Does It Have to Have Holes in It When You Use the Whole Thing?

There are quite a few things going through this mind of mine today. A nephew's birthday. Shakespeare was right about the passage of time, these days time is beginning to gallup. The profile picture of me with two of my teachers was first grade in 1974, 38 years ago. That was also the first year I bowled in a league. 38 years knocking down tenpins, 21 years coaching bowling... One thing good about being around long enough to remember with clarity events that occured nearly 40 years ago is that the distance gives perspective, the jury's out about the wisdom I'm getting from that perspective, but it made me look at whole language instruction in a new way.

I need to out myself. I am a 1994 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. That means I was trained to teach English using whole language. The knock on whole language is that it has holes in it-- too many practitioners threw the baby out with the bath water because it was expedient to do so. Consequently, we have a generation of learners who have no clue how to "sound it out" because they were not taught phonics. We have students who do not know how to spell because linguists pointed out that more than 75% of English vocabulary does not follow the spelling rules we taught. Instead, students were given "sight words," a list of words to memorize and know on sight without receiving the benefit ofthe tools to see the relationships between these rules.

I am glad I was born earlier enough to have been taught the "old way." I love words because of it. I even love the craziness of a language that has 85% of its words imported from other languages. Recognizing the cognates for me is like having the code list to use my decoder ring I bought in the back of a comic book. Many of my students were not given the tools to decode. As 8th graders, they will be called to task by the state in PSSAs and Keystone exams that presume these students will be able to decode vocabulary. What's an eigth grader to do? Moreover, how does their 8th grade English teacher help fill the gaps?

Driving home from obedience school Saturday, it came to me. Be who you are. Teach the grammar using the text, the textbook, and other resources. Haven't I already been doing that? To an extent yes, but the delivery was disjointed. Grammar out of the grammar text only. Reading comprehension using only the novels and stories. There is an intersection and it came running to me while navigating traffic down I83.

The first part of speech I am teaching 8th graders about is the preposition. Although in That Was Then, This Is Now, Bryon does not use a strong vocabulary, he does use prepositions. It is almost impossible to construct paragraphs without them. He doesn't use compound prepositions very often because his sentence structure is simple and compound prepositions convey complex thoughts. Show the students that. Better yet, have them find that on their own by setting them to that task.

So another "aha" moment struck me. This marking period, I want to improve students' knowledge of prepositions, decrease their pronoun-antecedent errors, encourage them to use more complicated sentence structures, and begin to recognize cognates for vocabulary building and reading decoding skills. Whole language can help us get there using the novel.

Bryon frequently makes pronoun-antecedent errors and this is SE Hinton's design. It makes him sound like a teen. Sometimes the verbs and subjects do not agree in the dialogue. Bryon's sentence structure is simple and needs more complexity. Why not use examples from the chapters to have students analyze with the new information they were given about effective written communication? Moreover, why not give the unit test with sections of Bryon's writing to revise to increase complexity, identify the parts of speech investigated this marking period and dialogue to fix the grammar errors in pronoun-antecedent and subject-verb agreement?

Even though I was trained to do this, it has taken 5 seasons of reading the novel aloud to some classes and re-reading on my own to revise plans to see the opportunities. In the meantime, my students have met the standards for annual yearly progress on the PSSAs, my reputation as an educator has been strongly positive, and parents have been happy to have me as their child's teacher. I am not satisfied with any of that because I know I can do more and go further. What about the teachers who have not had years to mull over the text and see the opportunities?

Why bother? When students study grammar and vocabulary in a vacuum, they tend to believe that it only matters on a worksheet or grammar book exercise. They don't see the connection to the "real world" of what they read on the internet, e-books, novels, textbooks, etc. For the most part, this novel is popular with my students. Showing kids how the writing of this novel works technically, hopefully will help them connect the lessons to their own writing. The motivated learner were already there. Hopefully this will help the rest find their way to the same place. Hopefully--- we shall see.