Teaching Grammar

This is actually a rather timely topic for me to be writing about because my middle school co/op just asked me to make a review activity or game for her student's test after Thanksgiving break. Literally all I have to go on at the moment is that they'll be tested on the parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, adverb, conjunction, preposition, and interjection. Needless to say, the combination of reading and seeing such brilliant lesson plans presented in class on Noden's Image Grammar will be a great help in designing a (I hope) fun test review.

Curiously, I haven't seen much grammar instruction at either of my placements. Granted, my high school placement spent many of my hours in PSSA prep, but you'd think with all the practicing that the students did for the essay portion that they'd get a little help in making their essays not only grammatically correct, but articulate and art-y sounding. Nope. Same deal with my middle school placement. They're reviewing parts of speech, but writing sentences with said parts of speech? That's next unit. *headdesk*

I suppose teaching grammar in the context of reading and writing is a little counter-cultural to the English profession. That doesn't make much sense to me, though. We learn how to speak and use English correctly through imitation and practice, so why not teach in the same way. Today, during a planning period, one of my co/op's peers expressed frustration at teaching transitive/intransitive verbs from the textbook. She said, "I know they know it. They say it. They use it."

With all that frustration aired out, here's my ideas for teaching the 100-some(!) textbook pages of grammar terms that these kiddos what they need to know for their test.

1. No hunting-and-pecking. This refers to my early days learning to type. I struggled with it and well into sixth grade was staring at the keyboard and laboriously mashing out keys with my pointer finger. It wasn't until I was given a keyboard cover that I got the practice I needed.

I can see the students doing the same thing with bellringer sentences with two or three errors for them to find and correct. They can hunt-and-peck out the errors, but don't always know why they are errors. Or worse, they hunt-and-peck something that is correct. Especially commas.

So, no deliberately mangling sentences beyond recognition. If I'm going to show the students how to correct, I'm going to do it one concept at a time and make sure they understand why it is correct.

2. Have fun with your examples! No need to stick to bland sentences about immigration laws and service dogs. Why not have examples about things students actually find interesting? Food, for one. That TV show all the kids are watching these days. Self-deprecating humor also seems to be quite effective.

3. Get students moving and working together as a class. Too often students are stuck working alone at their desks with their textbooks and fill-in-the-blank worksheets. I've heard students begging the teacher to be able to get up out of their seat, walk to the board, and write down the correct answer for the class. Just a little movement helps. One thing that I've seen used well are mini-whiteboards. Students use them at their desks to write sentences, answer questions, make corrections, give examples, etc. Then they share them with the class. They really like do like sharing what they know with each other.

Happy teaching out there!

Teaching Writing

From what I've seen in my observations, students don't like writing very much. They seem to have been workbook-ed to death. I graded a few essays which the students wrote for a practice PSSA test and was discouraged with what I saw – fake writing. I had to give most of them 1’s (on a scale of 0-3) because their essays were incomprehensible, didn’t answer the prompt completely or at all, or simply showed little to no effort.

I can tell that the students know that doing well on PSSA essays are high-stakes. It’s been drilled into them over and over: they need to pass to graduate, the school needs them to pass to get funding. I can see that they don’t write well because they have no good models of what good writing looks like. They've gone over "attacking" the prompt, highlighting useful information, and rewording the question with more understandable words. All of these things are great skills for writing a good essay under a time limit. However, I don't think that these skills are effective without the students having an idea of what they should be working towards. For example, I can tell the students have had the essay form modeled to them. In fact, some essays even had cues written before each sentence. Topic sentence. Example one. Example two. Conclusion. 

Even within the confines of PSSA essays, I think that there are some writing tricks that Gallagher suggests in this week's reading that might be helpful to my frustrated students.

The funneling technique described by Gallagher would be helpful in teaching students to narrow their essay focus. While grading, the most common error that I had to take points off for was not answering the prompt. When most students failed to answer the prompt, it was often because they had just restated it word for word and put one or two examples (if any) without giving them any connection to the topic at hand. Teaching students how to focus in on the topic and "write smaller" would help with the process of thesis creation and picking relevant examples from the essay prompt.

Another useful technique that Gallagher suggests is the writing fountain. I think that this technique might be useful for students who feel stuck with a particular prompt. Having had this experience before on tests, I’ve found that writing down all the associations that I had with the topic in the prompt helped me find an idea that I liked. I think that having an idea that you like, or at least relate to, make creating an essay easier. Writers write about what they know, after all.

I think that these students would find writing more enjoyable if they were able to practice for the PSSA test by writing about things that they liked. Sadly, that doesn't seem to be likely for this class, as they are restricted by the confines of the workbook. This makes showing the students good examples difficult. And outside of the canned responses given in the PSSA prep book, how can you give a good model of an essay response written in the heat of the moment? I don’t think that there is an easy answer to this question. I think that we as teachers work with what we get, and try our best to help our students make sense of it all.

Text Satellite

I apologize in advance for any weirdness that may occur. I'm still new to this presentation-ception that is Prezi.

My primary text was the young adult novel Al Capone Does My Shirts, which is about a boy named Moose (yes, that's what he goes by) who in the 1930's is stuck growing up on "the Rock" along with America's most notorious. The book is all around a lot of fun to read, and is rich in historical details hidden away in all the subplots, some of which include a character's odd behavior, which today would be diagnosed autism, as well as Moose's interactions with the legendary Al Capone himself.

I tried to link all the themes that I drew out in the satellite with a timeline, as well as links to modern day issues. I'm not sure if that idea was successful. It looks messy to me.

