Skip to main content

186 Unique Lessons

I've been working on this post for a while now. I wanted to write an end-of-the-year reflection on my third year of teaching, and I had initially planned to write a lesson that each of my 186 students had taught me this year. Along the way, I felt like it worked more to include some general reflective lessons I've learned, too. So here's a list, although it certainly isn't 186 items long!
  1. Don't assume a student's work was done by someone else. They just might be able to write in cursive. 
  2. Students can be incredibly mature and think globally. Give them this prompt, and you might just be surprised: "The world needs to have a conversation about..." For this student, it was "unity." 
  3. Quiet doesn't mean they can't contribute. They just might need an extra push. 
  4. Helping a friend memorize her recitation might just mean the first friend memorizes it too. 
  5. Students have writing interests outside our class. In fact, they might write so much that the English teacher gets overwhelmed with the frequent Google Doc invitations. 
  6. Second languages come in really handy when reading a children's book with Spanish words. If you're lucky, she might just teach you how to pronounce a few. 
  7. Students are able, willing, and patient helpers. Give them a real, authentic person to help, and they'll rise to the occasion.  
  8. Give a student a little room to create a club, and she just might make it bigger than you ever anticipated, develop writing prompts, plan summer get-togethers, and so much more.
  9. Just because a student is absent, it doesn't mean she wants to be. Ask her story and see how you can help.
  10. Give a student the chance to act, and he can really come alive in ways that you've wanted him to all year. 
  11. Find a student that you can trust to raise the bar high, and call on him or her first. Not only do they get used to it, they might just help challenge their peers to be even better. 
  12. Leonard Whiting's derrière can really get students' attention. 
  13. Students are always watching, especially when you drive through their neighborhoods. Don't text and drive. 
  14. If a student doesn't bring your book back even though he moves, it might be because he wants to keep reading, not because he doesn't care. 
  15. Being a first-generation American is a completely different experience for students, and this can be leveraged and shared. And I'll just go ahead and say this can count as RL.9-10.6, too. What's more powerful than a real person's experiences from outside the United States? 
  16. Find a way to bridge what a student is reading with what they care about. You'll get better work, even if everything is about technology. 
  17. Some students have an incredible amount of familial responsibility at home. They can then turn this into one heck of an argumentative paper. 
  18. Even though the earbuds are in, they can really hear you sometimes. 
  19. Graphic novels can work wonders to hook readers, and other students need to be pushed to rethink their assumptions about text complexity. 
  20. Reminding students that he or she "will fail" if they don't turn in an assignment doesn't motivate. As teachers, we have to build students up! 
  21. Spend a little bit more time introducing students to the sections of the classroom library at the beginning of the year. If you don't, your books will end up on different shelves. Make your strategic shelving clear and obvious. 
  22. Teaching during your prep is exhausting. That time is much more sacred to me now, having lived a year without it. 
  23. When students ask why, be prepared to answer. 
  24. The Rose That Grew from Concrete will need to be replaced for a sixth time in three years. Tupac really did something right here. 
  25. Authentic writing is really, really hard work. There were so many times that I and my students wanted to give up during our personally relevant argument unit, but we persevered. Many of the same students wrote that this was the most meaningful piece of writing they've done all year. 
  26. It hurts when a student leaves without saying goodbye. This is something that schools of education can't teach in college. 
... to be continued. 

Comments

  1. I have so much I could comment on here, but I am going to choose to comment on something seemingly insignificant, but it matters, I promise.

    I did not love Tupac's collection of poetry. In fact, I was disappointed because I was hoping for something deeper. Instead I found it a tad pedestrian. So I didn't buy it for my classroom library after I checked it out at the library.

    But then I had a student who found a Tupac poem online and chose it as his poem to memorize for our end-of-poetry month celebration. This was one of my students who hated to read and who would rather be seen as macho than smart. But he got up in front of the class and gave such a sensitive and powerful performance that it choked me up.

    So I think I need to stop being a gatekeeper and just buy a copy of that book already.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I felt the same way at first, too. Then students started making a list of who would check it out next. They began sharing them with each other in class. I think it helped me make the point that "texts" and "writers" are larger categories than we think.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo

Past Secretaries of Education

After last night's hearing with nominee DeVos, I decided to research past education secretaries. Senator Alexander talked a lot about "precedent" when it came to procedures regarding the HELP Committee. Let us remember that the first education secretary was appointed in 1979. That's the same year that Congress created the department under Jimmy Carter. This is also the same department that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish. Even the first education secretary had experience in government. Shirley M. Hufstedler was both a federal and state appeals court judge. I'm going to say that because of that experience, she's probably familiar with law and how laws work. As we saw last night, when Betsy DeVos was redirected a question because her answer implied that states could choose to implement federal law or not, she might need a refresher. Then we had Terrel Bell, who was a high school teacher, bus driver, and served in the Marines. Again, a long list of public