Cooperative Learning

Last week in class, we did a number of activities as an introduction to cooperative learning. It was fun, but I was struggling with how I would want to incorporate it into my classroom. I think it would be really great in classrooms with especially dynamic abilities and motivations but envisioning a classroom of high achievers, I wonder how well/how useful cooperative learning strategies are. I know that during our first activity with the squares, I felt useless. Yes, I had to move my colors and no one else could, thus making me important, but I was not quick enough to envision the squares and so I was only following orders. It was frustrating for me because I wanted to contribute my fair share but couldn't and thus felt bad for being a "useless" group member. I think knowing how to work together is really important. People need to learn how to accept the help of others and know how to ask for it as well. I think people need to know how to step back and let other people have their chance. But that second part I think is the hardest part for people. We live in a society where being number one is highly valued. It's expected that we always strive to be the best one with the best ideas and the best results. Being a fairly passive person, I will often give other people the chance to do what I could easily do myself. But in the world of school, where I constantly worry about what my peers think and what my professors will think and how that will affect peoples' perception of me (and perhaps my grades), I'm constantly worried about proving myself to be smart, a hard worker, someone who can stand on their own and is capable. But with the activity we had and the cooperative learning strategy involved, I just felt incapable and useless, like a pawn for the smarter people in the group. And so I do not know if this is a result of me not knowing how cooperative learning functions or if it is a result of a perception that cooperative learning is not always best.

At last at last, I teach at last!

Monday and Tuesday of this week mark the first days that I have had a chance to put my last four years of higher education to use! If you had told me last semester that I would have gotten through it, I would've thought you were a liar. And if you asked me prior to 10:15 on Monday if I thought I could do it, I wouldn't have been able to give you an answer without going into a full-blown panic. It has been an incredibly long academic year and there have been many moments where I have questioned why I ever thought I would be able to to teach ELA. After this week though, I finally feel as confident as I did where I first chose the major. My lessons were not by any means perfect. On Monday, we got to our exit slip twenty minutes before the class period was up. Up till that point, things had been going really well. The kids had jigsawed a chapter of the novel they're reading, we'd figured out the definitions of two new words, and we questioned whether or not someone can survive without society. As it turns out, I was pronouncing one of the vocab words wrong, but that was an easy fix. And in the end, the kids shared some of their writing and did some silent reading on the section of the book we were going to discuss the next day. I was elated that nothing major had gone wrong, not to mention the teacher told me that she could tell the kids liked me- one of the girls even wrote "you were awesome!" on her exit slip, much to my joy. I was more nervous yesterday- things could only be better or worse this time around. There were a few kids who showed up who hadn't been there the day before and as a whole, the class was much rowdier. But rowdy didn't really hurt me, in the end. We read the chapter out loud, stopping when we found "Thoreau-isms" and I couldn't help grinning every time one of the students said "Miss, stop! That was one!" Not everyone read aloud (I wasn't expecting they all would) but so many kids did, much to my surprise. And when afterwards I had the kids pass notes pretending to be HDT and Chris McCandless, they were near impossible to keep quiet, but the conversations they read out loud afterwards were priceless and showed how much they had been absorbing from their previous lessons. Afterwards when they did their constructed responses, they all wrote something, but I was sad that one girl in particular wouldn't write more than two sentences. The class was nearly over and she handed in her writing, so I didn't say anything. If I had the students for longer than two days, I might've tried to get more writing out of her but I didn't. This was my only disappointment. I know I probably shouldn't be as proud of myself as I am, but I am quite pleased. My mini-lessons in 406 were awful and my lesson plans in our special ed component were not things I was proud of, despite the effort I put in. I was beginning to believe that I had no right to be pursuing this field and I'm glad that despite the end of semester stress that I'm feeling, I don't feel like it's all for nothing.

