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Volume VII, Issue No.4
Reading
Journals:
Dear Jen, Right now I am reading Salamandastron by Brian Jacques. I really like how he writes, switching from one thing to another so he keeps you on the edge of your seat. Most times there are three or four things happening at once. You see, he starts with just two main places, like Redwall and Salamandastron. Then he branches out from there because people go on quests. When I read this piece from one of my studentsi reading journals, I was excited about her understanding of the book she was reading. I looked forward to future conversations with her about how authors create their stories and how I could connect her observations to her own writing. This single passage gave me information about her as a reader, and gave me information about how I might push her further. More and more, I was seeing the value of reading journals to the culture of my classroom. Reading has always played a big role in my life. As a teacher, my goal for my students is to instill in them a lifelong love of reading. Over the years, I have watched and participated in the debate over whole language vs. phonics. I have taught in schools leaning heavily one way or the other. I have felt frustration because the debate was false in many ways. Students need skills and strategies to help them decode the written word, and they need meaningful and real experiences with literature. There are many opportunities to put a name on a skill or strategy that will help students become literate. At the same time, merely naming skills does nothing to help students become readers or enjoy reading. Over the past three years teaching third and fourth grade at the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning in Denver, Colorado, I have tried to find ways to integrate meaningful instruction and experiences together. I was interested in improving my instruction with reading and keeping my classroom rich with discussions and writing about good literature. Last year, some colleagues and I formed a book club around Ellin Keeneis and Susan Zimmermanis book, Mosaic of Thought. This book offered some insights into what literacy instruction looks like in a language and text environment. We were excited by the literacy strategies and how they gave us a common language for literacy instruction that crossed grade levels. We had kindergarten to high school teachers involved in this book club. This book provided a wonderful forum for us to discuss literacy practices. We were able to try out the reading strategies outlined in the book and share our findings with each other. The group continues to be a great source of support for me.
After being involved in the book club, I decided to adapt and use Mosaicis strategies to help improve my literacy instruction. In my classroom, I wanted my students to write and discuss their thoughts about literature. The strategies helped me to focus my studentsi writing and conversations about literature.
Over the years, I have tried many different methods to keep track of what my students were reading outside of class. I tried reading logs, reading charts, and a variety of other formats. I was wholly unsatisfied with each of them. I continued to go back to my purpose for wanting to know what my students were reading outside of class. I did want to know what they were reading, and I wanted them to read at home each night. However, this was only part of it. I just could not seem to get to what I was looking for. The methods I had used so far made me feel like a police officer for their reading habits. I hated that. I also hated the fact that I never knew what to do with the information students gave me about what they were reading. It all seemed very meaningless to me and I was frustrated. I wanted to know what my students were reading at home because I wanted to instill the love of reading. It was painfully clear that simply writing down what they were reading at home was not the way to do it.
I was about to give up when I decided this year to try reading journals one more time. This time, however, I designed a format for the students to write about their reading. I wanted to connect it to the strategies I was teaching in all of my other literacy instruction. I was trying to create a common language for talking about books with my students.
I developed a framework based on Mosaic that helps scaffold studentsi thinking about what they are reading and pushes them to think more deeply. It is written as a key that they use to structure and guide their writing. The key includes:
The key also includes connections that I want the students to think about:
My students write in reading journals once a week about the books they are reading at home. They write as if they are writing me a letter. Each week, I respond with a letter of my own. In this letter, I ask questions about what they are thinking, about strategies they may or may not be using, and about how they feel as a reader. Through journals, we have good conversations about good books. Instead of "one more thing" I have to do, I look forward to reading and responding in my studentsi journals. They have become a wonderful, intimate communication with my students that has helped foster a love of reading. They have also become one of the best ways that I have found to support and challenge all of my students with their reading—regardless of their reading ability.
