In Which Ms. Lindsay Is Empathetic, Yet Clueless

What do my students need? I’m honestly not sure how to address this question. In my mind there is needs, as in something basic and typically a noun (water, food, shelter, sleep, etc.) and needs, like an action or a quality (they need to do their homework, they need encouragement, praise, discipline, etc.). The following list I have created includes mostly the latter. (Fair warning, this list is a lot of me admitting I’m not sure how to successfully address – and maybe even identify – the needs of my students. This blog also got fairly long.)

1.  My students need pencils & paper.
In regards to basic needs, like water, food, etc., my students don’t require much from me. What my school does need is more school supplies. The things I hand out most are pencil and paper, which is arguably not that much. Our textbooks are getting pretty worn though, and we have a limited collection of classroom sets of extended texts. I wish I was better able to expose my students to a wider range of texts and maybe over the summer I’ll set up a Donors Choose project to get more books for my school. For now, I will continue to provide the smaller things, like pencils, paper, rulers, scissors, and so on when my students need them.

2.     My students need heat.
The hallways are not ventilated at H.W. Byers High School and the teachers have limited control over the thermostat. The best I can do to fulfill this need is to program the thermostat as high as the central office will allow me, keep my door closed to stop the cold air from getting into the classroom, and commiserate with my students. (I get cold super easily, so you can usually find me wearing my coat for half of the period as I wait for the heat to come back on.) Although, room temperature feels like a losing battle to me. There is always someone, no matter the season, complaining that it is too hot or cold.

3.     My students need help with reading comprehension.
Even some of my best students struggle to read a text and comprehend what has happened. I have tried reading as a class, reciprocal reading, pair/group reading, and individual reading with guiding questions, but my students don’t like to slow down while they read. As someone who enjoys reading for the sake of reading, I also don’t know how to create buy-in for my students. Without fail, every time we read something for class, I have at least one student ask why they have to read something boring. I am honestly not sure how to address that question or this need, especially when students resent having to put effort into their reading. The best I can do is keep trying at this point and hope something works eventually.

4.     My students need help writing critically.
Again, this is a need I am not really sure how to address, but will be crucial for my students who go to college. During the first semester I put quite a bit of effort into teaching my students paragraph structure through AJIE (Assert, Justify, Illustrate, Explain), which worked fairly well. My students groan when they have to use it, but they have stronger paragraph structure and arguments (with textual evidence!). Although they have the structure down, they still aren’t putting the thought into their writing I would like to see. To meet the sentence requirements, their responses have a tendency to be repetitive, which in turn makes their analyses shallow. I don’t have a clue how to encourage critical thinking (and therefore critical writing), beyond telling them to dig deeper. Our struggles, I think, stem from my inability to effectively model some of these skills for my students; and in that regard, I’m failing to meet their needs.

5.     My students need more sleep.
Seriously, they need more sleep; I need more sleep; the whole world needs more sleep. Over the summer, I was a stickler about not allowing students to sleep through class. I would knock on their desks and issue a couple warnings before I handed them a clipboard and made them complete their work standing in the back of the room. Now, though, I am half tempted to let them dig their own graves. (The other half of me really wants to invest in an air horn…) I want these teenagers – I teach junior and seniors mostly – to take responsibility for their learning and I don’t feel like they will do that if I keep nagging them. If they choose to sleep, that’s their choice and they need to develop accountability. What happens to their grade is a direct consequence of them sleeping in class (or any other unbeneficial behavior they may exhibit). Most days I am torn between treating them like young adults about to enter the ‘real world’ and nagging them the moment they put their heads down. In other words, I haven’t found a solution to this issue either.

6.     My students need to be challenged.
Many students will call me over during assignments and even tests to double check answers or essentially ask for an answer to one of the questions. This need to have the exact right answer and to ask the teacher when they don’t immediately know tells me they are used to being given the answers. I am frustrated by students who immediately fall back on “I don’t know”, no matter how much I break down the question into increasingly simpler parts. The I-don’t-knows and the whining at the start of new assignments make me want to give up sometimes, to ask less of them, to let them have it their way. Whether they recognize it or not, though, being challenged in thinking, reading, and their education as a whole, is only beneficial to them.

7.     My students need discipline.
When we started the new semester, I re-taught my rules and consequences. I even tested them on it. My students need to realize that every action has a consequence, good or bad. If they don’t study for a test, they may do poorly. If they sleep through class, they will receive a zero on the day’s assignment. If they speak without raising their hands, they will receive a negative consequence. Continued misbehavior will result in further negative consequences. My students react in various ways to receiving consequences. Some grumble, some pout, some decide to space out for the rest of class, and some try to argue. All of which are very frustrating reactions when you are just trying to do your job. The best thing I can do for my students is to be consistent and as fair as possible (which is easier said than done).

