Tag: sentences

Things I Know 56 of 365: My job is to look closely

You can observe a lot just by watching.

– Yogi Berra

In his discussion of the use of Critical Friends Group protocols with student work, Sam Chaltain explains the process as a chance to look more closely at what students have created. Rather than looking for what the teacher was hoping would come from an assignment, CFG protocols take a step back to ask what the student was doing, creating and attempting in the completion of an assignment.

It turns out you don’t need a protocol to be reminded we need to look more closely.

SLA welcomed visitors today.

Touring classrooms, they happened upon one of my senior storytelling classes.

After a few minutes, one of the visitors approached me.

“I walked in and saw kids cutting pictures out of magazines and thought, ‘This isn’t good.'”

Admittedly, as my students played with form and function as they diagrammed their six-word stories and then created art pieces to display those diagrams, it did look like an Adirondacks summer camp exploded in my room.

“But then I looked closer,” my guest continued. “There’s some deep work going on here.”

That’s the key.

“I want to take this class,” another visitor commented after spending five minutes listening to a student explain how he was attempting to understand what he was asking words to do in his story.

Admittedly, the room didn’t look like the standard English classroom today. Still, I was able to stop and have a real conversation about modifiers and direct objects with a kid who traditionally turns in 1 in 10 homework assignments. He wanted to make something that showed how his story did what it did. To accomplish this task of helping others understand his creation, he was willing to discuss prepositional phrases, understood subjects and adverbs.

“They’re doing some difficult work,” my first visitor explained.

“I know,” I said, “Don’t tell them.”

It’s not that I’m attempting to fool my students into learning. Monday, we’ll start looking more closely and talking more clinically about what they’re learning.

I didn’t want word to get out how difficult the task ahead was because they were creating. The drive to create had overcome the drive to exclaim the difficulty of creation. I didn’t want to stand in the way of that.

I didn’t want to stand in the way, but I still needed to look closely.

As my students were using yarn, construction paper, magazines, markers and colored pencils to create stories, I was looking closely at their abilities to understand language, build complex thoughts, dissect narrative and understand the relative relationships of words.

Shhhhh.

I’ll be using the CFG protocols to get my peers’ feedback on student work soon. For now, my goal is to look closely as that work is completed and understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Rather than have them pause and take a test, my goal is to have them continue to create so I can continue to learn about their learning.

Things I Know 54 of 365: I teach kids English

– Victor Hugo

I teach kids.

First and foremost, I teach kids.

It’s always in the front of my brain.

The stupendously great thing is I get to teach kids something I love.

In the important rhetoric around the idea that I teach kids, I want to make it clear that I teach kids a subject or a discipline or a an art.

Sometimes, it’s all three.

My only real run-in with diagramming sentences was in Dr. Jerry Balls’s Traditional and Non-Traditional Grammar course in college.

For most of the other students in the room, diagramming sentences was the hellacious experience I remember it being portrayed as in some episode of The Wonder Years.

For me, though, something else was there. In diagrams, I saw something beautiful. The way Mr. Curry had seen beauty as we worked through problems in calculus or Mr. Schutzenhoffer saw beauty in the molecular models of chemistry, I was seeing tangibly represented in the subject I identified most closely.

I wanted to talk about what I saw, the way what language was doing was being played out in what we were seeing.

Dr. Balls and my classmates wanted to finish the lesson.

He was teaching a subject.

The seniors in my storytelling class started today at SixWordStories.net.

“Read until you’re moved to create,” I said, “Then let me know when you need a marker.”

They started reading.

Around the room, I heard students reading key stories aloud.

Not surprisingly, the sexy stories were a pretty big hit.

Gradually, hands went up.

I took them markers.

“What do I do?”

“Write some six-word stories.”

And they started to write stories on their desktops – all over their desktops.

Missy covered her entire table and had to move to another to keep writing.

At some point, when the tables of the room were awash with stories – beautiful, heartbreaking, hilarious stories – we watched a simple video I found as I was digging around the TALONS English wiki.

The video ended. “For the next step, you’ll be diagramming your stories. I can tell by the somewhat terrified looks on many of your faces that you haven’t the foggiest idea how to diagram a sentence. That’s ok. The Interwebs has millions of pages to help you out.”

A beat.

They began looking up the information they needed.

A few minutes later, they were taking their works of literary art and deconstructing them. We started to talk about how where the words were related to what the words were and how the story did or didn’t change when all the same words were in a space together but being asked to show how they were doing what they were doing.

Tomorrow, we’ll head to the final phase.

We’ll move our diagrammed stories (and I say our because I’m writing one as well) off of the tables and onto tangible objects and representations to be displayed around school. The subject of storytelling, the discipline of diagramming and the art of creation will be knotted together.

When students ask me why I chose English, I explain I love words. I love their power, their beauty, their arbitrary natures, their shifting meanings.

I know few, if any, of my students will major in English as they further their studies. I’m perfectly happy with that, so long as they can see English.

As much as I would not be doing my job if I didn’t work every moment to see my students, I would also be failing if I didn’t work to help them to see the transcendent beauty of my subject – to try on a new perspective.