In the Middle

In the Middle (Atwell, Nancy)

 

Thank you, Adam, for letting me come so early in the school year!

 

By trial and error and with help from a middle school student, I found Adam Holt’s classroom. A mixture of excitement and curiosity raised and sharpened my attention level.  Not having taught middle school students and suffering from amnesia of being a middle school student, I wanted to see how middle school students behave, speak, and learn. Of course, thirty minutes of observation gave me only a sliver of the whole picture.

 

The students reviewed how to study for an upcoming quiz. Study strategies, such as looking over the rules, watching a School House Rock video, making games, and memorizing, were generated by the students. I’ve noticed, regardless of the grade level, students need concrete examples of study skills and Adam expertly anticipated them.  Later, the students paired up to quiz each other on the “super sentences” completed for homework. The Interactive aspect of this exercise allowed the students to give immediate feedback on the benefit of studying with a partner.

 

Let me digress here. How to teach grammar was a big debate when I first began teaching.  I taught third graders, and the consensus was to teach grammar in an authentic format.  The instructional leaders, at the time, promoted teaching grammar using the student’s writing; a method to which I still concur. However, as a new teacher, I was confused and overwhelmed, trying to individualize the lessons.

 

Luckily, the pedagogy of a balanced literacy program came to the rescue. Within the context of a balanced literacy curriculum, a dose of direct grammar instruction and its application in student writing reached a middle ground on teaching grammar.  Adam’s students were obviously getting both direct grammar instruction and the opportunity to apply what they learned in their writings. Sometimes being “in the middle” is a good place. 

Writing: Pre-K through Evergreen

Pre-K
Jen Beazley and Beth Boyd
In the pre-k classroom, Jen addresses fine motor issues and works to strength hand muscles, so at a month into school, students write their names when they sign in every morning. The focus is to encourage the academic confidence and imaginative play of these young pre-writers. Therefore as a class with Jen as the scribe, they create thought/idea webs which require several skills. They use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast. Apples and pumpkins is a fall favorite. Jen and her students examine all aspects of the apple and pumpkin. They even open them up to see similarities and differences. This is brainstorming and critical thinking, and if you sit in on the class, you will hear their imaginations frequently taking flight.

They are also working on making Munchie Mission less abstract for the pre-k students. To make hunger a little more real for pre-k, for two days they will not have snacks so at the minimum they will experience what it is like to want to eat and not have food available. Jen and Greg, the other pre-k teacher, plan to turn this experience into a skit. This will involve critical thinking and reflection on the experience. It will also begin to develop some understanding that other kids are in different circumstances than they are. Here are the buds of empathy forming as they seek to understand “other.”

Second Grade
Yun Tansil
The second grade year-long theme is Community. They begin with the classroom community, move to the GH community, out to Addison, and then the world. They will launch a new writing project in January. The class will brainstorm who in the Addison and greater Dallas area are community workers —fire, police, park and recreation employees, and etc. The class will generate job specific questions and also ask what GH students can do as citizens to make the community stronger, healthier, and more vibrant. This will require critical thinking, research skills, and the potential for commitment to improve the community=empathy.
Also in Yun’s class, the students wrote get-well cards to a classmate who had been sick for several days. This emphasizes the importance of valuing the relationships between members in the community.

Third Grade
Judy Campos
One writing assignment Judy shared was the immigrant journal. After much research, shared exploration, brainstorming, and discussion, the third graders write journals about arriving in America from a child’s point of view. They imagine what the trip across the ocean was like and what the first emotions might be about arriving in a new land and leaving home far behind. This requires evaluative thinking and imaginative engagement. Putting themselves in the experiences of an immigrant continues to nurture the seeds of empathy.
The third graders also write letters to living heroes. They have to define “hero” and then seek to find someone they think is a hero. More evaluative thinking. They then send their letters to their heroes.


