Some thoughts about language and its problems

Hello everyone,

If you didn't grow up in East LA, or if you're new to the area, by now you're noticing the peculiar struggles with English that the students of East LA have.

The kids are designated with a variety of labels that are supposed to give an accurate assessment of their level of English ability, but the truth is that, with few exceptions, they all struggle with standard English. Students designated as native English speakers have many of the same difficulties that ESL students will have. "Bilingualism" (the unconscious mingling of two languages) is common; a large variety of shibboleths (pronunciations and expressions peculiar to a certain region) are used by the entire population; many lack variety in their vocabulary, and most have problems with multiple meanings of words; homonyms (different spelling, same pronunciation), homographs (same spelling, different meaning), and homophones (same sound, different meaning) are particularly difficult.

We need to understand where our students are linguistically (not only where they're designated or even where they should be), and we need to teach them from that place.

Part of this is not making any assumptions about their intelligence or ability to learn.

When I first learned a foreign language well enough to communicate with someone in that language, I remember having a variety of feelings associated with the process. My first feeling was associated with the realization that I spoke like an idiot, even though I knew I wasn't an idiot. When I first began to speak with other people, I was completely aware that they thought I was a bit of an idiot--maybe a child. They weren't in the least impressed by my facility in English, and they were only mildly impressed by my efforts to speak another language. It didn't help that I had excellent pronunciation but poor vocabulary, which meant that I sounded like a native idiot, not a bright foreigner.

I also remember the shock of speaking to people in both languages--English and my foreign language--and finding that I had a sudden understanding of their intelligence communicated in their native language, opposed to my previously incorrect assessment of their intelligence in English. It's a normal phenomenon, but it needs to be consciously avoided.

When I got my doctorate, I was required to read a lot in the target language. I can speed read in English with a decent level of comprehension. In any other language, I am slow, and I still have to sound out many of the words to help my comprehension. In fact, I often read in foreign languages by pronouncing aloud in my head.

Most of our students either approach English as a second language, or come from homes in which English is the second language. I believe that they feel many of the same feelings I felt, especially in their sense of knowing the complexity of their thoughts, but being unable to communicate that complexity. I think they are often frustrated and bored by language that is too fast or too difficult for them, but that they would be able to comprehend completely with only a little help.

It's true that to help them with the language takes time out of other things, but it's also true that to press on with other things when they aren't getting our language is not productive.

I want to spend the next few days talking about some specific language issues.

I would say the same thing in French, but I can't spell it.

Jeff Combe

How to manage a rigorous curriculum (some tricks of the trade)

Hello everyone,

I know that, from the point of view of an English teacher at least, the idea of rigor includes the idea that students will actually do more reading and writing, which means that the teacher will do more reading and correcting. For English teachers, working to make adequate writers out of poor writers requires a lot of extra work, and this can be daunting.

I must assume that what is true for English teachers is true for teachers in other disciplines as well. If literacy is taught across the curriculum, there will be reading and writing across the curriculum, and that means correcting essays across the curriculum, which is difficult and time consuming.

Rigor also means that tests will be more demanding and harder to cheat on; it means that students will be doing more group presentations that require them to have a better grasp of the material; it means that there will be careful analysis of just where the mistakes are happening in students' calculations; it means that students will be required to memorize material and then demonstrate that they can synthesize what they have memorized.

If you are starting to sweat or feel anxiety or rebel at the increased workload, then you are normal.

So, if you are going to demand more out of your students, you must find practical ways of dealing with it so that you are not having to use more time than you have, burden yourselves more than you are actually burdened, or sacrifice your own children on the altar of someone else's children. I want to suggest a few tricks of the trade that might help you push your students without killing yourself. Feel free to use them or not, to adapt them or not, and to make them your own.

1. Don't grade everything. Always grade major projects; always grade tests; always give sufficient attention to something that has cost your students significant time. Routine assignments don't require the same amount of attention.

2. Have the students grade everything that can be graded by students. Make sure that no cheating happens: have the students write their names on papers ("corrected by . . ."), then hold them accountable for any changes to answers; do not always allow them to choose whose paper they will grade; have them grade assignments that don't require accuracy in the grading; have them grade their own assignments when cheating doesn't matter. Let the grading serve multiple purposes: do this grading quickly; use the grading time as review time.

3. Never grade more than one draft of an essay. You might check that the outline and early drafts are done, but you don't need to seriously grade more than the final draft.

4. Read essays out loud and grade them in front of the students. Keep them anonymous; read them exactly as written; liberally praise what is good and condemn what is lazily done. You'll find that it saves some time in grading essays, and it teaches the kids to find their voices.