Here is the link, if you'd like to give it a lookthrough.

http://prezi.com/wjkfojgoi5do/text-satellite/

Assessment Practices

If these latest chapters from Teaching Adolescent Writers could be summed up in a few words they would be model everything and practice, practice, and more practice.

I can admit to being one of the “once and done” kind of writers. I've found that it is difficult to go back and edit my work, and not just because of the additional effort and time that it requires. I think that for some people, it is hard to edit their work because of the personal nature of writing. I’m very meticulous when I write and sometimes feel that criticism is a kind of attack upon me, even though that isn't true. I can’t imagine how criticism, even constructive criticism, must feel for less confident writers.

Because of this, I really liked the examples Gallagher gave for modeling. Well, modeling done right. I can remember being shown a “Grecian urn,” being told that this was what was expected of me, and just wanting to give up right then and there. But I can also remember the first time a teacher modeled the editing process. He gave us an essay that I, with all my tact back then, characterized as “atrocious.” After letting us tear into the essay, my teacher revealed that it was his, a college paper he’d written at the last minute. I was shocked (and extremely embarrassed about what I’d said.) But the lesson about never letting the first draft be the final draft has never been forgotten. Turning the idea of assessment on its head, where students give feedback on a teacher’s work, is definitely an effective tool, and one that needs to be used more often.

With that being said, I found Gallagher’s 4:1 grading philosophy a little off-putting at first. However, when I started to think about it, it made sense. Students are already feel scrutinized enough by the red pen. This approach lets them have a chance to practice getting their thought and opinions onto the paper; they also can write without fearing that their work will be judged by another (audience) or that their work will be judged for a certain value (grades). I’m definitely thinking about using this grading approach for writing assignments.

Speaking of assessments, I found the authentic/objective assessment assignment for this week especially challenging. I dislike traditional tests to begin with, as I feel that they don’t fit the nature of literary study. Reading and writing is intensely subjective, and an objective assessment is the exact opposite of that. I also struggled because, when I read, I try to search for relevance beyond what just the text says. I like to make connections to current events, to history, to society, to anything really. How can a multiple choice test assess all that?

Part of my problem with the objective assessment might’ve been that my short story, “If I Forget Thee, O Earth,” was so short—only 3 pages. I chose the text because I thought it was written concisely and well, but also because I thought that it would spur on thoughtful discussion and that could connect to a variety of texts. Like in a text satellite, come to think….

However, I think that my difficulty with creating a multiple choice assessment was because it ran so contrary to everything that I think of when trying to create a unit. That’s why I’m enjoying reading and learning about alternative and more creative ways to assess students. Plus, I think that alternative assessments are much more fun (albeit more time-consuming) to grade than running Scantron sheets.

Teaching Reading / Promoting Literacy

I can certainly relate to the effects of readicide. Having been a lifelong reader, I’d be flummoxed when people would say, “Reading is boring,” or “You really don’t have TV?” Unlike most of my book-averse peers, I can look back and always had reading modeled for me by my parents. The library was a simple, no-cost (I learned quickly that late books came out of MY allowance), and rewarding place for my family to find some quality entertainment. I can remember wondering back then why my classmates didn’t like reading so much. Everything that I learned and loved came out of reading .

Back when I was in middle school, when reading starts to become “uncool”, I noticed that teachers who kept libraries in their classrooms and let us sign books out—either for required or recreational reading—had fewer complaints when it came time to do in-class reading. At the same time, I can remember my sixth grade teacher’s bookshelf. It was full of books. Problem was, most of those books were old, Newbury Award-winners. And even back then, I knew that what might be considered an award-winning book for a teen might not be considered enjoyable by that same teen. Other than those few blessed teachers that at least tried to keep books on hand (likely out of their own pocket), even my relatively well-off private school seemed to rarely ever restock the library or use anything other than the battered literary anthologies from 1994. Book deserts, it seems, are equal opportunity offenders.

I know that it isn’t fair to just blame the school’s lack of resources. I’ve recommended books to people that I just knew that they’d enjoy, talk to them weeks or months later, and they’d sheepishly say that they hadn’t read it. But lend the book to someone, and then they can’t put it down. Because of that, I really liked where Gallagher gave the example of how he got students interested in reading Who Killed My Daughter? It took getting the students interested, and then getting book into their hands to get them reading. It’s the extra step that we book lovers forget.

The parts of this reading that just made me shudder were the sections about how test prep is pushing reading out of the classroom. I think Gallagher summed up the illogic of this with the statement “in an attempt to raise reading scores, school districts are removing books from kids” (11). You wouldn’t attempt to raise math scores by handing students workbooks completely without context from the original concepts and terms. That wouldn’t be effective, even with the analytic, problem-solving nature of math. So why do schools use this approach with reading? I’ve observed PSSA reading prep classes and I think that if the student’s eyes glazed over any more in them they’d turn into Krispy Kreme donuts. It’s such a demoralizing environment, for students and teachers. Tell them that it was time to do SSR, well, that perked them up as if they’d just eaten a box of donuts.

Finally, I fully agree with Gallagher’s suggestion to do research to find out how much reading the students actually are doing in and out of the classroom. I’m planning to write a capstone paper that involves surveying adolescent reading in and out of the classroom, and think that it is not only a great way to get a feeling for where your students are with reading ability, but about them as individuals. Knowing what students read says a lot about them as people, not to mention what they find interesting.  

In short, I think that Gallagher has some great thoughts on what schools are doing wrong and what we as teachers can be doing right. I think that his main arguments center around all about modeling good reading practices and getting students access to books that they want to read, something that I see as effective.