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education and teaching

Writing

Saturday 07 February 2015 | 0 Comments

The Girl is to write a research-based biographical report about Amelia Earhart. As with all homework, I'm willing (and sometimes insistent) to help her, at least to check her work. But this is a big assignment. We've needed to pace ourselves, so last week, we set up a schedule on Google Calendar to make sure L completed everything in a timely fashion and didn't simply let everything pile up at the end.

She completed the book, she finished the planning, and today, it was time to begin the report.

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It's a fine line, though, between helping and doing for the Girl. As a writing teacher, I have experience in guiding students to see the problems with their writing and helping them improve it. But in the back of my mind, I say to myself, "This needs to look like a second-grader wrote it." Should I teach her to transition between ideas within a paragraph? Should I show her how to turn her one-sentence opening, her thesis, into a full paragraph?

I've decided simply to guide her as minimally as possible, then ask her to read the finished product. If she feels it's clumsy, if she comments on the short introductory paragraph, we'll get to work fixing it.

“I Think He Has”

Thursday 05 February 2015 | 0 Comments

I have a little jar of olive oil mixed with grapefruit seed extract that I keep in a plastic bag in the bottom of a desk draw at school. It was from a long time ago, for an irritating spot of skin on my hand that I didn't want to go see a specialist about. The wise Internet suggested this as a homeopathic remedy.

Today, a young man caught a glimpse of that little bottle when I was pulling something from my desk draw. Or at least I guess he did -- the alternative is that he was rummaging through the drawer when I wasn't looking, something I don't want to imagine he did. At any rate, he went to Ms. W, the eighth-grade administrator and my immediate supervisor, with a concern shortly after that.

"I think Mr. Scott has a little jar of urine in his desk drawer."

Ms. W told me shortly afterwards that it was very hard to keep a straight face with that concerned young man. "I can assure you, Terrence, that that was not what it was, and that there is a logical explanation for what you think you saw."

Oh, but the fun I could have with that misconception tomorrow in class...

Dance The Night Away

Friday 30 January 2015 | 0 Comments

Few things remind me of how glad I am to be an adult as well as chaperoning a middle school dance.

Teaching to the Test

Wednesday 28 January 2015 | 0 Comments

I've heard about it from three different sources now: our principal, our department chair, and a colleague. We've all in the English department heard about it, and we're all more than a bit nervous about the new test students will be taking in late April. It's meant to replace a state-created test that measures progress for No Child Left Behind (still haunting us), but it even has the kids running scared. Even the most apathetic students responded the same as the teachers: "Are you kidding?"

The test -- the ACT-Aspire, created by the same company that makes the ACT -- porports to measure students' ability to create an essay, and all the various elements of that process: generating ideas, developing ideas, organizing ideas, and proofreading said ideas. My students, eighth graders, will be be required to write a persuasive/argumentative essay, and they will be judged on four things: the argument, the development, the organization, and the language use. For a perfect score in the argument strand of the rubric, they are to accomplish the following:

The response critically engages with the task, and presents a skillful argument driven by insightful reasons. The response critically addresses implications, complications, and/or counterarguments. There is skillful movement between specific and generalized ideas.

This is all fine and well: I have plenty of students who could write a paper that addresses the implications, complications, and counterarguments in an insightful way. Not a big big deal.

For development, a perfect paper would look like this:

Ideas are effectively explained and supported, with skillful use of reasoning and/or detailed examples. The writer’s claims and specific support are well integrated.

Again, not that big of a deal. Certainly a challenge for some less-accomplished students, but again, this is for the absolute top score.

Organization looks like this:

The response exhibits a skillful organizational strategy. A logical progression of ideas increases the effectiveness of the writer’s argument. Transitions between and within paragraphs strengthen the relationships among ideas.

Good organization is difficult for fourteen-year-olds, and in some ways I'm most worried about this one. Organization takes time, takes thought, and fourteen-year-olds tend to be a bit impulsive. But its a solvable problem.

Finally, there's language use:

The response demonstrates the ability to effectively convey meaning with clarity. Word choice is precise. Sentence structures are varied and clear. Voice and tone are appropriate for the persuasive purpose and are maintained throughout the response. While a few errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics may be present, they do not impede understanding.

For some of my students, I'm not even tackling the voice and tone issue. Not many fourteen-year-olds have a firm understanding of voice even with a lot of direct instruction. A lot of adults don't.