"Don't Say That"

Yesterdays discussion was hard but important. Though I kept silent throughout, I was thinking a lot. To be honest, I was quite emotionally drained after but still, I was glad for it. Now, I'm gonna ramble a bit so try to follow along. I have a lot of faith that by the time I am a more adult-y adult, my generation will have helped move society forward- to be more open, more accepting, less judgmental. I have been fielding racist complaints at my summer job since I was 17 and been fighting hard against them since, particularly ever since that first summer when I was told, "trust me, after a couple years here you'll be racist, too." It has always made me mad and sad to see this but I have no plans to ever give in. It has been obvious to me more than a few times during this semester that these sentiments are pervasive throughout. I don't think it's intentional, nor to I think it is right to attack people for their mistakes. Attacking only makes people defensive and nothing good will come from it. There are many tricky terrains we must tread not just as people but as teachers, as well. In a personal example, I am someone who sometimes mixes up with "people first" language. Not because I think that someone's conditions define them but because that is the language I have been used to hearing throughout my life. But also as an English major, I understand that it's not meaning that affects us, so much as connotation. Words that might have once been acceptable are used negatively and thus the negative connotation follows. Words acceptable in one time might not be in others, or in other places. We talked a lot about culture last class and whether it is right or wrong to assume that everyone shares the same culture. This gets to be a very awkward subject when we talk about the people of a race other than our own, but I think maybe I can make it a little easier. I spent five months studying in Ireland last year. This was a fabulous experience and I am doing everything in my power to go back as soon as possible. But even though I was in an English-speaking country, there were more than a few situations where cultures clashed. For example, in Ireland to call someone a "spaz" is as bad as saying "retarded". I did not know this- how could I when spaz is a word that is often used affectionately here in America, equivalent to calling someone hyper? But one time when I said it, I was sharply reprimanded by an Irish boy who said "don't say that." I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not and it was a really uncomfortable situation. Later I asked my Irish roommates if the boys were being serious and they explained to me the connotation in Ireland. I was careful not to use the word again, but I wish the boys had understood that I wasn't saying it to be rude, I just didn't know. Additionally, I often struggled with being known as "The American." In my small dance classes, most never learned my name, just asked "is the American here today?"Or, even better, once a kid said, "You're American? Well, I'll forgive ya." It was embarrassing and confusing to know people had an idea of what to expect from me because of the idea they had from what they thought about my country and so I would never want to do that to a student. I want to be aware of where my students are from, and what that might mean, but not ever assume they know something or are something or act a certain way because. I came away from this class with three things: connotation, situation, and most of all, to never ever asssume. I want to see my student as people- multi-faceted people who have been built up a definition of themselves by all sorts of things. Maybe they are a person who's black, or a woman, or a man, or has dyslexia, or has a hard time at home, or is a great student, or who's brother died from cancer, or who has a father in the military, or a mother in jail. They could be any or all of these things, and to know these things will help us understand. But first, and always first, they are people. They are teenagers. They are students.

Observations

Doing my observations, I was reminded by how much I love learning. Sometimes I forget because I'm not necessarily someone who loves school, but watching the 11th graders in the classroom I've been invited into has been a great reminder. I chose the classroom I'm in because not only is it well-organized, the kids seem engaged, even when they're just quietly writing. One thing I've noticed is that there's lots of calling kids at random in this classroom and aside from keeping kids on their toes, in case they might drift off, I think it does something to support the kids in their value. The students are valued in so many quiet ways in this classroom- in that they always start learning their vocab words by giving a guess and they aren't ever told that they're wrong but instead their logic is identified in a "I see why you thought that because a, b, c right?" Giving kids the chance to hazard guesses not only creates a safe, curious environment, but teaches kids how to give educated guesses. These kids are definitely learning in this class and even though they are not my students (at least not until next week for a couple days!) I wanted to applaud when one student used the vocabulary word from earlier in the week, when one girl decoded the meaning of "privy" by saying it sounded like "private", and when two boys discussed their reading in excitement. Knowing things you didn't know before can be so exciting and seeing the zest in these kids is so reassuring.

