Mrs. Ram's Jams

Tag: teaching

• An Ulcerative Colitis Tale: What I Learned During My Hospital Stay

  Posted at 2:54 pm by Jeddarae, on February 8, 2020

  

  Hey! For those who missed it, I spent three nights in the hospital due to an ulcerative colitis flare. 

  I’d tried telling two different doctors at various times throughout January that my medicine stopped working, but nobody listened to me. 

  For a week before I was admitted, my doctor’s office ghosted me. I called. I emailed. Nothing. No answer. Radio static. (Long story here. If you want more details, call, text, or inbox me.)

  I felt like Demi Lovato singing “Anyone” at the Grammys.

  Turns out, shocker, that my colitis had spread further into my colon, and I needed a blood transfusion to replace the blood I had lost. 

  Because. Nobody. Listened. To. Me. Seriously. 

  Ugh.  

  But I won’t get into the entire story right now because:

  1. I’m still really upset.
  2. it should have never happened.

  Because. Nobody. Listened. To. Me. 

  ---

  Enough of the negativity. Here’s what I learned during my hospital stay.

  1. Beware the pretty pills. My nurses ooohhhhhed and awwwwwed over a lovely, jade-colored pill, presented to me in a tiny plastic cup. We never get to see colorful pills! Look how pretty! They said. All we ever see are plain-colored pills! Considering the sheer number of medicines overwhelming my system, I missed all the warning signs that this “pretty green pill” was the Green Fairy in Moulin Rouge. After achieving mind-blowingly high status twice in four hours, I, slurring my words, accused the nurses of slipping me roofies and refused to take more. Unfortunately, my mother called both times I was baked, and I had to hang up on her. Sorry Mom! Also, if you texted me while I was drugged, and I promised I would steal you some roofies too, come see me later. (Just kidding!!!!) (gif credit)
  2. If you spill your water all over your bed, you don’t get a new bed; you get put on a puppy pad.  I felt properly shamed. Don’t worry. At least they didn’t try to stick my nose in it . . .
  3. Teacher expectations are ridiculous. Sorry. Here’s the negativity again. What was I doing before getting a blood transfusion? Typing up emergency lesson plans. Posting student instructions on Google Classroom. Trying to line up a sub for the next day–while I had IVs in both arms. Just to make sure my students weren’t given short shrift by my emergency absence. How insane is that? Read what I just wrote again. Insane. Utterly insane. If you are outside the education field, I don’t think you’ll ever understand the pressures that teachers face. My absence also created more work for my immediate grade level team members, and thank you, 8th-grade team, from the bottom of my heart for helping.
  4. I am officially a vampire. I’ve got someone else’s blood running through my veins! Call me Bill Compton! Edward! Dracula! Bunnicula! Waiittttt. Why are the great vampires all dudes? I need to rectify this, Le-stat! You can address me as Rampire. It has a nice ring to it. (My brother, on the other hand, thinks this equates me with a mosquito, not a vampire, and I’ll need a reinforcement coven to convince him otherwise.)(gif credit)
  5. Never doubt the medicine of a good laugh. Two of my friends came to visit, made me laugh the entire time they were there, and brought me this hysterical card. My bestie from high school sent me these flowers with this funny card. And the Facebook-requested memes and videos brightened my days. Here’s my favorite gif that I received during my stay. (Sorry not sorry for the crass humor. This is hilarious.)

  And while humor helps, what happened to me is no laughing matter. If you suffer from any illness, whether invisible or visible, you are your own best advocate. You are the only person who knows what the pain feels like, and if doctors aren’t listening to you, keep speaking up–even if it feels like nobody is listening to you. 

  ---

  (I respect all doctors, and I am not doctor bashing here, friends. This came down to ineffective communication within a doctor’s office and between doctors’ offices and medical bureaucracy. What happened to me could have been prevented. I’m just relaying how unnervingly unheard I was.) 

