Teaching in the Twenty-First Century

I get that we are on the path toward a society with no language. We allow students to misspell at will, so as to avoid bruising their overactive egos. We allow text speak because it is a “new literacy.” We do not ask our students to read the “Great, White, Dead.”

This rant comes from another part of education that really bothers me–the endless hoops we are required to jump through. My state now requires SEI (structured English immersion–which obviously means throw ELL kids into the mainstream and see if they sink or swim) training for ALL TEACHERS. 60 hours. Most districts are finding ways to make this training free (they wouldn’t get everyone to do it, if they didn’t) and I am now working on the 2nd block–45 hours worth and something mentioned in the training bothered me enough to post again. (Twice in one night after months of dry spells, I hope it continues.)

Videos, of teachers and ELL students, are being used to “make it real.” In fact, they have a disclaimer stating these are real teachers, not staged events. Yeah, sure, when you have a camera coming in and trained on you, you are not doing a dog and pony show. Anyway, one of the videos I viewed tonight had a teacher, of high school English, making statements about the need for “adapted” readers because “Why should they have to suffer through arcane language…and convoluted sentences…they can’t understand?” Um, because how will they ever learn to understand if we don’t ask them to struggle for it???? She went on to state, they don’t need to interact with such language until college. Yeah, college professors, go ahead and cringe.

What is wrong with these ideas? Now, the course I am in strongly cautions against making things EASIER or teaching at a LOWER LEVEL, but in reality, when you give the WHOLE CLASS adapted readers and forgo the actual reading text, you are dummying down the text. What happened to SCAFFOLDING? What happened to TEACHING the language? How will students ever learn to grow if they are not given challenges. Does anyone remember Vygotsky and his ZONE? The content is supposed to be a tad challenging for true learning to occur. If students can go through the motions and crank out what passes for “A” work, they probably aren’t learning it!

If you think the language is too arcane–make it work. Teach the worst of the vocab BEFORE reading. Get kids interacting with the vocab or types of (convoluted) sentences BEFORE the reading. Let them read bits and pieces (a sentence here or a paragraph there) BEFORE the reading, to give the kids a sense of what the reading is like. I agree–you can’t plunge headlong into an arcane text (have you ever tried reading The Scarlet Letter with a bunch of ELL juniors?), but you can scaffold their reading so that it makes sense.

Case in point–Huck Finn is a relatively hard book, even for the non-ELL student, because of the dialects used in the text. To overcome the difficulty my students would face, we did a pre-reading activity on writing dialog. We talked about the types of jargon and slang allowed in conversation (another chance to work on writing and formal versus informal writing!) that isn’t normally allowed in writing. I had the kids write conversations from different viewpoints and time periods. We shared these out loud. I pulled out some of Jim’s dialect and we decoded it together. We listed to 2 chapters in class a day and I sent the kids home to read THE NEXT 4 or 5 chapters on their own. They were taught how to work through difficult passages before they did this. They came in the next day and completed a quiz over what they read the night before (I have never heard so much discussion about what they thought they had read and who was right and why before!). Then we worked on the next couple of chapters in class. At the end we outlined the whole story on a story map. We watched a video version and compared them–discussing why there were differences and how those differences changed the story.

I do the same kinds of activites for everything I ask my students to read. I can’t skip colonial literature because it is written in Old English style. I would love to, personally not my favorite reads, but I can’t. Why do we allow and encourage such techniques? Why don’t we encourage the struggle anymore?????