Students wrote poems and then illustrated them in the style of William Blake. E., a high school English teacher, showed me the students’ work. It was awful. I was their art teacher. “I know she can do much better than that. He can too…” Were talented students just lazy, willing to make beautiful art in art class and then shrug it off in English class? A mystery.
E. showed up at school the next morning with a sample of what she had wanted from the students. She had written her own poem and then, not a natural artist, illustrated it painstakingly. Wow.
“How long did that take you?”
“Four and a half hours.”
A hah.
Students had each spent less than an hour on an assignment that took a teacher four and a half hours to do to her own standards and expectations. They had homework for other classes, they even had other work for English, and they had been given only one night for the assignment. It wasn’t a surprise that none of them, talented or not, spent the hours necessary to fulfill the teacher’s (unspoken) expectation for the quality of the work.
E. showed the students her work, told them how long it had taken her, made her expectations for the assignment explicit, and gave them several days to complete it. Their work was beautiful.
***
Z., a bright, motivated student who seemed interested in everything in the world, one of the few teens I have taught who was willing to say publicly that something academic—the quadratic formula or the defenestration of Prague—was cool, handed in his first essay for me. It was intelligently written but brief and almost illegible. I handed it back to him with this comment: “Brief. Sloppy. Seems hastily written.”
Turns out he wrestled with dyslexia and no one had told me. He had worked as hard on his essay as anyone in the class, it just didn’t show.
I generally grade essays with a check mark if they’re acceptable, a rare “check-plus” if they’re exceptionally good, and a check-minus if they’re unacceptable and should be re-written. But I edit them, correcting every misused comma, spelling mistake, awkward phrase, poor word choice, or lack of proper paragraphing.
(One of my fundamental beliefs as a teacher is that students generally enter high school capable of writing a perfect, simple English sentence and can then, with teachers’ assistance, learn to write more complex but still perfectly grammatical sentences. They will make mistakes along the way, but these can be minimal and instructive, rather than evidence of laziness or apathy.)
The content of Z.’s essays was often excellent, but other factors, most probably due to his dyslexia, kept him from getting check-pluses.
A year later, in a different course (one of the beauties of a small school is that we teachers get to know and teach students over several years), Z. handed in yet another essay. I read it through, pencil poised. Not a single correction. Thoughtful content, as usual, and no errors. Cool!
(Basing my assignments on those I found most meaningful when I was a student, I have students write many brief essays in most of my courses; I would rather read 1-2 really well-written pages than 5-8 pages thinly cribbed from Wikipedia and then padded with adverbs and adjectives.)
I returned the papers to the students. Z. came to see me, grinning. “I decided I was tired of your corrections. I wanted to write an error-free paper, to see if I could do it.” We chatted for a bit. It turns out it had taken him time to achieve his goal, but not quite twice as much time as he normally spent on assignments.
“You’re in trouble now,” I said.
“Why?”
“Now that I know what you can do when you try, you’ll have to do this every time.”
I can’t say that he rose to the bait completely, but the standards to which he held himself did change for the better, dyslexia or no dyslexia.
***
Will, work, and time. Aren’t these the keys to mastery, for teachers and for students, regardless of personal challenges?
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