Anyway...
The Good
We are halfway through week two of summer school and I have some voracious readers in class! That's awesome. Their enthusiasm for learning, despite the perfect beach weather outside, is amazing. Today we did a lesson about tone and did a variety of activities about finding tone words in The Giver, in song lyrics, determining if the tone of a word was positive/negative/neutral, describing the tone of pictures, classical music pieces, etc, and even acting out how they would say "what are you doing" in different tones (sarcastic, curious, concerned...sarcastic was the favorite tone). One of my students wrote "I love Kumu Pili" on the board, and at the end of class, one of my extremely witty, but quiet, students changed the word "love" to make a joke about our tone lesson today. My teaching partner and I got a good laugh out of it.
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| "I feel neutral about Kumu Pili" |
I'm feeling extremely overwhelmed by the amount of work we need to accomplish in five weeks: reading an entire book AND getting through the synthesis of the book as well as vocabulary and a culminating project, literary terms, grammar, and boosting the students' writing abilities. Besides that, I'm trying to get my ducks in a row to apply for grad school and choreograph a few dances before going back to school so I don't have to worry so much about schoolwork and dance team.
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| That little duck that can't climb the curb? That's me. |
Sadly, some of my students are not so quick to pick up their reading. In one-on-one conversations, I've learned that some of them usually get left behind by their teachers during the regular school year because they can't keep up with what the rest of the class is doing. In our summer school class, they won't ask questions or speak up when things are too difficult, because if their regular school year teachers don't listen, why should their summer school teachers be any different, right? WRONG. It breaks my heart to see some of my students experiencing such a deficit in their reading and writing skills in comparison to some of their classmates (who are nowhere near to grade level writing/reading either...) and I am beginning to get discouraged. So tomorrow, I think West (my teaching partner) and I are going to have a day of catching up with the students, maybe have them make an events timeline, with post-its on the whiteboard, of what has happened in the book so far, and review the tone lesson from today. I just want to see these kids succeed so badly; they are not deficient, the education system is. There's no room for letting any one of them slip through the cracks.
Tomorrow will be more positive. I'm optimistic (vocab word, woo hoo!)
xo,
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