   
  Posted in chronic pain, teaching, ulcerative colitis, Uncategorized, writing | 2 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, chronic illness, chronic pain, hospital, hospital stays, humor, ibd, inflammatory bowel disease, invisible illness, poop jokes, teacher, teaching, ulcerative colitis, writing

• A Teacher Poem: Buzz Words

  Posted at 11:17 am by Jeddarae, on January 25, 2020

  

  begin with the end in mind, AKA backward design
  Common Core and 504
  ELL, STEM, and IEP are not absentee (But if they were, you’d have to let them make up the work, for sure.)
  collaborate and debate
  Claim retired, and its replacement is assertion; try teaching that to little persons.

  rigor
  response
  reflection
  rubric
  will point you in the right (write?) direction

  facilitate with fidelity; provide actionable feedback . . . (but don’t call in sick unless you’re having a heart attack)
  Is your summative assessment warm or cold? (Grab a blanket–so we’re told.)
  flip the classroom; personalize learning (to get their brains churning)

  What’s the objective? 
  Does it align with the standards?
  How does the curriculum get them college and career ready?

  Scaffold.
  Differentiate.
  Rigor.
  Peer conversations.
  Rigor.
  Text complexity.

  Rigor.
  Rigor.
  Rigor.

  Build relationships. 
  Rigor.
  One to one.
  Rigor.
  Lexile.
  Rigor. 

  Rigor.
  Rigor.
  Rigor.

  TRIGGER WARNING

  The kids still find it boring.

  And by week’s end, the only buzz words we care about are Tito’s, tequila, and Tanqueray (with honorable mentions to happy hour and chardonnay).

  

  Photo by Daria Shevtsova on Pexels.com

  Posted in poems, poetry, teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 2 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, english teacher, humor, middle school teacher, poems, poems about teaching, poetry, teacher, teaching, teaching middle school, writing

• Mrs. Ram’s Jams New Year’s Resolutions for 2020

  Posted at 12:02 pm by Jeddarae, on January 11, 2020

  

  It’s that time of year! With our holiday travel, the new decade ushered in, and my 37th birthday (yikes!) over, I’ve found a moment to jot down my goals for 2020.

  ---

  1. Stop referring to myself as “Mommy” when conversing with Little Thing. 

  She’s seven. This is going to be a long-overdue, hard habit to break. Considering I’ve mostly conquered my spacing twice after a period at a sentence’s end habit, this resolution is attainable.

  

  image credit

  ---

  2. Spend less time on social media. 

  Last month, I read Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport, which calls for deleting social media apps and points out that when Apple created the iPhone, the company never envisioned it becoming a pocket-sized, distracting mini-computer. While I won’t be deleting Facebook and Instagram, I do agree with his underlying argument. I’m monitoring my activity closely, even deleting distracting Facebook notifications and turning off email notifications.

  

  ---

  3. Manage my stress better.

  A. My ulcerative colitis is barely managed right now. My medicine stopped working, and I’m a week out from an IBD specialist consult with a John Hopkins’ educated gastroenterologist. My UC stresses me out, and stress triggers flare-ups.

  B. I’ve got a new curriculum for one of my classes, and I have two preps. I’m existing like a primitive amoebic blob with mush for brains, crossing my pseudopods, I mean fingers, and hoping that everything works out in the end.

  C. My school district is building a new middle school, relieving overcrowding for my school and a neighboring one. To staff it, they’re taking teachers from both schools. What does this mean for me? Who knows, but it’s freaking me out! No matter what, it’s the last year I’ll be working with some of my coworkers, furthering my anxiety. 

  This all boils down to I’m a nervous wreck, and I need a way to cope. I’ve tried anxiety medicine before, but my fibromyalgia causes me to have exaggerated side effects with lots of medications. (For example, I tried to take half of a low dose muscle relaxer with my UC medicine last weekend, my rheumatologist assured me it would be okay, and I was a wet-noodled narcoleptic the next day.) I’m going to find some books on managing stress and look into therapy.

  

  gif credit

  ---

  What are your 2020 resolutions friends?

   

   

   

  Posted in chronic pain, fibromyalgia, parenting, ulcerative colitis, Uncategorized, writing | 4 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, kids, new year, new year's resolutions, new year's resolutions 2020, parenting, teaching, writing

• A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Guide to Grading Papers at Home

  Posted at 2:16 pm by Jeddarae, on October 19, 2019

  

  Although I manage to grade most student-written essays during school hours, inevitably home grading transpires from time to time. Here’s what my grading process looks like when I do lug home heaps of papers.

