Hollendale: We work for Kids!

  This is the motto that we have at our summer school.

Hollendale is a pretty interesting place. It is an outdoor campus- so the school consists of 10-12 buildings all connected by outdoor breezeways. (You can get away with this when the temperature doesn't drop below 40 degrees.) The buildings themselves are in pretty rough condition. Already this summer we had our afternoon session canceled because the pipes broke and there was no water in the school. Up north we have snow days, in Hollendale they have water days because this is such a regular occurrence. The buildings themselves have cockroaches running around. Luckily, I haven't had any in my room, but you will see them squished in the hallways. However, Hollendale is really intent on having technology in the classroom. Every classroom that I've observed in the middle school and high school has a Smart Board. Hollendale- they work for kids. Do kids need perfect desks or shiny new buildings to learn? Nope. Do they need some sort of visual aid for classes- YES. 100% of my students are visual learners because their reading and writing skills are so behind that the way they take in information is by seeing it. Hearing information is fine, but no one has taught them the note-taking skills they need to retain it. Having a smart board allows me to put the text on the board and show them how to take notes, annotate, and read with emphasis. I use videos and music to give them access to information they may not have seen before.
While I still struggle with getting the pens to work all the time, or how to use the highlighting function, it's a pretty neat opportunity to have this technology in my classroom.

  My students are wonderful. They are not disrespectful (except for the one, isolated incident), they work hard, and they are so smart. The problem is that no one has ever taught them how to convey how smart they are using writing or how to gain more knowledge by reading. Can they read out loud? Yes. wonderfully. Can they tell me a summary of a sentence they just read so fluently? Nope. Here's the breakdown in their learning. They do not know how to take the information in the words they just read and synthesize it into comprehension. Usually in their English classes, a teacher reads the whole text, explains what just happened in the text (which they quickly learn to memorize), and gives them some sort of activity to do. The problem occurs when they aren't asked to make their own conclusions about the text. They go off what the teacher has told them and use that information to get by without actually learning to comprehend the text themselves.

So, you can imagine their frustration when I walk in, tell them to read the text with me, and ask them to write their thoughts about the text in their own words. They shut down. They don't know where to begin.

This is what is scary to me- these are people who will have a stake in their future. They have needs, wants, dreams. But, they were not taught the skills they need to advocate for themselves to get those things. How can you be an informed voter if you cannot read campaign information? How can you be aware of what is happening in your community, state, country, or world if you cannot comprehend information from news articles? How will you advocate for yourself if you cannot write a structured sentence, let alone paragraph or essay?

My students have amazing insight once they understand what the text is saying. When reading the short story "Thank You M'am" by Langston Hughes, they were able to pull out information about the indirect characterization of Mrs. Jones and Roger that I hadn't even thought of. But they were only able to share these thoughts after we had spent the majority of the class working on comprehension. Here's an example of the word maps we did-

I will be teaching these students another 2 weeks. It's a short time to cram in a ton of information. So, my focus is on giving them skills that they will use whenever they read. Summarizing, comprehension, retaining and reviewing literature. Analysis will come naturally after that- but they need to learn comprehension skills first.