When I first started the reading journals, I was concerned that I would have to read all the books that my students were reading. I wondered how I would be able to respond to a book I did not know anything about. I found out, as we went along, that not reading the books my students were reading was not a disadvantage at all. In fact, it opened up many more opportunities for rich conversation with my students. The fact that I did not know a book gave me the opportunity to ask questions about the book that went beyond simple comprehension and toward thinking about authorsi craft.
For example, I asked one of my students, who had been reading several the Animorphs books, what was so good about them. I wanted to know why he was reading so many.
I asked: "So tell me, if the Animorphs have the same formula—by formula I mean they have a certain similarity in plot, characters, problems, etc. . . . what makes it interesting to read more than one?"
He responded: "They are formula books, but it is better to read more than one because you know more about the BIG plot, but not much about the little plot. You know enough about the BIG plot to understand the little plot. To understand it more, Jen, read it!"
Not knowing about these books gave me the opportunity to probe his thinking about them in general. We have gone on to talk about comparisons between other authors of series. We have also talked about what he thinks is good writing in books.
As I read a progression of my studentsi writing about the books they are reading at home, I can get a good idea of what strategies are working for them. One student, when writing about Matilda, by Roald Dahl, wrote using the key:
"In I think that it is important that Matilda reads and is smart and she makes her mom and dad crazy. V: I make a picture in my mind about when the Trunchbull is whipping people or should I say children. Q: Does Matilda have magic in this book?"
Journals allow me to ask her questions about this book, and give me a good picture of how her reading is going at home. I can read predictions one week and inquire about whether they came true or not a few weeks later.
Sometimes reading journals allows me an opportunity to help with a simple problem that a student may not be willing to share in another context. For example, in one struggling studentis journal, I asked her how she felt her reading was coming along. She responded: "Dear Jen, I feel comfortable, but I keep losing my space when I read and that gets on my nerves."
The next week, I suggested that instead of her finger, she use a bookmark to keep track. When she turned her journal in again, I asked her if she was still having trouble holding her place.
She responded: "Good because I have a bookmark. I donit need my finger anymore because I have the bookmark."
My students surprise me with thoughtful questions that allow us the opportunity to have terrific conversations. In the middle of a sentence about the book she was reading, one student wrote: "and Jen, do you have this problem where you really like a book and then thereis this other book thatis really good too?"
We wrote to each other about books we love to read and ways to choose a book so you do not end up trying to read too many. Other times, I can ask questions about strategies students use when reading.
I asked a student: "When a book is too hard, how do you know?"
She wrote the next week: "How I can tell if a book is too hard is I start reading the first page and if there are a lot of words I canit read, itis too hard for me."
This gave us the opportunity to write to each other about book choice and strategies to use when she is reading something challenging. I asked another student a related question: What do you do when you are confused, or something you are reading is hard?"
The next week she wrote: "Jen, I do two things when that happens. The first thing I do is read the part over and over again until I get it. If that doesnit work, I ask my mom and dad."
I was then able to talk to her about some other strategies that also work for understanding something hard. It also gave me the chance to ask her questions about the kind of books that were confusing for her.
For the most part, my students have really enjoyed this framework for their reading journal. One student wrote without prompting: "I like doing my reading journal because it helps me understand the book." There are some who have not found the key useful. One student wrote: "Jen, I donit like this TT TS TW stuff but Iid rather just tell you what Iim reading."
The fact that the structure I set up for the students did not prevent us from having rich, written conversations about what they are reading. Reading journals provide multiple opportunities that allow my students to write their thoughts about what they are reading.
These conversations with my students are highly valued by all of us. They have become an important part of our classroom culture. Generally, I read the journals during one of my studentsi silent reading times. I started doing this because several of my students were asking if I would read what they wrote to me right away. They are very excited to share their thoughts and pick up their journals right away after I have written in them. This has become an intensely personal and intimate dialogue between my students that we all cherish.
