The Curse of Knowledge and a Tactile Activity

Earlier in the school year I read the article, “The Teacher Curse No One Wants to Talk About” (URL: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/the-curse-of-knowledge-chris-reddy), which discusses the curse of knowledge concept. (Something I had never heard of either.) Essentially, once you have learned something and understand it fairly well, you forget how difficult it was to learn that skill. I recognized this problem in my classroom. I would give what I felt were fairly straightforward, simple notes followed by one, maybe two assignments. When my eighth graders didn’t master the material despite how simply I (thought I) taught it, I was confused. This article helped me realize I was moving too fast for my students, many of who were seeing the material for the first time. (For my high schoolers, a lot of the material was review/wasn’t their first time seeing it.)

This second term, we have been learning about point of view. In an effort to strengthen my students’ abilities to identify point of view, we have done several assignments (more than the one I assigned last year) and I incorporated POV questions into the daily bell ringers the last couple of weeks. Worksheets can get boring after a while though, so I tried a more tactile mini-project.

The assignment came from a Teachers-Pay-Teachers curriculum I purchased a month or so ago. The students were given 32 short passages. Their job was to identify the point of view in each passage, cut out the blocks, and glue them to a poster under one of four POV categories: first person, second person, third person limited, and third person omniscient. I made myself readily available to answer student questions, as well. I moved about the room answering questions as they came up or waved students over to my desk to work with them. (I felt more teacher-y than I have in a long time.) Initially, this was supposed to be a 50-minute-period project, but it became clear to me that most of my students would need extra time. I extended the project an extra day. I was pleasantly surprised by how attentive and careful most of my students were in completing the project. I even had time to work one-on-one with my IEP and struggling students.

Page one of the Point of View sorting assignment.

I think the tactile approach to learning was a refreshing change of pace for my eighth-grade students. A large majority of my students only missed 1 or 2 examples too. I was incredibly proud of the final grades! I hung up several of the 100s on my Star Student board (which had been neglected up until this point. Whoops!), making sure to pick students that may not be used to being recognized academically. And because we spent more time on this assignment, I made it a test grade to help those students out.  The few low grades I received were from students who didn’t ask for help, indicated they didn’t need help when I checked in with them, and/or weren’t working on the project diligently over the two-day period and just glued down squares randomly in an effort to finish the assignment. Although it was another identification of point of view assignment, my kids were more engaged overall than when they were asked just to read and write.

My slightly less neglected "Star Students" board.