Teacherscribe’s
Teaching Tip #60
Part 3: One of Those
Teachers
My students were engaged. For five minutes.
Then
hands flew into the air. There were so many - in fact - that I spent the better
part of the hour running from desk to desk, answering questions. The most common question, aimed at my
carefully constructed reader-response guide was, “What are we supposed to do with this?”
Note to self - sophomores are not keen on reading
directions. Be sure to state the
directions clearly several times. Even
better, ask the students to repeat the directions back to you.
The
other question had to do with one of the pre-reading questions - the one
designed to activate schema - and which had worked so well on the undergrads in
my Fundamentals of Education class - “What do you mean by ‘write about a time you were at a cross-roads in your life?’”
Note to self - 15 year olds don’t
know what a ‘cross-roads’ is nor have they lived long enough to experience many!
I
also had not expected students to struggle so much with the story.
“I don’t
get it!”
“What is going on?”
“I can’t follow this!”
Dissension
echoed around the room.
Someone
even muttered the dreaded, “This is boring!”
They
were not going to get done with the assignment in the allotted time. Forty minutes into the first period of the
first day of my first year teaching, and I was already lost!
Mercifully,
the bell rang, and I blurted, “Finish the story for tomorrow. There will be a quiz!”
It
just came out like it was second nature.
I had not planned on giving a quiz?
If I didn’t want to assign the questions at the end of the story, I
sure did not want to be one of those teachers who assigned a quiz
to force kids to finish reading a story.
Was
I wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment