My Senior Year

Authentic writing is the best way to help students with their writing skills. It introduces them to a wide variety of audiences and purposes while giving them a reason to write. I constantly hear from students, “why do we have to do this?” or “when will I use this in real life?” Students (and most people in general) don’t like to feel like they are wasting their time but that is what ends up happening when teachers just assign a boring writing assignment. If the student is always writing for the teacher they don’t learn how to write effectively for other audiences and that means that they aren’t being taught how to effectively write.

Also, I have found that when a teacher assigns some sort of authentic writing situation, it usually ends up to be a more entertaining and fun experience for the students. Students are more interested in assignments that have a purpose and I think that authentic texts can help students work harder because they act differently when they think their peers, parents, or community in general might get to see it.

Authentic writing can help English classes. As long as English teachers continue to use the same old boring format of “write a paper for me”, students will continue to dread the class. Authentic writing can help make the class fun again. Once students realize that they can use writing in their everyday life, they recognize the importance of what they are learning and then they view it in a different manner. Authentic writing will help make English a favored class once again.

One of the best ways to help students develop their ability to use and appreciate language is to begin by exposing them to language that in a friendly way. All of my students in my practicum love to talk (in fact, I have problems getting them to be quiet when I am teaching). All I need to do is discover a way to use their constant talking about the drama and gossip of the school into the type of language that is accepted and required for the classroom setting. To help do this, my classroom will have a focus on discussion because I believe that good discussion can help almost any type of student and that it helps students with their communication skills in general. These numerous discussions in my classroom will help familiarize students with language and it will hopefully develop their ability to use language. In these discussions, I would like to think my own use of language will help serve as a good model of the use of language.

It is a very difficult thing to find the happy medium between too much poetry and too little. Honestly, I have never been that much of a fan of poetry. In high school it was something I tolerated because I knew the teachers had to teach it and I knew it would only last for a week or so. Suddenly things changed. I don’t know exactly when it happened, but suddenly I found myself writing poetry. I truly believe that the only reason I started now was because I knew no one would ever see it. No teacher would look at it and say, “That’s wrong”. Then, as I got a little bit older and read about the different ways to teach poetry I began to get excited. I could possibly spark some child’s interest in regards to poetry. Students need to understand that not every piece of poetry needs to be akin to Walt Whitman (thank goodness). Every student will respond to poetry differently and I think it is important that every teacher remembers that.

Chapter Six in Milner’s book (Bridging English) is all about poetry. I think that one of the most important sections from this chapter was the section on Listening to Poems. Teachers need to begin teaching their students how to read poetry too because “the sounds of words-vowels, consonants, rhyme, alliteration, meter, and rhythm-create pleasure, produce effects, and contribute to meaning” (p 209). Poetry is difficult enough for some students to understand and reading it out loud could help them create a mental picture of what is happening.

 Check out the link below for a pretty awesome poem I heard on youtube!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42E2fAWM6rA

It is the first day of a new unit. Today we will begin reading Romeo and Juliet. The second the teacher says that, the students lose interest. They claim it is too boring or too difficult to understand. I can’t entirely blame them for this response; for years they have probably had teachers that just have them read the drama text by themselves or out loud in class. However, that is not the way drama, specifically Shakespeare, was meant to be heard. Drama is meant to be acted out! Instead, students read from the text in the same monotone voice regardless of whether their character is professing his undying love or swearing revenge on another person. This needs to be fixed in order for students to understand drama and respond to it in a positive way.

Milner’s book, Bridging English, devotes an entire chapter to ‘Responding to Literature’ (Chapter Five) and it lists numerous ways to get the students involved and engaged in the literature they are reading. However, the most important thing that I saw in this chapter was Elliot Eisner’s list towards the beginning of the chapter. Eisner lists and explains seven things that literature can help the reader to do. The list includes: Imagine new worlds, become seers, stabilize the evanescent, exchange our world with others, rely on judgment without established criteria or standards, see the universal in the particular, and learn to play (p 120).

As I said in one of my earlier blogs, I think it is important to remember that understanding and goals should go hand in hand. Any teacher that creates goals without first looking at what they want the student to understand is not fully grasping the point of teaching. It is also important to make sure that our goals are within reach for the students and that they also provide enough of a struggle for them. If you are not challenging your students with your goals than I’m not entirely certain there is a point to having that specific goal.

As English teachers, the rest of the education system seems to believe that the responsibility to teach reading falls solely on us. This is not true. However, we are just one of the many that are responsible for teaching reading. Many students, even those in the High School, struggle with reading and I believe it is a teacher’s job to help their struggling students. For instance, there a couple students in my practicum class that can not read very well; in order to help these students we read all of the literature out loud in class. I think teachers should try to help these students one on one but I admit that this isn’t always possible.

The obvious difference between designing units as opposed to lessons is that designing a unit is more time consuming, bigger, and it generates the big picture. On the other hand, designing individual lessons takes less time and focuses on only one aspect. It is always a good idea to design the unit and not just the lessons because the unit helps you you’re your students) keep track of what you are doing and why; as I said earlier, designing the unit creates the big picture.

Personally, I was always bothered by the classes that asked me to create a lesson plan for one day in my future classroom; making one lesson plan for one day instead of designing the unit never made sense to me. The daily lesson plans make up the unit but I believe a good teacher (if not every teacher) makes those lesson plans tie together. Each lesson plan that you design is like a puzzle piece; it isn’t until you put all those puzzle pieces together that the picture begins to make sense.

After spending a lot of time on my Teacher Work Sample (TWS) for our EDUC 473 class these past few weeks I have discovered a few things. First of all, Understanding by Design is difficult for my brain to work with. Secondly, I now understand why people take such pride in their TWS (after putting this much work into a something, I completely understand having pride in it). Thirdly, and most importantly, I understand the importance of goals.

Learning goals, as I have recently learned, are not set in stone. After my students took my pre-test today I realized that I have to alter a few of my learning goals and I have even discovered an entirely new learning goal that I will need to include. However, no matter what my final learning goals end up being, they will shape my entire lesson. They are the first things that I created and I have shaped every pre-assessment thus far off of them, I will continue to base my teaching and instruction off of them, and I will base my post assessment off of them. Our learning goals should affect our instructional design because that is what they are meant to do. They are meant to help us focus our entire lesson; they are the glue that holds the lesson together.

Many teachers understand that student-centered classrooms are a good thing. However, I also think that many teachers understand that it is not really possible or time-realistic to have student-centered classrooms every day. Also, there are many teachers that think they are creating a student-centered classroom with their discussions but really, according to Smagorinsky, “the teachers more typically control the floor in ways that limit students’ contributions” (32).

Smagorinsky offers many alternatives to the types of discussions that teachers usually lead. Some different types of Student-generated whole-class discussions are the fishbowl style, informal writing as the basis for discussion, talk show format, and (the one that I haven’t used before) put the author on trial. I have heard students complain about books and certain characters over and over; this is why I believe ‘put the author on trial’ would be a great activity for students. I think that this activity would really get the students involved and I can’t wait until I am able to try this in my own classroom.