My Teaching Experiences

More practicing for the ISATS Monday and Wednesday. Blah. One thing came up on Wednesday, however, that I have been milling about in my brain ever since. Question number one on the practice sheet read similar to the following:

The engine coughed.
The photographed leered at me from the wall.
My dog jumped with joy.

These sentences describe which of the following:
A. similie
B. metaphor
C. personification
D. symbolism

I had one person in my group of four read the question out loud but before that person read the sentences I asked the students in my group if they knew what all four of their options were.

In sixth period I was in a group with four girls who all requested that they be in my group, which I think makes a difference in how they responded to me (versus how the students responded to me in seventh period). When I asked if they knew those terms, they said that they had never heard them before. So, we had a lively discussion about each one, complete with questions, examples and stories to help them rembember. Then, when we read the sentences, all four girls knew right away that they were examples of personification.

In seventh period, I chose to work with the four students in the front of the classroom. I knew them to be three of the exciteable boys and the one flirty girl, but I was feeling good about sixth period's discussion and thought that the discussion in seventh would go at least similar to that. Plus, I have built a good rapport with the four students I chose to be in my group. None of that mattered. They also did not know the four terms, but instead of discussing the answers, two of the boys talked to each other and the other boy and the girl goofed off on their own. One boy kept commenting about what I was wearing: he liked my shoes, his mom also wears red toe nail polish, my skirt had cool flowers on it. The girl kept typing things into her keyboard, even though I had asked her to move out from in front of her computer station. When we went over the sentences, one person happened to guess personification, but the others either guessed randomly or had no idea how to pinpoint something close to the right answer.

So what I have been thinking about is this: How do we, as educators, get students to realize when they are in a learning moment? We're taught to recognize teachable moments, but is there even such a thing as a learning moment? At that moment in seventh period, I thought that I had something important to teach those students - especially since those types of questions will be on their ISATS next week and every one of them is worried about improving their scores because they all know that they have to make a three-point improvement. Knowing just one more simple thing, like how to recognize personification, will help them with that. Plus, it's something that they can use forever. It's a great term and it's something that people use every day - they should know what it's called when someone says "My computer is taking it's time thinking today." But instead, they did their own things, not even attributing a moment's concern to the questions or the chance to learn.

Are they much different from the students I had in sixth period? Are their priorities different? Did it matter that one group was all girls and the other group was mostly boys? Did it matter in either situation that I am a girl? That I'm young? That I'm not their real teacher? Was it because it was sixth period and they were excited because it's closer to the end of the school day? Was it because that's the natural culture of that particular period? What was it that made them ignore and completely pass up the opportunity to have a discussion and learn?