Slowing Down Instruction

If you're a teacher, do you ever feel that, in order to hit your CORE objectives for the week, your daily lesson plan looks like Mulligan Stew? I do. Today, I wanted to read, interpret, and analyze an Emily Dickinson poem, introduce the proper function of the pronouns "who" and "whom," allow kids to get new books, renew, and check out books.. all while adding a tech component for "Tech Tuesday!" Ack! to quote Doonsberry comics from my youth.

If there was no library/Tech Tuesday component, I probably would have flown through my curricular objectives today, but I would have been "covering," not teaching. Even reflective, thoughtful teachers can fall into the trap of succumbing to jamming their lessons with too much. Tech slowed me down, and that is a good thing.

It took a while for kids to login to the network. Students still struggle with finding websites because they pay very little attention to detail. After a marking period and a half, some students still think my last name is a computer command and therefore mispelled the name of my room. Others received restriction notices on their screens because they mispelled todaysmeet... <sigh> the more eighth graders change, the more they stay the same. The ten -fifteen minute visit to the library turned into 20 minutes.

When everyone arrived back to the classroom, there was only time for reviewing the differences between nominative case and objective case pronouns. We slowed down--- we talked about how questions are often composed in the reverse order of statements in English and therefore it is possible that a direct object may be one of the first words in a sentence rather than one of the last words in that sentence. We also had time to learn the trick for who or whom:

1. Find the verb
2. Is "who" acting the verb?
3. If yes, then use "who"
4. If no, then use "whom"
5. If there is a preposition in front of the word use "whom" because it would be the object of the preposition.
6. If there is a linking verb and who is linked to the subject then use "who" (predicate pronoun)

So no Emily D. today but we did explore a different way to study nominitive case pronouns and students left with more ownership of case through the exploration of when to you "who" or "whom." The good news? I taught today, I didn't just cover some material and plow through more poetry exposure. That's a bonus for my students.