The Wonder Years

I saw this episode of the Wonder Years the other day and had to laugh. It's the first day of 8th grade and everything is going well...until math class. When I watched this, I laughed at how ridiculous the teaching of math appeared. The episode was set about 50 years ago and I'd like to think we'd come a ways in math education since then. And certainly we have, in many ways. But I have to wonder why it is that math has a reputation for being the class that nobody understands and many students hate. What can we do to change this?

7th Grade Read Alouds

Sometimes middle schoolers can have a reputation for being superficial and academically apathetic. While I'm sure there are days when they earn that reputation, that doesn't mean we should expect it of them. When we had to do a read aloud in our dyad placement, I was a little nervous. It seemed unlikely that a 7th grade math class would want to listen to me read aloud about anything. So naturally I chose a children's book.

Before I began reading, I asked students to pay attention to both the author’s intended meaning as well as the ways they could relate it to math. After the read aloud they told me a few of the things they noticed. They compared the book to their lessons on proportional reasoning, noticing that there was a part to part ratio of 3:1 of wolves to pigs. After this comment was made, another student commented that the part to whole ratio would be either 1:4 or 3:4, depending on whether you were comparing wolves or pigs. They also noticed that the ratios in this story were inverses of those in the original story of the 3 Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. They also related the story to math by saying that the wolves really had to think and work together in order to come up with the initially less obvious solution to their problem.

Before I read them the story, I had pretty low expectations of the outcome. I wasn't even sure that the students would pay attention. Interestingly enough, in the discussion following, students who didn't typically participate in math class were some of the first to raise there hands. It was a great experience to remind me to set high expectations for my students no matter what.

Taking Risks

As adults, many of us (and by many of us I mean me) are reluctant to have others read what they've written. We're afraid that they'll judge our ideas, the way we write, or even our punctuation. We don't see other's suggestions to our work as an opportunity for improvement as much as we see it as a personal attack on who we are as writers. This makes sense of course, given that most of our lives anything we'd ever written for a class has come back to us covered in red pen. I'm not saying that those comments don't have their place, but there should be another avenue for teachers than to mark up every piece of writing presented by their students.

Routman's ideas about writing conferences seem like a valid way to combat the stigma associated with constructive criticism in writing. Having content and editing conferences with students before they publish eliminates much of the frustration in getting back a marked up piece of published work. Her approach to writing as a collaborative effort allows students to work together to come up with ideas as well as creates an atmosphere where students aren't afraid to share their writing with their classmates. Additionally, she allows students to create their own goals so that the conference process is more student centered than curriculum centered.

Finding Your Own Style

When I started my last job, working at Nordstrom, I was always anxious about what I was going to wear to work. Would my managers approve? Would my customers think it was stylish enough to listen to what I had to say? I would either let my coworkers pick out clothes for me, or choose something based on what they were wearing. Sometimes I was comfortable with those choices and sometimes I wasn't, but at least I fit in. As I continued working there, I became much more comfortable choosing these things on my own. There were certain styles that I loved and because I was comfortable, those worked really well for me. My customers were confident in what I was saying, because I was confident.

This week, my field supervisor came in to observe my dyad partner and I teach a lesson. After the lesson, one of his comments dealt with how similarly we both chose to teach the lesson. This was likely due the fact that we had watched our master teacher teach the same lesson 1st and 2nd period. He commented that there were parts of the lesson for both of us that we seemed slightly uncomfortable teaching the way we did. When he asked us why, we both responded with "that's the way our Master Teacher did it." We both realized that while that style of teaching may work well for her, it was not the only way the lesson could be taught. When we're not teaching a lesson in a style that we're comfortable teaching, not only are we less confident in what we're saying, but our students are less engaged in what we're saying.

It will be interesting, going forward to be aware of these things as I'm teaching. I'm excited to see how (or if) the next lesson I teach will improve based on my trying to find the style of teaching that works best for me.

Raising the Bar

So far one of my favorite parts about Regie Routeman is her high expectations of her students. What we believe abouts students will be obvious to them in the expectations that we set. When we set low expectations, students often believe that's all they're capable of. Setting high expectations sends the message that every student is capable of expanding their knowledge. Routeman cited teacher's tendency to set expectations below students' actual ability as a reason for such low achievement in their writing. And I agree. But where do we draw the line? How do we distinguish the line between how much our students are capable of and how much to expect before they become overwhelmed and disengaged?