  1. Sit at the kitchen table, and empty llama tote bag of dreaded essays.
  2. Shuffle all essays into groups of five, piling them into one tower by alternating stacks perpendicularly.
  3. Grab blue Uniball pen. Fancy pens make grading tolerable. Giggle because the word “Uniball” is funny.
  4. Snap a picture of grading setup, witty teacher caption included, and post it to Insta and Facebook stories.
  5. Realize fifteen minutes has passed. Pick up Uniball. Bust into laughter again. Little Thing hollers, “What’s so funny? Can I see?”
  6. Skim first paper while chuckling. Chuckles dissolve into whimpers of distress because the first essay is ghastly, soul-crushing.
  7. Shuffle the broken paper to stack’s end.
  8. Scan the next five essays without connecting pen to paper, and hyperventilating starts. HOW CAN ALL OF THEM BE PIECES OF POO ON A STICK?????? Question career path and meaning of life. Become convinced of worst teacher on the planet status. Stash those five essays to the back of the pile.
  9. Search for best student writer’s essay. Read it. Faith in humanity is restored.
  10. Glance up and around. Am horrified by the dishes mounded in the sink and clutter-strewn house. Decide to tidy up, clean the toilets, and scrub the master bathroom’s floor with a toothbrush.
  11. Register it’s dinner time, have wasted an entire Saturday afternoon, and cook dinner.
  12. Make husband do dishes in order to get back to grading.
  13. Scroll through Facebook on the ChromeBook for an hour instead with the stack of papers as an audience. Their collective judgment is palpable.
  14. Pick up Uniball. Smirk. 
  15. Trudge through five essays, finally giving feedback.
  16. Decide grading is more fun with wine. Pour a glass.
  17. Down the glass swiftly like a college student shooting a lemon drop.
  18. Grade five more essays in half the time, because wine. Uniball has the time of his life.
  19. Pour another glass, and lose steam quickly after, only grading two more essays. 
  20. Call it a night, and resolve to spend Sunday afternoon at the library grading because Grading. At. Home. Doesn’t. Work.
  21. Tuck a wilted and defeated Uniball into bed, errrr, back into his llama tote bag house.
  22. Decide a blue felt pen is more appropriate for library essay grading. It would be mildly embarrassing to get kicked out for hysterical laughter.

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 1 Comment | Tagged blogging, blogs, english teacher, funny, grading essays, humor, middle school teacher, students, teaching, writing

• A Poem: English Class Will Never Be Baseball

  Posted at 3:40 pm by Jeddarae, on September 21, 2019

  

  English class will never be baseball.

  Cracking open a book can’t compete with the crack of the bat and the crowd’s cheers for you.

  Fumbling through Homer’s The Odyssey will feel more like fumbling a grounder in the bottom of the ninth during a tied game than hitting a homer to win it all.

  Throwing words around with a pen and paper to write an essay will never rival throwing warm-up pitches in the bullpen.

  The thunk of the catcher’s hand pounding his mitt between curveballs and changeups will never sound like “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” nor The Catcher in the Rye.

  Wry puns and satire will never play hardball in your playbook. Three strikes you’re out and triple plays are more important to you than the rule of threes and idioms.

  Sliding into second and shaking hands at the game’s end will never be sliding into the second act of a Shakespeare play.

  And that’s just fine, sluggers, because English class isn’t supposed to be baseball, but the real MVPs and big leaguers value both.

  

  Photo by Matthew T Rader on Pexels.com

   

  Posted in poems, poetry, reading, teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 4 Comments | Tagged baseball, blogging, blogs, english class, english teacher, middle school teacher, poems, poems about teaching, poetry, teaching, teaching boys, teaching middle school, writing

• A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Teaching Tale: Reading Comprehension Fails in The Odyssey

  Posted at 12:23 am by Jeddarae, on September 15, 2019

  

  Currently, I am teaching The Odyssey for the first time in my career (I think. I might have blocked out teaching it like a bad memory; it’s not my favorite text.) As per my curriculum’s instructions, I’ve been working on summarizing, characterization, and conflict with the kids while reading Book One, and this week I assessed those skills using a passage they hadn’t read before. 

