Culminating Experience

It seems that Scott and I had the same idea of interviewing someone from the McDonalds in the town the high school is located at, a mainstay in my dining repertoire. I don’t want to know the impact of this experience has been on the opinion of white northerners amongst the staff there.

Anyways, I ended up interviewing the woman who was on break. She seemed to be going along to be polite but wasn’t too enthused about answering my questions. He answers about her childhood and her own education (West High School) were positive but general. She was slightly more talkative about her job, and previous jobs. She said she enjoyed interacting with people there, and that any job, from making and serving fast food to manufacturing parts in a factory required the same skills. The only difference was one involved food and one involved parts.

She only became animated when we got on the subject of East HS. It turns out her daughter is a tenth grader there, and one of the majorettes in the band. The majorettes at EHS are not like any majorettes I ever saw before coming here. They don’t have batons, and if I tried to dance like that, I’d probably hurt myself. Her mother was obviously proud of her daughter, and mostly for her academic ambition. She said that her daughter had told her she was determined to go to a four-year school, not a community college. In particular, MSU and LSU. We then had a conversation that lasted about three times as long as the first part, all about what she should be doing now to help her daughter. Her mother was wondering if she should take her daughter to visit campuses herself and I strongly suggested she should. I said that for a teenager, the future can be pretty abstract, and actually seeing a campus could do a lot to motivate a student. I told her this was true for my Hmong kids, and it was true for me. I also said that she should take the PSAT seriously next year (she’d been chose to take it this year) because she might get mailings from places she wouldn’t have heard of otherwise. Her mother asked how she could prepare for the PSAT, SAT and ACT and I told her about those big prep books. Her mother had never heard of such a thing. Now, they are expensive, but it makes me sad to know that many students aren’t even aware that they are out there, when ever person I knew in high school had at least one. She asked where she could get one and I suggested any large bookstore – knowing that there aren’t any close to Sardis. I told her that if she had me next year, I would try to have a lot of ACT prep and that I would help her with admissions essays.

It really lit a fire under my butt when I saw Yale’s campus for the first time the summer before my sophomore year. I had a tangible goal – a nice gothic revival dorm.* I also had parents who made getting into college a priority AND knew a lot about the process. In my case, the intersection of my biography and my interviewee’s is clear. She is like my own parents in that her priority is her daughter, and her priority for her daughter is college. The difference is a lack of knowledge about the process, but hopefully I can help with that. I will probably have this student next year because she is apparently one of the smartest students in the 10^th grade, and I hopefully will have an honors class next year. This interaction recharged my determination to focus on the path to college, especially amongst my honors students.

* I ended up in a Georgian style residential college instead.

Literacy in my classes

Reflect on literacy (or lack thereof) in your classroom. What have you tried in terms of literature and reading? Were the assignments successful? What are your hopes in terms of literacy instruction? What are the hurdles you are facing?

I probably should have done the entry on Faulkner, mainly because I think one of the quotes on my door is from that essay, but.... time is tight this week. So I didn’t want to spend it hunting down that text.

I’ve found that the level of literacy varies greatly from student to student. Students can be roughly grouped into categories, honors students, non-honors readers, students who can “read” but not read, and non-readers.

All the students in my honors class (about a third of my students), can read. Many of the students in this class will read for pleasure. So far, I hadn’t given them much to read that really stretched them. The biggest difficulty they’ve had was some of the more difficult reading comprehension questions I used for PSAT practice, and that was partially the result of the difficulty of the questions and not the passages themselves. They also had trouble completing the reading section of the PSAT in the time given. They also lack a lot of background knowledge that results in some comprehension difficulties. If the don’t know anything about a topic, then they are less likely to be able to predict what will happen. Authors of passages on tests like the ACT/SAT make assumptions about what their audience already knows about the subject that my students might not know. Unfamiliar place names, person names, or terms seemed to slow them down (even if you don’t have to know them to answer the questions). I hope to incorporate more ACT type reading to get them ready, but I haven’t done this yet.

In my other classes, reading ability is much more limited. Most students can read aloud the majority of the words in the texts we read. Fairly often however, they are tripped up by a word that surprise me. Many of my students didn’t know the words “gigantic” and “foreign” for instance. Even more than the honors students, they are hampered by a lack of background knowledge in whatever we read. Since they will be taking the state test in history, I try to use texts that are from the time periods covered (1877 to the present). The fact that I am exposing them to history that is new, or at least mostly new to them is good I think, BUT it also holds up comprehension. Giving them vocab lists beforehand and relevant historical and cultural information helps somewhat, but there are too many unfamiliar words in each chapter for me to assign all as vocab words for them to learn.

