I had an early start today. I was invited to attend Mrs. Dearly's staff meeting in regards to Writing. Basically, they voiced out concerns and questions regarding the State's new standards in Writing. The WASL, which "died" last year, is now being replaced by another test called the Measurement of Student Progress for grades 3-8. Rather than assessing the student's knowledge and academic skill, this test assess the student's PROGRESS in reading, writing, math, and science. It seems -- to me -- that every teacher is going to make re-adjustments to their curricula; this is what the meeting was about.
I felt honored to be part of Mrs. Dearly's meeting. I got to see the inside scoop of how each teacher think at different levels of teaching. K-5 Roosevelt Elementary school teachers were accounted for at this meeting, including Mrs. Fin the school principal. The ideas and expressions presented in this particular meeting were quite interesting. They used terms that I've never heard of (as of yet) like "web" (no...not www. or a spider's web), "Writing Maps", "Prewrites", and other writing-lingo.
What I found interesting about this meeting was when Mrs. Dearly talked about a book that she read by Ralph Fletcher, called "Boy Writers". There has been studies done in the past 20 years that boys' writing skills are declining due to a number of reasons. There are a few interesting conclusions that the book made about this research; but there was one that Mrs. Dearly touched base on: because of the high percentage of women-teachers in classrooms, curricula is female-based.
It seems that teachers aren't conscious enough to consider both genders when teaching. For example, when I was in high school, I read a lot of Robert Frost poems, did a haiku, and studied Shakespeare (sounds familiar? lol...my daughter loves Shakespeare, see one of my previous chapters). If I can remember correctly, most of the boys in my class groaned or shook their legs with impatience everytime we studied those readings. Boys, naturally, aren't interested in that crap!
When I volunteered at my son's school yesterday, the first thing I saw written on the board was (a writing exercise sample): "My soft cat likes to jump over a rainbow." Too girly? That was written by Mrs. Windell -- female teacher. The class were to write their own sentences about an imaginary pet, describe him/her, and what it likes to do. I would have to attest to the fact that the boys did struggle to find something to write about. If I had known what I learned today at Mrs. Dearly's meeting, I would have had devised a different direction with the boys in Mrs. Windell's class, but using the same lesson (I would never, ever, over step my boundaries over another teacher's lesson!)
There was one boy (Windell's class) who drew cars and trees and a "motion" that went with the car. I asked what his imaginary pet was (that was the topic). He told me that he's invisible and that he likes to run with the car. BUT he used the word "soft". He couldn't think of another descriptive word. It's tough to think of the "right" word when teacher used the word "soft" in her sample and didn't help any when the girls in his group were saying words such as "cuddly", "cottony", or "tickly".
Mrs. Dearly emphasized how we -- as teachers should be more aware about what we're teaching and be more considerate when we model for both genders.
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