Even though the dialogue in the journals is a private one between each student and myself, the conversations have spilled into our classroom culture. The framework that I use for the reading journals has become our common language. The questions and writing that my students do in their reading journals spills over to other conversations about reading. I have a wealth of information about each of my students as readers and I use it to guide my instruction. I can also use that information to connect students who are reading the same kind of books with each other. I am able to help my students make meaningful connections about the reading they are doing in class and at home. These journals have fostered a love of reading and an excitement for talking about books in a way that I had not been able to do before. Jennifer Wood teaches third and fourth grades at Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning
Strategies
for Talking About Literature In my classroom, I use three different discussion formats with my students: Socratic seminars, literature circles, and class novels. Each of these three are closely connected to the expedition that I am teaching. My goal is for the books, expedition topics, and fieldwork to thread together to make a strong fabric of literacy learning. Currently, I am teaching an expedition on Colorado history. In this expedition, the students are reading many different examples of historical fiction. For one of their final projects, students will research and write their own piece of historical fiction. My goal is to improve my reading instruction by making their experiences connect closely to the different kinds of works they are reading. Class Novel: The class novel is a book that we read as a whole group. Each student has a copy of the book so they can follow along and read aloud. I use this novel frequently as the medium for reading instruction. I will frequently give the students sticky notes of different colors and ask them to use them as flags for their thinking. The different colors represent: Questions, Predictions, Confusing parts, Important parts and Text connections. This is an excellent way to access studentsi thinking about reading and also a great opportunity for students to learn from each other. I often select passages from the class novel for writing mininlessons. The time that we spend reading this novel is often interspersed with rich connections students make to other experiences they have had during the expedition. Socractic Seminars: Socratic seminars provide a forum for having rich and meaningful discussions about a piece of literature. Socratic seminars offer a wholengroup discussion around a certain piece of text. They give me an opportunity to observe my studentsi thinking about something they have read. Each student reads the text and makes notes on it. to discuss the text, which I introduce with an opennended question related to the reading. For one Socratic seminar this year, I asked my students to bring to the discussion their notes from a trip we took to a gold mine. I had asked them to write what was important about the experience in the mine. Their notes from this fieldwork experience became our text. The conversation allowed me to see how the students were connecting their experiences from the expedition with their fieldwork notes. This seminar helped my students further understand that there are often two sides to a story. The conversation, and the use of their own notes, helped me reinforce instruction I had been doing with the students about finding out an authoris main points. Literature Circles: Literature Circles are a dynamic and meaningful forum for discussion. At the beginning of the expedition, I select novels related to the expedition. Each student chooses one novel to read with a group. Once a week, the students meet with their group to discuss their novel. In between meeting times, I design a task for them to focus on in preparation for their discussion. Many of the tasks that I design stem from Ellin Keeneis and Susan Zimmermanis strategies in Mosaic of Thought. They are closely connected to the class novel and reading journal assignments. The students write papers on certain strategies as they discuss the book. Students use those papers during their studentnled conferences. The papers document work that they are doing in class and help give them specific detail. They also help the students when they are asked to write an analysis of the book after they complete it. I use them as an assessment tool. After students complete their work with the group, I am able to review what they talked about and what they were thinking. This helps me plan our next weekis tasks.
Words,
Worlds, and Wonder: This draft platform will be shared and discussed for critique and feedback at our National Conference this month in Cincinnati, Ohio. We welcome your suggestions on how this can be most useful to practitioners. Please send enmail to JoAnne Eresh at eresh@infl.com, or join us at the National Conference for lively discussions. The simplest definition of reading would describe the act of the reader as translating the marks on the page into sounds and those sounds into words. A less simple definition would include a description of what occurs after those marks turn into words. How does the reader make meaning from those words? A more complex definition would refer to the fact that the development of such an interpretive process happens in a social and cultural setting that surrounds the reader.
At Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound, we embrace all of these descriptions of reading, understanding that the text itself—the word—is read in a context, an environment—a world—which a reader enters because of a motivation to do so, and that motivation is spurred by curiosity and desire—wonder. We believe that focusing on these three aspects of literacy—words, worlds, and wonder—will help us all plan and evaluate our teaching of reading.
