Teaching Revisited Part Two

More thoughts on being a teacher.

One thing I quickly learned was that although I taught the same subject to 5 classes a day, I never taught it the same time twice. Let me digress here a little and talk about my younger son.

When he got out of Army boot camp and before he went off to Korea, I asked him if he would like to talk to the seventh grade about this experience. He had a boot camp movie {which included him which I thought was neat} and lots of photographs and he told all about his boot camp experiences and answered their questions for five different classes. The part that I found the most interesting was how, even though he was covering the same material with each class, this 18 year-old born teacher instinctively altered his approach to each class going by their response to what he was saying and showing. I had always hoped to have a child of mine become a teacher, but, although the Army agreed with me and gave him many classes to teach once he had gotten his EMT qualifications, he has lived too close to the fact that teachers are grossly underpaid, and he has opted to go for something else .

As a teacher, I was required to take college courses {at MY expense} to update my teacher’s licence and one of the best classes I ever took {twice} was the South Mississippi Writing Project. This course taught me that I COULD teach my students to write. It gave me confidence that *I* could write and encouraged me to find techniques to help my students. I was fortunate to have a very supportive principal who backed me to the hilt when I said I wanted to teach ALL the required skills through writing {rather than worksheets and tests} only asking me to document that my students were competent in these skills and to keep a record of what I did to help those who weren’t.

So, I started by taking the kids into my confidence. I handed them a checklist of the skills they were supposed to have mastered by seventh grade and the skills which I was supposed to introduce. I had my own definition of “mastered” but had enough sense to ask the kids for rheir definition. After some very eye-opening discussion, they came up with “A skill has been mastered when we use the skill correctly the majority of the time in our “written-for-a-grade” writing and most of the time in our draft writing.” I was delighted to have this. I printed it out in a BIG banner across the front of the classroom and told the kids that I had a checksheet with all their names on it and that as I read their writing, I would be keeping these skills in mind.

This was very easy for me to do and they loved pointing things out to me. I remember one girl who had a problem with apostrophe-s coming to me after a week or two and saying had I noticed that she could now get this right most of the time? I said I hadn’t and how about she got her draft work folder and showed me? I looked at this, and then right there, at my desk, I wrote five brief sentences and asked her to punctuate them…and she did, correctly. She was SO proud of herself that she had learned something correctly AND that she got to tell the teacher and see me check off the skill on my list.

Over half the skills the seventh grade were expected to master were things that had been drilled into them for years and they were thrilled to be able to check off so many of them after a few weeks. After a while, I added some things like “Student understands that reader must be pulled into the story in the first paragraph.” and “Student uses simple, compound and complex sentences in his/her writing.” These skills took longer to “master” but most of the class was doing both of these things by the end of the year.

One of the more interesting lessons I did was to teach my kids that, YES, you CAN begin a sentence with “Because” if you know what you are doing. I gave them sentences like “We couldn’t go to the beach because it was raining” and showed them how one could rewrite this as “Because it was raining, we couldn’t go to the beach.” Then, I started rewarding those who used this construction correctly in his or her writing by adding a bonus point to his or her grade. This turned out to be a very successful ploy for about half the class who took to writing sentences like this so enthusiastically that I had to limit it to one per paragraph!

Hmmm. I am getting carried away here. I see my readers’ eyes glazing over…

Maybe this will be continued…