This week's outreach was three classrooms (2 3rd grades & 1 4th) just chuck full of ADD/ADHD kids. And overhead projectors that were fuzzy and unfocused. And no room to set up a computer/projector if I had even thought that it would help enough. Although, I really am leaning toward needing to prepare that to ACTUALLY work. At least one of the rooms had a projector I could have plugged my laptop into, if I had been prepared with the right presentation. Then, it would be easier for the kids to read - and I wouldn't have to worry if I'm writing my "e"s clearly enough for the 3rd graders to read/copy.
In the midst of my Language & Literacy class for the MAT program, I found myself highly concerned over vast differences in writing abilities in these classrooms. Some, the writing was small and neat, nicer than many middle schoolers'. Some, still large, messy, indistinguishable - worse than most 1st graders. How do we teach writing? These kid's need to learn it, but what do we do to teach it? To form words, to space them properly, to have a sentence that begins with a subject and ends with a predicate. They learn their pronouns ("it" "they" "them") and suddenly, they can't answer the question, "But what was 'it'? What did you measure in the experiment?" The sentence I try to get them to write - "My hypothesis was right because the circle magnet held more 3 more papers than the rectangle magnet" - becomes "I was right because it held more." Doesn't matter what grade either - they look for shortcuts and don't understand the importance of clarity of communication - no matter how many times we repeat and discuss and ask questions like "what did you do, how did you do it?" and "pretend I've never done this experiment."
How do we teach clarity of communication? Full thoughts and well-written sentences? How do we do it without making it more overwhelming then the content? How do we help the students who need it, without holding back the students who have the skills already? We learn to teach models of reading and writing. But how does that address the gap between students? And if I spend time with students who need extra help on the reading and writing, what are my students who don't need that help doing? Getting farther ahead in the content, while the 10% who need direct instruction and guided tutoring on the reading and writing fall father behind and the majority of the class, the average kids, have noticed that I'm distracted and take full advantage of it.
How do we, as teachers, fix it? How do we teach the content & the communication skills so that the students can learn more than how to copy a sentence off the board, so they can learn the content and explain their understanding of it?
I was planning on going a different direction with this post - more about how I need to develop the right materials to be able to use my computer & projectors instead of unreliable overheads - and how my video camera got its first uses this week - but I guess that the real story about Outreach this week wasn't the technology - it was the lack of a very basic skill amoung a very high percentage of students. How do I teach the content without leaving one half of the class behind, or the other half bored?