I know that part of the answer lies in knowing your students. There is a combination of information that is important to know in regards to academic ability as well as how they react emotionally to being pushed to the edge of that level. But clearly finding that line will be an art. As new teachers, how will we know when we've crossed that line?

In working with our Kindergarten buddy, this was a question my partner and I addressed often. Our buddy seemed excited to work with us at first, but as the weeks went on he seemed less and less engaged. We thought we were doing everything right. We really tried to get to know him the first week. We wanted to be able to incorporate as much of his interests into our lessons as possible. His attitude seemed to change somewhere during his initial reading assessment. As soon as he was unsuccessful in one section, he seemed to grow tired of the assessment and of us. In reflecting on his change in attitude, we considered many options. It was possible that the end of the test was tiring for him, or that he had never learned the section on which he was being tested, or quite possible he was just sick of us asking questions.

With these considerations, we opted to make lessons that focused on the areas he was having trouble with. However, week after week, he seemed to shut down. While he seemed to be making progress each week, he never seemed excited to learn with us. We wondered: Was he bored? Did he hate us? Were our expectations too high?

Trick or Treat?

I remember when I was in elementary school, Halloween was a huge deal. My friends and I would spend recesses planning our costumes so that we could show them off at the school parade on Halloween day. Generally that whole week would be a build up of excitement until our class party that day, where I can't say much learning went on. I guess this might explain why many schools (secretly to my disappointment) have refrained from celebrating the holiday all together.

This is why I was relieved when my master teacher from my main placement asked if I could help her out at their Halloween Party, the Friday before Halloween. While it wasn't what I expected, I was very impressed with the way she was able to incorporate learning into their activities while still making it a fun experience.

In the morning, before the party, she did a science lesson on spider anatomy involving vocabulary. For the party, she set up 6 stations between which the 4th graders would rotate. One of the activities was to draw an anatomically correct spider. After the kids rotated through every station, they played spider bingo. That morning, while they were learning about spiders, they learned 16 vocabulary words pertaining to spiders and/or their environment. Then, during bingo, she read the definitions and they had to mark the correct vocabulary word in order to win.

It was great to see my 4th graders again and to learn some fun ways to incorporate learning into class parties!

Teachers as Writers

After completing this week’s readings, I thought to myself, “I’ve never been much of a writer... Sure I can teaching writing as long as I don’t have to write anything myself…” like many of the students in Routman’s book, I remember loving to write in early elementary school and somewhere along the way growing to resent it. Because I was so often forced to write about topics that I didn’t have any say in, I now even have a hard time writing about topics I choose myself. It’s become easier for me to write about specified topics than it is for me to express my own creativity. I fear judgment, not of my ability to respond to a prompt, but of my ability to clearly illustrate with words what I’m feeling or thinking. How should I expect my students to love writing, if it’s something they see me avoid?

After reading the beginning of Routman’s book, I’ve really realized the importance of keeping students passionate about writing. How can we ensure success in a subject to which students have become so resistant? My master teacher in my main placement classroom does a fantastic job of ensuring success in her writing curriculum. She doesn’t teach specific writing traits as lessons dissociated with writing itself and she doesn’t give children topics about which to write that don’t leave room for creativity. She embeds her lessons on organization, word choice, and paragraph elements on writings that students are already doing on topics of their choice. She models those elements of writing in her own work in front of the students. Not only does this allow her to show her students that nobody’s writing is perfect, it also lends itself to creating community in the classroom through learning more about one another. She goes through the revision process in front of the class allowing her students to see and hear her thought process as it is happening. After they are comfortable with this idea, she publicly helps individual students and allows the class to give suggestions as well. This promotes the idea that there is nothing wrong with very rough rough drafts of an assignment.

One of the most successful assignments I have witnessed her give to students is her “small moments” assignment. On the first day of school, students make a “name art grid.” They divide a piece of paper into 4 sections and decorate their name on one of them and are asked to draw 3 exciting life events in the remaining 3 squares. These students never have problems deciding what to draw. What they don’t know at the time is that they will use these for a later writing assignment. The teacher asks students to pick one story and journal about it. They are then asked to expand on one part or moment of that story in order to elaborate and give more detail. The teacher uses this to model many elements of adding detail to a story and completes the assignment herself. She models the writing process while making it relevant to something the students feel connected to. She celebrates student work and encourages their love of expressing their ideas on paper.

It has been a great experience for me to have seen many of the approaches in Routman’s book ahead of time. It helps me to realize that there is really a practical way to apply many of the strategies that we have been learning!