a text by allowing them to “get to know” something about the topic and letting them “play around” with a new idea, they attack as if students are already interested and eager. Unfortunately, they are not.

A teacher’s interests, as well as a student’s interests, would be better served by romancing the topic. Recently, I worked with a teacher who wanted her students to read and analyze Edna St. Millay’s poem “Dirge without Music,” whose first verse is as follows:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Rather than jump immediately into teaching the poem or delving into a lecture on the characteristics of twentieth century poetry, she asked the class, “What happens to you when you die?”

After a few moments of silence, students began describing their conceptions of heaven and hell. One student in the classroom mentioned that three members of her family had technically “died,” and been brought back to life. She said that all three of her relatives had described death as a falling away from waves of bright, white light into utter darkness, followed by a rush of serene contentment.

photo: Carlos Porto via photopin cc

The extent to which the student was accurate in her descriptions of the near-death experiences of family members is superfluous. Soon, students began to run with the idea of the mysterious realms between life and death, and the entire class became engrossed in trying to figure out what poets had to say about heaven, hell, and the spaces in-between.

Next time you begin study on a new book, story, poem, or topic, remember to give students the time to “get to know” the topic first. The initial introduction is the first date in what will eventually be a life-long relationship between the student and the text. Don’t blow it by coming on too strong.

Lawrence Baines is a professor of English Education at The University of Oklahoma who has worked in over 350 schools. Baines is obsessed with the peculiar art of teaching writing to adolescents, and co-wrote the book Going Bohemian: How to Teach Writing Like You Mean It (published by IRA) with his buddy, Anthony Kunkel. Visit him on the web at www.lawrencebaines.com.



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