Thanks to pertinent research produced in the last few years, we have learned much about how students learn to read and become lifelong readers. Several national research centers and many practitioners have shown us that reading is not only a cognitive skill, but a social one as well. Expeditionary Learning proposes a way of thinking and acting on the variety of recommendations and findings about how best to teach students to read.
Words
Cracking the code, learning to read, is not the only task in teaching a child to read. Instruction in how to unlock the ways in which marks on the page represent sounds and wordnmeaningsnis a part of the job. Using strategies that enable readers to make sense of the words is a major part of the task of reading. Words are the beginning.
Knowledge of the alphabet and its sounds and its connection to known wordsnmeaningn is the beginning of reading. Isabel Beck and Connie Juel describe three understandings children must develop to "learn the code":
If this task of translating the sounds on the page to words understood remains labor intensive, the child will lack the mental space to make the connections between the number of words in a sentence. Until the decoding becomes fluent, comprehension will suffer. The hallmark of fluent reading is the ability to decode and comprehend at the same time.
But the ability to decode and the acquisition of fluency alone will not result in an expert reader. The skilled reader is one who reads fluently with understanding, one who can confidently read and comprehend the words on the page.
The Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound classroom supports and nurtures studentsi acquisition of reading skills by:
We are aware that literacy is a complex, interactive, and interpretive process. The development of the reading process is largely determined by the environment in which it occurs. The worlds the student enters either support her literacy or stunt it.
Worlds
Reading is much more than just "calling the words." The words on the page are part of the puzzle we help children to solve, but the words exist in a world of language, and in a world of expectations for those words. Reading is a social activity. Children are invited into a literacy community that supports its members. Additionally, reading is a passport into many worlds: the world of fantasy and fiction; the world of knowledge about how things work; the world of mathematics or science or history; and the world of expert and mature readers. These multiple communities are the habitats of readers, destinations as well as environments in which readers can grow.
As people, we act and speak differently when we are at work, at home, or at a social function. In order to function effectively we have learned what the rules are in each situation. When children come to school, they are entering a new world. Nested within this school and classroom community is a more specific one, described by Frank Smith as the "literacy club," entered into by those who are successful in becoming literate.
Expeditionary Learning has long recognized the importance of the learning community. Our design principles focus on the nurturing of a world that embraces Collaboration and Competition, Diversity and Inclusivity, Success and Failure, Intimacy and Caring, The Primacy of SelfnDiscovery, The Responsibility for Learning, and The Having of Wonderful Ideas. These attributes of a school and classroom community are the hallmarks not just of an Expeditionary Learning center, but the aspects of a world in which true learning occurs.
The literacy classroom is a world that values, nurtures, models, exhibits, and expects literacy. The Expeditionary Learning literacy classroom is:
When a student walks into an Expeditionary Learning classroom, he or she enters a world where language is celebrated and supported. Members of this community read and write and talk with each other. All members, most particularly the teacher, are proud participants of a literate community.
The classroom is the most immediate culture the student enters, but the classroom exists within a wider world, that of the school. John Bransford explains that "participation in social practice is a fundamental form of learning," and that "learning is promoted by social norms that value the search for understanding" (Bransford, 1999)2. The larger community of the school must exhibit its value for literacy obviously and diligently. The social norms set by the school must be based on the encouragement of literacy for all members. The Expeditionary Learning school nourishes literacy in its members by:
These schools are aware that their primary purpose for existence is to "grow" literate students. Exhibitions are shared with the wholenschool community and embraced as positive examples of student learning.
