Overestimating my students is something I have realized I have a bad habit of. Example 1) The attention span of the average 1st grader. Example 2) The ability of a sophomore to cooperate with the expectations of a student teacher. Example 3) The knowledge of writing an essay of an 8th grader.
Thursday was another eventful day. In the morning, I helped with a vocabulary activity with the 3rd graders and finished up some last minute details for my 1st graders. I ate lunch and then waited patiently for 4 to 10 little hands to wave through the window to let me know they were waiting "patiently" outside of the classroom. I rounded the corner and greeted 4 of the first graders, and to my surprise, the greeting was returned by all 4 of them with a variety of hugs, smiles, and very excited voices. I ushered them into the classroom, as I had at least 2 activities I needed to complete with them.
If you can recall, Monday afternoon I overestimated their attention span, so for today, I had 2 activities planned, and 2 extra just in case. I knew their wouldn't be time to do all 4, but I know now that being over-prepared is never, ever a bad thing. The first activity was a story map. I gave each student a blue piece of paper that had 6 large empty boxes (2 columns across, 3 rows down) and 2 smaller boxes inside each of those. I had printed out 5 sets of 6 pictures that the students either associated with a vocabulary word or a sentence from the story and cut them out for each of the students. I had a master copy of the story map that had questions about the story (character, "setting," additional details, problem, solution) in "1st grade friendly words." For example, the students know "main character" as "the new friend." The students then held up the picture they thought answered the question and I called on a student to share their answer; then they glued the picture into the larger box and wrote one vocab word in the smaller box.
After this activity, we moved on to the fun activity I had promised to the students at the beginning of the week. If you are friends with me on Facebook, you saw the blob cookies I baked earlier in the week. Well, I brought those in, along with white frosting and food coloring. We then made our "own" class color, because the story was about a chameleon trying to find his own color. The students obviously loved that.
As I walked my students to the door and wished them a good rest of their afternoon, I ran into my supervisor, on her way to observe my next lesson: 8th grade writing workshop. This was the lesson I was most excited for all week. I adore the 8th graders-- as chaotic, distracted, and unmotivated as they are 70% of the time. There is so much potential in that class, so many students that warm my heart, and yet cracking them just doesn't seem to be happening in that classroom, or in any other class from what I hear. I walked in the door, and to my fear, the students were all talking. To my delight, it was about their novel, but still they were talking. When I arrived, the students were supposed to be writing their thesis statements so that I could help them workshop their examples from the novel into solid, detailed, supporting body paragraphs! One of the other teachers asked if this would be a problem for my mini-lesson. In my head: "doesn't matter if it's a problem or not, there's nothing I can do about how prepared they are for what I have prepared. I'm getting observed, so I've just gotta go with it." Verbally: "No, I can do it."
20 seconds into the mini-lesson on adding details and using descriptive words, I realize how very little the students know or care about essay writing in general, let alone writing descriptively. Plan B: let them write. We had some fun adding details to a few sentences about my beloved home state of Idaho and how much I love potatoes, but then we focused on the basics: what's the point of your essay and what are examples to support you? Introductory paragraphs at their most basic level. I walked around the room, helped the students that wanted help, and redirected students who needed redirection. As you can probably tell, this was also not my smoothest lesson, but it happens. When you overestimate an entire's class ability or knowledge of one thing, you risk the chance of students being completely lost. It happens, but what do you do? You take a step back, evaluate what the students know, and re-engage by adjusting to their current needs. They didn't need detailed writing. They needed to know how to make their main idea into a simple sentence. So that's what we did.
After talking with my supervisor, she was very supportive in my struggles for the week. She said I handled myself, the reluctant students, and the curve balls well. Her biggest concern wasn't the fact that I overestimated my students; it was that she feared the classroom wasn't set up in the most student-friendly way... and she's right. There students are not all on the same reading, writing, or critical thinking level. And with 3 trained adults in the classroom 80% of the time, there is a lot more that could be done. Next step: do something about it.
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