Love::Teaching

Tonight was the celebration of my 8th grade students’ promotion to high school. Every year I think I’ll never love another group like the ones I have at the time. It’s so hard to let them go, but as teachers it’s part of what we do. Here is speech I gave my students tonight:

You guys have a lot to celebrate this evening, but no celebration is ever complete without a little advice. As I was trying to figure out what little piece of life advice to share with you tonight I thought of all the fancy and complicated-sounding things I could say, but then I came across a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that kept it simple, but said it all at the same time. Just six little words. He said:

“Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.”

That’s it, three things that will take you far.

Be silly – I know most of you can do that one right now, but as you get older, it gets hard to remember to take time to have fun. High school can seem like serious business. I know most of you are nervous, and some of you are just plain scared, but if you remember to take time to be silly and have fun wherever you go, life will always be a little brighter.

Be honest – Being honest means taking responsibility for your actions – accepting praise for your great accomplishments and admitting when you inevitably make mistakes. No one is perfect. Everyone messes up now and then, but being honest when you do briefly go down the wrong path lets those around you know that you’re going to make a better choice next time.

Be kind – In the world we live in, it can sometimes seem like kindness is in short supply. Think of your favorite people – teachers, family members, friends – what do all of those favorite people have in common? Kindness. The people we like to be around are warm and caring, just like all of you. When you are faced with a choice of how to treat someone, choose kindness, and be someone else’s favorite person. The one that make’s their day a little better.

I have such hope for all for you. I’m so proud to have been a part of all of your lives. As you move beyond middle school and enter the world of young adults, I hope you will remember to do these three things every day: be silly, be honest, be kind.

At the end of each quarter in my school district each student at the secondary level is required to take benchmark exams. Because we are preparing for the transition to the Common Core, my district decided that for 4th quarter we would replace the project-based 4th quarter benchmark that we had been using with a Next Generation Assessment taken from the Common Core.

I’m all for it – if Common Core is where we’re going, I want to be as prepared as possible. But when I got a look at this assessment, I was nervous. It asks the students to perform 3 main tasks with a poem:

1) analyze the impact of word choice on meaning and tone
2) identify and analyze analogies
3) identify and analyze allusions

Word choice is something we talk about all year, so I didn’t worry about that one. Analogy is a new term to my 8th graders, but we talked about comparisons, similes, and metaphor, so it isn’t that much of a stretch.

Then there’s allusion.

My first thought was, “Is it even possible to teach literary allusion to 8th graders?” Allusion is nowhere in GLEs or objectives. I’ve never taught it, and I don’t think I even learned it myself until college! Besides being able to define the term, allusion is 100% based on schema. Can I teach my kids the schema of a literary cannon in 3 weeks of 8th grade??

No, of course I couldn’t. I didn’t need to. I needed to calm down. My students and I could find a way to do this. I was trying to squeeze their toes into tiny shoes again!

So this week in my 8th grade Reading class we tackled allusion. I figured out a way to introduce and play with allusion, and the kids really enjoyed it. They worked really hard, and they truly did figure out what allusion is. Lack of schema is a huge stumbling block, but we got through it together.

Here are the tools we used:

Introducing Allusion Prezi

Activity for identifying Allusions in groups:

allusion

Fantastic poem for basic allusions:

Standing Tall

In my experience when you ask a middle school student what they know about poems one of the first things they say is, “They rhyme!”

In my class this week we talked about using rhythm as a way to make a cohesive poem without using rhyme. We practiced counting syllables. (My syllable-counting trick is to say the words like a robot. For example, in you best robot voice say, “I can talk like a robot.” –See how you broke up the syllables!)

For our project I had the students write out their full name.* The number of syllables in their name was the number of syllables they had to use per line in their poem. We had a lot of fun!

Below are my favorite examples for different numbers of syllables, from 3 to 7.

*Some names have been changed, but number of syllables was retained.

This weekend my husband and I went shopping for our kids’ Easter shoes… yes, we waited until the last minute. I knew what sizes we needed, so I showed the salesperson the style of shoe I wanted for my son and asked if she had it in a size 1. When she came back with the box and opened the lid my husband said, “Whoa!”

Easter Shoes

“Do you think they’re too big?” I asked.

“Yes, they look huge,” he said.

“I thought he wore a 1…”

“I did too.”

We decided to buy them even though we were both certain that our son’s feet would be lost in the giant shoes. “Better too big than too small. We can always bring them back.”

And I bet you can see where this is going… they fit fine. He’s little in our minds, but in reality, not so much.

And this got me thinking about school. How many times have I thought about using a text or trying an activity and then thought, “Maybe it’s too complicated” and dialed it down to “meet” where (I think) my students are? I wonder how many times I made the less difficult lesson because my students’ abilities were smaller in my mind than in reality. Have I prevented them from growing to their potential because I have been stuffing their capacity to learn into lessons that were too small?

I’m going with the “bigger” lesson next time. I can always take it back if it doesn’t fit…

My school is closing in on standardized test time, so my students have been brushing up on test-taking skills. We block off a couple of weeks to review our year’s worth of content and remind the students of testing “tricks” like coding. Like anything, some kids need more practice than others, so after the first week I broke the students into two groups. The first group (made up, for the most part, of students who enjoy reading and have a history of success on assessments) were given the assignment to make a video that could be used to help gets kids excited about the upcoming test. The other group stayed with me to get more practice.

