Extreme Teaching

It's Spring Break, finally, and I am looking forward to the break. Not that I don't love my students. My placement at ABPS is wonderful. All the adults in the room work really well together, which is huge, since there's 5 of us. It's a joy and a pleasure and I learn so much watching Mr. Lee. But it is a workout: my husband calls it Extreme Teaching. New sport on ESPN 2.

Seriously: just for starters, you have a few students who need a lot of language to stay engaged, and you have a few who get about two words out of every sentence or phrase you utter. Everyone else is in between, so you have 30-45 seconds to focus their attention on something visual, and about 6 minutes before you lose them- pretty small window for a lesson. Then you have students who are really only engaged with movement or processes; others who hate such things and prefer to draw or look at visuals. I have a reading group that is four kids: two get easily discouraged, two who have noticeably fewer oral-language skills than the other two, and one who absolutely cannot sit still for longer than it takes him to read the text. It's tough. I have a math group of three students and they are in the same group because they don't have place value yet, but there the similarities end.

Individually they're unique, engaging, funny and wonderful. Some of them come from less than ideal circumstances, a few stories that will really break your heart in there as well. Most of them are mercurial in their moods- something small that you didn't catch can throw them into a black, unproductive mood for a long time. They cry a lot. They hit sometimes- too many times. They aren't as nice to each other as I'd like them to be. They're pretty darn hard on themselves, too.

So while I am already missing the morning hugs I get from many of them, I am also ready for a break.

Although I have to say, the moments that they are kind, and the displays of mature, calm behavior, (which are not at all infrequent) shine like stars in contrast to the many, many conversations we have as a group about mindfulness, about conflict and being conflict-solvers, about wasting time and saving time.

It's quite something to watch how they respond to these ideas. Even the students without a great deal of language can understand from the many, many examples we discuss. I think, on balance, these kids try harder for more of the day than your average students: there's fewer of them, nowhere to hide and Mr. Lee does not give them a pass. But it never seems to get easier to see how many things are so hard for them. I know they will miss school, too, although they may not miss me specifically. I hope they have some fun this week.

Reading... or not?

We have four different reading groups in our class of 12 kids. At least four. I worked with one group of them the other day. They had a brief set of instructions: they were to re-read two short books of a series and then read a new one, and answer two questions about it. These were very short books, maybe 8-10 pages, with maybe 2-3 lines of text per page.

Kids in the second grade class I was in last semester were pretty quiet, but they were not silent and still during silent reading. But maybe because there were 25 of them, and not 3 of them, I didn't watch them each as closely in terms of their reading behavior. There was also an expectation (created by peers, not just from us teachers) that during reading time, you read. Students can read, and so they do. Maybe not every second, but for more or less the entire time. We had only one kid who didn't, and he was a source of great anxiety for the teacher.

But when you are sitting with three kids at one table, it's a completely different story. Focus is not these kids' strong suit, even if it isn't their main presenting issue. I really should have taken notes of the range of behaviors I saw during this activity. They were quiet and they were, for the most part, turning pages. But from moment to moment, it was not easy to tell who was actually reading.

So they answer the questions, or not, and that's how you know if they read the book, right? Well, maybe. It's like what I said in my post about assessment (http://studentteacher44.blogspot.com/2012/12/like-shakespeare.html)- when you ask a student to write, you are assessing their ability to write first, regardless of what you've asked them to write about. If they can't or won't write, you can't know anything about what they know or have learned by asking them to write. Right? So... some of the students seemed to be reading, but they pretty much all struggle with writing, so writing wasn't showing me if they had read the book, or understood it. The only way was to have them each read it aloud. And this was quiet reading time: not appropriate.

Anyone who survived the trauma of reading aloud in school when it wasn't their strong suit is probably saying "Nooooooooo!!!" at this point, but.... there really is something to be said for reading aloud. It's the real deal. I love quiet reading time, and I know a lot of second graders that do, too. But for this group, they may not be getting a lot of reading done. It's really hard to tell.