Foot: Firestone Assignment

            The assignment in class got me thinking about our tutoring experience and multiple modalities. At the time I could not come up with anything that would fit in that category. It did not help that I only met with my student three times and I even went the extra day. Things were a little confused, and so I got to work with two other girls as well. Now that I have had some time to think, I have came up with a few instances that multiple modality was brought into the tutoring experience.

            One of the girls that I tutored got her phone out during the session to call home and ask her folks if she could stay for the after school tutoring. I don’t know Firestone’s policy on cell phones, but I was kind have squirming in my seat because I was afraid that she would get in trouble. No one even saw her, so I didn’t have to worry about that. Another instance was when I was working with my student and for this blog post I will call her Sherry. One of the writing prompts asked about a time when the student had learned more outside of class than during the actual lesson. She related a time when her softball coach taught her about force. He told the athletes that the more force they put into throwing the ball against the wall, the harder it would bounce back. This instruction outside of the classroom made her understand about force more than her teacher instructing the lesson.

            The one-on-one part of the tutoring was very successful. I think one thing that the students needed was that one-on-one attention. It was not the most fun for them and many times my student just looked at me and I could read her eyes, saying she didn’t want to write anymore or just wanted a break. While I do think they learned a great deal, I think there are other ways that they could learn the same material.

            One problem that my student had was with identifying certain words. This is something that they will encounter in their daily lives forever. I think that looking at a magazine or a newspaper that interested them more would have made them more intrigued. When you are reading about something that you are interested in, you are more likely to figure out the missing part. Perhaps if I got a Sports Illustrated magazine and found passages with relatively hard words, then she would want to figure out the definitions. Her interest in sports could relate to a lot of other instructional approaches. Sherry really enjoyed writing and spent time outside of class doing it. What I think was hard for her was to come up with ideas about some of the topics. Some of them were quotes by famous inventors or philosophers and they did not seem to resonate well with Sherry. I believe that if she had the chance to write about her love of softball or how much participating in a sport teaches you, then she wouldn’t have a problem with writing the essay.

            Another problem that reoccurred was telling the tone of the author of a passage. Almost every time this question came up Sherry was debating between two answers. This is something that a book might not come right out and say. The student may need to analyze the text to come up with the author’s attitude toward it. A great way to implement tone in a lesson would be to use movies. Students are almost always jumping at the sound of seeing a movie. You could watch a movie in a classroom and have certain students focus on different characters and identify that characters attitude throughout the whole thing. Then students could share with the rest of the class what they came up with.

            Practicing for the Ohio Graduation Test is no way fun. It’s necessary, but most of the information is dry and leaves the students wanting to take a nap. I know of a good grammar website that allows you to take a quiz and then tell you if it’s correct and why or why not. We used this website in one of my classes and it was a lot easier for me to concentrate with it than listening to the professor speak the whole time. A final instructional approach I could use in my classroom that includes multiple modalities would be to allow students to pick among a list of television shows and have them watch that show for homework. Then the students would have to complete a list of general questions that you formed. This would teach the students that they can’t just watch the beginning of the show or the end and expect to be able to answer all of the questions. This is the same way with reading a selection. Students need to read the whole thing and often they might need to read it a second time. If you teach students that they can miss something the first time they watched it and let them know that you might have to watch the whole thing to be able to make inferences, they might be able to align that more with a book and the same processes that go along with it.

            As I said above, the OGT is no fun. There is clearly a link missing between teaching students and assessing them. I can honestly say that half of the things they ask on there you don’t use again. You can be a genius, but not a good test taker and thus what the OGT results says defines you being able to graduate. This is unheard of, yet it’s the way for American high schoolers. As we continue to try to get the people in power to see our side of these assessments, we will have to continue to try to prepare students for them. Teaching to the test is one of the lamest excuses I have heard. There were classes in high school where my teachers didn’t even bring up the topic of the OGT except only to say that we would be taking it in the future. Those teachers taught better without mentioning it than the ones that just try to cram it in your brain. I would think that the men in charge would realize that we continue to give and take these assessments, yet our country is still behind others. Is there not something wrong with that? Perhaps we need a new way to assess students!

            As you can probably tell, this is a very frustrating topic. It’s not that I don’t want to keep students accountable, but that the American way is not fair. I wish I could get it through to people that have not spent time in a classroom or taken these tests themselves that it’s not helping our country. Until that time comes, I would gladly use multi-modal literacies in my classroom to help prepare for the standardized tests. I would be willing to use any of the ideas I mentioned above that I could have used with my tutoring student in my own classroom. Newspapers, magazines, movies, and televisions shows, if used in the correct manner could be great tools instead of a test packet.