Jessica Reid marched all 22 of her students out into the hall to look at the "Writing Up a Storm" bulletin board. These were displays of personal essays done under the tutelage of the teacher whom Ms. Reid, even while serving as an assistant principal, had just replaced.
"Look at it," she said. "What do you notice?"
"It's pretty empty," whispered one tiny girl in glasses.
"Yes, that's right, isn't it," Ms. Reid replied. "And think of the irony that it says 'writing up a storm.' Just seven out of 46 fifth-grade scholars have their essays up there, and some of them have grammatical mistakes and misspellings."
"The worst part," she added, "was that last week I said I would edit these for you if you asked, and in the entire grade, only two scholars asked for their work to be edited. That tells me you don't even care."
Several of the children shifted nervously on their feet. Most looked embarrassed. "Those of you who know me know that I am the most stubborn person you will ever meet," Ms. Reid concluded. "You're going to rewrite your paragraphs until they have correct capitalization and punctuation, because when you create a piece of writing that has errors you're sending the message that you're not intelligent. Why would you do that to yourself? I know you're intelligent."
Two weeks later there would be 44 pieces of nearly flawless writing on the board outside, and Ms. Reid had hung 3-D images of clouds from the ceiling above it (accompanied by pencils made to look like raindrops) because, she would tell her students, "you now really are writing up a storm."
—
A fascinating look inside US schools, with plenty to say about the current plight of teachers and not just in the US. (I also loved the display idea!)
No comments:
Post a Comment