Gladly Would I Teach

When I tell people that I teach high school seniors, they often respond by rolling their eyes or by telling me that they could never teach seventeen and eighteen year olds. I always laugh and state, “There the easiest group to teach because they already know everything!”

It’s a great line, but it is far from the truth. No, they don’t know everything, and few of them behave as if they do. In fact, it is fascinating to teach high school seniors who are about to step out into the “real world.” They are so inquisitive about what will happen next, and they usually realize that today is the last chance they have to prepare for that huge step into college.

Research papers are due Wednesday, and we spent part of the class period going around the circle so students could tell the topics for their papers. Students often mentioned a topic that was unclear, and I tried to help them clarify the focus of their papers. Other students selected topics that were too broad, and I encouraged them to narrow their focus so their papers would be more informative. Most students were appreciative of my help, and I have no doubt that they will take my advice and write better papers.

However, there is always at least one student who rejects suggestions. When I told one student today that her topic was too broad, she immediately challenged me and told me that she had already done the research and the topic was not too broad. I tried to gently explain to her how she could write a better paper by narrowing the topic to something more manageable for a short (4-5 page) research paper.

Much to my surprise, she rejected every suggestion I offered, and all I could do was smile and move on to the next student.

I wanted to caution her about the importance of listening to a teacher’s suggestions. I wanted to reminded her that after having taught and graded the research paper for almost twice as long as she has lived that maybe I might know a thing or two about research papers.

Instead, I smiled and moved on to the next student who was much more receptive to my ideas. After more than three decades in the classroom, I know that some students have to learn the hard way.

I just hope she learns before she turns in the final paper on Wednesday!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Students learn to write through writing. It’s a simple concept. If we want students to write well, they need lots of practice. Mondays are writing days in my AP English course. In addition to outside writing assignments, students write a 40-minute timed writing in my class each week. I am amazed at how much my students improve during the semester.

“You’ll hate me on Mondays,” I warn them, but you’ll thank me one day . . . years from now.

Since I know that students will be absent occasionally or will be worried about tests in other classes or will just go blank when they see the assignment, at the beginning of the semester, I give each student 2 free passes. They are allowed to pass in a pass whenever they decide they do not want to write the paper.

Today, three weeks before spring break, many students decided they just didn’t have the energy to write, particularly when they discovered that the writing assignment from the 2003 AP test was about BIRDS.

While students were writing during first period, a flock (or gaggle or skein) of geese flew overhead and made us laugh.

Although I am often tempted to create a couple of free passes for myself, I haven’t yet. How relieved I would be to collect 70 papers and then return them ungraded and say, “Today I’m using one of my free passes.”

Tempting!

Today I might as well have used a free pass. I only had 12 papers from first period, 8 papers from second period, and 17 papers from 3rd period.

It’s been an easy night!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Based on standardized test scores, this year my school has focused on improving our students’ reading comprehension. Every now and then we have been shown scores and have been encouraged to increase the amount of reading that we require, particularly the reading of nonfiction texts. We’ve had staff development on how to increase reading comprehension and have been asked to document reading activities. Recently, we were told that scores from our upcoming spring tests will measure how successful we have been this year.

We weren’t asked why our students reading comprehension scores have declined. If we had been asked, however, I could have immediately explained part of the problem. Until this year, my school embraced “Quadrant D” learning, or learning that is performance based (at least that’s how it was described to us). We brought in “experts,” who are no longer in the classroom, and they taught us what we needed to do to engage our students in more meaningful learning.

Kids don’t need to sit around and read and discuss Shakespeare, we were told. They need to be up moving around and performing Shakespeare or working on group activities, or working on computers. Traditional reading and writing activities were strategies of the past that no longer worked with today’s students.

So most teachers, particularly the young teachers with little experience that would have helped them filter the  suggestions from the “experts,” jumped on the bandwagon and constructed lessons that allowed students to spend more time performing, more time drawing, more time acting. Reading and writing declined.

Now our students’ reading comprehension scores have declined, something that any veteran teacher could have predicted (and did predict) years ago when we drifted away and decreased how much reading and writing we required from students. Our kids were so engaged, just not engaged in reading and writing.

I am reading Diane Ravitch’s new book The Death and Life of The Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. In the introduction, Ravitch chastises educators for jumping on the latest fad without any proof that the fads work.

We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them.

Our kids declined in reading because we chased a rainbow that seemed so happy and colorful and enticing. Well-meaning people chased rainbows, and our kids suffered. I would like to hope that we have learned from this and that we won’t jump on the bandwagon of the next greatest fad, but I know we will.

Why do we always think that the “experts” who have little contact with children know best how to teach them?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Regardless of how long I teach, I will never understand when students plagiarize papers. While grading a wonderful set of This I Believe papers (see yesterday’s post), I started reading a paper that puzzled me. Since I require students to submit papers to Turnitin.com, a plagiarism detection site, I took a closer look at the student’s paper.

According to Turnitin.com, the paper contained over 20% of matching text from information that appears elsewhere on the Internet. I then checked a book about the student’s topic and found even more sentences that he apparently copied.

In most cases, this would anger me, but today I am just sad. The student is a nice young man and not a student I would normally think would cheat on a paper. I want to believe he would not cheat or copy part of a paper. I just don’t want to believe it.

Did he not realize that he couldn’t copy sentences from another source? I would like to think it’s a mistake, but no student could make it all the way to AP English without knowing about plagiarism.

Did he simply forget to enclose copied material in quotation marks? Again, that would be hard to believe for a seventeen-year-old student in an honors English class.

I gave the student a zero on the assignment, explained the problem, and asked him to see me individually. I’ll return the paper tomorrow.