Co-Teaching and Lesson Plans

I am terrified of lesson plans. There, I said it. I know I shouldn't be, as I've done them in my 406 and in the special ed component, but I am. Absolutely terrified. I think part of my problem, in 406 at least, was that I couldn't wrap my mind around a mini-lesson. Consistently I thought too big and wasn't sure how to pare my lessons down into short, sweet, and informative snippets. But now having watch Bob, Kim, and Buddy, I feel like (maybe) I get it. To have the privilege to watch them bounce ideas off each other was an awesome one but the part that was most useful to me was when Buddy pulled them back and said something to the effect of "but yeah, what's the goal?" I realized then that lesson planning is sort of like writing a good essay where at the beginning and end of every paragraph you can relate it back to the thesis because every paragraph is doing its job to most effectively get across your statement. Even if I have to literally write out HOW DOES THIS RELATE? at every point of my lesson planning so that I remember to periodically look back and change things if I must, I will do it. Whereas in the past I felt like I was floundering in my lesson planning because it was just so much to do, I feel like I have a solid base to stand on. Most of my classmates probably came to this realization a long time ago, but it was really perspective changing for me. I think having such a solid goal in mind is really the difference between being prepared, as in having a lesson plan, and being prepared to go down every possible avenue it takes for students to reach the goal of my lesson plan.

Chapters 9 and 10

Sometimes when I think about all the negative press that comes with public education these days- much of it from teachers themselves- I get discouraged. From the outside it looks like a bleak profession where first a teacher’s passion is crushed via the powers that be (the Common Core, No Child Left Behind, and the like) and subsequently their students’. Part of the reason I want to be a teacher is because most of my education has been made up by me dreading school because it felt boring and futile, often stressful and difficult, and like my teachers couldn’t care less that I felt that way. The other part of the reason I want to be a teacher is that I adored those teachers that made me want to come to school because they were vibrant proponents for their subjects, made me curious and eager to learn more, and in the end made me feel smarter and better off as a person for having had them as a teacher. I mention all this because while I was reading chapter 9 about book clubs in the classroom, I felt myself getting excited about being a teacher all over again because these are the type of projects that are meant to get students excited. The chapter ends with “after doing Book Clubs, do you think young people will want to read more books? We think they will.” And while I think this is incredibly important- and I no doubt want to at least get my future students to think, “hey maybe reading can be kinda cool”, I think the chapter is modest in the ways Book Clubs can help students as people. On page 204, it is suggested that teachers and students compile a list of social skills that should be remembered during book clubs (the idea is revisited on 213 where it is suggested these skills be used to develop a class criteria). A huge part of high school is meant to teach students the people skills they need to be “good” members of society. Personal responsibility, respect for others, and self-respect are all part of the suggested grading criteria. If students are making sure that they abide by these “rules”, reading should come naturally as they can only be responsible if they do the work assigned and can only give their classmates proper respect if they pull their own weight. If students are graded in this manner, no one can really be a “bad” or a “good” reader, there are only readers. Chapter 10, I have to admit, was a bit of a bummer after all my engagement in chapter 9. I agree that creating a “big idea” to shape lessons, particually cross-content big ideas, will help students to think more deeply and cause students to draw the connections that create understanding. In a way, “big ideas” are a way of teaching theory to students as you are asking them to look through a lens. This is a pretty interesting idea to me, but I wonder how often it occurs in schools. It seems to be a big undertaking for teachers to all work together, particularly when high schools tend to have different tracks and students may be in an honors track for some classes but a more standard track for others. It is a nice ideal but I don’t know how well it would work. That being said, I was also a little wary on the suggested grading technique for the Book Club. I really liked it but I don’t know how well it would fly with the administration. Schools want to see how technically “good” their students are and I don’t think that the assessments suggested can really do that.

