You have to care.

You have to care.  It's something we've heard over and over again in our teacher prep courses.  It always seemed like common sense to me, I mean who would go through all this effort to become a teacher- a job which has historically been undervalued and underpaid- if they didn't really care about kids?  Yet how many articles have we read that stressed the importance of kids genuinely feeling that their teacher cares about them.  I always found it somewhat tiring to read this same thing over and over again.

This week I read these words in a different context.  In Lamott's Bird by Bird there is one simple quote I underlined that seems like it should be just as much common sense as my former example but somehow has seemingly been forgotten in light of NCLB and the increasing pressure of standardized tests.  The quote is, "To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care." (107).  Such a simple quote, nothing flashy or poetic about it but yet it pretty much sums up what is missing from the education of many young writers.

With standards to meet and cirriculum materials to follow I fear that students free choice in writing is being greatly diminished and I think that's such a shame.  If we don't give students the opportunity to choose what they write about how can we expect them to care about it?  If they don't care they will not grow.  We have to teach them to love writing and to see the power in it first and foremost and worry about the details later.

Raising Expectations

The Routman reading for this week really got me thinking about performance expectations and my preconceived notions about what children can and can not do at a given age.  This has always been something I've struggled with because I know there is a fine line between expecting too much of a student and causing them to loose confidence and not challenging them enough and causing them to loose interest.  Lean either way too far and you are going to be seriously impacting their learning in a negative way.  To add to that every student is going to be at a different place and the teacher is responsible for finding out where that place is, monitoring it and adjusting expectations accordingly.  It seems like a huge responsibility.

I have a connection to this reading that is pertinent to address here.  Last year I took part in America Reads, America Counts, a work study program where college students can earn financial aid by going into classrooms that are identified as having high need for additional support and tutoring students in reading/writing/math.  I worked in a learning support room at a title 1 school that had a high proportion of minority students.  The learning support classroom was set up in learning centers that groups based on ability would rotate to at given intervals.  I manned the writing table where students worked on "perfect papers" which were essentially just answering questions based on a short non-fiction reading and including appropriate punctuation and spacing.  I quickly noticed that many of the kids had hand writing that was almost illegible and several other mechanical errors that were being overlooked.  At first I went along with this because I assumed there was a bigger picture focus and didn't want to step on any toes.  After some time I started challenging the students to write better, write slower, and fix their mistakes.  The boy who probably had the worst hand writing changed over night.  He started writing on the lines, his letters were suddenly recognizable.  His teachers and the other aides in the room were astonished by his sudden and unexplainable improvement.  I didn't accept anything less after that.