All in all, a decent but challenging rubric. Until you consider one thing I've left out: its a timed test. And the time limit for this? What do the test creators consider a reasonable amount of time for students (and the time is universal for all grades) to create an essay on which so much depends? Two hours? Three? Ninety minutes? How about thirty minutes.

That's right: one half hour to conceive, plan, organize, write, and proof an essay.

"Are they crazy?" we teachers all said almost on cue.

"Are they crazy?" all the students replied.

I have plenty of students for whom this would be a tremendous challenge if give two hours to accomplish, but thirty minutes seems laughable. It sounds as if all the decision-makers in the fine organization that creates the test got high on every possible drug and then decided on the time limit.

"I got it! I've got it" laughs a young executive who's just sniffed three lines of coke, shot up some heroin, taken a few Vicodin, smoked an enormous joint, and done an Irish Car Bomb. "I've got it! Just for the fun of it, just for kicks and giggles," and breaks into fifteen minutes of giggles before continuing, "Let's give them half an hour!"

Howls in the boardroom.

Howls in the classroom.

Not the same howls. Not even close.

I'm not even sure what such a ridiculously short time limit is supposed to accomplish. Raise the stress level of students? Ensure as many short essays that are so bad that they're easily gradable as possible?

I've a feeling when the state results are published, the howls won't just be in the boardroom and the classroom anymore.

“Today Is Going To Be A Great Day”

Monday 26 January 2015 | 0 Comments

I have a colleague who inevitably says every morning as she walks down the eighth-grade hallway by my door, "Today's going to be a great day!" Sometimes she's sarcastic, but most of the time, she's very much in earnest. It's an easy enough trick, I suppose, this power of positive thinking, but it then throws you for a loop when the same lady, after saying "Today's going to be a great day" passes by you and says, "Today is going to suck."

One of the many challenges with teaching is that we enter a room in which we have the whole range of thoughts from "Today is going to be a great day!" to "Today is going to suck." Those conflicting expectations result in conflicting behaviors, which results in a conflicted teacher. When is a kid being a pain in the butt just because he feels like being a pain in the butt -- i.e., the natural function of being an eighth-grader -- and when is it the function of something bigger, something direr? The response to those two different motivations is shaded differently.

Two Exchanges

Friday 23 January 2015 | 0 Comments

Two exchanges from school to show how radically different a day can be.

First, I was passing out report cards and a young lady declared, jokingly, "I'm going to cry!" She's a sweet student who usually does her best, but occasionally she gets a little lazy. And that's what happened this quarter: she didn't turn in a major assignment, so her grade suffered for it. She didn't fail, but it was a high D. So I played along with the joke. "You probably will when you see the grade for this class." And a few moments after I gave her her report card, she was indeed crying. I felt awful, apologized profusely, and then pointed out the obvious: "It hurts, but look at the good side of this: you realize what you did, you're upset about it, and you'll be able to change. Not all students react that way such grades."

The second exchange came at the end of another class when a young man who has struggled through the year with behavior and grades approached me to tell me about a fundraiser his community basketball team is having. He didn't quite know how to invite me, so he just ended up telling me about it. But the fact that he shared with me something from his personal life -- this is a kid I've butted heads with a time or two, and other teachers have absolutely struggled with. He can be a challenge but not yesterday. And for me, not recently.

Two exchanges, both haunting in their own way.

“No Reason to Do It”

Tuesday 20 January 2015 | 0 Comments

Dear Teresa,

Since you phrased your starter self-evaluation as a letter and ended it by saying, “Yea so thats [sic]1 the question, but wheres [sic] the answer,” I thought I would supply the answer. I feel it is important to make sure my students understand the methodology I employ in the classroom, and it is to that end that I write to you now.

You wrote that the reasons you “have no starters is becase [sic] to me there is no reason to do it.” It’s an odd thing to write: I gave you the reason at the very beginning of the year. This is a writing class: I want you writing as much as possible. Additionally, if you didn’t see a reason for doing them, perhaps you could have asked me in private why we do them. (To shout it out in class would be disrespectful, and I know you would never want to be disrespectful.) But you never asked for the reason, so I didn’t know you were confused about why we do starters. Finally, it seems fairly logical to me what the reason is: this is a writing class, and the best way to improve in writing is by doing it. That’s why most of my starters, if you haven’t noticed, are questions to help get you writing, to get your brain working in a compositional mode. It might have worked for you if you’d tried it, but you never did. So despite your claim to the contrary, there are clear and solid pedagogically-sound reasons for the starter we do in class.

