Reflection

I have learned that I need to always have patience. Whether it be with students, faculty, or just the school day in general, patience is key. I realized that no matter what you want to get accomplished in a day, that things will inevitably come up and force you to reconsider your plans. I need to make sure that I do not get frustrated by this, and am flexible to change. Students do need to have a structure, and I think giving them specific amounts of time to do something is good, but it is important to listen to them if they really do struggle or need more time.

I also realized that students will always surprise you. The 8th graders I worked with were always thinking of clever ways to complete an assignment (or a witty excuse for why it wasn’t finished). I love how much students respond to you when you show them that you really do care about them. I think it is important for students to see me as someone that is there to teach them, as well as listen to them. I want students to feel comfortable enough with me to tell me when they are struggling and know that I want to help them succeed.

Finally, I realized how much I am going to miss those kids. It was very hard for me to leave the kids, and I loved going back for my final evaluation and having so many be excited to see me. I think it is crucial for students and their teachers to have positive working relationships. I am so looking forward to meeting the students at BMS and becoming a part of their academic world. I’m a little uneasy, but the excitement outweighs the nerves.

Rubrics

Throughout my middle and high school career, I can not think of rubrics really being used. Teachers seemed to grade papers on what they thought was right or wrong and we just had to look at their comments to understand why we received the grade we received. I loved when the teacher gave ample feedback, and I normally never had a complaint if I could figure out why they gave me a specific grade based on their comments. However, I was also the student who would ask why if a teacher just assigned a grade and never gave me any real reason. In college, minus education classes, I also never received a rubric for a paper, where I think I would have liked a rubric the most. I had to learn how to write for the professor on my own, figuring out their personal writing style based on their comments and critiques on my first paper – then I would tailor the rest of my papers accordingly. I feel like rubrics set a standard that everyone must meet, and I think that overall they are a good idea, especially in schools today.

Rubrics have really been brought to my attention this semester. Dalton is using rubrics fairly often, and I am sure I will encounter them at Blacksburg Middle, as well as I will be making them myself. I do think Wilson made some good points about how student’s writing never seems to surprise her and that rubrics do not (typically) account for potential, effort, and progress. I agree that many times we do not want students “writing for the rubric,” but I feel that is what many of them do. Many times rubrics may not give students enough freedom to be themselves, which is why some subjectivity or openness should still be left in a rubric. If I was a student given a rubric, I would simply write exactly to the rubric, making sure all elements were included; my creative thinking would turn to more practical thinking as I tried to make sure I followed the guidelines to get the good grade. Many students need the guidelines, and rubrics are a good way to prevent bias. I think the most important thing is to remember that there is no perfect rubric, and a student’s reasoning for doing something the way they did should always be taken into consideration.

Writing About Literature

I have always thought that writing about literature is one of the more exciting aspects of teaching English. It is a way for students to be “essayists, editorialists, playwrights, fiction writers, poets.” I really enjoyed the freedom I was given in college to take something that was important to me in whatever it was that I was reading and roll with it. I want to, in some ways, incorporate that kind of freedom/choice into my middle school classroom. I want students to care about what they are writing and they need to feel like they are having a say in their work in order to really make it significant to them. I think students also must be exposed to a wide variety of writing styles. Some may not like to write an essay all the time, while other students hate poetry work. The multi-genre paper, which I was introduced to when I was in college, is a great way to incorporate many types of writing styles. I loved writing mine and I think it can be incorporated into the classroom quite nicely and easily. It can be used with a unit plan or as a 6 weeks project. In the end, it is something the kids will be proud of doing and they will have a binder-of-sorts of all their accomplishments, together for all to see.

