Teaching about adolescent literacy, I often encounter students who will cheerfully declare that they hate math or science. Occasionally, though, I get a student who will shamefully declare how little they like reading.
This sort of split extends all sorts of places and certainly the gap between the humanities and the natural sciences seems to be growing. I like this idea, though, as a way of giving students a chance to genuinely connect across disciplines.
This story in yesterday’s Times reveals the frustrations parents increasingly face in upscale urban neighborhoods: you’ve paid, maybe overpaid, for a house in a neighborhood that features a great public school. But…you’re not alone and all of a sudden there’s not room in the building.
You’re out of luck.
And…upper middle-class parents are coming to realize what many parents in struggling neighborhoods have long known, that you have no right to a school. A school district, so long as they violate no laws or so long as a lawyer can’t prove that the district is purposely discriminating against a certain group, can assign students anyway they like.
How do you teach revision when revision, for most students, is about the grade? What happens when students re-work a paper, not because they’re engaged or even care about the topic or the craft of writing, but because they want a better grade?
I have allowed students to re-write papers since I began teaching and I’ve usually graded the paper afresh and taken the highest grade.
But I’m finding that students are using the re-write process as a way to avoid completing drafts. I’m also finding that it’s seen as a right rather than a responsibility; students feel that they deserve to submit as many drafts as they want. That’s my fault for opening that door.
I think next semester I’ll demand drafts and engage in the peer-editing process while making it abundantly clear that the final draft is indeed the final draft. And I’ll make the students paste the rubric into the paper so that the expectations are even clearer.
I wonder what experienced teachers would say when asked what they want students to come out of teacher certification programs with, particularly if they were limited to things that can be taught. In other words, the traits I’d identify as necessary to succeed in a classroom — humility, intellectual curiosity, self-awareness, compassion — are very difficult to teach.
What kinds of things, then, can be taught?
My first thoughts:
1. the ability to look at a state standard and immediately have several ideas as to how to shape a classroom so that students could attain it.
2. the ability to look at a topic and see multiple approaches to teaching it.
More to come.
It’s not shocking that someone reported that Reading First was ineffective; what’s hard to believe is that the report came from within the Department of Education.
Glad to see that the magic of repeating “science” and “research” as often as possible will eventually fade.