Wonder
Perhaps even more importantly, the urge to enter such worlds is the stuff of wonderment: to wonder how things work, what happens at the end of the book, and how am I like that character. Teaching someone how to do something is only one part of educating; helping students see the purpose and meaning in doing is the other part. Motivation to learn is absolutely necessary. Recognizing and taking advantage of the studentis wonder, creating environments and tasks that build on this wonder provides the student with an immediate reason to learn and to improve. It is the true "heart" of literacy instruction. If a student can comprehend text and lives in a community that supports and encourages literacy, usually what contributes to the growth of an expert reader is the readeris sense of wonder. We can see this wonder in the firstngrade studentis face as she realizes for the first time that she can read a whole book. We see it in the fourth grader who has found a favorite series or author and enters a world repeatedly and happily or in the middle school student who wonders about how a radio works and jumps into magazines and diagrams to discover the answer. Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound schools and classrooms nurture wonderment by:
If all learning is a search for meaning, we must help each student find the meaning in what he is being asked to read or write. No one becomes an expert reader or writer without discovering a need to do so, without discovering the wonder in the literate act. Sometimes that need is found in the mere joy of discovering new and different (or similar) people or places in books. Sometimes it is the wonder experienced as being able to do something one could not do before, the sheer joy of learning. For many, it is the wonder found at being able to help his community by means of his ability to read and to write.
Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound regards literacy as a central concern of schools. Language—reading, writing, speaking-—is integral to learning. It is through language that we translate experience into learning, that we frame our mental models that inform our future learning. Reading, writing, and speaking are not only ways of showing what we know, but are media for coming to know, to learn.
JoAnne Eresh works on standards and literacy with Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound and is based in New York City.
Was
it Magic? Or Was it A Rubric?
It gave me focus to know what to change and it broke the revision
down into small pieces
Was it some sort of sorcery that my students said showed them how to revise and motivated them to do another draft? No, it was not really magic, it was a rubric. It was a rubric that my thirdnand fourthngrade class at Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning in Denver, Colorado developed together and used to assess their work. My students said these things after a year of working with the rubric. What follows is the story of that year, why I wanted to use studentnauthored rubrics, and what my students taught me about how to use them better.
My students and I were in the middle of an expedition on sailing. We were studying the history of sailing and learning about the explorers. We built and tested new boats almost each week of the expedition. We learned about the life of a sailor, and prepared to become sailors ourselves on a fournday, roundntrip sail from Newport Beach, California to Catalina Island in the spring.
One requirement for our Kn12 graduation portfolio is a cultural or historical investigation. For thirdn and fourthngrade students this often takes the form of their first research paper. This is a challenging task for beginning researchers learning to take in and reorganize information and for budding writers learning about paragraphs and organization as well as continuing to learn about sentence structure and spelling. They need a lot of scaffolding to be successful with this piece of work. That is one reason I decided to use a rubric to help my students evaluate their writing and organize their revision process. I also wanted to be consistent in my assessment practices. I did not trust my gut enough to give feedback on such involved pieces of work without some tool to keep myself consistent.
I had my students build the rubric with me because I often ask students to assess themselves in math and other areas, and I had seen how their insight helped me understand more about them. I thought it would let them know what I expect in polished writing and allow them to feel some ownership of the tool we would use to evaluate their work.
The process of creating the first rubric was not easy (see rubric on page 9). My fourth graders had used rubrics before, but my third graders were a little lost. We had several conversations about what good writing looked like. Those discussions led to a brainstorming session in which we identified the categories for our rubric. Students suggested categories and had to convince all of us it was an important part of good writing. One student argued that spelling is important because if you spell badly the reader cannot figure out what you are talking about. Another student said that if the writing is not organized the reader can get lost and not understand the point of the piece. At the end of our session we agreed on the following categories: spelling. presentation, punctuation, capitalization, information/content, readability/clarity, and organization.
When we had the list of categories, we reviewed the assessment words used at Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning: Beginning, Developing, Accomplished, and Exemplary. I explained that we needed to describe what a piece of writing would look like for each level of accomplishment for each category in the rubric. I also let them know that by the time their work was polished everyone should be accomplished in all categories.
With that in mind, for homework I asked them to come up with descriptors for each level of accomplishment for each of the categories in our rubric. In the meantime, I was looking back at the list of categories to be sure the rubric assessed all the aspects of their writing I wanted them to pay attention to. After looking it over and passing it around to a few kind and sharing colleagues, I decided to add a few categories. For example, I added paragraphs because as one of my goals for the research paper, I wanted my students to write well organized paragraphs.