Something interesting, that I agree with, yet had not specifically thought about for a while was the fact that teachers need to be writers. If teachers want to teach writing, they must develop their craft. If they do so, they will discover what works and what does not, what is beneficial, what takes time, where frustrations may set in, and etcetera. Teachers also need to think about the students they will be teaching. Rief gives us questions to as ourselves as writing teachers, “What do I believe and why? How do I shape those beliefs into sound practices in my classroom? Who are the students with whom and from whom I learn, to whom I teach, and for whom I care and have a responsibility.” If we think about these questions before we teach, we may be able to better prepare our lessons and our students for the assignments and challenges to come.

Also, something that I 100% agree with in the reading is that one cannot write without reading. I think it is extremely important for reading and writing to be taught hand in hand and relationships between the two illustrated often. Finally, I think a writers journal or folder is essential for students. It gives them a place to put their ideas, and also, they are all in one spot and much harder to lose.

Media in the Classroom

Media in the English classroom has mainly seemed to be a reward/relaxation time for me when I was in middle and high school. We would read a novel or play, and then we would watch the movie. That would give us two or three class periods where we did not have to do anything, because we were never asked to do something with what we watched. I think that media needs to be used for a meaningful purpose. Media needs to be used in a way that makes something more alive, vivifying the text or activity; students need to be aware that media can be approached critically and can expand an experience. I really liked the idea of analyzing magazines (339), however once the students performed the four steps the book talked about, I think it would be interesting to expand off of that and have students write their own article for the magazine and use the tools they learned while dissecting it in their previous activities/assignments. I also really liked the idea for the bumper stickers. We had to make a bumper sticker in one of my education classes; they had to speak to our field of study. It was concise, interesting ways to think about my English profession and how I could sum up something I love about teaching into a few words. I believe I may be teaching quite a bit of grammar next semester, and I think it may be a fun idea to give a student, or pairs of students, each a grammar term and have them come up with bumper stickers that help us remember the term in a clever, precise way. They can then be presented and hung around the room.

Last week, at Dalton, we had the students look at pictures and think about what the poems they were about to read could be about just from looking at the picture. The students were able to think visually, and many of them picked out minute details that ended up being important in the poem(s). We also read a poem a few weeks back and had the students draw what they heard before we gave them the poem – we did not give them the title of the poem because it would have given the topic away. The kids need to think more creatively, and from the pictures we were able to see how well the students were listening and understanding what they were hearing.

Vocabulary Instruction

Teaching vocabulary is something that all English teachers are going to have to do to some degree in their classrooms. My cooperating teacher has an interesting way to teach vocabulary – it is called CSSD. (Context – Structure - Sound & Definition).

This is a sentence that was demonstrated on the board for my 8th graders, “When I retire, I plan to live at the beach in a peaceful, picturesque setting.” The students then drew three boxes side by side in their notebooks, one for context, one for structure (root word), and one for sound. Then we went over the sentence. The kids looked for words in picturesque that sounded like any other words they had heard – they came up with “picture.” They also thought the word picturesque could be broken down into the root word “picture.” Then the students went to the sentence to look for context clues. They came up with “beach” and “peaceful” and they thought the sentence described a place that was “happy” and “beautiful.” From those three boxes, the students create their own definition, which was “like a beautiful picture.” After doing this with all their vocabulary words they look them up in the dictionary to see how accurate they were.

This is by no means a full proof way to teach vocabulary, but it is really a good way to get students looking at the word and the sentence(s) around it to try and use context clues to make sense of a word they do not know. Not every box in the CSSD method will be used with every word and that took a few practice tries for students to see that. I think that once students get a feel for how to use the CSSD it could be very useful for them and something they can do in their head eventually once it becomes more of a habit to them. This technique will be helpful for them when they are reading individually as well as trying to determine a definition on an SOL test. When it come time to test the 8th graders, my cooperating teacher gives them a test that is a little more advanced than a fill in the blank/matching test. The vocabulary tests usually take a vocabulary word and then have the student pick the synonym or the antonym in the form of multiple choice questions. I think this shows if the students really do grasp the concept of the word – often times student are also asked to use the word in a sentence they create themselves.


