This is Our Classroom

While I want to be realistic about how frustrating and tiresome my students can be at times, I am desperately going to miss them once I’m done with student teaching this semester.  It’s not that I expected my experience to be any different, but it’s overwhelming at the beginning of the semester to even consider what the end is going to be like.  I learned so much, I am currently learning a lot, and I’m looking forward to getting a job and continuing this learning process.

“This is not your classroom!” This is a sentiment I just heard screamed from the classroom next door this morning at 9 am on a Monday.  I think this is indicative of the opposite of my experience this semester, and perhaps it’s also the underlying reason behind the chaos outside our classroom door (especially from that classroom next door).  I’ve seen my CT constantly strive to make all of his students feel welcome in his classroom—and he wouldn’t actually call it “his” classroom.  It’s our students’ room.  Students are always dropping by during lunch just to hang out and chat with us.  One of my students gets out of his last period class every day (it’s “football class”—so, now that football season is over, it’s basically just “sit around” class) so that he can help do different tasks and even engage in classroom discussions.  I think that the environment that has been supported in my classroom this semester has definitely affected my view of what a classroom community looks like.  I’m not going to pretend that every class is always on task and accomplishes everything we have for them all the time, but I do think that they feel supported and want to come to class, even if they don’t necessarily have the desire to get all their work accomplished at the moment.  I think it’s been a successful experience for me and for my students, and I’m so excited to check in on them next semester while subbing.  (I’m also working on writing letters to each of my students, responding to their daily journals and making sure they’re aware of their status as amazing people.)

As far as Burke’s question-driven book goes, I’ve actually started to incorporate his ideas in my current unit for 11^th grade.  We’re going deeper into writing analyses of short fiction, so I gave out a worksheet with his levels of questions (factual, inductive, and analytical) that we are using with a few different texts.  While I’m not always a fan of such structured work surrounding texts, I think it’s really helped a lot of my students dig deeper in the texts.  I think that’s really the advantage—making sure that most of the students are getting into the texts rather than a select few who will end up dominating conversations.  We tried out “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, and Halfie” by Junot Diaz, and then we read “Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin on Thursday.  I was a little concerned about the Chopin story keeping their interest, but after we had a brief conversation about women’s rights (and they knew a lot about women’s suffrage—thanks, American history!), they really dug in deep.  The questions led to some classroom discussions, and I think we could use the questions they came up with to lead us to really great thesis statements.  I know it sounds a little boring, but I think that the classroom conversations before the thesis statement formulations save the lessons from being painfully boring.  The tough part about this unit is that I’m only teaching a couple of weeks anyway, so I just wanted to use this time to kind of experiment with where I can push them.  J 

This is all to say that while I’m resistant to some of Burke’s units that are driven by whole-class texts, I do like the basic framework that he uses to support reading texts.  He also uses a kind of worksheet at the end of his book to guide teacher planning for units, which seems somewhat helpful and a little overkill.  Still, I think the reasoning behind the text comes from a good place—“America must now, if we are to maintain our place in the world, become ‘a society of creators and emphasizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.’”  And where else can we support the inception of this kind of society than in the ELA classroom?  Well, in our classroom.