Upper School
Marilyn Stewart and Linda Woolley
In Marilyn’s first paper for her ninth graders, she asks them to express their response to a poem; she gives them several to choose from. They work with key images and through a close reading of the text arrive at a conclusion as to why a reader should care about what they think. Here, they not only have to think critically about a text but also about the validity of their reading of it. Later in the year after reading The Reivers, they students write a reminiscence. This requires a close reading of their lives, beliefs, traditions, and values. They become the text, and they have to think critically about themselves.
This type of self-examination is picked up again senior year in the personal narrative. Students have to evaluate themselves and their experiences to create some sort of synthesis concerning the meaning of their experiences. As Marilyn said, “How can they be expected to understand other people or other perspectives if they can’t think critically about themselves?”
Linda will bring in a service learning component to a senior elective this year that will require students to journal about various aspects of their experience. These written reflections are meant to move the students from the point of view of “self” or “I” to seek to understand/empathize with the “other,” perhaps to prepare them for the world beyond GH and a more global environment.
Marilyn also discussed writing for Evergreen. This requires the student to “get rid of their opinions” and seek the opinion of others. They have to be able to report the story from someone else’s point of view without editorializing and without bias. To sort out what are their ideas and what are the thoughts of the people they interview requires sophisticated critical thinking. They then have to pull all the information to some sort of conclusion.

Assigning excellence (?/!)

Joel Garza, Modern Lyric Poetry
Five questions
Explanation:
First, choose a poem from the text. Next, read the poem carefully and take notes on it—in the book, in your notebook, somewhere. Finally, answer each of the following questions. For this assignment, then, don’t worry about a title, don’t worry about an intro, don’t worry about a conclusion. Just read, think, and interpret.

The questions:

1. What are the effects of this poem’s structure?

2. What are the effects of this poem’s rhyme scheme?

3. What are the effects of this poet’s narrative voice?

4. What are the effects of this poem’s imagery?

5. What’s something you noticed about the poem that I didn’t ask about (meter, allusion, tone, subject, argument, grammar, whatever), and why should I care about that element of the work?

Purpose:
I am challenging students to identify and explain the effects of several poetic techniques and devices, one by one, as they appear in a single poem.

Creativity? Monica: Maybe for the next assignment, return to the same poem and change one of the elements—make a sonnet a haiku, undoing the nature imagery and make it, say, legalistic imagery.
Empathy? Tony: Well, empathy can become a sort of detour. Empathy shouldn’t be shoe-horned into every assignment. Monica: Maybe in looking at one of these poetic facets, especially in poetry, the students can’t help but react empathetically.
 
Monica Bullock, Sixth Grade
Mystery Theater
Explanation:
After writing a biography report (fourth grade), the students are grouped with three or four other students who have researched different historical figures. As a group, the students must construct a play depicting each of these famous people, without naming each of these famous people. The audience is invited to pay close attention in order to determine who is who. Examples: JFK, MLK, Lincoln.
Purpose:
In order to shape character, the students must comprehend the reading they do. They put into practice conflict, characterization, suspense, dialogue, resolution.

Creativity? Each year, the plays are completely different because the subjects and the combinations of the subjects are different.
Empathy? They’re embodying other people fer chrissakes! Jeez, come on.
Rigor? They are lengthy. They are each seven to ten minutes long. Each student is responsible for his/her own character—they have to bring the character into the action. There’s no hiding on this group project.
 
Tony Adler, Fifth Grade
Creation myths
Explanation:
The students live myth throughout the winter—the play, the reading, etc. Each student crafts a creation myth about anything s/he chooses. Examples: the greenness of grass, earthquakes, volcanoes, the earth.

Purpose:
To expose students to a variety of writing genres. To explain the importance of myth generally. To advance their creative writing ability, while working through the writing process (invention, drafting, outlining, revising, etc.). Most importantly, perhaps, this is fun. Many students, by means of this project, are drawn into writing for fun.

Creativity? There’s a lot of structure, yet there are very specific goals. Still, they get to accomplish these goals in any way they’d like. Mindful of the ancient models, each student must first choose an object to depict, then imagine the beginnings, the motivations for such a thing to come into being.
Rigor? While using the myth tradition as a backdrop, they have to maintain a story structure, an internal logic and a resolution. Plus, for fifth graders, this is their longest written project of the year—some run to twenty pages!
Empathy? Students gain empathy for the philosophical/poetic urge. Ancient people explained their world imaginatively, from the ground to the heavens.