Sticking to Your Guns...

Monday is just hard. Good, but hard.

The day always leaves me questioning, "Am I doing anything right here? At all?" but, thankfully, I have to give students some credit, too. They're just as tired and just as desirous for the return of the weekend where they can eat whatever they want to and sleep in until noon. Ahh... the memory.

So after first period, I was ready to throw Monday's "Reader Response" procedure right out the window. It just isn't working, I said to myself. They're just not getting the idea behind it all! 

Keep in mind, this is the 3rd week we've tried it. Talk about tossing the baby out with the bathwater.

Okay, so it's not perfect and the students are - well - less than thrilled about what they've realized is just a glorified grammar lesson (those intelligent kids! gah!). But that doesn't mean it's not working.

In that same first period, my students were throwing around those "subject" and "verb" terms that we reviewed last week (when I had that epiphanic moment about what 7th graders know and don't know). Something, obviously, got through.

I just have to stick to my guns. In my first month of teaching, I have created dozens of unit plans in my mind, only to change ideas at the last minute, and it only leaves me scrambling.

JUST BECAUSE SOMEONE'S DOING SOMETHING DIFFERENT DOESN'T MEAN THAT WHAT I'VE CHOSEN TO DO IS WRONG. - this is the message I've been trying to get across to myself for the past month or so. Thus the caps, my friends, are for me.

So, I'm sticking to it. Reader's Response will continue on Mondays; however, that doesn't mean that procedures don't need some adaptations.

Ideas for future Mondays:

• Have students share passages in partnerships and submit ideas for "power" sentences into a bucket for me to pull out of (pros: everyone's engaged and everyone's prepared to contribute / cons: I lose the ability to monitor students' comprehension of the book they are reading). 
• Have students act as teacher and begin the "What do you notice?" discussion (pros: student led means more learning and encourages a more student-directed discussion / cons: I can't always trust students to take it seriously or stay focused; students may not have the vocabulary or background knowledge to be able to talk about sentence structure).
• Have students still present their Readers Responses, but have my own sentence ready to be able to discuss what makes that sentence powerful (pro: this allows me to use my assessment of student needs [i.e. if students need a mini-lesson on using quotations marks correctly, I can choose a sentence that forces us to look at how quotation marks are used] / con: students are less involved in the appraisal of sentence power or what makes a sentence work).

And - I can't take it personally. Every glance that seems to shoot arrows of "You really think we're actually going to do this?" or "This is so incredibly lame," or "Bored out of my flippin' mind," isn't an estimation of my success as a teacher. It's good feedback for me to include more engagement opportunities, but it doesn't mean I'm failing. 

Thank goodness for that. 

Here's to Tuesday's adventures. Personal narrative, here we come.