I heart Daniels and Zemelman

I feel like I say this every week, but in case I haven’t gotten my feelings across, I’ll say it again: I love our text book. You may or may not understand how great and unusual this is. Textbooks are usually long and boring and difficult to understand, a good read for when I’m trying to fall asleep at night. But Subjects Matter is so fabulous, I’ve already decided that I will not try and sell it back at the end of the end of the semester (something I usually do, even if I really like the books, just because the money is something I need) because of how useful I think it will be as I begin to teach my own lessons. Chapter 5, with all it’s pre,during, and post reading activities is heavily dog-earred at the moment. I love that the authors don’t just tell you what to do but also explicitly how. For example, in the brainstorming activities it is suggested that occasionally students should be given a few moments to jot down their ideas before sharing so that “passive or unconfident kids” have something to say (104). Even things that might seem sort of obvious are stated, such as in the think-aloud strategy, where teachers are reminded to shift their voice when moving from the reading to their thoughts so students are able to separate the two. The authors leave no worry unspoken, even going so far as to present potential problems (or non-problems) and how teachers can address them, be it that students are unable to keep quiet (just remind them that they’ll be able to speak aloud at the end) or end up arguing (perhaps a lesson on valuing other’s opinions), as they may in the “written conversation” strategy, which was one of my favorites and I hope to be able to use someday. Chapter 7 on creating community in the classroom was wonderful as well. This past weekend at the writing conference, I attended a panel that asked us to write “teacher manifestos” and one part that I wrote was that I want my classroom to strive for community, not competition. Competition isn’t bad; but too much of it can drive even the most confident student down or the most humble student to have an unappealing ego. The first page of the chapter says it all for me: “good teachers know instinctively that the work of teachers runs even deeper than that [than teaching kids to read more or better]. We need to make the classroom a community, a place where students feel safe to take the risks involved in learning, where they see it connected with their lives, and where they help and learn from one another instead of working only as isolated individuals” (167). Two classes ago, it was suggested that I was dismissing content for saying that I feel that the more important thing is creating happy and empowered students. What I was saying, in different words, was precisely that of the authors. Students who are confident and happy won’t be so scared to try and learn difficult things, to share what they know with others, and will appreciate those around them for what they can offer. I love English and I love reading and I love vocabulary, puns, and Latin roots. I want dearly for everyone to have read some Steinbeck and some Shakespeare (who I’m not even a huge fan of) and John Kerouac because I see value in them and because having a working knowledge of them because certain authors are referenced so frequently, either explicitly or inexplicitly, and knowing them will make the work that references them will gain deeper meaning. There are many things that I value more than school (gasp). I will always love my family, friends, dance, and adventure more. It just is that way. But I still love, love, love reading. Because I feel this way, I am 100 percent aware and okay with the fact that sometimes, simply people won’t like the authors I teach. Not everyone will like To Kill a Mockingbird nor will everyone have had the chance or desire to read it. But I know that these people have other things to offer- maybe they’re fantastic at math or an excellent mediator, a hilarious comedian, a moving lyricist, or a compassionate friend. When community is valued over competition, knowing who is the valedictorian in the class isn’t valued over the star football player or the quiet art student. Being well-rounded makes for an interesting world and that is why students should be taking Brit Lit and Algebra or American History, regardless of whether they like it or not. But knowing every single grammar rule and reading as many classics as possible is most definitely not the end all be all of human existence.

I was going to leave it at my last post for the week but

I loved the chapters we had for reading too much to not share! The authors are head on in their descriptions of textbooks, both in their intention and misguided flaws. The two quotes I liked especially were: "those bodies of knowledge, those big building-blocks of information, need a place to live- and that's what textbooks are for, among other things" and "In the drive to include everything, key ideas fade into the background, or are never successfully communicated, or simply don't stick with students."

I have been feeling this for so long know but have not had a way to put it so succinctly. I knew that I felt textbooks had good intentions and there was something I felt was important about them. As the authors put it, textbooks are reference books. I have long believed that students should be taught skills so that, essentially, they could learn to teach themselves. This is why in elementary school (and again in middle and high school), librarians and teachers and aides all spend hours and weeks teaching students how to use a card catalogue (some schools and libraries still have them!), how to use the library database, how to look up a topic in a encyclopedia (and how wikipedia can be used as a starting point but not necessarily a reliable source!), about indexes and libraries and anything and everything source-y. Teaching students how to use these tools allows them to open worlds of knowledge or simply learn a little about something. But when you take these tools (textbooks **coughcough**) and make them the one and only source. Well, it's too little and too much at the same time.

