Good morning beautiful lady!
Austin (my husband) had this beautiful way of explaining a reading problem that my students in 7th period were having and it reminded me so much of something you would say/do! I wanted to share it.
We are reading The Odyssey right now and Jill and I came to a moment yesterday in my 7th period class of complete panic. They were not getting it. They couldn't recall even the simplest detail of what we were reading. Panic mode set in and "what do we do?!" was discussed.
I was discussing this with Austin and Kara after school, and we brainstormed ideas together. Then, Austin grabbed a sticky note. In these steps:
1. He drew a smiley face on the note and asked me what it was. I said, "it's a smiley face...?" He responded with "So you understood it was a smiley face because you saw it as a whole."
2. He then ripped the picture into 4 different parts and mixed it up and said, "but when the whole picture is ripped apart, you have to figure out how to make sense of it and piece it back together as a whole."
3. Then he said, this is your students' problem. When they encounter pieces of writing, like The Odyssey where the words seem to have weird order and don't make sense, the students panic because they don't know what to do with the pieces and they aren't visualizing it as a whole.
4, Then we looked at some of the sentences from the reading, and I think he is right! It wasn't necessarily a comprehension of the plot issue, but rather the words are in weird order to our students!
I know we have discussed this so many times, but when he explained it that way, it was like a lightbulb went off. (I then continued to jokingly ask him if he wanted to be an English teacher haha). I just had to share that with you!
Candice Spain
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