Grammar Nerd

Something that I was a little shocked to learn about my own teaching lately is that my least favorite part of language arts when I was growing up, may be what I’m destined to teach. In elementary and middle school, I absolutely loathed learning about grammar. I didn’t like that it took away from the more creative parts of the subject and struggled to learn them. Now I find myself editing friends’ papers and silently correcting publications I read. I don’t know when it happened and I certainly don’t know why, but I’ve become an English nerd. The funny part is that I’m okay with it. Maybe I’m meant to teach others the lessons I hated as punishment for the torture I’m sure I put my teachers through. What I do know is that I’ll try to teach it in a more entertaining way than when I was in school.

Language arts are in everything from science to gym class. Without language arts skills, you wouldn’t be able to read this sentence – and I wouldn’t have been able to write it. It’s a subject that constantly touches our lives, whether it is reading the Iliad (reading), making a YouTube video (speaking and visually representing), or even watching Spongebob (listening). Without language arts, society as we know it wouldn’t exist. For this reason and more, I am proud that I have a passion for the subject. Even if a student doesn’t become the next great novelist, I can be assured that some of what I teach them will come in handy in their lives, in one way or another. And at the end of the day, if I can say that I made even the tiniest positive difference in someone’s world, I think I can say my life was worth it.

Overcoming Postman

I chose to read Jim Burke’s, What’s the Big Idea. My rationale for doing so was in the description of the book. The concept of backward design and essential questions is one that transcends Language Arts and even school in general. It’s an idea that can be applied to just about any facet of life with success, and that – the ability to take what was learned in a classroom beyond its walls – is exactly what I want to teach my students.

During my time with this book, I was able to make many connections into my own life, even though I’m not yet in a traditional classroom setting. For example, when I teach swim lessons, I model the goal for my students before I begin teaching a skill. This way, my swimmers know what the end product should [through much practice] look like, and are better able to achieve it. I don’t jump right in and demonstrate strokes and skills far out of their ability level, rather I teach in carefully planned sequences, each requiring more skill than the last, until they are able to put them all together into the end product. It’s also important not to teach too many different skills at once; if a student is learning to swim breaststroke, it may confuse them to throw in aspects of the butterfly stroke. These things fall into Backward Design in that they are focused on a particular goal, and superfluous lessons are avoided.

Burke sited Neil Postman’s quote, “Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.” saying that his students consistently break the rule. This statement was the theme for my presentation because I felt it encompassed the idea of the book while debunking the common thought on education that it only happens while at school. 

Please take a moment to view my Sliderocket presentation below. 

Thematic Unit

Bullying has come to almost epidemic proportions in our schools. This is why two classmates and I created a Thematic Unit Plan on bullying. We put it in the form of a four week, multi-step WebQuest. The site is designed so that teachers and students can create real change within their school. 

The first week asks the question, "What is a bully?" In this week, students will take the first steps toward change by looking at the bullying problem that may exist in their school, defining a bully, and learning how to identify a victim.

The second week delves deeper into the bullying epidemic, challenging students to explore how a victim survives a bullying situation. Students will be asked to put themselves in the shoes of a bullying victim, in order to gain insight on the difficulties children in the position face everyday. By understanding the victim, students will be able to look at bullying from the inside and be better equipped to prevent it.  

The first two weeks of the WebQuest focus on defining what bullying is and how it effects the school environment. In this week, student will research ways in which bullying can be prevented in their school. They will look at the issue as a bully, as a victim, and as a bystander.

In the final week, students will be challenged to find real life solutions to their findings. They will use the knowledge they have gain in the previous three weeks to create a culminating presentation for a group of younger students. This presentation should include the following ideas:

1. The student's definition of a bully

2. How to identify someone in crisis

3. How to relate to the difficulties of being a bully or a victim

4. How to prevent bullying

Take a moment to visit our WebQuest and "Start the Change".

