I have noticed that my students are generally not what I would call "real" English students. This sounds derogatory, but I mean it more as an indictment of the way they've been conditioned by many of our teachers in many subject areas than as an indictment of my students. As in many high poverty schools, we are simply teaching them "life-skills" English: how to spell, proper grammar, and that the purpose of reading is only to be able to answer the questions your teacher puts on the test. It's the equivalent of how special ed departments approach teaching their students in the past by simply teaching them how to tie their shoes and proper hygiene. Don't get me wrong, life skills are important, but by the time students are in high school they should be at a level where they are being challenged to their cognitive maturity even if they don't have all the "skills" yet. Let me explain it another way, yes, you can teach 30 year olds how to read by having them read "Go Dog Go" over and over, but it will not be challenging them intellectually, only teaching them reading. It's not that there's anything intrinsically wrong with teaching skills as long as you are simultaneously working on their higher reasoning skills as well.
And therein lies the rub. In order to get them to be able to challenge themselves with high level literary discussion, it seems that it is now necessary to train them in the skills that they never learned while only focusing on the life skills portion. In essence you must teach the skill needed to get past merely teaching skills. SO, this year I want to begin focusing on how to scaffold kids to these higher levels of learning by teaching how to hold meaningful discussions, how to read in a meaningful way, and how to process material without the direct prompting of the teacher. To me, it's like deprogramming everything school has taught them thus far about what it means to learn.
To make things a little more coherent for myself, these are my reconditioning plans. First I plan to try to strip away all the bad habits, and replace them with new understandings of English as a subject of high level inquiry.
Things to be untaught:
- Learning is passive.
- Being a good reader is inborn.
- There is one answer to understanding literature.
Things to be reprogrammed:
- Students need to be trained how to have actual classroom discussions where the teacher isn't the center of the focus
- Being a good reader is a matter of learning not only how to decode words, but decode meaning and the work's social relevance.
- Teacher's don't supply meaning, readers do. Students are always "right" as long as they can prove it in the text. Students must be taught that the academic process and English inquiry isn't a magical act or inborn talent only available to the teacher or a small group of students, but a very calculated cognitive skill that students are capable of learning through practice and proper teacher scaffolding.
Posts
