Why Do We Have To Learn This?

“Why do we have to learn this? How's this going to help me in my real life?”

Ever hear those questions? If you've taught school for more than one month, I know you have. And sometimes, doggone it, they're tough questions to answer. For one thing, sorry to say many times we teachers don't really know why we're teaching what we're teaching. For instance, if a kid wants to know how learning parts of speech is going to help him in his real life (“I can talk good already”), the answer we might give is, “You see, you made a grammatical error right there. It's 'I can talk well enough already.'” This may get us out of the hole, but there is very little evidence that teaching parts of speech improves usage.

I've heard teachers use the following answer: “You're going to need to know this next year in Mr. Harvey's class.” This may be true, but it begs the real question: then why does Mr. Harvey teach it?

Some teachers are more direct: “You need to know this for the test.” Again, so what? Why is it worthy of the test?

A thoughtful teacher may have an answer which is legitimate. She may say, “Learning the parts of speech gives you a handle on language and with that handle you can improve all facets of your grammar.” Unfortunately, true as this may be, it often doesn't really connect with the student. He may take us another level deep with, “But why do I need good grammar? My dad has bad grammar and he makes more than you do.”

Of course, good teachers have a lot of good answers to that question, but there are times when none seem to work. That's when I pull out the following: I say, “Why does a professional football player lift weights? He never lifts weights during a game. The same applies to this concept I'm making you learn. In itself it may not have any obvious practical value, but it strengthens your mind and let me assure you: you will need to use your mind in any job you do and in every other area of your 'real' life as well.”

This works, I believe, because it is absolutely true. The latest brain research indicates that any mental activity a person does increases the brain's acuity. While I would never want anyone to think that I only teach things for the sake of 'neurobics' (as one author has coined it), it is certainly a valid rationale for the teaching of anything.

Mr. Incognito

The Setup

The prospect of beginning a unit or mini-unit on punctuation thrills few students. One entry point into this mundane topic is to show the kids how little they really understand the nature and function of punctuation.

The teacher begins class with this simple, direct question: "What punctuation mark is the most heavily used in English?" She then fields answers. Everyone will have one and most of them will pick the comma or period as their answer of choice.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, says the teacher, with growing mock-exasperation.

After the usual gang of suspects has been rounded up ó the comma, the period, the semicolon ó and disposed with, students move into the lesser-used marks.

"Quotation marks!" someone suddenly yells. The teacher rolls her eyes.

"Brackets!" "Yeah, right," the teacher responds with heavy sarcasm: "Brackets are used all the time. I'll bet I even used them today."

Soon the kids are out of guesses. They think they've been tricked. In a way, they have but not really.

The teacher gives a hint: "Think hard: it's on a computer keyboard."

More guesses (Tilde! Percent sign! Parentheses!) but no right answers.

Aha

Finally, a better clue: "It's the most obvious key on the keyboard."

Thinking, then: "The spacebar?" a student will say, hesitantly.

"Well, not the spaceBAR."

"The space!"

"That's right."

"But that's not a punctuation mark," a chorus of voices protest.

"Wanna bet," says the teacher. At this point she holds up a copy of an early New Testament manuscript. "This is how ancient classical writings were punctuated: with no spaces."

It astonishes students to realize spaces have not always been used.

Enrichment

At this point you might want to field a debate on whether or not capitalization qualifies as punctuation (it does). Ask students if a keyboard has a key dedicated for that purpose (it has two in most case: the Shift and the Caps lock).

You can further the discussion by asking students if they know of any new punctuation marks that have arisen in recent years. Many have, thanks to computers: the entire set of emoticons (those sideways combinations of existing marks that add up to a message. Example: ; ^ ) is a winking smiley face.) In fact, point out that the smiley face itself has become a new handwritten mark. Ask if any of them have a font that can do smiley faces. Now ask how the smiley is used (It has several uses. One is just to indicate an upbeat tone. Another is to indicate an ironic, or wry, tone.)

Finally, ask them if there is any gender preference to punctuation marks. Usually students will say that females are more apt to use exclamation points, and punctuation in general. Some males will brag that they don't use any.

The Aha! moment has reached its peak. Ask the students to try to define punctuation. Conclude by having them write down this definition: "Punctuation is the use of standard marks and signs in writing in order to clarify meaning." Make the following sub-points about this definition.

1. "Standard." Unless the marks are standardized, only a few would understand them. These standards are constantly evolving and subject to change.
2. "Signs." Capitalization is not a mark but it is a sign. Ask students whether the space is a mark or a sign. The answer is: it's both. But, it's an empty mark, much as in math one can have an empty set.
3. "In writing." Spoken language does not carry punctuation per se. It does, however, have punctuation equivalents in the form of nonverbal cues (raising voice, using hand gestures, etc.).
4. "In order to clarify meaning." Over-punctuating is just as improper as under-punctuating.