Mike Davis Elementary

I did observations at Mike Davis Elementary School, on the southeast side of Naples, FL. In doing these hours, I learned much about myself and the education process in general. I saw that teaching younger children is much like teaching the older ones; it’s the passion and connection with the children that counts. To paraphrase Jim Burke, the point of teaching is to get students to learn on their own (Burke, 2010). A five year old can develop that passion just as easily as a 15 year old if they have the right teacher.

When I asked Mysha if I could observe her classroom it was because I knew I would get a real life view of classroom activity. What I didn’t count on was learning so many things that I can apply to the grade level I wish to teach. Watching the way she interacts with her students and the passion that she has for not only language arts, but for teaching and education in general showed me what it takes to be a great educator. Mysha is the type of person who would be teaching whether or not she had a classroom. The biggest thing I learned from her was to do what you love…That, and to keep your sense of humor and patience.

Southwest Florida is highly diverse and Mike Davis Elementary is no different. Actually, the majority of the students are Hispanic. This can present a challenge in teaching, especially in relating to the students. When I asked Mysha about this, she said she finds that students learn more about reading and writing when she picks topics that are interesting to them, regardless of where they came from. For example, I observed one class that was assigned to read a story about Ann Frank, a typical lesson in a fourth grade classroom. Although the students read it and completed their work, it was obvious that they weren’t really interested in the subject matter; some had never even heard of Ann Frank. Mysha said that her goal of the assignment was more to teach about the parts of reading than to learn history.

I observed another class where she had the same goal of teaching the parts of a story, only this time she assigned a story about the movie Oz. When she gave the page number of the article the students were to read, there were cheers they were so excited. At the end of the lesson, the students had learned the same thing as those who read about Ann Frank, but they retained it more because of their interest. On top of that, they were more focused during the read and more detailed in their responses than those who read about Ann Frank. It didn’t matter what the ethnicity of the student was, if they were interested in the material, they learned it more fully.

Creating a curriculum that the students can relate to has proven to be a challenge for Mysha. We talked about the FCAT and how she is preparing her students for the upcoming exam. She said that she feels her students are capable of passing it as long as the reading portion is something that they can relate to. She said that in previous years the reading has been about things like snowmen and sledding. This proved to be a challenge for her students because most of them had lived in the subtropics their entire lives and had never seen snow. The fact that the children couldn’t put any context behind what they were reading threw a wrench in the cogs and the test scores suffered for it. Mysha said that her students were frustrated with the exam not because it is a challenge, but because they couldn’t relate to anything on it.

I hadn’t really thought about something that seems so obvious to me now – that learning is a lot about context. Michael Martinez says in his book, Learning and Cognition, that our schemas are all interconnected and that our learning gets a jump start from the schemas we have already made (Martinez, 2009). When a student has to learn something for the first time, they automatically reach for something they already know for context. The less context, the harder the material is to learn.

Think about it on a small scale. If you are introduced to a person whose name is from a foreign ethnicity and is something you’ve never heard before, chances are you’re going to have a harder time remembering it than if they shared a name with your best friend. It’s the same thing with learning. If you try to teach a student calculus before addition, their math schema will be too underdeveloped to comprehend the subject. But if you start small, connecting things as you go along, they’ll be channeling Rene Descartes before you know it.

Technologically speaking, Mysha uses both high and low tech options in her teaching. Mike Davis is a very low income school. If everything she taught was high tech, her students may not be able to take their work home for lack of proper resources. At the same time, if she kept everything low tech she would lose her students, who grew up with technology. Mysha does a good job with combining “traditional” forms of teaching with modern advancements. For example, part of each week is devoted to “packets”, which is a list of things that each student must complete by the end of the week. Each packet involves computer work as well as putting pen to paper. By incorporating both the old and new school, Mysha keeps her students interested while keeping things accessible to everyone.

I am very thankful to have been able to spend time in an experienced teacher's classroom and see how a passion for education can influence a student. I can only hope that one day a bright-eyed college kid may have the same experience in observing my (future) classroom.