Confession time: though I have worked very hard to maintain my grades throughout my school career, as a "good student" if you will, I very often struggle with the feeling that I don't have any real basis to actually learn anything. In high school teachers often accused us of not caring about learning and only caring about grades. This bothered myself and my classmates because we couldn't very well not care about grades, could we? It was our grades that would make our teachers and parents and friends call us smart, that would maybe help us get scholarships, get into National Honor Society, and make it so we could wear a cool little sash thing and have an extra tassle and pin at graduation. It wasn't that we didn't want to learn, it was just that learning how to sort of work the system could only be in our favor. We were BS experts, vocab-droppers, and multiple choice test taker extraordinaires. Honestly, I have to admit that these skills have served me doubly in many of my survey courses at college, where we're expected to learn twice as much as high school students in half the time. As a voracious reader since childhood and someone who has spent many hours googling and going from one link to the next to learn more and more, it makes me really sad that in the high school and college levels, it is often the case that "getting through it" is often valued over "getting into it." I think it would be so much more valuable for me to really understand energy conversion than to just know that it involved ATP ... or something?

I am grateful that despite what my teachers thought, I often really wanted to learn about what they were telling me and often they were excellent teachers who really taught me a lot and inspired me to learn more. Unfortunately some of them I could not understand, went to fast, didn't break things down, didn't give us a chance to delve in and explore different sources so that maybe one of them or all of them would trigger that lightbulb, and so I gave up understanding for figuring out how to simply pass. Without all those colorful opportunities, with one skim-able and forgettable textbook, what my teachers feared would happen happens: students give up any chance of understanding for simply passing. That is if they've been lucky enough to acquire those skills because otherwise they might fail, both your class and really having learned anything. And really isn't that you failing your students?

Class 3/25

Class last week was really interesting all around. I so much preferred the observation method we used last week as opposed to the I-Walk method. Though I think the I-Walk has its merits (you can get more observations done in a shorter period of time, it's good for observing classroom layouts, teacher to student ratios, and so on) I think last week's protocol gave us an opportunity to really, really see how teachers interacted with their students. As someone who likes to take my time with things and think about them, this method was very conducive to my own preferred methods. Of course, even though staying in a classroom for so long gave us a better opportunity to observe a teacher's style and how the students reacted to it and how the teacher reacted to the students, even still I found myself wishing I could stay and watch the classes for longer. It is nice to see a variety but sometimes I think we're going too fast to ever really see what's going on, to mull over what we saw, and then find a way to integrate what we learned into our teaching schema.

After the observations we got the chance to hear from parents what they look for in a teacher. I think this was so important to hear because nearly always parents will not have a say in who teaches their child and so I think it is crucial that we always try to be the best teacher a parent or child could hope for. And, like with the student panel, what the parents are hoping for is almost logical and really so easy: to be available. I think this sums up what the parents said because they all agreed that they think a teacher should make their personality available and, most importantly, be available and willing to communicate to a parent how their child is doing. Phone calls were brought up over and over again, requests that teacher's not only tell a parent when their child is struggling (though if this is the case they want to know as soon as you know) but also when their child is doing well. Because kids spend a minimum of six hours at school a day, not including the time it takes to get to and from school or any after-school activities, it might be inevitable that teachers see more of their student than the parents do.  They are trusting you to take care of their child as well as they would and that you care about them, as well.

Chapter 4: yes ... and no.

