Every September, I say to myself: "You know what? I had an awesome bunch of lesson plans last year! I am just going to reuse them! I figured out what the kids need and how they will learn it best!" And every October, I say to myself, "What the #$%* is wrong with these new kids? They are so dumb! How do they not get this simple concept?" Then, every mid-October, I am brutally reminded that I literally don't know anything about teaching if I am going to judge this year's kids based on last year's kids, and I have to swallow my pride, let go of my "rigor" crap, and I have to start over. Let me give you an example.
I assigned "Milkweed" by Jerry Spinelli as summer reading, thinking that would be a good introduction to how scary and horrible the Holocaust was for people in the ghettos or in the concentration camps. I thought the style of the book would be interesting because the narrator is kind of unreliable in that he doesn't always understand what's going on around him. But what I discovered when reading their projects is that the students had so little background knowledge that they actually didn't pick up on the things that Spinelli intended them to. I realized that my 7th graders have little to no understanding of the Holocaust. I spent a little while being pissed about that but then proceeded to figure out what to do. I assigned some informal research on various topics. I showed them a scene from "The Book Thief" where they were burning books and it became obvious that Leisel was a Jew but in hiding. They seemed to understand that some people were not on board with Hitler but that they didn't feel they had a choice. Then we read the play based on "The Diary of Anne Frank" and my students were shocked when they found out that Anne had died - even though we knew that from the first scene in the book! So this wasn't a context problem; it was a reading problem. It's like they forgot that part. I also realized that they couldn't put together how the stage directions demonstrated major insights into the characters' personalities - and that I couldn't assign them a page or two to read on their own without them becoming confused about who was talking when. Apparently they were unfamiliar with dramatic conventions and how to understand what's going on in a live production. To round out our study, I decided to read "Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" as a class, since it's told from the side of a Nazi soldier's family. I don't have the physical book but was able to locate an online PDF version. I figured that since the book is told from the perspective of a 9-year-old, and because it's not a tough text (vocabulary-wise), they would be able to read 3-4 chapters in a day if we did some in class and they did some at home. I thought we could FLY through it. BUT I WAS SO WRONG! This book's difficulty lies in A) genius storytelling, in that the reader has to infer a TON about the characters to make sense of the book since Bruno understands almost nothing, and B) the "toughness" level is increased tenfold because the students still don't understand a lot of the political and historical context that drives the characters. I gave 2 separate, FACT-BASED pop quizzes on the reading. I mean, these were like "Who-what-where" types of questions. I watched the kids melt down over these! Several students admitted to me that they didn't read, so that is one problem. But others swore they read but didn't pay full attention, or that they read it but couldn't remember what happened. I had more than one student get every answer wrong on the quiz but then have a full-blown conversation with me about what happened in the chapter! I was so frustrated and began to think - these kids are really low-level and don't understanding anything! What are they doing here? And then I thought - what am I actually trying to assess here? Let me force them to SLOW DOWN. I printed out only one chapter and asked them to read it that night and to write all over it- questions, ideas, predictions, theories, judgments, whatever. And yeah, there were some who didn't even read it. But most of them DID - and they had tons of stuff written all over the place. They were driving the conversation today, and we talked about how much more they got out of it. Now, I've been teaching a long time so I KNOW that this happens when students write notes on what they read, but I wanted to do this book really fast so we could squeeze it in and move on... but honestly, I was robbing them of enjoying the book, of discovering things as they read! That was my bad, 100%. I told them to go back into previous chapters and start making sense of things that now popped out to them since they have read so far into the book. They were KILLING IT. So I am throwing out the pop quizzes because they were not good assessments of what they can do. After this discussion today, after I apologized to them for rushing them, I felt like a door opened up and they really respected my vulnerability. They were so much more engaged and so much less stressed. I assigned them only one chapter tonight, and I know they are going to kill it. I can't wait to talk to them tomorrow! Just like any relationship, I had to really look at myself and see what I had done wrong in this situation. I am hoping this is a great turnaround for us as a group this year 😍
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