Highlights of the week

This past week brought about some rewards or otherwise noteworthy moments in and out of the classroom.

After a couple of weeks of more mundane aid work at the school, I had a very hands-on role in the sixth grade. With conferences to attend to and only one month allotted for Mrs. Shook's students to achieve the expected math standard, each student was required to fill out a planning page on how they would reach their goal (well, really the system's goal). After I watched Mrs. Shook go through the process with one student, things got busy and I was handed the rest of the stack. Even among the semi-scripted pool of ideas (do homework, pay attention, check my answers...) it was interesting to engage the students in talking about their current study habits and brainstorm how we might shift them to make them more effective.

The next week, I started to see those shifts (a little; I mean, it isn't an over-night thing). In Open Gym,  one of the more reluctant and unresponsive kids in the class came right up to me stating he had reading and math to do, and sat down for an uninterrupted 20 minutes or so. This made me realize that our other Open Gym kid from that class should have his homework also and I got him to (begrudgingly) tackle his as well. This happened on Wednesday as well. TWO Open Gym homework days in a row! It was a tingly feeling inside.

In school that week, I was even more hands-on. It began on Tuesday when Mrs. Shook dished out 4 lengthy pages of kill-and-drill fraction problems. One particularly stubborn girl who reminds me a lot of myself at that age sat stark-still at her desk, unwilling to shift her sight from some trivial focal point on her desk (another tactic of defense I know well.) I sat beside her desk patiently and quietly after making a brief empathetic statement about how I could relate. After a few minutes, she finally shifted her demeanor and we ended up using the big classroom smart board to tackle the problems. By the end of the hour, two other students had asked to join us and the three of them were plowing through the problems with increased speed and a slight enthusiasm that perhaps they didn't even notice was creeping up as they began to understand.

As much as I adore Mrs. Shook, I often find myself cringing during reading hour, as she places inflections willy-nilly across the page and reveals subtle hints that she is not quite paying attention to the words she is taking off of the page. So when I was asked to go in the hall and catch one of our students up on some chapters she had missed in absence, I had to contain my excitement. I kind of love reading aloud. We read about 2 and a half chapters and at the end, she complimented me on my reading and we both admitted our anticipation that had arisen from the action-packed chapter.

The next day, the three math musketeers eagerly gathered around the smart board to tackle math with me again. At reading time, there was yet another student that needed to be caught up. He was one who, after an initial burst of encouraging improvement at the beginning of the year, had relapsed back into very intensive behavioral and academic barriers. For the past few weeks, it had been nearly impossible to interact with him and then he'd disappeared from school for a week. After being rather apathetic about coming into the hall to read with me, we ended up having an incredible reading period. With him, it wasn't as easy to tell if he was really paying attention and it occurred to me that I should probably pause and use some prompts that would normally be used in the class reading time. I offered our usual stem "When the book said ____ I thought this was important because _______." Not only was his response insightful but when I offered him that attention, he began to initiate his own thoughts as they came up during reading. He was far more in tune with what I was reading than I'd thought. At one point in some snarky dialogue lines, he interjected with his own tone of snobbery. I laughed at his impersonation and he then asked if he could read all of that character's lines. We started to switch off almost every paragraph of reading and his inflections were more accurate than even Mrs. Shook's.

Teaching these kids is like the weather and from day to day, there doesn't always seem to be a clear line of improvement. But on weeks like this, I just bask in the sunlight.