As a future English teacher, I think I will have an easier time applying the notion that students should read a variety of writing than perhaps those in other content areas. Though it might seem a little odd in a science or math classroom to read fiction or a non-fiction narrative, such as is suggested with biographies on Einstein’s theory of relativity, it is completely normal in an English classroom. Really, I only occasionally used “English” textbooks growing up and usually they were anthologies, or once in awhile a grammar workbook or a Greek and Latin roots book, which were helpful references. The only thing I disagree with is that the book says that there is time to implement extra/different novels because standards are seeking for teachers to cover less topics with deeper understanding. Well, perhaps, but that ignores the fact that there are still required texts within that “smaller” number of topics. Teachers I know, good teachers, tell me time and time again how they have to cut out extra reading in favor of making sure they fit in every book mandated by the state, or how they have to get rid of lesson plans because the state has decided that they’re superfluous to what “should” be taught. Also, the book hates on older texts some, which I find a bit ridiculous. Think of The Outsiders, one of the best stories of prejudice to be written, so timeless that kids often don’t even realize that it was written 50 years ago, and was one of the first true young adult novels to exist. Yes, there are dozens of books that are more recently written, that might mention cell phones or the internet, but it doesn’t mean they’re more relatable. Often the classic is the way to go because it was so wonderful and well-liked that it spawned hundreds of authors to attempt to recreate the feeling it gave but only the original will have all the power. Other times, it is perhaps better to start with a newer version or novel, but not as a replacement. I can attest to the power watching 10 Things I Hate About You as a way my teacher unlocked Taming of The Shrew for me (and made me truly appreciate it), as well as nearly any other modernized version of Shakespeare, but it was a mutual appreciation- I couldn’t fully appreciate the film without knowing the play nor could I fully appreciate the play without the help the movies gave me. It never meant deleting the text all-together.

Central Falls Scavenger Hunt

  4. How many schools are in the city?
 As far as I can tell there are 6 public schools in the CF district (1 pre-k, 3 elementary, 1 middle, and 1 high). There is also one private school, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, that serves pre-K through 8, and their pre-K program is a spanish/english immersion classroom.

10. Is there a movie theater in town?
 No, and as far as I can tell there has been since very early in the 20th century, all theaters closing around the 1920s. I would guess that residents usually go to Cinema World in Lincoln or one of the providence theaters.

22. The first mayor of Central Falls looking down on its current students. I couldn't find his name but I guess his visage lives on!

 12. This here is a bit of Jenks Park covered in snow. By reading the plaque at the corner of the photo I learned that Jenks is also a bird sanctuary created by CF students. The park is also a historical site; the tower in the background is called "Cogswell Tower" and was erected in 1904. It also was a significant site during King Philip's War. Reading the history and having learned abut King Philip's War in high school, I think I'd like to walk around a bit more sometime soon!

 8. This is the outside of the Dexter St. post office, right by CF High.

14.  The only newspaper I can find that is produced in Central Falls is http://acontecerlatino.com/, a newspaper serving Latino communities. I'm shocked that they don't receive the Valley Breeze in Central Falls (we do in Burrillville) because they would usually be considered part of the Valley.

23. The Irish revolutionary that escaped Australia  and eventually settled in Central Falls was James Wilson (a different James Wilson than the signer of the declaration, who was born in Scotland.) And visited by DeValera, wow! I took an Irish history class while I went to University of Limerick and learned all about the Fenians and their revolutionary plights against the British. It is so cool to see a piece of this fascinating history so close to me!

18. According to some statistics I found, the overwhelming majoritiy of CF residents identify as Roman Catholic. I found 8 Catholic churches, 1 Baptist church, 4 "spirit-filled" churches, and 1 specifically "hispanic" church. As far as I can tell, there are no mosques are synagogues in the city. I think the closest mosque would be perhaps the one on Sayles Hill but I'm not sure about synagogues.

9. Is there a fire station? a police station?  how are fire emergencies handled? What crime statistics are available?

-Yes, there is a fire station. The website for the department says "call 911" for emergencies, so I'd guess that fire emergencies are handled as they usually are. Calls are likely dispatched to the station.
-Yes, there is a police station.
-Statistics for every crime are available for 2012 on the RI state police website. They can also be compared back to 2005.

11. Are there public rec facilities? Are there organized community sports?
-There is Jenks Park, Macomber Stadium, the Higginson Ave Sports Complex, the Higginson Ave basket courts, the Garfield Street Playground, the Wyatt Detention Recreation Facility, River Island Park, Pierce Park, Lewis and Hunt Playground, Illinois St. Playground, Sacred Heart Ave Playground, Crossman Street Playground, and the Saul Tarlow Ballfield.
-There is youth soccer, football, and little league.

(EDIT 2/24)

What did I learn? What am I know questioning?

