Gettin There

Hello again!

I’ve once again disappointed you- promising to post often and always, but never actually getting to it. My only reasonable excuse is that my employment at local flower shop over Valentine’s Day weekend completely swallowed every ounce of my time and energy; I haven’t seen anybody my own age for a week, unless I happen to live with them!

I’m surviving, though, because my students remain remarkable and rejuvenating. We’re bounding through the units at a good pace, and I can’t believe the fourth week of the semester is already done. (12 to go!)

The unit on The Eleventh Hour ended somewhat abruptly; the kids were so good about taking their time on each page, gathering details, and decoding the messages, that on the last day of the clue hunt we had to skip several pages in order to finish on time. When each group was at least headed in the right direction, I revealed the answer to the class and took a couple minutes to have a class discussion. We talked about the skills needed to compile details, but not getting stuck on red herrings, and how you can figure out the difference between important clues and superfluous ones. They seemed to get the basic idea presented on the first page of the story, hidden in pencils in the border illustration: “Drawing conclusions from sketchy clues may lead you astray. So sharpen your eyes and your wits - get the point?!”

I gave them two assessments at the end of the unit. The first was a brief writing assignment (only three to four paragraphs), where they were to compare and contrast The Eleventh Hour with the class novel they’d done earlier in the year, The Falcon’s Malteser, which is another mystery story. The main thing I looked for was basic understanding of the elements of mystery writing, and a clear progression from prewriting to rough draft to final draft. Most of them did this very well, but there were a few stragglers- kids who either included too few details, or didn’t do any prewriting and had disorganized papers as a result. The papers were a delight to read, as it was my first real look at lengthy expository writing from any of them. Additionally, this kind of assessment allows me to differentiate the assistance I give to each student. Those who struggled with the basics, I mentioned that they should think about how to organize information into logical chunks. For more proficient writers, I suggested they shake up the sentence structure a bit in order to make their paper more interesting to read. It allows me to personalize the mini-instruction and help each writer with their biggest problems.

The other assessment I did for this unit was a brief quiz over the basics of symbolism and foreshadowing. Despite the fact that I gave them a study guide ahead of time, as well as a few minutes directly before the quiz to study with a partner, the answers the kids gave me were largely hit-and-miss. A select few got a good grasp on the definitions of the two terms and their significance in literature. The chunk of kids in the middle confused literary symbols with more commonplace symbols, so when I asked for examples, they told me a stop sign was a symbol for stop, and a circle with a slash through it was a symbol for “No.” The rest just said “Symbolism is when a symbol is used to symbolize something.” Technically, correct, but not really what I was looking for.

This discouraged me somewhat, but when we began our next class novel, Kokopelli's Flute, they were able to recognize the recurrence of the owl in the first couple scenes, remember what an owl symbolized, and make logical predictions as to what the owl would mean for the main character later. It's satisfying to see your lessons cross over and have the kids be able to use the information you've given them effectively in different lessons and different settings. I take it as a sign that I'm at least doing something right.