  And while most students rocked the summarizing skill portion of the task, some epically misunderstood these lines from the text: 

  But all of the suitors broke into uproar through the shadowed halls,
  all of them lifting prayers to lie beside [Penelope], share her bed,
  until discreet Telemachus took command:

  (A little context might be helpful as well:  Odysseus, the king of Ithaka, is taking an eternity to get home from the Trojan War and people fear him dead. His wife Penelope, a snack, is bedeviled by suitors who have taken up residence in her own home.) 

  Now think like an 8th grader. How would you interpret this with your nearly teenage brain? Let’s look at some student responses. 

  1. “Penelope dies, which leaves the suitors devastated.”
  2. “Penelope’s suitors hope to follow her into her room, but Telemachus does not allow it.”
  3. “The suitors are outraged that Penelope has gone back to her room without them.”
  4. “The suitors are entering Penelope’s room as Telemachus yells at them for destroying his house.”
  5. “The suitors come to ask Penelope if they can sleep next to her . . .”
  6. “The suitors try to get into Penelope’s bed and cause an uproar, but Telemachus stops them.”
  7. “The suitors bombarded Telemachus’s mom by going beside her in her own bed.”

  Y’all. I giggled uncontrollably while grading. Handling questions about why students missed points for these interpretations is going to be brutal. I don’t think a comment like Well, Kayla, you insinuate salacious behavior occurred instead of explaining that individually the suitors wish to marry Penelope will go over well. So please think happy thoughts for me and my sanity when I hand these assignments back. 

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 1 Comment | Tagged blogging, blogs, funny, humor, reading, reading comprehension, students, teaching, writing

• A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Tale: What I Bought Versus What I Got–Llama Dress Edition

  Posted at 9:21 am by Jeddarae, on August 31, 2019

  

  Like any llama loving teacher, I scoured the internet for llama-phernalia for my classroom before summer’s end. I scored a new water bottle, shoulder tote, and sticker decal set. 

  And while my favorite fluffy animal has been incorporated into my teacher wardrobe via a plethora of printed punny shirts, I desperately wanted a llama dress for the first day of school. Now before judging me, I realize a llama dress might be a bit obnoxious on the first day, but the longer I teach, the more I let my crazy flag fly from the get-go. At my school, we’re allowed to wear jeans and T-shirts as rewards, and teachers-a-plenty wore jeans on the first day of school. But, I’m of the staunch opinion that IT’S TOO HOT FOR PANTS in Louisiana in August, particularly when sweating through outdoor recess duty at lunchtime. So imma wear a dress, a llama one at that, thanks. 

  Unfortunately for me, Amazon doesn’t currently offer a llama dress (I’m researching ways to remedy this situation. I mean, how dare they!). Adding one to my already chock full-ama virtual shopping cart wasn’t an option, so venturing out into the non-Amazon, scary Russian roulette interwebs shopping realm was my last resort to fulfilling my dream.

  On meowpinky.com, my eyes grazed this dress, and like any responsible social media user in her mid to late 30s, I immediately screenshot it and polled my Facebook friends as to whether I should purchase it. To no one’s surprise, the answer was yes. I decided on green, even though it was available in many colors, because I wanted to make my new llama friend feel like she was in nature, chomping on hay or grass or whatever llamas eat. (Mental note:  Must make time to research what llamas actually eat.)

  

  I anxiously awaited my new llama dress, but she didn’t arrive by the first day of school. In fact, she didn’t arrive until last week because she journeyed all the way from China, and upon arrival in the U.S., meandered her way from the West Coast to Louisiana like the free-range camelid she is.  

  When she finally arrived, I tore into her packaging with glee and unfurled her to view her full glory. And while she is glorious, she’s not quite the glorious that I was expecting. She looks rather cheap, and I’m quite scandalized by her appearance. She’s honestly gloriously terrible, and I love her even more because of it.

  You see, the person who brought her into being simply printed her outline in black on a giant piece of army green vinyl and then IRONED ON THE ENTIRE PIECE OF ARMY GREEN VINYL, OFF CENTER NO LESS, ONTO AN UNMATCHED MOSS GREEN DRESS.

  

  Her poor pockets resemble two marsupial pouches, she is of the camel family dammit, that look like they have both housed five too many babies. 

   I would wear her to school to parade her around, despite being poorly made (It’s not her fault.), but she’s too short to wear even with leggings. So me showing her off like a proud mama displaying pics of her newborn on Insta, Facebook, and WordPress will have to suffice as her first and last public appearance. 