When they came back with their descriptions we had a "share and negotiate" discussion and filled in the rubric line by line. I asked a volunteer to share their ideas to define "accomplished" in one of the categories. The brave volunteers shared their suggestions, and then I asked for feedback from the class. Sometimes their language was a little confusing, and so I would rephrase it and ask for input again. Usually other students had similar suggestions to share, or there was a substantial amount of agreement. If there were strong disagreements, I asked each student to share his or her reasoning. Each time I suggested another way of saying things and this made each student happy. When I was sure the idea was clear, we had a final quick vote. Then I added the suggested description to the master rubric on my overhead projector.
It may have seemed like the end of a long road, but we still had to practice using the rubric. After completing several drafts of the research papers and when I thought we were pretty close to final drafts, I asked for a couple of volunteers willing to have the class assess their research paper using the rubric. I had Lauren share her paper about the Mayflower, and Ben volunteered his paper about Magellan. As a class we read through each piece one at a time and used the rubric to assess the spelling and presentation of each paper. This allowed me to model proper use of the rubric. Next, half of the class finished assessing Laurenis work and the other half finished assessing Benis work. When they finished, we came together and shared our assessments. This was important not only because it gave the students a chance to practice using the rubric, but because it further standardized our understanding of what beginning, developing, accomplished, and exemplary writing looks like.
When I collected their final drafts, I handed out copies of each studentis research paper to the author and another student, keeping the original copy for myself. I sent them home with two copies of the rubric and had them assess both pieces. There were many good reasons for doing this. Everyone needed practice using the rubric so they could use the tool effectively to evaluate their own work. It is easier to be critical of someone elseis work than it is to turn the critical eye on yourself or your work. Having done an honest assessment of someone elseis paper helped further clarify how their work compared to the standards we had established in the rubric. Since each student received the feedback given to them by his or her peer, this process also gave each student two sets of feedback to consider.
For homework that week, the students used the rubric to assess their final drafts. Finally, I shared the rubric I had filled out with each student and talked about places we agreed and disagreed on the rubric assessment of both the student and his or her peer.
What happened still gives me goose bumps. Brad, a confident student who usually makes a competent first draft and does not think the rules of revision apply to him, came to his conference with his rubric. When we compared rubrics we found that both of us agreed that there were specific areas of his writing in that piece that he could easily improve. Then he asked for permission to write one more draft.
What happened with Brad was exciting, and it was only the beginning. Each student came to his or her conference wanting the opportunity to make just a few more changes. I had pushed and prodded them to write six or seven drafts and when they turned these in they all felt like it was their best and final draft. Then, one by one, they asked for permission to do another draft because there were just a few things they wanted to tune up. It was sometime during those conferences that I started to ponder the apparent power of the rubric. That grid made them want to revise.
A month later we started working on stories. With a guest author, we talked about what made a good story. We settled on having an interesting character who struggles to overcome a problem and grows or changes somehow. Right away we had new categories for our writing rubric. Instead of waiting until we felt done with our writing, about two weeks into the actual writing I asked my students about making the research paper rubric fit stories. We followed an abbreviated version of the same process we used to develop the initial rubric. Right away, the students and I agreed that the more mechanical sections could be exactly the same, but things like organization and voice had to be very different. Then, without taking it home for homework, we brainstormed changes to the existing categories as well as the addition of new ones. Naturally, this time through was much faster than the first.
When we finished revising the rubric, I passed them out. As soon as they had a complete rough draft, they used the rubric. This time we paired up, traded stories, used the rubric, and then shared and compared. The students then did multiple drafts using the rubric each time to check their progress. Students were welcome to share stories with other students and required to share it with me for feedback on each draft. Each time they turned them in they had made small changes and improved their writing.
