What really came through to me in both of this week’s readings was the need for teachers to be more empathetic–the way a friend (or really any caring individual) acts. A friend gets to know you. As a corollary to that, a friend knows what your interests are and how you work best, and probably what you could be better at too. But a friend would never be rude and callous enough to just tell you what you’re bad at. If they did, they wouldn’t be your friend very long. Instead, knowing you and acknowledging your shortcomings, I think most friends usually try to help you slowly improve in your less-than-shining areas by helping you along and focusing on what you already have. Think about the first time you went to a school dance and you didn’t know how to dance and so you embarrassed yourself. Did your dance-savvy friend ridicule you? Make you feel lesser? No. Of course not. That’s not how friends behave. Friends work together. They’re in the same boat, both working for mutual benefit.

But all too often that’s just how teachers behave. Maybe not with such harsh terms as ridicule, but doesn’t the result often feel the same? Think back to the teachers you hated, and why. Did they roll their eyes when you asked a stupid question, almost as if you were an annoying underling who just couldn’t seem to get it right?

In my experience, the teachers who got the most respect from their students–and the ones who got the most hard, sincere work out of their students–were the ones who treated their students like equals and like people they sincerely cared about. And what’s most interesting to me is that it seems like if a teacher starts from this point, only good things can follow. It seemed to me that most of the points in Dunn’s article essentially stemmed out an attempt to be more compassionate towards disabled students; to empathize with them and see their perspectives and insights as valuable, the way a friend would.

Now of course this is overly simplistic (we clearly shouldn’t be too involved in students’ personal lives), but I just wanted to expand upon an insight Mitchell made because I think it’s a useful way of re-imagining the role of a teacher in the classroom and I think it’s a really useful perspective to start from.

At the beginning of this course we talked about who considered themselves readers and writers. I said I was a reader, but not a writer. And yet I write everyday! It seems a little silly in some ways. But part of what we talked about that first class was intention when you read and write, that being purposeful and thoughtful were what ‘made it count.’ I don’t completely agree with that statement when it comes to reading, but I think it’s huge in writing. I wrote papers for school and notes to myself, but nothing that mattered much to me. I was focused much more on the ideas I was writing about than using writing as a process to find meaning.

Now, halfway through the semester, I would call myself a writer (albeit, not a particularly good one). The reason for this change is that I’ve really been forced to use many different styles of writing quite regularly. I have to write blog posts every class for two of my courses. I never know what I could possibly have to say until I sit down and slowly find myself responding. I have to write a one to two page analysis paper every week for my religion class and every two weeks I get a new creative assignment to slave over in my english class. Then I have the typical larger papers due around midterms and finals! What I’m constantly finding is that writing is incredibly difficult for me. And what I’ve found most true–particularly in the english class–is that writing is how I find meaning. I can’t possibly find what I’m grasping at until I hit upon a word that seems to capture something that I didn’t even know I was trying to say. And that just leads to more words that take me somewhere–often somewhere completely different from where I thought I thought I might go.

My point is that the chapters in our textbook this week really resonated with me because they stressed how the process of writing–which can really only be taught by someone who participates in the writing process regularly–is really what creates meaning. That means meaning in the content of what’s being said, but also in the concepts and presentations used to express it. I think that’s what makes writing such a good tool in the classroom. It just naturally evokes meaning of all kinds that we can always use to examine and learn.

I was honestly underwhelmed by the chapter we read on building vocabulary. Allen made a lot of great points, especially those about helping kids learn new words by drawing on their prior knowledge with her example of the word-of-the-day activity and strategies for committing words to permanent memory with the word walls. What struck me was how worksheet and text-based the learning remained, particularly since this chapter came after one about very creative forms of YA Lit. Written words need only be decoded in books and on assignments for a relatively small amount of a student’s day. The rest of the time they’re talking and listening (in school and out).

I think one of the best ways to make new vocabulary words more meaningful to kids is to have them speak them. That way the words can literally jump off the page and acquire meaning and value outside of academic settings. Most importantly, they are more readily experimented with when spoken. I remember a teacher I had in elementary school who literally transformed a dull vocab workbook into an amazingly fun and interactive word-meaning experiment. After the usual copying definitions, we did a section of the workbook that involved matching each vocab word to a list of potential synonyms and other words that had to do with its meaning or connotation. But the best part was that the teacher didn’t ask us to do this part on paper, she asked us to argue (amongst ourselves and with her) for why each of the possible words was or wasn’t related to the meaning of the vocab word. It was great because it gave us a chance to use the new words in several spoken sentences (not just one on a worksheet) and really clarify their exact meanings for our whole class. I also remember that when I was a kid I learned the most new words from listening to adults say them and trying my best to mimic their usage of them. It just seemed like my teacher’s approach mirrored real life–using the words by trial and error until their meanings in multiple contexts became clear. My tutoring at VAST has greatly reinforced this belief because I so often hit stumbling blocks with kids who don’t want to change vocab sentences that don’t make sense once they’ve written them down. To them the assignment is done, immutable.

I am positive there is still a need for written vocab building work, but I’m also positive there is a much bigger place for spoken vocabulary improvements and innovations besides just listening to audiobooks.