Presently English is undergoing a trend toward simplification in punctuation. Commas are now recommended to be used only when they clarify meaning. Semicolons are often not used at all because people generally distrust them. Internet chat and email usage is both simplifying usage and complicating it. Many emailers no longer capitalize, spell correctly, or use much punctuation at all. On the other hand, the use of emoticons and other cryptic devices (such as the use of initializations like ROFL for "rolling on the floor laughing") keep newbies wondering what is being communicated.

Followup

Give the kids an ungraded quiz. Each question requires them to tell how we presently punctuate the following:

1. Sarcasm (using quotation marks around a sarcastically stated word)
2. An interruption (usually with a dash or long dash --)
3. Trailing off (the ellipsis . . .)
4. Exceptions (usually an asterisk* with corresponding explanation at the bottom of the page)
5. Separation between minutes and seconds (the colon:, which also separates hours from minutes)
6. Volume (all capitals)
7. Increased volume (all capitals plus underlining)
8. Generic information which the reader will need to convert into specific data (the greater-than>, less-than signs<. Like this:
9. Siamese items, that is, two items brought together like a compound (the slash/, as in "The participant/fan is more involved than just one of the other.")
10. A change of scene, as in a book (usually just a blank line)

Activity Summary

1. Question and answer session concerning the Space.

2. Teacher-led discussion about the essense of what punctuation is.

3. Definition with explanation.

4. Ungraded quiz.

The Four Stages of a Professional Development Day

Stage 1:
Hope Springs Eternal
"This one’s going to be different!"

Traits

• Donuts, coffee supplied by administration; teachers wearing shorts, blue jeans, chatting
• Session opens with entertainment from high school choir, teachers lean back, close eyes, enjoy early morning nappy-time
• Speaker gives self-effacing introduction; cracks jokes (some actually kind of funny)
• More jokes, several anecdotes; some sincere laughs, occasional honest clapping
• Elementary teachers smiling, nodding at each other
• Guidance counselors whispering to each other, hoping certain teachers are "getting the message"
• Even high school teachers fairly attentive, minimal paper grading, magazine reading
• Cynical comments restricted to "the cynics" (you know who they are); one cynic writes down predictions when vice-principal will make first exit to "check out" something
• Oohs and aahs from techno-illiterate teachers entertained with dissolves and wipes of PowerPoint presentation
• Teacher famed for sleeping during in-services still awake, quietly doing statistics
• Chairs feeling comfy; several teachers experiment with different slouch positions
• Speaker introduces main concepts, a few new easy-to-understand terms

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Stage 2:
Bring on the AV
"It’s deja vu, all over again"

Traits

• First transparency rears its ugly head
• Audience begins to realize this is just common sense or worse...common folly
• Jokes starting to sound suspiciously familiar, forced
• Speaker’s idiosyncratic speaking style surfaces, encourages mimicry among less mature staffers
• Urban legends creeping into speech, being used as "anecdotal evidence"
• Elementary teachers looking around worried, annoyed at coaches
• First "Far Side" cartoon appears on overhead...it’s the same one last speaker used
• Resident sleeper out cold, others beginning to nod off
• Chairs starting to feel cramped, one bold teacher flings legs over seat in front of him
• Terms becoming technical, vague, psycho-babble
• Speaker begins speeding up PowerPoint screen changes, neglects to even read some of them
• Guidance counselors taking names of teachers who aren’t paying attention
• Vice-principal makes first exit, right on schedule; principal soon follows with brow professionally wrinkled in "Something's come up" mode
• Resident cynic begins drafting a Four Stages of In-Service Session

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Stage 3:
Mumbo-Jumbo Land
"We get an hour and a half for lunch, right?"

Traits

• Terminology explosion, abundance of hyphenated words and phrases involving the word "cognitive"
• People communicate with others across the aisle concerning lunch plans by making gestures related to local eating establishments: fishing gestures for the seafood joint, two hands around an imaginary burger for the burger joint, and a chopstick manuvre for the local Chinese restaurants
• Auditorium alive with watch-checking gestures, some members average more than one watch-check per minute; one teacher simply stares at watch
• Cynics entertain each other with comic nonverbal gestures such as eye-rolls, caricature mimicry of speaker, and frozen look of comatose state
• Speaker drones on, beads of sweat appearing on forehead
• Resident sleeping teacher lifeless, feared dead
• Overhead projector use now dominates, audience stirs to attention when a fly is seen walking lethargically across transparencies; bets are taken whether it will make it to the other side or not
• English teacher completes grading research papers; basketball coach puts finishing touches on summer weight-lifting schedule
• Teachers begin exhibiting the same behavior they despise in students: note-passing, talking out loud, reading Mad Magazine; principal -- back from trouble spot -- gives dirty looks
• Lunch break! Spirits soar.