5. Collect everything, but don't put everything in the rollbook. You must have at least one assignment per week; you should have two; all major or significant assignments must be given attention and credit, but routine assignments could be grouped together as "participation" or "classwork."

6. Assign students as assistants. Have equipment monitors, lab assistants, peer tutors. Offer extra credit. The more the students do, the more they learn, and the more you are freed to handle the very difficult things that a rigorous curriculum demands.

7. Practice "holistic" grading when appropriate. I always graded essay tests or "quickwrites" in this way. This is the way AP, CAHSEE, and CST essays are graded. You rapidly read the essay, then assign it to a pass/fail standard based on a rubric you've made out for the students. After that, you assign how high a pass or fail the essay gets based on your rubric. You might use numbers or letter grades. Numbers could correspond to letter grades or actual raw point values. For example, I may grade an essay test with two essays worth 50 points each. I read the essay quickly, and determine if it's a pass (above 30 points) or a fail (below 29 points). If it's a pass, I can easily judge the thoroughness of the answers, the depth of the analysis, the organization, and the relative lack of mechanical errors. I don't have to judge every single possible correct answer or inclusion of a large number of specific facts. (Practice makes this a very useful technique.)

Don't resist a rigorous curriculum because it is more difficult for the teacher. Manage your time and resources intelligently, and you will be able to lift the students without bringing yourself down.

Jeff Combe

More on rigor

Hello everyone,

You must forgive my continual return to the idea of rigor.

I was in a special day class at a middle school today where the students were reading THE HOUSE ON MANGO STREET. I couldn't help but think about how popular the book is in the regular (and sometimes honors) English classes of Garfield.

I remember the slap in the face I felt when I was teaching honors English 10 for the first time. A girl from my class transferred out to Shurr High School, then transferred back. In the interim, she had read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in both Middle and Modern English--as a classroom assignment.

Our students are sometimes resistant to rigor, and they will try all sorts of strategies to avoid the sort of rigor that is common in other school districts. This is understandable; when I was a teenager, I never wanted to work hard in the subjects that weren't my favorites. I avoided hard work in everything except what I liked the best.

The biggest problem comes when, rather than give them what they need, we give them what is easiest to give. We look at the state standards, and we know that--for whatever reason--the kids are below the standards, so we assume that they are incapable of the standards completely, and we teach what is easy to teach.

What I see in all sorts of special ed. classes is the concept that the kids are able to learn anything (usually), but they need help with it. I think that's a good concept. The kids can learn anything. Nothing is beyond them (speaking of the generality, not the individual). What our profession is supposed to do is break difficult things down into acceptable chunks (it used to be called "chunking," in fact; now it's called "scaffolding"; the concept is similar: they end up at the place they are supposed to be, but some take a few big steps and others take a lot of little steps), and serve them up in a way that is digestible.

We are not supposed to wheel ourselves around like a dessert cart, placing ourselves in front of them until they eat all our sweets. That's not what I mean by "digestible," and I deplore the practice of pandering to our students tastes for sex, or glorifying thug culture, or fomenting rebellion in naturally rebellious teenagers (a colleague of mine some years ago told students that they should never believe adults, but he never understood why his students doubted him--he thought that encouraging their rebellion would make him one of them, even though he was more than 20 years older than the oldest student).

The best way to get students to rigor is to set a tone of rigor in the first day of class. Avoid parties and free days. Avoid teaching them things they have already been taught (review, yes; completely re-teach, no). Take them in orderly fashion from low to high. Enhance their vocabulary. Remember what college was like, and prepare them for it. Demand high standards.

Jeff Combe

Making the transition from discipline to instruction

Hello everyone,

There is a large, fuzzy line of demarcation between techniques to manage behavior and techniques to improve instruction. Some days, it seems you can hardly teach because the students behave so badly, and other days, the students behave badly because you haven't planned your lesson well. There are periods during the school year when the majority of your attention is focused on getting order in the classroom, but what do you do when you have order? Sometimes your students are disorderly because it is in their nature to rebel, but sometimes they are disorderly because the lesson is either too hard or too easy.

The truth is, you cannot wait to teach until you are satisfied that the students will not rebel at all, nor should you dumb down your curriculum because your students are reluctant to be challenged. (I have known teachers who found a silly, useless activity that kept the students quiet, but the students never learned anything except how to do quiet activities that required no thought. Avoid busy work for its own sake. I confess, I write this partly out of personal animosity for busy work. My own teachers suffered from my repeated rebellion--rebellion that I am proud of to this day--whenever they insisted on my doing work only to keep me busy and quiet. I could tell stories . . .)

