Blog #8

Blog assignment #8: How prepared do you feel in effectively teaching your students in reading?  Is this one of your strengths?  A weakness?

I love teaching students reading. Because I teach English at the college and high school levels, I consider teaching reading to be one subject of many components. One component is vocabulary, one component is a variety of different syntax and structures, and one component is practicing that reading, both aloud and silently. See, reading isn’t just about phonetically translating something from a paper into spoken words or thoughts, but it’s about understanding what you read.  I don’t care if a student has the ability to run their eyes over words if after that they don’t remember or understand what they’ve read.

I would like to hope that teaching reading is one of my strengths. Sometimes I read to them and they take notes on what they read (and they really take notes –they don’t doodle and claim it’s note-taking), and sometimes I “pass the pug” (toss a pug beanie baby) as popcorn reading so that they take turns. If I’m teaching something that contains older language (Shakespeare, The Federalist Papers), I’ll stop after a foggy paragraph and say, “What does this mean?” For one of my junior classes, there is a moment of crickets after I ask this, after which I always add something about how reading “17^th and 18^th century literature a learning outcome for your grade. I don’t care if it’s 100% accurate, but I do care to see you reason your way through the meaning. What do you think this is about? Prove to me that you understand.” Because I teach at a college prep high school of high-achieving students, this is usually enough to spur them on; after all, one mustn’t be considered below average! So as in the case with yesterday’s lesson, students would look at the gigantic paragraph, pick a few operative words (I’ve trained them to look for “the most powerful words in the sentence”), and then to talk themselves through it based on the intuition they have in the text along with their comprehension of the vocabulary. I love days like this: it proves to me that they’re not apathetic or complacent in my class.

Have you started to plan to the Common Core Standards?  If you have, how is that going?  If you haven’t, why not?  What support do you need?

When I started teaching at the high school level last year, I built my lessons around the Common Core Standards. When I taught at a different charter high school in 2012, there was the AIMS standards that I taught to with much more structure in those projected lessons. For example, when teaching Revolutionary War-era literature, the AIMS standards included recommended authors to read, recommended poems and short stories, recommended pieces of art to tie in, and recommended vocabulary words. I loved that format and while I understand the impetus behind the Common Core Standards structure in their deviation from this, it was also tremendously helpful. To that end, I attempt to draft units that appeal to both: I use the recommendations from those units (or at least what I remember from them, since I seem to have lost those hardcopy documents) with the learning outcomes and standards from Common Core. To extend my Revolutionary War example, we still read Phyllis Wheatley’s poem about George Washington, and Longfellow’s poem about Paul Revere. We still study what an aphorism is, since we also read a selection from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. Our vocab list is comprised of words in The Declaration of Independence and James Madison’s Federalist 10. While the structure is taken from AIMS, I’m still appealing to Common Core Standards with regard to reading and analyzing information, with interpreting 17^th, 18^th, and 19^th century literature.

At the end of the year, we put together what’s called our “purple folder” where we put together a number of educational reports to prove to our specific school board that we have upheld our end of the contract. One such category of our portfolio includes providing Common Core Standards and proving that we uphold those standards. Last year for the portfolio, I broke down every standard and provided a lesson that spoke to that standard. I have often thought about providing every lesson that speaks to that standard (more for my own reference than for the board’s) but I have yet to do so since it really is a lot of work –not that I’m adverse to hard work, but when I spend 20 hours a week at my house grading on top of a 40 hour workweek (not to mention responsibilities for Rio classes, YC classes, and Nanowrimo group organization) it’s hard to add one more thing to my list.