A former colleague's post on FB last night really saddened me. I lay awake in bed thinking about it for a while before I could fall asleep. She shared that her son he hates school now. Recording and graphing his reading minutes has stolen the joy of reading. Other content is disconnected and pointless. Another FB friend commented that her fourth grade son was kept in from recess because he forgot to make notations while reading because he was lost in the story.
These posts saddened me for several reasons:
- I used to assign these joy killing assignments.
- I feel sadness for these children who are losing their enthusiasm and curiosity, yet have years of formal schooling ahead of them.
- I am scared that in a few years I will make these comments about my own children.
Eventually, I came to the idea of "playing the game" and that allowed me some peace last night.
Several years ago at some sort of collaborative meeting, my group got on the subject of "playing the game of school." We debated about teaching students how to play the game. Is it right to teach students to play the game? Aren't students who know how to play the game at an advantage? Should we be spending valuable class time on this?
Playing the game means knowing how to navigate school. It encompasses a lot of things. In this case, of the tedious reading assignments, its a matter of purpose. The little boy who was kept in from recess needs to be taught the difference between reading for pleasure and reading to practice skills. Then, he needs to be taught that if he gets lost in his reading, he can "play the game" by just going back and writing out his annotations before the teacher checks.
Playing the game also includes skills like knowing the textbook questions go in order of the chapter or knowing how to look up a SparkNotes summary of the reading you didn't get to do before you go to class. Playing the game is knowing that school work is just that - work. It isn't always fun or personally interesting, yet you still have to find a way to get it done. Figuring out how to cut corners on that work is part of playing the game.
A lot of how to play the game can be taught. There are many study tips and skills that make school just faster and easier for the kids that know them. But, there are aspects that are more about values. The perfect example is a student I had my first year of teaching. GC was dependable and well behaved. But, when I started to read his work, I quickly learned that he hated school. But, GC knew had to play the game. He knew that even though he didn't like what he was doing, he had to get his work completed to get an acceptable score. He would use 10-15 minutes of every advisory period to get his journal entry done for my class so that he didn't have to do it at home for homework. That is playing the game.
It seems wrong that learning to play the game is even an issue. Education should all be about the joy of learning and the wonder in the world around us. But, school involves hoops that need to be jumped through, for students and teachers alike. There is mandated curriculum. There are tests. There are grades that must be assigned. Teachers are expected to give homework that practices what they taught during the day and to then use the scores for those assignments to determine the "final" grade of the term. Its very easy to loose sight of whether the practice is needed or if the type of assignmen is the most effective or even fair way of assessing the skills. But that is where public education is today. Teachers and students have to play the game.
But the discussion we had about playing the game was about high school students. It seems like it would be very confusing for an elementary student. Its contradictory. Do some work one way because you love it, and then do other work because it is just part of being in school.
As a teacher, I hate that I have to play the game. Over the last year of my time in the classroom, I started to believe in workshop approaches and standards based grading. While I still feel strongly about using rubrics that anchor my assessment, I don't feel like a lot of the work I'm asking the students to do should have scores or grades that will go towards their final grade for the term. Ideally, I want to gather data through conferencing and many small assignments that lead up to a few big assignments at the end of the marking period. Lots of practice that is manageable for teacher (to plan and review) and student (to produce) before the big performance. But, parents, administrators, and students feel uncomfortable not knowing their grade, especially in an age of online, live grade books. So, I was forced to play the game of school by giving out scores and calculating them all into the final grade. It was a huge headache and waste of my energy and time compared to how I wanted to be teaching.
But I'm an adult. I might be annoyed, frustrated, or even infuriated about having to teach this way, but I understand its part of what I need to do to keep my job. How can you ask a ten year old to get that same concept? How do you ask a fourth grader, or even a nineth grader, to do work a certain way because it is what the established system requires? I want to teach them to buck the system!
It was really hard for me to learn to let go of my assignments I'd spent four years creating. See, my first four years of teaching I learned how to teach reading and writing skills. I learned about prior knowledge and modeling revising, about inferencing and writing goals. These were things I felt I should have learned in my undergrad, but instead learned about in my graduate work. But then I went back and read Nancie Atwell again, the beginning of In The Middle and all of The Reading Zone. It was then that the work of my master's really made me decide I was going to give up most of the work I'd done and move to a completely new-to-me workshop structure using standards based grading as much as possible.
One of the biggest changes for me was getting rid of the "proof of thinking" that I used to require with all the reading my students did. It was the same sort of assignments that my collegues FB friend mentioned. I had the kids doing journals or post-its. The idea behind it was solid. I wanted kids to thinking about what they read and record that thinking later to be used in discussion or writing papers. But, the kids didn't understand the purpose. Either I had students who avoided reading or students who read tons for pleasure. Neither group understood the point of the post-it notes. But, I found when I did reading workshop, that the purpose of the assignment was much more valid. Previously, the post-its were proof to me that the students had read. Kids dutifly filled them out to get their credit knowing I couldn't read them and only did a spot check. There was lots of room for playing the game to get their credit. When I switched to reading workshop, the kids read primiarily for pleasure and practice. There were no post-it or journal requirements, but they did need to be able to talk to me about what they were reading at any moment and they had to a writing assignment about it a few times a term. In other words, the joy of reading was not squashed, but they still had some accountablity. But, a few times a year, we all read the same text. This is when I required the post-its or journals. We read a text like Animal Farm or Huck Finn to analyize through discussion and a major thesis driven essay. Now the post-its weren't a tedious exercise that had become reduced to a homework check but were what they were meant to be: A meaningful record of thought. I taught the students the difference in purpose. We were not reading Huck Finn for pleasure. It was great if they enjoyed it, but that wasn't why we read it. We read it to have a text to study and pracitce literary analysis essays. We were attacking Huck Finn like you would a history text book or a set of algebra problems.
Over the course of five years, I came to feel that about three books a year requiring this type of annotation was fair; we also would read some short texts together like poems, short stories, or articles that also required that type of attention. Previously, we had treated every text we read all year as a serious exercise in metacognition and annotation. It was overkill for freshmen and sophomores. It must be exceedingly draining for elementary students.
