Welcome to room A220! I’m going to introduce you to my students and share a few of our successes. I had 5 students altogether. They were fantastic individuals and a handful together.
D: passed his TAKS (Texas standardized tests) but slept through sixth grade the first time. He fell asleep and drooled over his diagnostic test the first day of class. I kept waking him up and he would write the first thing that came to his mind - like what he thought he was supposed to be writing about. He was still half-asleep the whole time, however, and so his essay at the end of the period read something like: "A topic of an essay tells the main idea...an author tells the plot of a story...characters do actions...beginning, middle and end." It was a start. But as soon as I was able to get him excited about brainstorming and writing, he had some exciting stories to tell (and quite an imagination!).
R: Adorable. I don't know why he was in summer school - he knew all the answers and was anxious to participate. He was always early to class, so we got to chat about how summer school was going. He had a bizarre obsession with weapons and things, however, and while I can imagine where this might come from, it was a startling contrast to his softer, more childish exterior. For example, when I asked them to choose which animal they would be and describe why, he chose a penguin because he had "fuzzy hair and kind of walked like one." But then, when he finished before everyone else and I asked him to draw the animal, his penguin had a giant, jagged sword in it's little wing. In any case, R moved back to Mexico at the end of summer school, and I'll miss him.
H: The only girl in the class. She was adorable also and, as it turns out, not as much a handful in my class as in other classes I observed. I think that I gave her a little more attention as the only girl in the class (an ally of sorts) and she really ate it up. She participated all the time and I could always count on her to give the answer I needed. She was a little shy about reading aloud, however, because she wasn't very confident in her English skills (she often asked whether she could just answer the written questions in Spanish), but I think we got to the level, about half way through, where she would hesitantly raise her hand to offer to read aloud. She was also a great writer and always wrote about her big family.
F: A sixth grade heartbreaker. He was charming and a jokester. He walked around with a confidence and strut that hid his struggles with basic academic material. It was extremely challenging to get him to sit still for long enough to actually try on his work. Partner work did not help, he would first distract his partner, then take their answers right before time was up. His best friend, M, was also in the class and that absolutely did not help. The could not go for 60 seconds without interacting in a distracting way – I never though boys could giggle as much as they did together (and at times, unfortunately, it was contagious – for me too!). No matter how far away I put them, they would make eye contact somehow and break down into laughter. They would make clicking noises with their mouths during silent, independent exercises. They would call out. At times, they were exasperating. But as I got to know them, some things changed. For F, he started to follow directions. In the last week, he would actually reprimand M and tell him to be quiet when M was misbehaving. He participated more in an academic way. And even though I highly doubted he improved much over the summer, his grade went up 45 points from the diagnostic test (the first day) to the final test (from a 28% to a 73%). Seeing his face when he was so proud of his achievement was really exciting. After the times I tried to sit down one-on-one to reason with him, I think he might have begun to see the correlation between better behavior and better grades. And when I showed up in their last period class on the last day, he ran over excitedly and explained their whole science experiment to me, even offering me some of his homemade ice cream. I had to decline the offer, unfortunately (he thought I was crazy for not eating ice cream), but it was a great ending to a sometimes frustrating summer with F.
M: Oh, what to say about M. I wish I had more time with him, and I think I learned the most working with him. He definitely struggled with the English language, and this was evident in his speaking, reading and writing (although he wrote the most endearing stories about his family and their fishing outings). He was in summer school because he didn’t pass either of his TAKS tests and there was a marked difference between his concentration before the tests (about half way through summer school) and after. The day before his reading TAKS, F wasn’t in class. I asked the four students whether they wanted to play a review game or practice more with the worksheets to prepare for the test. Three wanted to play the jeopardy game but M spent the whole class period reviewing his notes and re-doing the worksheets to make sure he knew the material. I had never seen him work so hard! It was awesome. But after he took his test, he kind of fell apart. I don’t think his test went very well and it discouraged him immensely. I think he was really nervous about being retained and from then on, whenever he got discouraged he said he was going to fail anyways and he put his head down and stopped trying. This is why I wish I had more time with him, because I knew that he was capable of working hard and getting the material, but he was so easily discouraged. I wish I could have figured out how to show him he was successful every single day. He was so awesome and I will miss him a lot.
All five of my students were great writers and, early on, I realized they enjoyed writing enough to sit in their own seats and silently work for an extended period of time. Therefore, we wrote a lot. They also really enjoyed idioms and drew fabulous pictures of pigs flying, cats and dogs falling from the sky, talking someone’s ear off and cats holding onto someone’s tongue. All my students passed onto the 7th grade, which is so exciting! But they all have a whole lot to work on, and I wish we had more than 4 weeks together. I felt like we were making some headway with some things, and by the end we had figured out our rhythm and dynamic, but it was just too short.
Of all my days in Institute, my high was being in room A220 and seeing all five of my students. I might have spent all morning complaining about a seemingly useless session and I might have felt sick all morning trying to keep myself awake in said session, but as soon as I shook their hands coming into the classroom, it felt worth it. Sixth graders, too, still have an innocence about them that really reminds you they are still children. And they deserve a top notch education, so much more than I could give them in our brief time together. So, as I prepare for the year to come, I remind myself, beyond thinking about behavioral issues and frustrations and mistakes on my part, I think about how excited I was to see them every single day. My goal is to maintain that excitement for my own students all year long.
sign celebrating Georgetown's title as the Red Poppy Capitol of Texas, and finally stumbled upon a whole-in-the wall winery. Of course, we couldn't pass by Georgetown Winery! We spent a good amount of time in that tiny place, sitting at the dark wood bar, pretending to know anything about the fine Texas wine we tasted. We met the owners, bought the obligatory bottle of wine after many tastings, and I got some souvenir glasses to begin a collection as eclectic as my mother's. (Right, Spencer taking a rest in Georgetown, TX on our way through the countryside.)