  I’d love to hear about your online shopping mishaps! 

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 0 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, funny, humor, llama, llamas, shopping gone wrong, teaching, writing

• How I Build Relationships with Students on the First Day of School

  Posted at 2:11 pm by Jeddarae, on August 17, 2019

  

  On the first day of school, I memorize each of my new students’ names by the time they exit my classroom. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. Let me reiterate:  Mrs. Ram Jam, a walking disaster who can’t even remember her own telephone number or her husband’s real name 80 percent of the time (In my defense, he goes by his nickname. If you know my husband, do you even know his real name????), matches every single kid’s countenance to their name correctly within a 75 minute class period on the first day, retaining a 98 percent accuracy the next day–and I teach 90 kids, every day.

  You might be flabbergasted, flummoxed, or impressed by my powers of memorization, but here are three reasons why I make committing their names to mind a priority:

  1. I’m trying to build relationships. It shows the students I care–from day one. It says I don’t know YOU as a person, but I value YOU, even though I don’t know YOU yet. It says I’m here for YOU and I see YOU and I recognize how YOU are an individual, separate from the sea of other faces in this classroom. 
  2. It makes me look like a badass. (Just kidding!) 
  3. I lied. There are no other reasons. See bullet one. 

  Now for the how I do it:

  1. I handwrite all students’ names, emblazing them on my mush-for-brain, and tape their names to their assigned desks.
  2. On the first day, I stand outside my door, student roster clipped to a clipboard, and look at students’ faces while saying their names out loud, confirming their pronunciation.
  3. I call students by name anytime I address them in class.
  4. While students do an icebreaker that requires them to meet everyone, I’m up and talking to them, ensuring I match each name to each face several times. 
  5. Right before class’s end and without looking at their names, I stand in front of the class, go around the room, and say every student’s name correctly–like a badass.
  6. During my off period, I click through our online grading/attendance program, looking at their names and their pictures to reinforce name-to-brain imprinting.

  (Sidebar:  THIS ONLY APPLIES TO STUDENTS’ FIRST NAMES. LAST NAMES TAKE ME WEEKS. BABY STEPS, Y’ALL. BABY. STEPS.)

  While memorizing students’ names on the first day might not be how you start building relationships, I’d love to hear your beginning of the year methods that make you look like the badass teacher that you are.  

  And for those of you who struggle with memorizing students’ names, here’s an oldie but a goodie that I wrote last year:  A Poem (Plus Stage Directions): Why Teachers Can’t Remember Names at the Beginning of the Year.

  Happy new school year!

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 6 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, buildingrelationships, students, teaching, writing

• A Teacher Tale: What’s Your Late Work Policy?

  Posted at 8:45 pm by Jeddarae, on July 26, 2019

  

  As I sit here staring at my syllabus for next year in denial that I’m embarking upon my 14th year of teaching, I grapple with changing my late work policy for the upcoming school year.

  Last year during the first semester, I accepted late participation work for half credit and any late test grade assignments for a letter grade off until the grading period’s end, resulting in a bejeebus load of poo-on-a-stick late work to assess right before grades were due. Post Christmas, I didn’t accept any late participation work and issued one late pass per nine weeks for test grade tasks, allowing students 24 hours to turn in a late assignment for full credit. Once that pass was cashed in though, I didn’t accept work period–unless the student was in danger of failing. 

  If you’re reading this with a parental or administrative eye, you might cringe at my former policy’s harshness, but . . . 

  1. In my classroom, there are nine grades per nine weeks. Typically, students take two tests. I’ll assess them through writing and projects for the other grades. Unfortunately, a hefty number of 8th graders avoid completing complex assessments because it’s time-consuming, hard, and, let’s face it, boring. 
  2. You might decry my policy for admitting my assessments are time-consuming, frustrated with your middle schooler’s homework workload. However, if students are bringing work home from my class, they aren’t using the time that I give them in class wisely. Ninety-five percent of the time they are provided AMPLE time to complete work in class. 
  3. If students hand in an essay or project four weeks after it’s due, we’ve moved on. The material that was covered isn’t freshly emblazoned in their brain juices. More than likely what they end up handing in doesn’t follow directions, demonstrate mastery, or is low caliber work. 
  4. Keeping track of late work and grading it makes Mrs. Ram Jam even more insane than she already is. My brain has a hard time reshifting to grading assignments from weeks ago, compounding a near palpable increase in my own time anxiety. My students’ lack of time management makes my own time anxiety worse–crazy, right? 
  5. Kids need to be taught accountability and time management skills. Unfinished work needs a consequence. 

