Blog Post #1 Teaching English Language Arts

 Yo!

Hello, all you wanderers out there in the cyber universe. I’ll be publishing perceptive posts periodically to let you know what the process of student teaching is all about. I’m currently a teaching intern in both an English and a social studies class. My students are sixth graders participating in the precursor to the International Baccalaureate program. This means that the students work hard to achieve rigid academic requirements. A large number of our students have college professors for parents, so I’m sure they have great intellectual role models and maybe even high pressure to succeed. The fact that I’m teaching a bunch of geniuses in the making means that my job is likely easier than my college peers as far as student interest and behavior go. Bwahaha! In this blog, I’ll be focusing on my experiences in the language arts class.

How Do Today’s ELA Classes Contrast with the Ones I Attended as a Student?

             To be honest, I barely remember most of the curriculum from when I was in middle school. It’s probably because when I was in sixth grade, the popular music was Coolio and TLC. Flannels still abounded. Star Wars was only three films. It was a while ago.

            However, there are some things that stand out as different now. The most obvious is technology. At our school, each student has been provided a tablet. If they need to find a definition, they don’t flip through the deliciously musty pages in Webster’s masterpiece; They hop on the internet to clickety-clack their way to understanding. This is a blessing and a curse because it also means that the temptations of Minecraft and Roblox are always lurking. There’s also a lot of moronic misinformation on the internet. But hopefully, if we can show them the most trustworthy online resources and model how to navigate them, the students will develop solid researching habits.

            Something we’re teaching the sixth graders now that I don’t recall being taught until my senior year is paragraph structure. Before secondary school, we learned to indent paragraphs. We learned to start a new paragraph once we changed the subject. But I vividly remember in twelfth grade when my teacher wanted us to begin each paragraph with its own mission statement and make each sentence following it be evidence supporting it. At the time, I didn’t like it. This wasn’t the laissez-faire style of writing instruction I was used to.  Now, the schools are leading kids on the path of deliberate structure from the start.

How Will I Apply Concepts I’m Learning in College to My Classroom?

            In his hit book Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms, author Randy Bomer highlights appreciating students’ existing literacies (20). This strategy will be a great tool for building relationships, and that is the best way to make our teaching effective. If students feel that we care about them, they will be more likely to care about the things we ask them to do. They will know that we’re trying to improve their lives, not just make them into drones. Plus, inquiring about students’ interests and habits in reading will give us useful insight into different means we can use to reach them.

            Another thing that Bomer exhorts is the pros and cons of different structures of class activities (10). I’ve already found this helpful in my class. I found that when I led whole-class discussions, some kids’ attentions kept drifting elsewhere if not dwindling down to a sleepy malaise. In the best teaching feedback I’ve received thus far, she told me that I should try placing the students into small groups or partners so that each student will remain engaged with the lesson. She and Bomer totally made sense. Whole-class talks can work sometimes, but I’ve got to mix it up.

Find me here next time for more adventures in teaching!

            Jake

Works Cited:

Bomer, Randy. Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classrooms. Heinemann, 2011.