Most puzzling, though, is your claim that I “don’t even check” the starters, which “don’t even get graded.” It’s a strange claim because I directly told the class several times, at the beginning of the year and throughout each quarter, that I take up the starters at the end of the quarter. I probably also said, “Take care to do them and keep up with them because it should be an easy A.” In addition, I told the class several times as we approached the due date of January 15 that they would need to bring in their starters at the end of the week. Why would I take them up if I weren’t going to grade them? There’s simply no logic in that. Finally, I often walk around the room as the class works on the starters (you excepted) and I check roll. When I do this, I’m looking at what students are writing, often interacting with them about their ideas or possibly pointing out a silly grammatical mistake. It is during this time that I often encourage students who are not working on the starter, students like you, to begin doing so. Some students do; you often do not. So to suggest that I don’t check the starters is patently misleading.

The real key to understanding your response, though, was when you contrasted my starters to Ms. H’s starters. To begin with, it doesn’t make much sense to compare them because we teach you different subjects: she teaches reading while I teach writing. Of course we’re going to have different kinds of starters; it only makes sense. However, the whole comparison is bogus to begin with. I spoke to Ms. H about your response, and she informed me that you don’t do the starters in her class either except on rare occasion. I would bet that your behavior in her classroom during the beginning of class is much like your behavior in my classroom: you sit without any materials ready, turning around in your desk, and engaging in conversation with everyone around you. Thus your attempt to contrast my starters with Ms. H's starters is fairly meaningless.

I trust this explanation answers any questions you have about my starters. It is my sincerest wish that during this penultimate quarter, you mend your ways and begin taking this assignment seriously: it is intended to be a fairly easy way for students to improve their grade, and I hope you see and treat it as such. However, the choice is ultimately yours. I cannot make you or anyone else do anything. Don't make the mistake, though, of suggesting that I haven't fully explained to you the consequences of your choices.

Sincerely,
Your Teacher

  1. “Sic” means is the Latin adverb “thus.” It comes from the full Latin phrase sic erat scriptum, which means "thus was it written.” Writers use this to indicate a grammatical mistake in source material, in this case, your evaluation. It simply means, “I did not make this grammatical mistake; the original writer did. I just copied it as it was written.” ↩

Teaching

Wednesday 07 January 2015 | 0 Comments

Before dinner, K and E sit in the middle of the kitchen floor, working a puzzle. It was the Boy's idea, his initiative.

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After dinner (more or less), K and L sit at the dinner table, doing Polish lessons. It was K's idea, her initiative.

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Perhaps if we could figure out some way to make Polish lessons as fun for L as puzzles are for E, we might have more success. And so that's what I tried, putting on my jester's hat and giving ridiculously wrong answers to L's work, getting a giggle and correction.

Before It Begins Again

Sunday 04 January 2015 | 0 Comments

It always goes in a flash, an absolutely yet tragically predictable flash. Two breaths, a party or two, and suddenly we're eating lunch on the last Sunday of the break. And what a lunch to have, a classic of Polish country cooking: kotlet schabowy with the requisite sauerkraut and potatoes. The Girl loves the cutlet; the Boy loves it all.

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After lunch, we decide it's time for a walk: after almost three full days of rain, we're all sick of being inside. The Boy takes his four-wheel coaster, and the Girl opts for a scooter, but putting the Boy on wheels is always tricky: "I'm Lightning McQueen!" he squeals and with each time, rides further and further out in front of us.

"E, if you're not going to stop when I tell you to," I explain after he ignores us a couple of times, "you won't be able to ride this anymore." It works for a while, but not long enough to get us home, so he finishes up the outing on foot and in tears.

We have to hurry home, though, because K has yeasty dough rising. "Pół godziny!" K insists as we start out, and sure enough, half and hour later, we're back in the kitchen as K rolls out the dough for what she calls babeczki, which would be tempting to translate as "muffins" but in this case, it would be incorrect.

It's one of those things I'm unable to translate, something like cinnamon rolls with a plum and apple jam -- leftovers from the Christmas Eve compote -- in the place of the sweet cinnamon mix.

With a day ending like that, L and I think we can head back to school tomorrow...