This summer I was asked to help out in our summer acceleration program…I assumed I would be doing science or technology. Wrong! I was paired with a wonderful English teacher to co-teach English 2. What I was skeptical about in the start turned out to be a wonderful experience. It not only taught me how adaptable I can be, but it also taught me about my own writing skills and how I should expect my students to perform when I ask them to write.
As to my own writing, it made me think about my process. I just sit and write. Wait a bit, come back to it to edit, and if it’s a blog like here I post it. For my “more important” papers ( I think blogging is just as important as my technical writing but you know…society) I will send it to my favorite editor, Mom! Then make more edits based on her comments, she usually proofs for grammar which I’m not so good at but better now that I spent two weeks helping to edit English 2 papers. Then I submit…usually to a professor, but I have high hopes of submitting to a journal soon. But that is beside the point…my point is I had to think about my process and how it works…FOR ME! Others don’t have the same process as me, they have their own, but how did they develop it, how did I develop mine? Well, from exposure to other’s processes. Sure I was taught a process in elementary, middle and high school. Then I had to find my own voice for college. But I had role models.
Which brings me to how I should expect my students to perform in writing tasks, I can’t expect them to write the same way I do or have the same process. I have to help them develop their own process and now after teaching a process (as formulaic as it might seem to me) for two weeks, I have an idea of how to do that. And that is show them how and let them practice. Simple I know, but it is an approach that in today’s high stakes testing and common core standards (or in my case TEKS, my Texas state standards) that I feel gets lost sometimes. We don’t let them process and practice. It is always on to the next standard, the next task, the next experiment, forget processing and internalizing the concepts. It’s drill and kill, without the drill.
I have a professor this semester who has taught me the value of time in learning. She has no idea that she has taught me that. In fact she is a physics professor teaching a roomful of high school and middle level teachers electromagnetism, surely she couldn’t teach us about teaching! She’s the PHYSICS expert! But she has, possibly and probably, unintentionally. (Of course seeker that I am I am always finding lessons in the everyday.) She gives us examples, she gives us homework, she takes it up and then gives us the solutions. All standard fare in the classroom…but then she gives us TIME to process the problems and their solutions. She doesn’t try to cram everything she is currently teaching on a test that is given two days after the concepts are taught. See the thing is it could have been like that, she could have completely justified doing this. It’s a five week (four days a week, 2 hours a day) course on ELECTROMAGNETISM…not easy, very broad and HEAVY on the math. But rather than rushing though she gave us what we needed to comprehend a complex subject. Now did we learn everything on the planet about Electromagnetism, no. But do we understand and can actually calculate the things we did learn, yes.
So what have I learned from my two weeks as an English teacher? Slow down, tell them exactly what you want, and give them the time to do it. So I encourage you to spend some time learning something new and analyzing your process, it’s amazing what you can learn.
O's Bureau of Scientific Investigations 