As the book says, I really do think that books and reading are a key way to strengthen vocabulary knowledge, and many times kids do not even know they are learning new words. I also think audio-assisted readings are a great idea for the classroom. This has been done in the middle school I am working at and it gives kids a chance to follow along and the reader can set the mood and enunciate words that a child might not be able to figure out. This also has the downfall of students zoning out, but I think it is important to stop the tape at specific point and go back and discuss to make sure students are understanding and are staying on task. Finally, it is important that students have multiple encounters with new words. The contexts of new words need to be meaningful as well as useful. For a student to really remember a word, they need to ad detail to the word, make associations/elaborate on it, as well as see it in multiple situations.

Thoughts on Teaching Grammar

I can not remember having formal grammar lessons since I was in the 9th grade, when we would do a couple sentences a day at the beginning of each class. I think grammar is the thing that makes me most nervous about teaching, but I see it as something I will brush up on as I go along and something I will become better at with time. I have to say, I think I’m still developing my ‘most compelling reason for teaching grammar.’ I do think that correctness matters, and for students to prosper in academic/professional settings, it is something they will need to learn. I also think it is extremely important that students know that there is a difference between the formal grammar in writing versus the everyday speech they use. As an undergraduate, I took Linguistics and Language & Society, and from those classes, I developed an adoration for the spoken word. I became aware of the fact that all dialects are unique, beautiful, and worthwhile. I think Nancy Patterson has it right when she says, “Grammar becomes a highly compelling subject for students when they can use their language and play with it, recast it in other modes for other audiences than their immediate peers and family. This is true for all students, regardless of dialect.” Students need grammar, like all school subjects, to be made relevant to them. Grammar should never be taught as a “deficit.” I think the separated, stimulated, and integrated way of instruction that Jeff Anderson talks about is a good way to think about teaching grammar. We need to Zoom In and Zoom Out in a contextual way that will be full of meaning making.

I think teachers will need to work with grammar issues as they come. Pretests and daily activities will be a good gauge for how students are doing in their work and show teachers how much they already know. Teachers will also find grammar “mistakes” in students writing. This is something that happened in a 7th grade class that I work with at Dalton. The teacher was just reading the students’ papers and noticed that many of the students were writing could of instead of could’ve. When students write this Nonstandard form of could’ve, they do not even know they are doing so. They are writing what they hear themselves say. I am sure that these 7th graders are unaware of what they are doing. The teacher of this class is going to make a worksheet to go over this writing error with the entire class as to not single anyone out. (She told me that this error is a big one on the SOLs.) She will be able to use students’ writing to illustrate her point and make kids aware of something they do subconsciously.

A Book Trailer

The past few weeks I have been very stressed out about working on and completing our book trailer project. I am very much an amateur at technology, and I was apprehensive about having to do something like this all on my own. I will admit that I was not looking forward to the project at all. The project really took me a long time, and I would have been lost if it was not for google images. The project probably took me longer than most to complete, but I feel like I got an understanding for a teaching tool that I had not previously had before. I ended up writing a script for my book trailer and having a friend narrate it with a bit of an accent (sort of Reading Rainbow-ish),and that got me thinking about collaboration and doing something like this in my classroom one day. I think, for middle schoolers, a book trailer might be just the thing to get them excited about reading. They can read their book and then do a book trailer for it instead of a typical book talk or report. Yet, a teacher will be able to tell if they read the book based on what is included in the trailer. Student could also work in pairs and create book trailers for a book that the class has read as a whole, just pick and choose different scenes/chapters. I ended up showing my book trailer to the reading specialist at my school, and she is going to use it this coming week after she has the kids write about what they think might happen in the book. I am interested to see how the students respond to the trailer. One thing I would do differently for next time is I would try to figure out how to incorporate my own video footage (maybe) or at least my own pictures. I really enjoyed finding the music for the end credits, and I think students will enjoy that as well. I think one important thing to do with students when they are working on the book trailers is to make sure that they are given a specific amount of time to complete it – otherwise I could see them taking an excess amount of time.