8.     My students need repetition and routine.
Unfortunately they despise repetition. They think one lesson with a new skill equates mastery and that it doesn’t need to be touched on again from year to year. They don’t like to practice, but it is necessary in an ELA classroom, where reading and writing skills are expected to achieve higher sophistication (whatever that entails) from year to year.

I am working on enforcing procedures and routines as well. I haven’t been teaching units so much as trying to keep a weekly schedule. (However, this has been completely thrown off by a close reading unit I am teaching that was shared by a Team teacher). Lately though, I have been thinking about having Writing Wednesdays, where students are given an extended writing assignment that they must work on the entire period and which must be turned in before they leave. Many of my students are close to graduating, yet completely lose it at the thought of writing a five-paragraph essay. I am sincerely worried how some of them hope to survive college, where paper writing and timed essays tests are likely.

The other routine, which I implemented just last week, was Current Events Friday. I want them to feel more connected to a larger global community, especially since where we are located in Marshall County is pretty isolated. This is also a weak attempt to connect a lesson to their personal lives, something I have not been doing so well at creating. I do believe, though, giving them a chance to express their opinions on world events – or even what is just happening in the United States – does empower them. I think the plan for right now is pick shorter articles for Current Events Friday, have them complete a written response, and then hold a short discussion at the end of class so that they can share their opinions with other students. (Major concern: Students getting out of control and not respecting the opinions of others. The discussion process will need to be consistently proceduralized so that all students feel respected and heard if the topic is potentially controversial.)

9.     My students need choices.
I have not addressed this need as well as I could. Giving my students choices would make them feel like they have more control in matters of the classroom and their education. I don’t have many projects in my classes and the last time my students completed an essay, I overwhelmed some with an open-ended prompt that required they chose three narrative elements to analyze in a short story. They need choices, but not too many, if that makes sense.

My most immediate solution: As I said previously, I decided to implement Current Events Friday. My students would read and respond to an article – thus fulfilling some RI standards. This would simultaneously expose them to informational texts and provide them with a chance discuss events that transcend their local community, thinking about the world in a larger context. As my students adjust to this new weekly assignment, I would like them to have the ability to choose the topic of the article (i.e. arts, sports, science, health, etc.) and potentially progress to them choosing their own articles.

Another recent solution: Choice boards. When I finish stories (or chapters if I ever have my students read an extended text), I want to give them a choice in how they ‘summarize’ what they just read. Yesterday (1/21/16), I had my Mississippi Writer students choose between Comic Strip (draw and color three major scenes in the order they occurred in the story), Billboard (pick important images from the text and make an advertisement), Timeline (place at least five major events from the story in chronological order with title and description for each entry), and New Perspective (write the story from the point of view of another character) when we finished reading “A Memory” about Eudora Welty. (Their reaction to being given a choice in the classroom was between groaning at having to complete an assignment and awkward silence.)

10.  My students need pride in their work.
I have no idea how you encourage a student to care about their work. My students, and this is generalization, tend to care more about completing an assignment over the quality of work they produce. Around progress reports time, I will have students approach me about grades, not understanding why their grade is poor if they have been completing the work for my class. The subsequent conversation that quality of work also affects their grades never fails to make me feel like a jerk. If I showcased more student work on my Star Students board, I think that would definitely help them see what good quality works entails.

11.  My students need appreciation and understanding.
This need works in both directions. My students need encouragement and sympathy, but they also need to be able to reciprocate these qualities with classmates, teachers, and others outside the school environment. I try to model politeness (please & thank you’s), to praise students for sharing responses and willingly reading aloud during class, and to provide rewards for good behavior, grades, or both. When students complain about headaches, I still encourage them to work, but let them know they can put their heads down when they need to (although, I do get some nasty attitudes from these students for ‘disturbing’ them). If I can see they are having a bad day, I try to give them space. If they are feeling sick to their stomach (and they actually tell me), I let them know they are excused to leave the classroom in case of an emergency. Just the other day, I regrouped two pairs of students because I found out one pair was a recently broken-up couple and they weren’t comfortable working with each other. Am I great at recognizing when and why students are upset? No, not really. Do I help them in what ways I can when they ask for help? Absolutely.

12.  My students need a teacher.
I care way too much about what my students think of me. Their opinions about me personally shouldn’t matter. I am constantly afraid that when they laugh, they are laughing at me or that I’m overly strict. My students don’t need a friend or a doormat, though. They a need a teacher that has high expectations, that makes them work, that makes them use their brains, and that takes controls of the classroom. So what if they think I am mean for giving consequences for talking? They need teachers that expect them to learn and that create an environment in which they can learn. Being that teacher is a long-term project of mine, and hopefully I am taking steps – even baby steps – in the right direction every day.