CSotD: This should not be so remarkable
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Mark Parisi shared this creative use of an "Off the Mark" panel on his Facebook page.
The Spanish teacher deleted the original caption — "I give it three months." — and asked her students to fill in a new joke, and gave this one — "That man needs to shave." — the highest grade for using demonstrative adjectives and the vocabulary for daily routines that they had just learned.
(The other caption reads "What a shame. She doesn't know that that brush is brushing another tooth.")
It's a brilliant way to let kids creatively show their stuff. Of course, having just covered daily routine, a cartoon using a toothbrush kept things focused on recent learning — a less well-targeted panel might have left the kids flailing for a hook to apply their new vocabulary. But then the bar setting gave them a chance to have some fun with what they'd learned.
One of my sons took a fourth year of French simply because he enjoyed the teacher's class so much. I imagine this teacher gets a few of those students, too.
Language teaching in the United States tends to not be done very well and most kids come away knowing how to translate but not how to actively use the language.
It's not the teachers' fault so much as a systemic failure. I covered a school board meeting a few years ago at budget time and they were discussing a program that gave first graders a little bit of foreign language exposure — I think it was three days a week for 45 minutes, or something similar.
The head of the language department, and the teacher of this particular program, explained that exposure at that age allows kids to pick up a second language on a more fundamental level that makes it easier for them to actually absorb the language rather than just learn to translate it.
Their presentation apparently went over the heads of the majority of board members and the program was axed because the kids could start taking languages in seventh grade and there was no need for it in elementary school.
The same year, the tech assistant at another elementary school contacted me for advice on a program she was developing with a third grade teacher where the kids would do comic style biographies of local inventors. The idea was that, by putting their research into individual panels, they would learn how to sequence their new knowledge, as well as how to divide it into distinct categories. Meanwhile, they'd be doing on-line research as well as scanning their comics into the computer and printing out copies.
I suggested she steal the format used for Sunday Mark Trail strips, with a number of smaller panels leading to a large panel. When the kids finished their projects, I went to see them and it had worked wonderfully: The kids used the smaller panels to tell about the inventors' early lives and the steps towards the particular invention each was famous for, and then the large panel to tell about the impact and legacy of that person's life and work.
In other words, it did just what she had designed it to do. The kids were not just writing down facts but were thinking about and applying their knowledge at a level I wouldn't have expected for another three or four years minimum.
During those same budget hearings, it was explained to the board that the tech assistant in each school was there not only to troubleshoot technical problems teachers might be having but also to research and develop innovative uses of technology in teaching and help teachers devise ways to apply them to specific goals and issues in their classrooms.
And the board members listened and then announced that, while it had made sense to have tech assistants when the computers were new, the teachers ought to know how to use them by now. The positions were cut.
It's this kind of thing that makes me go crazy when people talk about extending the school day, and the school year, so that kids will learn more and rise to the level of education in other countries. I don't know why they think that more of something that doesn't work will improve things, especially when they seem to go out of their ways to ignore and misunderstand the good things already happening in their own schools. I don't know why they won't listen to their own best teachers.
And I hate the fact that this Spanish teacher seems so remarkable.
Most of us can remember a couple of teachers like her, and that's the problem. It's just not right that, after 13 years of school, so few of us remember encountering more than two or three imaginative, inspiring teachers.
The kids who had this teacher are going to remember her the rest of their lives. And that's a damn shame.
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