Help?
The ambulance, police, and fire trucks soon arrived. My husband was thanked, and then he went on his way... with a full day of work ahead of him.
What makes a person help others? When is help needed? When is help not so helpful, but instead keeps a person from learning?
The answer for the pedestrian is clear. HELP, NOW!
There are a lot of situations that I walk into daily where the answer isn't so clear.
When a student is struggling with material, is the need acute? How long should they suffer? If I provide the right answer am I doing the right thing?
I don't think so. The students have been taught, in their years of public school, that the teacher is the gatekeeper of knowledge.
That would mean that I, Alison, hold the key to Spanish. lol....
Nope, but I can hope to present it in a way that the kids can acquire some of the basic building blocks of the language. I provide multiple examples highlighting the grammar facts that I am trying to teach, and ask the kids to create the grammar rule. I will correct the rule if need be, but at the basic levels of the language, looking for patterns and then naming them comes easily to most students.
So, on any given day, you could walk into my classroom and hear...
"HELP!" "Brink, how do you say, The monsters like to eat their Spanish homework?...in Spanish?"
"Hummm...Where would you start?"
"Uhh, with The Monsters."
"Yup... how did we say that earlier?"
"IDK" I don't know.
"Groovy, ask your table mates." The kids are seated in groups of four.
Lo and behold, if I give any table, at any time, a few focused minutes, they will produce happy homework-eating monsters.
It takes a lot longer...but I believe they learn more from their Socratic-like dialogue amongst their peers than they would learn from The Teacher as Dictionary model.
There are some situations where an individual needs focused one-on-one assistance. If a quick one-minute chat can't solve the problem, then the student, regrettably, needs to come in before school, after school, or during our short lunch break for help. My classes have at least twenty-eight students in each section, if I pause for more than a minute here or there, then getting the group to move from one activity to the next is painful for us all.
I don't hold the keys to Spanish, or to their brains. As students, when they work together to learn, they are powerful. They can use the few blocks of language that I show them to create things that I would never come up with.
I try to answer questions with patience, when I am willing to answer them at all.
Posted in DemEd in Real LifeStudentsTeaching on Feb 23, 2010 - 11:40 PM
It has been a strange week at the Brink house. It all culminated yesterday morning, when my husband drove to a job site early, to pick up some tools. Yesterday was crystal clear. He was on a stretch of road with a 35 mile an hour speed limit. The car in front of my husband's van struck a man walking across the street. The walker was tossed into the air, hit the pavement, and rolled multiple times. The driver of the car barely slowed down, and then fled the scene. My husband stopped, helped the injured man to the side of the road, began basic first aid, and called EMS.The ambulance, police, and fire trucks soon arrived. My husband was thanked, and then he went on his way... with a full day of work ahead of him.
What makes a person help others? When is help needed? When is help not so helpful, but instead keeps a person from learning?
The answer for the pedestrian is clear. HELP, NOW!
There are a lot of situations that I walk into daily where the answer isn't so clear.
When a student is struggling with material, is the need acute? How long should they suffer? If I provide the right answer am I doing the right thing?
I don't think so. The students have been taught, in their years of public school, that the teacher is the gatekeeper of knowledge.
That would mean that I, Alison, hold the key to Spanish. lol....
Nope, but I can hope to present it in a way that the kids can acquire some of the basic building blocks of the language. I provide multiple examples highlighting the grammar facts that I am trying to teach, and ask the kids to create the grammar rule. I will correct the rule if need be, but at the basic levels of the language, looking for patterns and then naming them comes easily to most students.
So, on any given day, you could walk into my classroom and hear...
"HELP!" "Brink, how do you say, The monsters like to eat their Spanish homework?...in Spanish?"
"Hummm...Where would you start?"
"Uhh, with The Monsters."
"Yup... how did we say that earlier?"
"IDK" I don't know.
"Groovy, ask your table mates." The kids are seated in groups of four.
Lo and behold, if I give any table, at any time, a few focused minutes, they will produce happy homework-eating monsters.
It takes a lot longer...but I believe they learn more from their Socratic-like dialogue amongst their peers than they would learn from The Teacher as Dictionary model.
There are some situations where an individual needs focused one-on-one assistance. If a quick one-minute chat can't solve the problem, then the student, regrettably, needs to come in before school, after school, or during our short lunch break for help. My classes have at least twenty-eight students in each section, if I pause for more than a minute here or there, then getting the group to move from one activity to the next is painful for us all.
I don't hold the keys to Spanish, or to their brains. As students, when they work together to learn, they are powerful. They can use the few blocks of language that I show them to create things that I would never come up with.
I try to answer questions with patience, when I am willing to answer them at all.
Tags for this entry:
collaboration,
homework,
questioning
