I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you're not reading Bjorn Paige's blog (bjornpaige.wordpress.com), you are missing some fantastic writing and reflection on education in general and middle school in particular. In January, he announced the second installment of the Diegueño book club for parents and staff, focused on Daniel Wolff's How Lincoln Learned to Read: Twelve Great Americans and the Educations that Made Them. (Amazon link)
Since the book club meeting is scheduled for a Tuesday evening, Bjorn and I decided to also use this book as the topic for our weekly district Twitter chat, On March 10, #SDUHSDchat will be at a special time and will focus on several issues raised in different chapters of the book.
Wolff's book is a collection of 12 more-or-less independent chapters, each describing the education of a famous American and how that education both reflects the ideas of the times and shapes the lives of the people who experience it. Bjorn is planning his own questions for the in-person book club; for our Twitter chat, aimed at people who may or may not have already read the book, each of our discussion questions will be based on a short excerpt from a chapter. If you have the time to read the book beforehand, that would be great; if you don't, you'll still be perfectly able to participate in the chat.
This is an experiment on our part. I've never live-tweeted a book club discussion before, nor have we done a hybrid Twitter/in-person conversation like this. I'm hoping that the combination of the two discussions will produce something greater than the sum of the parts.