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

  With all that being said, I’m leaning towards enacting my second-semester policy for the entire school year.

  Please feel free to share your late work policies or what your district/school suggests to do and the reasoning behind it. I’m always up for suggestions. And enjoy your last week or two of summer, teachers!  

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 5 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, english teacher, late work, students, teacher, teaching, writing

• An English Teacher Tale: Guess What? Cold Read Tests Don’t Work and How I’ve Gotten It So Wrong

  Posted at 10:38 am by Jeddarae, on June 29, 2019

  

  Invigorated and overwhelmed, I’m freshly nestled home post three day teacher leader conference in New Orleans. While attending, I listened to 2018 National Teacher of the Year Mandy Manning discuss teaching fearLESS (teaching with less fear). I learned more about growth mindset, the importance of recruiting teachers, and cultural competency. But mostly my chosen sessions focused on ELA curriculum shifts, particularly text complexity. 

  By midafternoon on conference day two, two things became glaringly clear: 

  1. The New Orleans Convention Center is a dementor; it sucked my soul arid. (I’m not knocking the conference AT ALL; it rocked. The convention center itself is cavernous and scary, all dim backlighting and conference tables billowing in death-black robe tablecloths. The stale air permeating the facility was akin to a dementor’s dreaded kiss, leaving me dehydrated and lifeless by day’s end.)
  2. According to experts, I’ve been testing and teaching my subject matter the wrong way for at least 8 years; if I’ve been doing it wrong, chances are you’ve been doing it wrong too. And I’m a great teacher–and chances are you are too. (I’m not saying I’m doing everything wrong.)

  About 8 years ago, Louisiana ELA educators started making the shift to assessing kids with “cold read” (readings that kids hadn’t seen before) tests, the idea being that kids should be able to use the standards that are being taught in the classroom and apply them to any text that’s given to them, essentially moving away from testing kids on the content that we’ve taught them and focusing on mastery of standards. This is more reflective of the way our end of the year state tests work too (Students are given multiple pieces of complex text they’ve never encountered before, answer multiple choice questions about those texts, and then write essays about those texts–all strictly timed.). Disclaimer–this is a MAJOR oversimplification of the process, and I may have botched it. Please bear in mind my recently escaped dementor’s kiss. I’m awaiting Dumbledore to appear with some chocolate for me, and then I’ll be back hunting horcruxes, errrrrr, I mean existing like a rational muggle in no time. 

  For a few years now, I’ve been lamenting to my fellow coworkers, my mom, willing ears:

  1. How can you give “cold” literature to kids, timed no less, and expect them to comprehend and analyze it? They could be given anything on those tests! For example, I could be teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and focusing on the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Depression. How does that content help them read a cold read task about the Cold War on a benchmark or standardized test? It doesn’t. I can’t prepare kids’ background knowledge on every single topic/culture/time period/etc. that they encounter. 
  2. Vocabulary is my biggest battle. How can I prepare my kids for every single word that they encounter on a cold read test? Yeah, context clues might help, and they know how to use context clues, but YOU CAN’T FIGURE OUT EVERY SINGLE WORD FROM CONTEXT. And yeah there are roots, prefixes, affixes and other tricks, but again, it’s no panacea. Furthermore, what about the words they encounter in test questions and answer choices where there’s virtually no context? It’s mind-boggling, disorienting even, to think about how limiting this can be for a child to be successful when it comes to reading comprehension, and if they don’t understand what they read, they sure as heck can’t analyze it.