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Stage 4:
Death: aka Jonestown Revisted
"Pass me the Kool-aid, please."

Traits

• Teachers hunker down for post-lunch session
• Speaker repeating stories wholesale, jokes degrading to Reader’s Digest anecdotes
• Actual snoring heard in large quadrant of auditorium; even superintendent fully asleep, eyes moving in dog-like REM state
• Cynicism reaches critical mass — resident cynic has lost his market niche as scores of teachers begin plying their wares
• Speaker demonstrates professional "stretching" skills, spending thirty minutes on one overhead transparency which, to his ignorance, is upsidedown
• Some members of audience begin unintentional TM…staring at wall, chanting "HOME...HOME;" a few actually enter altered states of consciousness; some discover true meaning of life
• Resident-Sleeper’s hibernation ends; he awakes with a start, gathers himself, asks a couple of already-covered questions which the speaker, full of joy, answers at length
• Speaker raises hopes with mention of possible early release, a cough from area where administrators are seated dashes them immediately
• 3:25: Five minutes to go; teachers begin waking up, lots of shuffling of papers; evaluation forms passed out
• 3:30: Nirvana! Teachers so elated they actually write positive comments on evaluation form; "It’s like finally getting out of the car after a l-o-n-g trip," one teacher exclaims
• Administrators awake, vice-principal reenters auditorium, all clap enthusiastically, and comment to each other what a success the day has been
• Dismissal! Teachers race for parking lot; several injured in pile-up at exit gate.

The Art of Test-making

Making out good tests isn’t easy. A variety of flawed techniques will rear their ugly heads early in one’s teaching career, ugly heads that I have seen up close and personal with my own two eyes. The dangers include:

• Vague questions that students will argue over
• Questions that don’t really test anything you’ve taught
• Impossibly arcane and tricky questions
• Tests where the entire class scores about the same
• Tests where the hoped-for bell-shaped curve looks more like a cardiogram readout
• Tests that take too long to take
• Tests that don’t take long enough
• Tests that take too long to grade
• Tests that take too long to type out
• Tests that use up too much paper
• Tests that are difficult to decipher, both in content and in form

The list goes on. How can the beginning teacher avoid these land mines? Of course, experience will teach you a lot, but as the old saying goes, the fool learns from his mistakes; the wise man learns from the mistakes of others. Since I’ve already made all of the mistakes listed above, let me save you from folly.

My Sorry Story

Early in my teaching career this is how a typical test-making-out night transpired.

I grabbed all the important books, notes, and files that I thought were germane and headed home from school. Back then, I always made my tests out at home, which was my first mistake. Why? Because I never grabbed enough books, notes, and files.

Then I rolled some typing paper into the typewriter (this was 1975, mind you) and typed

Name _________________________

I was on my way.

Hm, what would be my first group of questions? I liked matching because it allowed for recognition rather than recall...plus I had excelled in the process-of-elimination aspect of matching in my test-taking days. The problem was, what to match with what? Suddenly, on the night I was making out the test, I didn’t know what I’d taught them. This wasn’t good.

This sudden realization betrayed an element of something that most beginning teachers have to deal with: undefined objectives. It wasn’t until test time that I really was forced to consider what I wanted my students to learn.

This sounds terrible -- I mean, a teacher that doesn’t know what he’s trying to teach is unfit for the profession, right?

Wrong. Please allow me a paragraph or two to defend the teacher who doesn’t know exactly what he’s doing. Somebody needs to do it...believe me, the critics of public education won’t do it.

Teachers who aren’t quite able to articulate just what their teaching objectives are, quite simply, rookies. How can any beginning teacher know exactly what they’re doing? Most beginners operate one of two ways: they either mimic what their college profs taught them or they follow the school’s existing curriculum guide to a tee. Well, there is a third option: the free-wheeling charismatic soul who plans little and shoots from the lip. It doesn’t matter which of the three one is, if he is a beginner, he probably is doing a lot of driving in the fog, if you follow my metaphor.

The cure is simple: experience. Nothing, and I mean nothing, takes the place of four or five years of teaching to help clarify what a teacher is doing.

