Crazy, Crazy, Crazy...

Oh Mondays...

Friday was great - gotta love end of term! But the first day of term is always an adventure. New students, transferring students, and Powerschool deletes all of your seating charts! Good thing I made a hard copy. Smart move, baby teacher. Smart move.

I love the opportunities for technology at this school, but - boy - technology takes a lot of time to teach. You would think that with a group of young minds who were born in the technological age, they would just catch on. And, of course, they do. But to have them do things in a specific way so that you can have access to their work is a whole different story. Opening an assignment from the school's IASSIGNMENT App and editing it in Notability took a good 5-7 minutes to explain. Add to that all of the students who said (despite my attempts to check this beforehand) that they didn't have the app, and that was 5 more minutes. In a 35 minute class period, that's the majority of class. Granted, teaching them once and repeating the process tomorrow will help and will be worth it in the end, but technology is a skill, too, and it takes time to learn.

I can't blame those students who get lost because they went ahead of my instructions though. I've decided that teachers often make the worst students because WE do what we don't want our kids to. We go ahead. We explore. We take things into our own hands, assuming we know what's going on. It's made things quite funny during our technology trainings, almost like these 40-50 teachers magically morphed into students from my 7th grade classes. "Wait, I don't get it!" or "I don't know where I am!" or "How did you do that again?" or "Whoa - how did you get there?" comments fill the room.

And I AM that kind of student - the I-need-to-figure-this-out-on-my-own-and-you're-going-a-little-too-slow-for-my-pace-so-I'm-going-to-go-ahead-despite-your-directions kind of student. Yup. I confessed. And, to be honest, it's proven to be a good thing, but I do miss some instructions.

So, today, when I saw most of my 4th period class moving ahead of my directions, I didn't get all worked up by it. I just said, "Hey, if you want to go ahead, that's fine, but I want to make sure you do this correctly so you can send it back to me and get credit for your work, so you might want to keep an ear open to my directions." More often than not, that simple declaration was enough to at least keep their eyes on me long enough to understand what I wanted them to do.

That kind of differentiation is really difficult. Though I am the going-ahead-of-the-teacher kind of student (and though I have many students similar to me in that aspect), I have many students who NEED the step by step, direction by direction method. They get lost if I give them multiple steps at once - they need it broken down. So, how do I play to both? Usually a comment like, "once you get there, read the directions and get started," helps, but it also invites students to fool around because they've noticed they're ahead, and they assume that means they've earned themselves some free time. Also, I've realized that explaining the purpose and directions for an assignment before we get into the step-by-step stuff helps, because, then, once students get to the necessary page, they are already equipped with the knowledge to go ahead without my watchful eye and careful explanations (so I can work with those students who need a little more explicit instruction). Either way, differentiation is difficult - if I go to slowly, some students get bored. If I move too quickly, some students get lost. Neither is particularly advantageous for me, but I'm working on developing more strategies to handle the task.

Last lesson of the day - I promise - though it's not an absolute. Remember when I stressed about pinpointing the differences in needs and preferences between 7th and 8th grade? Well, again, I'm making progress.

My 8th graders want to feel like they have input in my planning. I am giving them more choices and more opportunities to let their voices be heard in my class. For example, I just found enough copies in the school of the novel I was going to read with my 8th graders so that everyone can have their own copy - no sharing. So, I gave the decision to them. Do you want to read it in class and take activities/worksheets home to do for homework or do you want to take a novel home, accept responsibility for it (if you lose it, you pay for it) and read assigned chapters every night and do activities/worksheets in class? Both 8th grade periods were koo-koo-for-co-co-puffs with the latter option. So that was what they decided on Friday. Today, I gave it to them again. Do you want to have this be the novel you read for Novel #1 rather than choosing your own novel and reading two books at once? Most of them said yes even when I warned them that this would mean I would assign more chapters for them to read as homework every night. And they visually appreciated it. They liked having a voice.

My 7th graders, on the other hand, have a harder time accepting the responsibility of making those kinds of choices. They are much more inclined to take directions from me, than make a decision on their own (and, they get a little more touchy if their opinion isn't accepted by the majority). Again, just an observation! Will they probably change halfway through this novel and regret their choice? Maybe, but it was their choice, so I'm not to blame!

What can I say? It's a crazy Monday, but I wouldn't have it any other way.