In five years, I've been exposed to various teaching strategies. Some of them have stuck with me. I've embraced multi-genre projects, reader response journals, "learning groups," and more. I've learned that I am not a fan of the literature circle, something I'm not even sure I should admit on a blog that's written by an English teacher. Perhaps I haven't learned how to tweak it to most effectively meet my needs yet.
One strategy I have learned that has been effective in every instance I have ever used it is to pick my battles. Though probably not touted as a teaching strategy, I firmly believe that the art of battle picking should be the topic of books, professional development, and conference presentations. Learning to do this in a moment of dire stress can make the difference between a child learning and a child shutting down. Children today bring a lot of baggage with them into the classroom. Many of my students go through more in a week than I have been in through in my entire life. When I first started teaching, I didn't realize this. It was my fatal flaw. I waltzed into my classroom on Day One ready to conquer the world. I envisioned a classroom full of students who had grown up in homes just like mine, a home in which education was a priority and reading was mandatory. Some of them do, but some of them don't. Instead of my little utopia I had envisioned, I was faced with students who came from a variety of backgrounds--students who didn't have homes, who didn't have books, and who didn't have anyone showing them the value of an education. I learned that I was teaching students who didn't know if they would have dinner when they got home and who didn't know how much longer they would have electricity before the electric company finally turned off their service. I was teaching students who were mothers and fathers, students who left school and went to work from 3:30 to 11:00 p.m. Some of the students I was teaching were the caretakers in their homes, taking care of little brothers or sisters, cooking dinner, and keeping the home going. I teach students who are bullied by others, who are insecure about who they are, and who don't know how to deal with high school drama. My education courses didn't prepare me for any of that.
After "teaching" for a few short weeks, I learned that the greatest teaching strategy that existed had never been taught to me. That strategy? Pick your battles. Sure, this strategy can masquerade under a whole host of terms: "Be compassionate" or "Monitor and adjust," but I think the most accurate way to phrase it is simply to pick your battles. Students today deal with a lot. After a student has gone home to find his family has no food and no electricity, should we really be surprised that he doesn't care about learning the ten vocabulary words we insist he know? If a child is harassed by her peers day in and day out, should I be surprised that doing the assigned reading was not high on her to-do list? We have to know which battles are worth fighting. For me, those battles are always the ones that benefit my students, and if I have to choose between making sure a child is fed or making sure a child is safe and teaching him ten new words, I will feed him and do whatever I can to make sure he is okay every single time.
In education, we often get lost in our standards and our testing and our pacing guides. The truth is that we have to make sure we are continuing to see individual children. If we're not, we need to take a step back and analyze what we're doing and why we're doing it. Our students fight battles every day. Some fight battles just to get out of the house and on the bus and through the school door. They have to know we're fighting for them, too. That's a battle that's always worth it.
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