As a child, I was thrilled each time my mom told me I can go visit her school and classroom. I would excitedly pretend to have students while writing on the board or get tickled putting checkmarks on my moms' students' math drills. I was destined to teach...
Twenty one years ago, just like any new teacher then, I firmly grasped textbooks in my hands. They were my bible. I stuck to the curriculum to the tee, giving math drills with a hundred items for 5 minutes and lessening the time each day. I was ecstatic when my best student scored a perfect hundred in 50 seconds, no one has ever beat her record! Teaching spelling routinely - pretest, definitions, post test was another traditional activity I did weekly. Were these traditional methods effective then? Most definitely, 20 some years ago...
About 10 years into teaching 3rd grade Homeroom, I started noticing changes. Instead of having that usual 1 child that stood out in class as he needed more of my attention, I started having 2, 3, 4... Moreover, it was not merely my extra attention they needed as well, they needed me to modify my lessons, they needed me to find different ways to explain the lessons to them. I would join in on the complaints in the teachers lounge about how so much more 'difficult' students are these days. "I was able to do spelling sentences and definitions for 20-25 words before...now I can only do 15-20"; "I used to be able to get my students to write 6-8 sentence paragraphs and write 4-6 paragraphs per book report...now I'm lucky if I can get them to write 3-4 sentences, complete ones at that!"; and "we used to be able to do math drills with 100 items, now we do 5-10 at a time" are just some of the common comments I was hearing more frequently at the teachers' lounge.
This made me reflect upon my teaching. What's going on with these students? Something is missing here...is it them or is it me? This got me started on tweaking the lessons here and there. Putting in more game based activities, interactive lessons, and more hands on learning experiences. For students with more specific needs: I let Student A type up his stories because he would clam up otherwise or give me the usual "nothing" after being asked what he did on his 3 week Christmas vacation; I quiz Student B orally, otherwise she would sit on the floor for 2 hours to get through a 15 minute test (with additional prodding and calling out her name 10 times); for Student C, I let him draw his scene first for his story, and let him choose his own topic, due to his excitement about the extremely detailed scene he just drew, he is just overflowing with ideas to write his story. I can go on and on with the little tweaks I did here and there over the years. Was it more work? YES. Did it frustrate me in having to do 20 mini lessons instead of just doing one? YES. Did it leave me exhausted at the end of the day? YES. But most importantly, was I now teaching these students more effectively that they no longer stood out as the "usual 3-5 difficult students"? The answer is a resounding YES...and that's all that matters in the end.
We now live in a world where a 'one size fits all' no longer works. Future jobs that await the next generation require more creativity, thinking outside the box, driven young boys and girls who want to make a difference and stand out in the crowd. So why do we keep on forcing them inside the box that no longer serves their growing needs? Why do we continue to make 20 copies of the same worksheet? Instead, let's try to see the best in each and everyone of our students. Let's believe that someday, each and every one of them will make it in the real world, each in his own time. Every one of my former Grade 3 students have made it in this big, harsh world. Each and everyone of them make me so proud, and yes, even those "difficult' students made it as editors (trust me, way back in 3rd grade, some of their writing made me cry, it was like pulling teeth, a very painful activity some 10-15 years ago) for famous fashion magazines, teachers in Ivy League schools, doctors, entrepreneurs... Twenty, fifteen or ten years ago, I may not have believed in those "difficult students", I may have wondered how will they ever make it through school, but each and every one of them have proven me wrong...it's a good thing I didn't give up on them...it's a good thing I believed in them. Each one is unique. Each and everyone of them has a voice that just wants to be heard saying, "let me be ME".
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