By far the biggest problem is understanding what they’ve just read. Even if they know all the words, they have trouble getting meaning out of it. For instance, a lot students incorrectly answered a chapter question in Night about the conditions of the train with information from a paragraph where some men repeat rumors about the condition of the camps. The have trouble noting what each part of a chapter is talking about, or finding answers in the text, especially if the answer is scattered throughout a page or two. This is a hurdle I’m not sure how to best approach other than giving them more practice with varied and increasingly complex texts. reading with inflection, books on tape, and stopping and getting everyone caught up on what’s going on. I’ve also got them to predict more recently, which seems to help.

There are a sizable number of students who, in addition to having the aforementioned difficulties, that still have trouble with pronouncing words from the page. To their credit, they don’t mind reading out loud to the class from time to time, but it’s painful to listen to. These students generally have not passed their English II test, and so that might account for their motivation to improve their reading ability. For them, the task of reading silently is pretty overwhelming, but since this is the best way for the reading students to get some practice in, I’m torn about what method to rely on most.

I think that some of these problems might be a result of a lack of being made to read in other classes in lower grades. Ideally, students should read and write regularly in every class except math, but I don’t know if this is the case in middle school. Also, having parents who encourage reading and read to/with their children probably makes a huge difference. I can’t do much about those factors now, but I would be interested in research about the factors that influence reading ability development.

(Yesterday there was a kid who looked about 10 sitting by the cashier at the Batesville Dominos reading the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I asked the man working he was his son, and he said no, he was the owner’s kid. I told him to pass along how happy I was to see a child reading).

You could have been a school book

On Friday, I taught a lesson on simile and metaphor using Motown songs because this week was homecoming, and it was a Motown theme. The student got into it, perhaps a little too much. My biggest management issue was curbing out of seat dancing (in seat dancing is technically ok, as is singing). I wanted to get them to answer higher DOK questions like "Why did the songwriter choose a metaphor here." I was tired to getting responses like "to make it more interesting," so I played "Cloud Nine" by the temptations. Ironically, only my honors class couldn't figure out the metaphor. (The answer was "to avoid offending fans and to be radio friendly")

I've got a lot of grading to finish for this week, but tonight I will be trying some new fondue recipes and watching Interview With a Vampire with other MTCers.

"You can draw a four-pronged fork if you want to avoid drawing a gang sign"

I introduced my students to the essay tree organizer thing Aaron showed us last class. I like it better than the other ways of organizing because you can fit a lot of different details on a page, and things won’t get jumbled up as easily. I used it along with some pre-made handouts on how to construct a thesis and find supporting points. The assignment was to prepare to write an essay onCall of the Wild by filling out the chart. They had to select a thesis (One theme in Call of the Wild is ….. which is shown by (issue 1, issue 2, issue 3).

I ran into several problems with this assignment. The first is that I did not have anything concrete due by the end of the period. They were told they should have a thesis selected and their three issues chosen and be started on the evidence. In almost every class I had at least one student refuse to do it. Usually it was a student who was a struggling reader. It took a lot of prompting to get then started – wasting my time and giving them a delayed start. I spoke with Ms. Serkedakis and we agreed that they needed to have something to hand in each period, so the next day I told them it was due at the end of the period, completely filled out and it would be worth a test grade. That really lit a fire under their butts. I also called the parent of the student who was most reluctant. She was not pleased to hear he’d spent an entire class period not working. He was all business the next day.

Another problem was that they had never used a three-pronged thesis before. I had always thought that was standard, but I guess it’s not what the English II test requires and so they are not taught it. Although it does make for a cumbersome thesis sentence, I prefer to think of my main points as being part of my thesis. I think this drives home the idea that those three “issues” must support the “proposition.” The second day I clarified this and they adjusted well.

A third problem was that one class period refused to draw the chart because it looked too much like a gang sign.

One thing I did well was that the day before, I taught a lesson on theme and had the class list themes from Call of the Wild they could come up with on their own. This meant that once the assignment was given, I did not have to also field questions about what was or wasn’t a theme. They could just pick from the list if they wanted. I also made sure to tell them to start writing down page numbers now next to their evidence - they still don't believe me that you need to cite things, but they've started humoring my funny notions at least for the sake of their grades. I was also pleased with some of the quality of ideas that came from my honors class. They had a more difficult prompt - their thesis had to be (One theme in Call of the Wild is ..... and this relates to three of Nietzsche's ideas, (issue 1, 2, 3) OR One idea of Nietzsche that Jack London incorporated into Call of the Wild is ...... which is reflected in the themes ... (issue 1, 2, 3). On the flip side, some students with a solid grasp of the plot ofCall of the Wild had trouble figuring out what details might support a theme.