  So why highlight these two points and how does it relate to me teaching and testing the wrong way (and quite possibly you too)? Louisiana is currently piloting a program where . . . wait for it  . . . the state test aligns to English teachers’ actual content in their classroom . . . because research shows that:

  1. Teaching solely standard based for ELA doesn’t work. How many of you have been told to develop your lessons around a standard and subsequently gone scrambling around for content that lends itself to teaching said standard while trying to find interrelated texts? [Mrs. Ram Jam raises her hand.] Sidebar–I do rely heavily on my district’s curriculum, but I supplement.
  2. Giving struggling students texts to read on their “reading level” actually does more harm than good because they’re not grappling with more complicated syntax and vocabulary. Say you’re teaching about the Holocaust at the 8th grade level and decide to give your struggling readers Number the Stars while handing out The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to your more accelerated readers, focusing on teaching the same standards in both texts over the course of reading. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most English teachers have done this, myself included, but I have moved away from doing this–whether in relation to big pieces of literature or different leveled exit tickets. But look at this chart using ACT data:(image credit) What can you surmise? Hey, how well people do on the ACT has to do with their ability to read complex texts. Also, I learned that it doesn’t matter if students have mastery of skills necessarily. I know if my students have mastered a standard, but if students can’t read a specific complex text independently they’re unable to answer test questions correctly. (Both bullet points 1 and 2’s ideas were discussed in Tim Shanahan’s Ed Talk: “Educational Equity and the Importance of Complex Text.”) This ties in directly with my next bullet.
  3. Background knowledge is key for success on tackling complex texts. So Recht and Leslie, researchers, did this study known as the baseball experiment. Over-simplistic premise: Let’s give kids a comprehension test about baseball. Look at this:(image credit) Guess what? The kids, no matter their reading ability, who had little prior knowledge of baseball did way worse on the test than kids of any reading ability who were more familiar with baseball. Earth shattering, isn’t it? P.S. this study has been around since 1988, and this is my first time seeing it. I have a master’s degree in curriculum–WHY HAVEN’T I SEEN IT BEFORE? If we learned about it in grad school, I don’t remember it.

  Y’all might have been privy to this info before, and while my biggest struggles as a teacher are directly reflected in my main takeaways from the conference, I feel validated in my criticisms of the way we test children, but heartbrokenly irate that we’ve gotten some teaching and testing methods so wrong for almost a decade. For at least this next year, if not two or three, my students are still going to take standardized tests with cold read passages that are not reflective of what my students, your children, are capable of achieving. 

  But change is on the horizon. Thank goodness. To read more about Louisiana’s Innovative Assessment pilot click here.  

  Teachable Moment: While I know this post is rambly, all over the place, full of glue words and not written on a particularly high reading level, keep in mind what I’ve been I’ve been telling you. How many of you aren’t teachers who read this post? What teacher jargon did you struggle with? Did you know what a “cold read” task was before reading this? Or even what mastery of a standard entails? Do you know what the standards are? Do you know how to determine what makes a complex text? Do you know what ELA stands for? Chances are if you aren’t an English teacher or even a teacher in general you had to struggle to make meaning with what I was talking about. Then on top of that I made Harry Potter allusions throughout this post. If you’ve never read Harry Potter or seen the movies, are you going to get all of those references? Or is it going to go right over your head? An allusion missed means there’s missing meaning in a text. On that note, do you know what allusion means? Did you figure out what it means based on the context? Or did you just fly by it and register it as a word you don’t know? Think about all the different ways you had to make meaning behind my thoughts, my word choice, the way I built my sentences, the way I structured this post. How many different ways can understanding be hindered? (This idea is taken from Natalie Wexler’s Ed Talk: “The Importance of Background Knowledge” and applied to my own writing.)

  And that friends is what our children are trying to do every single day when they’re in my classroom with readings they encounter and why it’s a shame to ask them on a standardized test to read texts they’re completely unfamiliar with. 

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized | 4 Comments | Tagged blogging, cold read tests, standardized tests, students, teaching

• Search

  Search for:

• Recent Posts

  • Top Twenty Books 2022 December 31, 2022
  • A Teacher Poem: Oh, Her June 12, 2022
  • Mini Book Reviews February 2022 March 6, 2022
  • Mini Book Reviews January 2022 February 6, 2022
  • Twenty Popular Books That I Dislike January 16, 2022
  • Top Twenty Books 2021 January 1, 2022
  • A Poem: Pressure October 9, 2021
  • The Books I Read in August and September and How I Rated Them October 3, 2021

• Subscribe to Blog via Email

  Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

  Email Address:

  Subscribe

  Join 371 other subscribers
• Follow Mrs. Ram's Jams on WordPress.com