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This is another of the Disney Award essays. I had misread the question the first time and I posted that wrong essay earlier. Here's the real question:
Tell us about a moment or event (possibly more than one) in your teaching career that left an enduring impression on you, and discuss how it has shaped you as a teacher.
***
My fourth year of teaching Latin at Porter Middle School provided me with two contrasting and curious classes. Among my 8th grade students was a brilliant trio of girls who responded well to my experiments with extensive reading. Latin studies, by nature, are almost entirely based on intensive reading—knowing what ever single word means, how it functions in the sentence, etc. I believe that this is part of what is wrong with Latin education and why so few students stay with Latin long enough to read authentic texts/classical authors. Even though I only teach beginning Latin, I decided that year to stretch my students so that they could see that Latin can be read a page at a time, not just one word intensely analyzed at a time.
While my 8th grade class consisted of a half dozen or so truly talented A students among mainly average kids and a few strugglers, my 7th grade class that year was distinctly the opposite. The majority of that class were strugglers, several had learning disabilities, and one or two students I still believe, sadly, will never finish high school because of their home life. The students who did not have learning issues often tended toward hyperactivity. In other words, it was a truly diverse, challenging class, but I like a challenge. The most striking feature of this class was the number of students who would just totally shut down when faced with a test, on which 40 out of 50 questions were objective and 10 were reading comprehension of an unseen Latin passage (answers in English). In addition, the majority of the objective questions would be previewed by students via computer review drills of my own design at the Quia website (www.quia.com/pages/porterlatin1a.html) the day before the test. Students did not exactly struggle with tests, they simply refused to try—leaving whole sections blank or randomly writing down A, B, C, D, while never noticing that the section they were working on either had only 2 choices or was true/false. For these students it was preferable to fail from lack of effort because they were afraid to discover what many of these students had been told by their parents or others for years: that they were stupid.
The low self-esteem of many of these students was compounded by a severe lack of academic preparedness. They did not have parents at home to help with homework, nor could they manage to come to class with their books or materials. While the smarter students would have finished with the warm-up, these students would still be looking for something to write with. Then the smarter students would be bored and off-task while these strugglers attempted the warm-up. The end result was a chaotic class period with easily 10-15 minutes of wasted time, which was absolutely intolerable from a teaching perspective. It was a difficult, unproductive year with regard to these 7th graders. When attempting to discuss the problem with other Latin teachers, I was told that I needed to train my counselors weed out the riffraff. I rejected this answer because I firmly believe that Latin should no longer be treated as an elitist subject, that the only way to prevent having split level 3/4 classes or no advanced classes at all is to make Latin accessible to everyone without watering it down. I knew I was on my own in finding solutions to helping these students and others like them.
The following summer I studied Harry Wong’s The First Days of School in an effort to restructure my classes so that I would no longer struggle to control my 50 minute hour. (My procedures handout can be seen here: http://www.txclassics.org/Procedures20052006.pdf.) But that was only part of the problem. I also developed strategies to help my strugglers succeed on quizzes, tests and other assignments, teaching them how to think, how to figure out answers, how to apply information—in essence, teaching them how to be smart. By the end of the 8th grade year, no one was leaving any portion of the tests blank nor were they wildly guessing at answers. And, as a treat, we even studied a section of Vergil’s Aeneid that year, reading the sea serpent scene and even writing a film scenario of the lines. Those students were not without talent, nor ability, nor creativity—they just didn’t know how to tap it.
Tell us about a moment or event (possibly more than one) in your teaching career that left an enduring impression on you, and discuss how it has shaped you as a teacher.
***
My fourth year of teaching Latin at Porter Middle School provided me with two contrasting and curious classes. Among my 8th grade students was a brilliant trio of girls who responded well to my experiments with extensive reading. Latin studies, by nature, are almost entirely based on intensive reading—knowing what ever single word means, how it functions in the sentence, etc. I believe that this is part of what is wrong with Latin education and why so few students stay with Latin long enough to read authentic texts/classical authors. Even though I only teach beginning Latin, I decided that year to stretch my students so that they could see that Latin can be read a page at a time, not just one word intensely analyzed at a time.
While my 8th grade class consisted of a half dozen or so truly talented A students among mainly average kids and a few strugglers, my 7th grade class that year was distinctly the opposite. The majority of that class were strugglers, several had learning disabilities, and one or two students I still believe, sadly, will never finish high school because of their home life. The students who did not have learning issues often tended toward hyperactivity. In other words, it was a truly diverse, challenging class, but I like a challenge. The most striking feature of this class was the number of students who would just totally shut down when faced with a test, on which 40 out of 50 questions were objective and 10 were reading comprehension of an unseen Latin passage (answers in English). In addition, the majority of the objective questions would be previewed by students via computer review drills of my own design at the Quia website (www.quia.com/pages/porterlatin1a.html) the day before the test. Students did not exactly struggle with tests, they simply refused to try—leaving whole sections blank or randomly writing down A, B, C, D, while never noticing that the section they were working on either had only 2 choices or was true/false. For these students it was preferable to fail from lack of effort because they were afraid to discover what many of these students had been told by their parents or others for years: that they were stupid.
The low self-esteem of many of these students was compounded by a severe lack of academic preparedness. They did not have parents at home to help with homework, nor could they manage to come to class with their books or materials. While the smarter students would have finished with the warm-up, these students would still be looking for something to write with. Then the smarter students would be bored and off-task while these strugglers attempted the warm-up. The end result was a chaotic class period with easily 10-15 minutes of wasted time, which was absolutely intolerable from a teaching perspective. It was a difficult, unproductive year with regard to these 7th graders. When attempting to discuss the problem with other Latin teachers, I was told that I needed to train my counselors weed out the riffraff. I rejected this answer because I firmly believe that Latin should no longer be treated as an elitist subject, that the only way to prevent having split level 3/4 classes or no advanced classes at all is to make Latin accessible to everyone without watering it down. I knew I was on my own in finding solutions to helping these students and others like them.
The following summer I studied Harry Wong’s The First Days of School in an effort to restructure my classes so that I would no longer struggle to control my 50 minute hour. (My procedures handout can be seen here: http://www.txclassics.org/Procedures20052006.pdf.) But that was only part of the problem. I also developed strategies to help my strugglers succeed on quizzes, tests and other assignments, teaching them how to think, how to figure out answers, how to apply information—in essence, teaching them how to be smart. By the end of the 8th grade year, no one was leaving any portion of the tests blank nor were they wildly guessing at answers. And, as a treat, we even studied a section of Vergil’s Aeneid that year, reading the sea serpent scene and even writing a film scenario of the lines. Those students were not without talent, nor ability, nor creativity—they just didn’t know how to tap it.
