Blog #6

Despite being “on vacation” from school this weekend, I found myself constantly surrounded by conversations about education. Most topics stemmed from the perfunctory, “What are you doing?” or “How’s student teaching?” questions but then spiraled into broad discussions of proposed educational reforms, the use of standard assessments, the value of games and gaming (ie. video) in education, and in-depth questions about my own thoughts and experience. Almost no one in my family has a background in education (and opinions on my choice of career vary), but most of them had quite a lot to say about the system.

My dad was especially vocal in his questioning of why I graded or taught in certain ways. He wanted to know why don't teachers use all standard assessments for writing? why do you make choices based on individual students? Why do you do this? Why do you do that? Talking to him felt like a dissertation defense – and I’ve had these conversations with him before. In fact, my Dad has never supported teachers or schools that I attend. But I think I won him over! At the end of this conversation, he said, “Well, I certainly respect all the work you’re putting in to this. I always thought that teachers have one of the easiest jobs in the world: show up, teach a little, go home…and they even get the summers off.”

My brother Sam was another critic of the school system. When my dad wanted a definition for a “bellringer,” Sam explained that teachers use them to settle students by immediately having a task to complete. He mentioned that he hated doing things he viewed as “procedural” rather than educational. I explained that my bellringers were definitely part of a classroom procedure, but they also served as writing/grammar review, as practice responding to text, and/or as a writing exercise that tied thematically with the topic of the day. I went on to say that his criticism of teachers “needing a way to get students settled” was unfair because although he may have been calm and collected, his teachers were really serving him by settling the class and starting class in an orderly manner. In a friendly way, I called him elitist and overly critical. He agreed and said, “I probably would have done a lot better if I’d just participated in class with this sort of thing.”

But anyway – I have some reflections on teaching, too. I just wanted to record my family’s changing perceptions.

I graded all the double-entry journals from my honors and collaborative students this weekend. It was a struggle. At this point in my teaching, I assume that students are not completing assignments correctly because I did not explain them well enough. I hesitate from docking points because I’m not sure whether students did not listen, listened and misunderstood, or simply do not understand. Then the ambiguity of comprehension leads to questions like, “How do I comment to help them?” and “Will they pay attention to comments if I do not dock points?”

Also, I’ve been worrying lately about the range of student achievement in both my honors and collaborative classes. I’m afraid that my instruction will be goldilocks-style “just right” for the middle of the class and I’ll lose students on the high and low end. I want to find ways to differentiate instruction and assignments for these students without causing mayhem in my planning/grading/classroom management.