I have always been a player with words, trying to expand meanings and applications beyond the obvious. Even
back in high school, I knew that Chemistry was not close to the “exact science”
Mr. Leistinger tried so hard to make me believe it was. I was assured of my
belief every time I carefully followed the experiment’s directions and ended up
with some indescribable residue rather than the nifty puff of smoke produced by
my classmates’ efforts to manage the positive and negative valences of the
elements. The prescribed measure of that hard science was beyond me; the
metaphysical nature of the idea of “chemistry” was not. In fact, the longer I was in a classroom, the more I was convinced that "real" chemistry is that
immeasurable connection that occurs between/among living beings who share an
activity. Case in point: my efforts to teach high school Juniors about
prepositions.
Brief
prologue: that year the Florida Legislature realized (Accepted? Faced up to the
fact?) that, though the state’s FCAT scores were higher than expected, the
students’ SAT Essay scores demonstrated a marked decline in writing skills. The
legislators’ response was to include grammar skills in the FCAT test, thus,
condemning 10th graders all over the state to lower scores because
the Language Arts focus for the past decade has been on reading to the almost total exclusion of writing. (Enough of my mini-rant.) Many of my Juniors were caught
in this sinkhole, so each month I focused writing skills on one grammar
specific. In November, prepositions were the target of choice.
Right
after Halloween, the students took a pre-test on prepositions. 84% failed. Our
goal was clear. We worked and worked on preposition recognition and use. After
a couple of weeks of groaning acquiescence to the rote material, I gave the
post-test because classwork and homework indicated an increase in preposition
knowledge. Alas, 63% still failed. An improvement but not the numbers I wanted.
The disparaging faces that greeted the news of the scores drove me to experiment
with a different learning approach - I took my kids back to kindergarten.
I
handed each student a sheet of paper with 20 squirrels printed on it, 20 bits
of string, a pair of scissors, and crayons. The students cut out and colored
the squirrels, inscribing one preposition on each squirrel and attaching a
string bit. Then I rolled into the room a 7’ ficus I had borrowed from the
Media Center and instructed the kids to attach the squirrels to the tree as
prescribed by the preposition on each squirrel.
23
teenagers stormed that poor tree. The first few squirrels were placed with no
problems. Then the fun began as the elements of my experiment began to
mix. Football tight-end Charles
was insistent that tennis-player Alex could not hang his “by” squirrel on the
branch where he (Charles) had already hung his “with” squirrel as the leaves
were “with” each other on the branch. Alex’s retort was that the leaves were
“by each other.” This scenario was echoed when Chloe tried to put her “over”
squirrel in the vicinity of Maria’s “above” one; Chloe eventually surrendered
to Maria’s argument that “Heaven is above us, not over us.” My favorite was Jon and Bradley’s contretemps over which was deeper,
“beneath” or “under.” Bradley was victorious when Charles interrupted them to
point out that when he’s tackled he’s “beneath a player but under a pile of
bodies.”
The
lesson took over the class. 48 minutes after the initial bell rang, the kids
were still contesting preposition placement. The next door teacher came around
the all to see what was going on because my students were laughing so much that
hers did not want to watch Ivanhoe.
The
final post-test was November 21; 100% passed. Almost two dozen teenagers had
changed their elemental knowledge of preposition use because of the chemistry
inherent in play. If Mr. Leistinger could have seen my class that day, he might
have acknowledged that I had finally gotten an experiment right and that "chemistry" is more than valences and the Periodic Table.
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