After interviewing parents and students and reflecting on the rubric, I see now there are several effects of creating and using a rubric that I did not anticipate when I set out to standardize my assessment and encourage students to assess themselves. The conversations we had about what good writing looks like and our discussion of categories and descriptions in the rubric helped students understand their task better. Thinking about what a good research paper or a good story is before you start your work helps you organize your thoughts and break a complicated writing task down into small pieces. I see that focusing on one or two aspects of good writing at a time is a better way to tackle revision. If you read your work only looking at its organization, you see flaws in your organization more clearly than you would if you were also checking spelling, clarity, and punctuation. I see that students want to do accomplishednlevel work. If you help your students see what accomplished work looks like, they will work very hard to get there.
So while it is not the key to mystical powers, the rubric is still magic. Rubrics helped my students be more responsible and independent writers; that sounds like magic to me. Gretchen Strong is a thirdn and fourthngrade teacher at Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning.
Designing
Literature with Principles Sixthngrade students at American Heritage School, an Expeditionary Learning Outward Bound schoolnwithinnanschool at Poe Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, used the design principles as a guide to analyze and critique literature in their journals.
"If you donit use the design principles, you donit know them," said Diana Carry, former director of the school who is now principal at Murch School in Washington, D.C. In thinking about students as literary critics, Carry said she thought the design principles would afford students a richer and more meaningful relationship with literature. In turn, in working with the design principles, students in Ruben PizaOais language arts class begin to understand them and see their relevance to the world.
"I think the design principles are so powerful that we need to find ways to integrate them in the natural rhythm of the course work," Carry said.
Below are excerpts of students responses to the novel Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli:
The Primacy of SelfnDiscovery
This design principle relates to Maniac
Magee in the way Maniac learned about himself. In the novel, he
found out or discovered that he had abilities. The novel was filled
with adventure and Maniac learned that he could survive on his own
even though he really wanted a family. He had the ability to untie
knots. I discovered that his life was really a big knot, as big
as Cobbleis Knot. His community was a big knot too. But Maniac had
big ideas! I think I can say he had wonderful ideas! His best achievement
in selfndiscovery was when he untied the knot of racism and he brought
together the East and West sides. —Matthew Garcia
Intimacy and Caring
Maniac was funny because he was intimate
with everyone he met right away. When he met Mars Bars, who was
an antagonist in the novel, Maniac ate his candy bar and even when
Mars Bar and John McNab were mean to him, he was still caring. Maniac
cared about everyone if they were Black or White or mean or nice
or even little kids and old people like Grayson. —Valerie Tamez
Success and Failure
Success and failure are greatly expressed
in this novel. Maniacis parents died in a tragic accident and he
lived with his aunt and uncle. Their marriage is a failure for Maniac
and he leaves but he succeeds by overcoming his being alone. He
fails with his relationships at first, but he succeeds in the end.
He learns when he fails. Maniac succeeds with Amanda and breaks
the color barrier but he is not too successful with Mars Bars until
the end. He took many risks and he had many challenges in the novel.
He turned them into success. In our expedition "We the People of
the Americas," we learned that in the countries we researched there
were failures and successes. No system is perfect but a system like
Maniacis society in the novel would be good because they failed
at getting along, Blacks and Whites, but then they succeeded at
the end to get along and do better. —Patsy Alcala
Solitude and Reflection
Sometimes you can be quiet, and sometimes
you can be quiet, but your brain is loud. It is thinking and talking
even though your mouth is quiet. Maniac had plenty of time for solitude
because he was an orphan and he thought a lot when he was alone.
If he didnit have time for reflection, he might not have come up
with so many wonderful ideas to help so many people in the novel.
He helped himself too. —Luis Urbina
Service and Compassion
In our expedition "We the People of
the Americas," I learned that every country doesnit have the same
level of service and compassion. In our research I learned about
health care and systems that rule people and per capita income and
literacy rates and infant mortality, and ethnicity and life that
is nurtured and challenged. Service and compassion nurture life.
Maniac was compassionate. I will never forget how Maniac helped
the people (antagonists and protagonists) in the novel. I really
liked how he helped Grayson to read and they had a good Thanksgiving
being together not alone. —Michael Tujillo
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