We’ll use Perusall to annotate and read together. Grammar Quiz…?
http://a4esl.org/q/f/x/xz71mha.htm
Why IRE is not for me (or, yet another ball analogy)
Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about IRE and why it’s bogus. When I was five, I was on a little league softball team. During the first game of the season, I was up to bat, swinging it wildly as the ball came at me (Initiate). When I hear the crack of metal hitting leather, I ran- fast. Unfortunately it was the wrong way. I headed towards third base, and my run didn’t count (Response). You know what my coach did after the game? He yelled at me. I heard my teammates complain that I had lost them the game (Evaluate).
You know what that made me want to do? Quit. To the sport there was only one answer, to run right and not left. I was in the wrong. People got mad at me, at a beginner, for choosing a different path. They got mad at me for learning, for trial and error. For my half-formed thought that was just “RUN TO THE BASE”, because that’s what I had been told to do.
My left-right issues haven’t really been solved. A friend of mine once told me it’s a form of dyslexia, and although I haven’t looked into it beyond their word I do consider it a problem when I’m being given driving directions. I guess what I’m getting at here is that some people just have to think a little before they act, but that doesn’t mean they’re “stupid” or “lacking in order”. With Maria, June shut down her half-conceived thoughts because her evaluation only had one clear-cut answer, like a multiple choice test, and Maria’s stumbling over her words had been like choosing C over B. What June should have realized is that, as a teacher, she needed to RE-evaluate her own preconceived notions and considered that C could also be right, or on the right track, or even on the different side of the tracks in a whole new realm of thinking. Maybe then she would have seen that Maria was not in need of “remediation,” but instead in need of help and guidance to bring her thoughtful ideas out into the world in her speech in the same way that they shone in her writing.
Wow, that was a long and probably obvious rant. But man, standardized tests are BOGUS. The I-R-E system is bogus, too; teachers need to encourage their students’ train of thought so that they can better educate themselves, because teachers DON’T teach- they inspire. Great teachers do, anyway. You can’t take a 5 year old and tell them to run towards the base, then yell at them for doing just that, albeit in a roundabout fashion. And you can’t dismiss a student’s comments just because it isn’t a subject that you initiated. If a student goes beyond what you asked, doesn’t that PROVE that they’re really thinking and cranking their brains?
“Academic Genres”
Hey all, if you’re looking more into what a “genre” is regarding the Mutt article, this is a link to different forms of academic writing.
Talking in the Middle: Why Writing Tutors need Writers
Today was frustrating. The English 030 class I’m interning in started workshops, and 95% of the time I felt like the head teacher and myself were the only ones talking and giving advice. Why wouldn’t the others speak up? We were practically the same age as them, and the 030 class is pass/fail, not graded. Workshops don’t have right or wrong answers! Yet still only three of the nine students said something- and two out of those three were having their own projects worked on.
So, yes, today was frustrating. Near the end, though, something amazing happened. The head teacher asked the last student whose project we had been critiquing if our thoughts had helped, and he said yes, they had. By us asking him questions on what he wanted to do, what the criteria for his project was, and helping him to sort out the themes or “thesis” of the project, without ever specifically telling him what and what not to do, he had gotten to explore his project in more detail and had come to new conclusions. And now here I sit in the library, typing up this blog post for the gallery walk on Wednesday, and I think “Wow. We may be future teachers, but all we’re really doing right now is tutoring.” Muriel Harris got it right when she said:
“Most students come to writing centers because they are required to, but even so, students leave feeling that the tutorial has been a beneficial experience (p. 3).”
And you know something else? I think we tutors also are benefited from the experience. Teaching is HARD. Most of the time during our first years in K-12 schools (secondary schools especially) our students aren’t going to want to speak up. They’re going to sit there while we try to teach them what they need to know and not join in during discussions. They won’t listen to what we have to say about their papers in our comments. So this thing we have now, this interning gig? It’s prepping us for The Real Teaching Experience, yeah, but it’s also giving us that little smile and nod at the end of the day, where our students say “Yeah, that helped” and thank us for our time. It’s a valuable experience to keep in mind for when things get tough, to remind us why it is we wanted to start teaching and to remind us how we can connect with our students to make everyone’s time worthwhile.