Besides, there are a lot of people, myself one of them, who think “exploratory teaching” has its major benefits. Most of my best ideas come during the course of a unit, not at the beginning. Many come during a detour or even following false lead. I know this about myself: if I limit myself to my pre-articulated goals and objectives, or last year’s test for that matter, I limit my teaching in a major way.

So all you readers who have felt bad for wondering, just what the heck did I teach those kids, take heart. You’re okay. You’re a good person. You’re smart. You just haven’t been at the job long enough. Plus...you haven’t (up till now) read this article. Because, as I said earlier, you’re in the process of learning from my mistakes.

Okay, detour over. We’re back at where I was on test-making-out night: staring at a white sheet of paper wondering what in the world I was going to quiz my students over. At this point, I usually began to consider what had gone on in class. I tried to remember the discussions we’d had. I knew that none of my four sections of sophomore English had covered the exact same terrain. I worried that I hadn’t even given one group the vocab or another group all the same stories to read. Should I just ask questions as if I was sure they all had covered the same material?

Yes. That’s what I learned to do. It was easy to tell, on test day, if they hadn’t. I’d just wait for the processional to begin: Student A, B, C, and D would march to my desk and say, “We never read that story.” And, after one or two reliable ones said it, I’d announce, “Hey, class, you can all skip numbers xx through xx.” They’d be happy, I’d be, well, not happy, but at least at peace with myself (well, maybe not total peace) and all was well.

So one thing I learned in those early days was not to be afraid to alter the test on test day. This made making out the tests ever so much less stressful.

Another thing I learned as I was making out tests went right to the heart of those objectives I wasn’t so sure about. As I was making out the test, I began to really see what it was I wished I had taught. Or taught better. This, rookie teachers, is a common emotion felt by the most experienced of veterans. It often takes a sojourn through a unit with a real class in front of you to make you aware of what’s important. Those beautiful ideas, complete with stated goals and objectives, that you created prior to teaching the unit, get whittled down to reality by a roomful (or 5 roomfuls) of kids.

And here’s where I learned a second important test-building trick: “learning” tests. What’s that? It’s a test that’s half-test, half-worksheet. I would allow a certain amount of time during the test-taking with notes or I would give fresh information at the beginning of the test period. I remember one time in particular when I had neglected to teach the concepts of “static” and “dynamic” characters. To remedy, I simply explained them before class and then used questions that required the students to apply these concepts to the characters we’d just read.

By serendipity -- or my own stupidity and sloth -- I had stumbled onto one of the major hidden beauties of test day. It’s the day the kids are most open to learning. When you’re giving notes on day one of the unit, three weeks prior to a test, kids are thinking, “Whoop-dee-dee. I can study these later.” When you’re giving information on the day of the test and telling kids how to use it to enhance their scores, they’re listening. I now make all my tests have some degree of new learning in them. The trick is not to test them over the new learning. You simply use it to apply to the material they were supposed to have learned. It really works.

From this, I learned another secret: lots of tests. Lots of tests means lots of grades which translates to less grades variability. (There is a handy term statistics people use regarding this -- something to do with standard deviation, but I can't remember exactly which term it is. Anyway, you get my drift, I'm sure.)

Related to this, more tests allows me to grade written work differently... and not as harshly. Kids won’t argue as much about a low test score as a low composition grade. They also won’t accuse you of grading favoritism.

And I learned other test tricks. For instance, I learned...

• how to write questions that allowed for some “play” in the outcome, a little fuzz factor.
• how to be fair in grading.
• what type of questions needed most careful wording.
• how to proportion tests so that everyone has a shot at passing
• how to write analytical questions
• to always give explicit pretest reviews
• how to write easy-to-grade tests.
• when it’s appropriate to have kids grade tests for you.
• how to quickly grade essay and short answer questions.

All these things I learned by trial and error. Had I a document such as the one you’re reading, I probably could’ve avoided some of the error part.

I’m telling you my story for several reasons. For one thing, I want you, the beginning teacher, to realize you’re not alone in the fog. And I also want you to know that you can navigate in it, if you’re creative. Furthermore, I think beginning teachers need to see the connection between tests and objectives. Tests really are nothing more than your teaching objectives in question form. Despite what I said earlier about the value of “exploratory” teaching, we do need to have objectives in front of us most of the time. It sharpens us as instructors and students as learners.

I’ve heard teachers moan about “just teaching for the test.” The sentiment is wrong: teaching for the test is simply teaching towards the goals you have.

Finally, I want you to see from my early experience -- and the fact that I survived -- that you don’t have to be perfect, nor do your tests. Teaching is a growing experience. Making out tests will make you a better teacher.