Fun?

Last year in our district formative assessment committee,  we examined, experimented with, and critically analyzed a variety of new tricks of the trade to gauge student readiness to learn, student acquisition of knowledge, student schema, and generally some cool stuff (LOVE using illegal words!) The most enduring revelation I received from all of it effective feedback. I have always commented on papers--- sometimes I have more comments about my students writing than the actual writing they produced. I learned that some of what I was doing for years may not be that helpful to learning after all.

The hardest thing I had to learn (and now continue) was asking questions rather than pointing out mistakes. I did what every English teacher has been trained to do. I took out my marking pin and made editing suggestions to their work. Bad idea. Why? I was doing all the work, thus making my students dependent upon my editing and not responsible for their own.

The new strategy was to ask questions rather than point out grammar errors, misspellings, fragments and gaffes in fluency. So I'm taking a break after plowing through half of last class's Write Your Think. We just finished chapter 5 of That Was Then, This Is Now with five minutes left of the class period. Rather than talk about our reactions to Charlie's murder, I asked the question: "Whose fault is it that Charlie is dead?" Students wrote paragraph-long responses to the prompt.

It is getting easier to ask rather than direct. Everytime I saw a proper noun that needed capitalization, I underlined it and drew a line from the word to the margin where I wrote "What must we always do with the first letter in a specific name?" Where students neglected apostrophe "s" I asked: "How do we show possession when we write a person's name?" For incomplete sentences I asked: "How could you make this a complete thought?" For misspelled words or misused homonyms I would ask : "Is this the correct spelling of the word for this sentence?" There is a pragmatic benefit to this paradigm shift.

After writing the same questions over and over again, I received a direct message from my students. "Mr. Logan, we need to be reminded how to capitalize proper nouns. We need a refresher about how to show possessive in our writing. We need to keep a log of the words we misspell frequently so we know to pay attention to them. We need to look at how to writing complete sentences." See? Now I know what writing issues to focus upon next week to complement their reading assignments.

Novelty is a message I latched onto from an in-service last year. I have a tendency to be a goof or overly dramatic in class. I have fun in class, nearly every day. How-- try being a goof with 8th graders and watch their faces. Priceless. From that point, you have their cooperation and attention-- they want to know what other crazy stuff you're going to do. I once told a friend that what I like about teaching is that it takes everything I have and asks for more. In elementary school, junior high, high school, and college, I was a singer and actor. I now use those skills when I teach.

Sorry Justin Timberlake, you might be bringing "Sexy Back," but I'm bringing "Grammar Back." Smiles, eye rolls, rib jabbing, perplexed stares and mild amusements that crawl across their faces. Priceless. Some parents come to parent teacher conferences singing my versions of pop songs that thair kids sing to them on the way to soccer practice or whatever. You never know what lingers with kids or what they are taking home. Do you know: "Two types of nouns/Only Capitalize One/Proper, proper, proper nouns please?" I'd probably be in trouble with Lady Gaga if she knew my students know my lyrics better than hers.... Fun with grammar. What a concept.

Not really. Sister Eleanor Grace Spirodozzi, at Saint Mary's School in Baldwinsville, NY, used to host spelling relays every Friday. She would divide the class into two groups. We would get in line at one end of the room. The middle of the room was cleared so we could do the relay. Someone would keep score while we played. Sister would call the spelling word from our list and we would try to beat our opposing runner to the chalk board on the other side of the room and spell the word correctly. The person who spelled it correctly first earned her team a point but then she had to run back to the end of the line so the next word could be called and the teams were literally off and running again. How fun is it for kids? I still remember it 34 years later... and I can spell.