The kids who stayed with me, for the most part, do NOT like to read, and have the unsuccessful assessment history to prove it. I couldn’t roll out the worksheets again. If it didn’t work last week, it wasn’t going to work this week. So I took another approach.

I decided to try to get them invested in the activity by showing YouTube videos that displayed the lyrics to popular songs, and then giving them some selected response questions I had developed to go along with the lyrics. Less silent reading, more practice with content vocabulary, GLEs, and test-taking practice. Here is an example:

What is the meaning of the line “You had my heart inside of your hand”

A. it is literal, he was holding her heart
B. it is a sensory detail describing what she saw
C. it is figurative, he had power over her emotions
D. it is a sensory detail describing what she felt

The phrase “reap just what you sow” is as example of:

A. jargon
B. simile
C. idiom
D. alliteration

This song is written in:
A. jargon
B. dialect
C. slang
D. onomatopoeia

What is the theme of the song:

A. Fishing is fun for all ages
B. Sometimes the little things are most important
C. Kids don’t always know what’s going on
D. Blood is thicker than water

Was this a true test-like scenario? No. Were the students engaged? Yes. Did they get practice with test-type reading? No. Did we spend time engaged in discussions about the difference between slang and dialect, what a theme truly is, and the fact that sometimes you can answer a question by knowing that 3 answers are WRONG instead of know which is RIGHT? Yes.

Did they come in the next days saying, “Can we do what we did yesterday?” Yes. And that means a lot.

I will try to keep my misgivings about standardized state testing out of this post. The world doesn’t need another rant about why they aren’t great – if you don’t like them, you’ve heard it a dozen times, and if you think they are important, I’m sure you’ve already made your case too.

This post is about something else – test prep burnout. Not the kids’. Mine.

In about three weeks my students will spend some hours silently filling in bubbles without the opportunity for any help from me or their peers. Just the student, the booklet, the pencil, and the bubbles. This is not how they have spent much of their time with me in the last seven months. We have spent our time discussing things in groups big and small, reading aloud, putting our thoughts into words on paper and screen, and creating projects to express our ideas in new ways. We have had great insights, some failures, and lots of laughs. But there wasn’t much silence. There weren’t many bubbles.

And so, for the few weeks before THE TEST, we practice. We talk about test-taking strategies – the tips and tricks for successful “multiple choice” test taking. We review all of the main things we have discussed during the year, and a few things from years past. We start by practicing together, and eventually they practice on their own. With the silence, the booklets, the pencils, and the bubbles. And guess what… it’s BORING! Not for them so much, (Quite a few of them actually like it. “It’s easy.”) but for me.

I go from lead learner to class monitor. I go from idea discusser to worksheet grader. Yuck.

But the thing is, I think it makes a difference. As long as the students are going to be judged by their scores on these tests, then it is my job to help them get the best scores they can. No matter my ideology. No matter my misgivings. My classroom is about them, not me. They need this practice so they can go into the test with confidence. They need it to put their best foot forward for those who will judge them as numbers on paper. They need it, so we do it. Even though, for me, it sucks.

Making words clouds is really fun, and they look cool, but sometimes I forget what a valuable tool they can be for truly getting a picture of the focus of your writing (or your students’ writing).

This January I began my coursework for a Masters in Technology in Schools (which is part of the reason I haven’t be blogging as much!) My first two courses are just coming to an end, and I have been assigned to write a reflection paper for both. I thought it would be interesting to make a word cloud of my combined reflections, to see what stood out. Here is what I got:

Online
Technology
Class
Think
Students
Course
Time
Learning
Feedback
Enjoyed
Education
Assignments
Classroom
Others

I wrote two whole papers to turn in to my professors, but my word cloud pretty much sums it up!

I just found an extremely fun tool called tagxedo for making word clouds. It’s similar to Wordle, but I found it to be easier use, faster, and even more fun. You can use it for a lot of things, but I made two word clouds for myself.

First, I made one from all the text on THIS blog:

Second, I made one from all the text on my twitter account.

I love word clouds because they show you your focus. I strive to be student-focused in my teaching, and it looks like, at least in words, I am keeping the students right where I want them.

Why are you still reading this, go play on tagxedo.

My family members and coworkers have been dropping like flies with various ailments all week, and I finally succumbed this morning. I woke up with a sore throat, closed nose, and questionable stomach. It wasn’t happening today for me and 120 8th graders.

This semester my students have been using Digital Reading Notebooks, for the first time and I have found a lot of reasons to love them. Today I found another:

I uploaded an assignment to their journals from home! And I’ll be able to read and respond to what they wrote from home and be ready to hit the ground running on Monday.

I love teaching middle school. Middle school students are unique beings. If you teach middle school, you know that, and will appreciate the story to come. You will smile and nod and think, “Yep, that sounds about right.”

The real reason I am taking the time to write this, however, is for the non-middle school teacher. Because this brief conversation I had with a student is a perfect example of what it is like to work with the minds of these strange, beautiful, funny creatures.

I teach reading. On the first day of school (about 20 weeks ago) I showed the students the book bins, where they store their independent reading books. They use them twice a week, every single week.

This Friday one of my best students, a girl who doesn’t miss school, loves to read, and gets strait As walked up to me at the the end of class and held her book out to me.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“Can you hold on to this for me? I don’t want to lose it,” she said.

“Why don’t you want to put it in the bin?” I asked.

“Oh! I forgot we had those!” she said. And she turned and walked away.

Middle School.