As you are gaining control over the classes, you need to give them a steady stream of meaningful activity that teaches them to the standards or above. (The standards to me are a minimum, not the opposite.) You may have to break the activities into shorter segments to accommodate shorter attention spans, but you should avoid things that are meant to just keep them quiet. (In the warmups, you certainly want something easy enough for them to be quietly engaged while you take roll and manage the classroom paperwork, but if you give meaningless busywork just to keep them quiet, you must expect an eventual rebellion.)

How do you know whether the work is too hard and needs more scaffolding, or not hard enough and needs to be strengthened?

The students' behavior will give clues. If they finish rapidly and mess around, the work was probably too easy. If they don't start at all but mess around, the work was probably too difficult. If they complain the work is too easy or too hard, they are probably telling the truth. If you have to tutor every one of them individually, the work is too hard.

And what do you do if the work is too easy? You skim or skip over what they already know. There's no need to reteach it, though a light review won't hurt. You might give a preliminary test to find out what they know or don't know, then skip what they know (or review it lightly). Start just before the point they are really having trouble, and let that be your curricular jumping off point.

What do you do if the work is too hard? That should be the subject of a series of emails, I suppose, but I can keep it short here if I speak generally and metaphorically. Here's the metaphor: You are entrusted to give a full, nutritious meal. You should give emphasis to calories rich in nutrition, and avoid empty calories. Very little dessert; no junk food. If you are feeding some dense, chewy protein to someone with underdeveloped teeth, you cut it up into bite-size chunks or puree it. Make it taste as good as you can make it taste, but make it edible for immature appetites if necessary, and don't let it slide just because they don't like it. Skipping the vegetables for tastier fare may make you a temporary hero, but it will stunt their growth later on.

Jeff Combe

How Do You Know You're a Good Teacher?

Hello everyone,

Last month, in the middle of the holiday blur of activities, someone asked me, "How do you know when you're a good teacher?"

I think it's a question worth considering, here in the middle of the school year.

While it's a good question, the definitive answer usually won't come to you for anywhere from one to twelve years:

The best answer to the question comes when a student returns from college--sometimes at the end of college--and tells you that you did a good job of preparing him or her for college. Or, the student may return to you from the workforce and tell you that you helped him or her be ready for a career.

It meant a lot to me as an English teacher to have students report that they didn't need to take remedial English in college, and that they got high marks in their college English classes. It meant a lot to me to hear that my film students got jobs editing right out of high school, or that my English students were able to pass the reading/writing entrance exams necessary for admission into a field of work.

Conversely, I felt terrible when I learned that one of my students had to drop out of college because it was too difficult.

Barring the college/career indicator, you will have to turn to other things to let you know how you're doing.

There are little hints and clues that may suggest that you are doing well as a teacher. How many of your students pass the CAHSEE, or how well your students do on the CSTs or periodic exams can help. There are a variety of factors that you might not have control over that may affect the outcomes of those tests, but they may be very helpful anyway. (The CAHSEE is a very good indicator of how you're doing, especially if you teach non-honors 10th graders in English or math.)

Post-year interviews help. I have spoken of these before: these student/teacher interviews occur at the end of the school year after grades have been submitted. Students will be very honest with you then. You must acknowledge, however, that the interviews may be colored by the students' unwillingness to hurt your feelings. If you want them to be very accurate, let them be anonymous.

I got a lot of information about how I was doing from the freely written journals that my students were required to hand in. If you use this tool, it is very important that you resist the urge to make excuses for yourself or comment on what the student is saying if you want an honest appraisal. More than once I altered my classroom practice when a student complained in a journal about how I was teaching. More than once I shut down the appraisal (the student refused to say anything) because I commented on it defensively. Sometimes, I didn't alter anything because I couldn't consider the student to be a reliable describer of my practice. There are problems, but the tool is a good one.

You will notice that there is nothing here about how popular you are. Popularity among the students is at best a tangential indicator of how good a teacher you are. If you are exciting and interesting and funny and good looking, and your students love the subject you're teaching, you're likely to be popular, whether or not you teach them anything at all about the subject at hand. Now, if you're all of those things, AND you teach them the subject, preparing them for college and careers and using your social power to do great pedagogical wonders, then it's a different thing all together. That, however, is unmeasurable in and of itself, and many teachers mistake popularity with pedagogy. I think you should never alter your practice just to be considered "cool."