I learned that even though it is so small, Central Falls has a rich history right within its square mile! This should not surprise me as Rhode Island and the Blackstone Valley in particular play significant roles in American history, but it thrilled me in the very least! I love learning RI history and was so excited to hear about how CF rubbed shoulders with Irish history as well! I guess it's the same as the excitement we feel when we're on a known battleground or recognize a location in a movie and that feeling of "I've been in the same place that history happened! I could be standing on the same spot so and so stood!" and it's quite fun. Now I'm wondering if students of CF known how much exciting stuff has happened in their little city.

What will this mean as I continue my journey from student to teacher?

I think what this activity embodies is the idea that now I won't just passively wait for teachers to feed me information but rather, as the teacher, I will seek out information to feed my students because of my own feelings of what is important and wanting them to know the same.
 

Understanding UBD

Understanding by design, or UBD, is a teaching tactic that is new to me but one I can easily see myself attempting to employ. I think myself and many of my classmates (though I don’t mean to speak for them, these are just my own assumptions) struggle with what we’re taught about teaching for several reasons. Namely:

1.       What we’re being taught is often drastically different from the way we were taught in high school, thus taking away the opportunity for us to have any models.

&

2.       What we’re being taught often demonizes the methods by which we were taught, creating a strange push and pull from our inclinations as teachers: we gravitate towards the methods through which we learned but also feel the need to shun them as we’ve been told that these methods are “bad” methods.

I will not say that none of my teachers in high school created their lesson plans “backwards”, from what they wanted us to understand to the ways in which they planned on transmitting such understanding. However, I know for a fact that nearly all of my high school successes can be measured by the grades I got on tests, quizzes, and essays. Though chapter 1 extolls  a balance between “demonstration and application of knowledge” and drilling, I find it to be, for once, one text that does not demonize such “drilling.” I appreciated here the sports metaphor because as a dancer (sorry, it’s always going to come back to dance for me!) I know that drilling is necessary to get good at a piece of something but I also know that drilling doesn’t always translate to understanding in the long run. Yes, I can do that move on its own perfectly, but can I do it in a step? Can I do it with a different timing? When I practice it in context, there comes my demonstration of understanding and application.

I would say that my high school teachers got understanding out of me in the same way- tests and quizzes and in-class practice/drills resulted in understanding via essays or projects. I think that modules A and F (thank you, thank you for giving “real life” examples and processes in these readings!)  were excellent in conveying this process, particulary in instances such as:

A driving test is an excellent example of how knowledge and application converge to create understanding. For once, I kind of get it and see that the methods we are being taught really aren’t so different from the way in which I was taught. And for once, teaching is somewhat demystified and I can actually see how I will apply these not-so-new methods in my own teaching someday.

My Blog Log

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XDY4OuJm3Ug05U6FIbYs_vUcCF2caQ3htrUsVaNTzmw/edit?usp=sharing

Chapters 1 & 2

                Reading through these chapters, I had a few  general thoughts: “well there’s another problem”, “that makes sense”, and “why aren’t we doing this?”

                First things first, I do have to say that I enjoyed reading these chapters. They were much easier to read than many text books and articles and gave many opportunities to actively stop and consider what we’ve just read. The first example about the students who read Fast Food Nation was one of these opportunites. Honestly though, I was a more than a little distracted by the students actions. I understand that the “point” of the example was to celebrate the fact that students were inspired by their reading (and having read the book, it’s a fairly long read with lots of history and figures involved) but I couldn’t help but be a little appalled. As a future English teacher, I of course want my students to realize how much relevant information can be garnered from books and to use that information to become active members of society. But in raising readers and training them to be active members of society, it is also our duty as teachers to raise thoughtful members of society. What kind of teacher would allow students to harass innocent workers, who need a job to get money, and take time out of their day to deal with them? The whole scene was downright rude and just knowing how often workers have to deal with the repercussions  of such “peaceful protests” was upsetting, as well as these notion of reading a book about slaughter to young children. It is wonderful to think of students being able to take texts and make them meaningful in their lives, but they are still children yet and it is a teacher’s job to help them be intelligent enough to act like the adults we would want them to be. Teaching is that large of a job.