Just when I was so sad over the idea that a student would plagiarize part of a paper, I picked up another student’s paper about her belief.

America needs to return to the days where people followed through on their promises and tried their hardest, no matter what the circumstances. Once upon a time, cheating was a serious offense, mistakes were acknowledged and rectified, and handshakes were the equivalent of a legal contract. Once upon a time, there were not unlimited opportunities to try again. Once upon a time, people had to work hard to succeed because there were no handouts. These are the values that America needs to return to. This personal responsibility is an important part of society that has been recently lost. This must be found again as America recovers from its recession. This I believe.

At the beginning of the semester, I always tell students how much cheating disappoints me. I emphasize that I can still have respect for students who make a horrible grade but who do not resort to cheating. I then emphasize that I can have little respect for students who take the easy way out and cheat.

I so hope the student can give me an explanation for what happened – some explanation that does not include copying.

If not, I hope he will admit his mistake and apologize. We all make mistakes.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

One of my favorite writing assignments is National Public Radio’s (NPR) This I Believe. Based on a radio series that started several decades ago, students write a 500-word essay that expresses ONE of their beliefs. The best papers illustrate beliefs with stories and lots of examples.

Some of the student essays are funny, and some are poignant. Almost all of them are thoughtful. Although some students charge through the assignment quickly and whip out something with little analysis or thought, most students have a hard time narrowing their beliefs to only one concept they wish to express.

I spent all morning grading their papers, and this batch of papers is probably the best group of papers I have ever read for the This I Believe assignment.

What do teenagers believe?  Teenagers’ optimism always rejuvenates me. Here is the list of beliefs from this semester’s students. The NPR format asks writers to name their belief, usually starting or ending the topic with “This I Believe.”

If you would like to use the NPR’s This I Believe assignment, please see the NPR website:

This I Believe

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

“Me and my brother were late to school.”

“This photo is of me, Kayla, and Lauren.”

“Me, Shirley, and Jane want to do our project on Monday.

Is anyone else seeing and hearing “Me and _____” (fill in the blank) repeatedly?  Without question, I have more students uttering this solecism today than I have had at any point in my career.

When I first started teaching 30+ years ago, I often heard students utter “Me and ___,” but these students were not academically advanced students or students who were planning to attend college. Oh, how things have changed.

Today, I have to correct Advanced Placement students who not only utter “Me and _____” when they speak but also write it in formal papers. I know this probably sounds like an old English teacher concern, but I have reached my limit.

I don’t usually correct a student’s grammar errors in front of other students, but I’m making an exception on this one.

Years ago while I was teaching a grammar lesson, a student blurted out, “But that don’t sound right!”

I immediately stated to the student, “Don’t ever determine what’s proper according to what sounds right to YOU!”  When so many people continue to make the same errors and students hear the error repeatedly, they think the error is correct.

I don’t want to embarrass kids, but when so many of even our best students think it’s okay to say “Me and ____,” it’s time to circle the wagons and take a stand.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Don\’t knock blogging – it\’s the answer to our literacy problems

If you are looking for a new way to interest boys in writing, please take a look at this article from England.

As part of my class, I maintain a Facebook discussion board where students respond to a question or topic that I pose each week. When I first started this assignment years ago, I felt this it was similar to other assignments I had in class, but I was wrong. While it is true that some students do not like to share their ideas online, many other students thrive on opportunities to write online because they enjoy sharing their ideas with others.

This article also poses the question of whether students will ignore spelling and mechanical rules online, but I have seen the opposite. Since students realize that their writing will be online for everyone to see, they scrutinize their writing closing because they want it to be as good as possible.

“My Access” Helps Students Write

I have my doubts about this new program that reviews student writing and offers suggestions for revision, but I really hope it works. Imagine how much help such a program would be for English teachers who drown under stacks of essays. Although I have my doubts, an English teacher interviewed in the article states:

“It’s important that teachers go back and explain that the score is not necessarily reflective of their overall writing,” said Warren, who teaches advanced placement and honor students. “As far as the mechanics go, it’s dead-on with the spelling and grammatical errors.”

Actually, if the program can check and teach grammatical and mechanical errors so teachers can narrow their focus to teaching the content of papers, I would be ecstatic.

I just wish I had the money to give “My Access” a try!

Here’s another article about the need to require students to write longer research papers in order to boost their critical thinking skills and prepare them for college.  As long as our classes remain so large and our curriculum requirements remain as extensive, teachers in the future will probably decrease the number of writing assignments they require instead of increasing them. Oh, what we could accomplish if we had control over our curriculum and only 20 students in a class!

Coming to terms with the effects of no longer requiring long papers

We are in the final two days of school before having a week off for Thanksgiving Holidays!  We are all tired and ready for a vacation. It’s the perfect time, however, to do something a little different in class.

As an English teacher, I talk about writing every day – from discussions of literature and an author’s style of writing, to analysis of various writing strategies, to reviews of grammar and usage rules, to construction of timed-writing responses and research papers, and to oral reading of student papers in class. Amidst all of these lessons about proper writing and preparing students for the writing assignments they will face in college, it’s easy to lose sight of the most important writing that students will complete during their lifetimes: personal writing.

I suspect that we spend so little time on personal writing because we assume that students know how to write personal notes. With today’s influx of technology, however, I’m afraid emails, instant messaging, and other forms of digital correspondence may replace personal correspondence if teachers don’t step in to teach the need for personal correspondence.

Today as Thanksgiving approaches, I’m teaching students how to write thank-you notes and then giving them time to write thank-you notes in class. I’m going to encourage them to write a note to their favorite elementary or middle school teacher. I picked up cheap cards from the dollar stores.  If you want to include this activity with your students, here’s the handout I’m distributing to my students.

Writing Thank You Notes