Questioning Technique

OK, I think I am backing off on that whole last post. I am still committed to getting my kids as much education as possible but I am also trying to do it in the most engaging possible way. It is in that way that I used a questioning technique to gauge my fairly aggressive approach to teaching.

There are so many things these kids need to know about the world. They come from bad backgrounds. Most of my kids are over 15. One told me he sold drugs. The vast majorities aren’t getting the parental attention they deserve. They have role models that make me cringe, rappers and athletes whose behavior is often abhorrent. They need to hear something else.

I want them to hear optimism. I want them to hear things that apply to their lives. I want them to learn something about their history, which they seem to be stunningly ignorant of. I also want them to read and write well so that they can out in the world and make something of themselves. It turns out that I can do both at the same time. It may be the case that I have to do both at the same time for either goal to be accomplished.

As a person of color, I have so much more leeway to talk to these kids about race and class and poverty than the majority of teachers in the program that despite their best intentions don’t understand the sting of racism because they never experienced it. I have to talk about the world these kids live in because it seems that very few people are willing to. If I don’t talk about this stuff and give them a positive, optimistic message at the end, who will?

In response to this situation and exploiting the previously stated advantage, I’ve attempted to become a teaching idea machine. I’ve already played rap music in class to introduce ideas (with some success, especially after other teachers in my group gave me ideas to make it better), created extended metaphors between writing structure and a basketball team (not so hot, others could do it better), and attempted to get content that interests them. So far I have been getting better and better at the last one. I may have peaked this week, when I finally got over myself and talked about race and poverty, flat out, through literature and got their attention more than at any other point I have taught them.

Jesse Jackson (as much as he sickens me) gave speeches to the 1984 and 1988 Democratic National Conventions about the plight of the people at the bottom, ones that look quite similar to them. So yesterday I worked through those two speeches with my class. I used to talk about rhyme, repetition, word use, and more importantly to them, its message. THE CLASS ATE IT UP. It was the first time a student complimented my choice of content. James Baldwin wrote about the destructive nature of racism. I worked through one of his writings with the class talking about the exact same things. Although less successful than Jackson, they got the message and hopefully learned some more writing elements. One of the other teachers in my group read Maya Angelou, giving them rich poetry with a message to teach them about rhyme structure.

OK, so the point of this post was to talk about a questioning technique I used. Today, as we talked about James Baldwin, I used cold calling. Since my class has six people, I made multiple index cards for each student and then drew them at random, calling out questions as we were reading. I think it was fairly effective. It allowed me to keep the pace of the class where I wanted it and prevented long, painful silences between me asking a question and somebody volunteering to answer it.

I also gave out index cards to the students at the end of class, asking them to write three questions or comments about the reading and my teaching of it. I found it to be an effective way of gauging comprehension. In this case, all but one of the kids understood the meaning of the reading and enjoyed it, an indicator that I am still engaging them with this content. I also got enough information that will enable me to refine my style of teaching for future classes to maximize comprehension.

I really want to get better at teaching. But I strongly suspect that as long as I am putting forward good content that they are far more likely to walk away with some new knowledge. I will keep asking my students for comments at least once a week, ask for more outside observation, and keep finding things that my students need to hear and will help them both learn English and to survive in the world.

I mean, my class won’t be focused on race or poverty come fall semester. I have much bigger concerns, like keeping control of the room. There will be political things here and there but there is far more to learn. My class will be focused on interesting readings by interesting authors, stuff that the kids will actually want to read. I will attempt to assign engaging papers. So there, I hope to get them to the state standards by being consistently interesting. That is my approach thus far and I will stick to it until either it fails (as perhaps indicated by the question/comment cards) or something better comes along.