                The other impressions I had had to do with the fact that we as teachers need to teach students not just how to decode but how to read deeply.  Teaching read strategies, going through the stages of reading, to that I say “of course!” But then I hesitate because it makes sense that teachers may not remember that students need this. The chapters in the book keep reiterating that most students have never been taught these skills, so why is it to be expected that we suddenly gained them in college? I don’t know how the other content areas differ, but I know that to be in the English content area requires lots and lots of English classes. But they are the same classes taken by “regular” English majors. Usually this involved reading a book a week, discussion, and then an essay. If this is what we do for four years of our lives, how are we going to remember to slow down the process for our students if our teachers haven’t given us the same opportunity? Well, I guess we’re learning it now in classes such as this, but we aren’t applying it. So that’s a problem to me.

Literacy Profile: Irish Dance

Jump! Flutter and treble toe up bang bang, treble click switch click spin treble bang!

This is just the first two bars of one of my newest hornpipe steps.  Of course, Irish dance steps always last 8 bars. And of course after you go through the eight bars that started on the right, then you have to repeat the moves by starting with the left. Unless you’re doing a set dance, obviously.

Except not of course and not obviously. Though I have now been Irish dancing for more than half my life, as I started when I was nine and am now twenty-one, I can still remember my days as a beginner when Irish dance was as mystifying to me as most art forms are to those who are not literate in them. Back then, I would only start counting when my teacher cued my to, sort of remembering that I was meant to start my steps after I had counted to 8. But I learned quickly enough, because there was nothing I had ever wanted to learn more than Irish dance. 

As a kid going to Catholic school in Rhode Island I had a lot of classmates who, like myself, had families who had come to America from Ireland at some point in the not-too-distant past. For these classmates, the sport of choice was Irish dance. I was so envious of these kids who got to perform in front of the whole school in the cafeteria on St. Patrick’s Day, the girls with their hair curled and their Tara brooches pinning their silky capes to the back of their dresses, and after performing for us, would get to ditch school for the day to dance in other places around the state. I loved the music, I loved the steps, I loved the idea, even at that young age, that I had probably had family members who had done these same sort of dances. Eventually my mom finally took me to my first beginner class in a VFW hall and there’s been no looking back since.

Now that I am not just a performing, competitive Irish dancer, but a teacher as well, I have become so much more aware of how knowledge is required in Irish dance and how much incidental knowledge is acquired as well. To simply be able to dance, I had to learn what each move was called by my current dance teachers. When I switched dance schools in college, getting over “language barrier” was a struggle in and of itself, but there was some overlap as the teachers I had as children and the teachers of my current studio had been trained by the same teacher as children. But the same translations would have to occur again whenever I attended workshops or when I went to Ireland for a semester in Ireland. In Ireland, a treble jig is a waltz, a treble is a rally, hard shoes are heavies, ghillies are lights. Thankfully, some things always stay the same, such as the music: I can tell a slip jig (which is in 9/8^th time) from a reel (4/4 time) after two bars. Traditional set dances are nearly identical through the world, as are ceili dances, which is a type of social dancing.

As I mentioned above, lots of incidental knowledge comes with being an Irish dancer. Because of Irish dance, I’ve learned Irish history, I know a handful of Irish words, I know hairspray makes the bottoms of your shoes kind of sticky when you might be dancing on a slippery floor. I've learned you should turn-out from your hips, not your knees and even when you're way too tired to stretch you really are gonna regret it if you don't. I’ve learned teamwork and that when you've committed to something, that's the end of the story. I’ve learned that some kids learn steps better when they’re broken down, other kids need to just do the step to speed over and over until it all comes together. I’ve learned that usually the wildest kid will become a model student if you give them a “special” job that you think only they can do. Most importantly I think I’ve learned that learning, although sometimes it is easy, can be really hard. It can hurt. It can feel impossible. But with hard work, and sometimes that means working ten times harder than anyone else in your class to just be able to do half of what they can do, nearly nothing is impossible.  I’ve tried to express that to my students, who mostly might be too young to understand right now, and to carry that over into all aspects of my life. Truly, Irish dance has taught me “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” 

Except usually it’s like “try, try, try, try even harder, and then try again.” But the success that comes at the end of hours and months of practice has never not been worth it.