It's true that students learn better when they have positive feelings about you, but those positive feelings can come from a variety of places. (The best place for positive feelings is when the kids want to learn, and you really teach them.) Frankly, many students will not enjoy being pushed to work hard, and you may lose popularity points by requiring your students to think deep thoughts and do difficult tasks, which you should do. If you're a good teacher, you're able to persuade them to do those things regardless of whether or not you're their favorite teacher.

Good teachers are good motivators.

Good teachers make difficult things seem do-able--even easy.

A good teacher is able to ask for silence and get it, but rarely wants it.

Good teachers know what it looks like when the little light bulb goes on above a student's head, but they don't get discouraged if it takes a long time for the bulb to warm up, and they are patient if the bulb flickers.

Jeff Combe

Documentation

Hello everyone,

I once learned a valuable lesson in an embarrassing way.

I was working with some students on a film, back when I taught film production. We were making a film on violence in the schools, and we wanted to show a boy who got in trouble for bringing a weapon to school. We wanted to bring a prop gun to school.

That, in case you didn't know, is a VERY BAD thing to do. I came this close to getting myself arrested. (Imagine two fingers almost touching.) (Also, imagine an exponent after VERY, so that VERY is multiplied by the x power, and x is very great number.) I explained to the administrators in charge, showed them the script, and did everything I could to placate, as well as convince them of the necessity for the prop in light of what we were trying to teach.

This was in the years before Columbine, but there had been some recent campus shootings, and the administration could not afford to allow a prop gun. I wasn't allowed to show any weapons in the video at all, and I was required to document every detail of what happened. "CYB," the administrator taught me. "Cover Your Butt." One might finish the thought: "Cover your butt with documentation."

The valuable lesson I learned (besides, "You can't bring props to school that look like weapons unless you have a special dispensation from top people at the school, in the district, and with the police first--in writing") was "Document."

It is important for you to document

When someone does something in your class, document it. When you call home or send a letter home, document it. If you have to send a student out of class, document it. If something unusual or very odd happens, document it.

The immediate problem is how to keep from getting snowed under by documentation.

I keep a personal journal, and much of my documentation is there. My emails are documentation. If I'm using Easy Grade Pro, it's very easy to double click on a date box next to a student's name and write my documentation in the Note feature that will come up. (Contact me if you want me to show you how to do this.) Your roll book, with all the assignments, is documentation.

The latter is important, legal material. Make sure that whatever grade you give is easily proven through the documentation of your roll book.

Indeed, proper paperwork and documentation is a contractual obligation. Besides covering your butt.

Oh, by the way, without showing any weapons, our film won first place in a national contest, and we were flown to New York City for five days, all expenses paid. Later, in a different climate, with special permission, and under supervision of the school police, we used a prop gun in a school play--fully documented.

Jeff Combe

Mid-year Course Corrections

Happy New Year to everyone.

You're all back, feeling a variety of post-holiday feelings. Some are rested; some are tense; some are ready to go; some are panicked.

Do not pass this opportunity, no matter what you feel, to project feelings of hope and confidence to your students. Give them the feeling that you intend for this to be a productive semester.

Treat today like a major course correction on a long rocket voyage.

Think about it this way: If you are in charge of calculating the course for a payload carrying rocket, you know that, at the beginning of a voyage, a few millimeters off course may not seem like much, but will end up missing the target by thousands of miles over a lengthy voyage. You should assume that you will need frequent course corrections at the beginning because the lift off alone will have disrupted your trajectory. (You will need fewer course corrections later if you planned everything very well at beginning, but you will still need corrections.) At the great midpoint of the voyage, you've had some time to re-calibrate, and you should be ready for the corrections that may be required. Assume that corrections are necessary.

If you continue on exactly the course you were on before, you will end up with exactly the same conditions, but those conditions will worsen throughout the semester unless you correct them. Failure to make corrections now, will create conditions that will require you to have to do major changes later, and may cause the voyage to fail. If you were the least bit off course last semester, you will be light-years away from where you need to be by next June.

Some of what you're looking at, of course, is student behavior. If, last December, you were struggling with problems with student behavior, you may find today that it's briefly not too bad. (They've "recalibrated.") Let them know you mean business while they're "recalibrated," and you will save yourself trouble down the road.

If you were spending more time on discipline than instruction last month, you might take advantage in this brief lull to get them into an instructional mode more easily. Later, you will have to nudge them back into instruction, rather than force them back.

Best of luck in all your course corrections.

Jeff Combe