My Engl 90 classes flummox me: I don't quite know what to expect of the students, and I have a HUGE range of abilities in these classes. A couple of students seem not to have much command of the English language at ALL, yet they've both passed our Engl 80 course.
A couple of other students seem to have no command of their giggles, and they constantly nudge and bump each other, wiggly as puppies.
A couple of other students smell -- really.
A couple of other students walk in and out of class, impatient with repetition and classmates who need the assignment explained twice and thrice.
A couple of students shouldn't be in this class because they're already fluent writers, thoughtful thinkers, bad test takers (evidently, since "the test" is what put them in Engl 90).
A couple of students have revealed their pasts in essays that haunt me: abuse, pain, terror, deprivation. How do I grade these stories?
A couple of students can't read. Or at least when their eyes go over each word, they recognize the words but can't figure out how to put them together into a thought.
A couple of students need to visit me in my office for clarification instead of listening to assignments and advice in class.
A couple of students are embarrassed to be in this class, but eager at the same time to get "good grades" and "move on" to another college-level course.
A couple of students go missing every class period.
A couple of students haven't turned in a damn thing all semester.
I am so lucky. Really. To be working with these people who are willing (for the most part) and engaged with the difficult task of learning to say what they think on paper (and to think of something to say on paper).
I'm struggling, and I'm so privileged to be doing so. How awesome is that -- to be taught by my students.
Evacuation roots
5 hours ago
4 comments:
My classrooms are just a little better... and a little worse, because there are more of them, thus more "diversity" of challenges.
Now, if we could only deal with the people who aren't in our classroom but are causing us problems in the classroom....
Hmmm. Part of me loves this post, but part of me smells one of those Hollywood scripts coming.
1. Maybe your sabbatical was a bad thing, in that it took you away from the hard core realities of your job?
2. I have given up on the idea that students learned anything in a class before mine. While teaching at a four-year school makes the teaching easier, I find that if I presume that paragraphing is a skill that they are still working on, and parts of speech are still jargon to them, it goes better.
3. You change your assignment so that students can't write about haunting stories. Who were they envisioning as an audience? Why do they think that you can be that audience? I wouldn't know what to do with that, and I would worry that I was being played (a la Oprah).
4. For some, even, of my students, the act of reading a line of student's paper aloud lights up a different part of their brain that interpreting the paper's meaning. Maybe we need more oral interp work in the lower grades?
5. A minimum of 10% of my students every semester fail to see that I answered their question about the assignment when I (a) answered someone else's question (b) discussed sample "x" or (c) reminded them of the significance of the "y"th criterion on the rubric.
6. I typically smell worse than my students, because I use cheap cologne liberally before I leave to teach. Why? For the same reason I jiggle my doorknob twelve times -- some faulty wiring in the brain.
David, David, David: my sabbatical is what makes it possible for me to exist with the "hard core realities" of my work. :-)
And I concur with everything you've listed: regarding #4, we are doing "reading aloud" during our writers' workshops, sort of like the way some Creative Writing workshops work. The students like it and hear some impressive work. I recommend it.
And regarding #2, I'm a big fan of seeing writing as "endlessly perfectable, if at all," so I agree with your presumption that we're all still working on things. Kairos, my friend!
There was no need to agree with #6!
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