Looking back on my educational career, I have fond memories of my grade six teacher, and in particular one ELA unit. Up until that point, I had been included in the ‘read a novel, write something, move on’ club. Each chapter was read painfully going around the room, while my eyes glazed over, my head going elsewhere to deal with the monstrosity that was being committed within the classroom walls. Or at least, that is what I thought. It wasn’t that I didn’t like to read, per se, but rather had established that I was interested in a very particular genre (generally speaking WW2 historical fiction or autobiographies) and could navigate myself around the public library quite successfully.
We came in one day, and he announced to us that he was going to read to us. I was suspicious. Why was he reading to us? Was the book going to be terrible? Oh no. He was holding up a book with an animal on the front. I hated books with animals. I wanted to hear about people! I wanted to finish reading that Kit Pearson novel I had in my backpack! The last thing I wanted was to be bored out of my mind- yet again- by a novel that didn’t apply to me or interest me.
Instead of launching into (what I imagined would be) a long droning lesson on something boring, he simply opened up the book to the first chapter and started reading. I’m a visual person, but I love being read to. I always have. There is something so powerful about reading read a story, and being read a story well. In this case, my teacher paused after he had gotten us interested and handed out copies of the book so that we could follow along if we wanted to.
We were encouraged to listen. If listening to us meant to sit back and close our eyes, we were more than welcome to. The caveat however, was that we had to respond to chapters (usually this meant that we’d respond to 2-3 chapters at a time) in a journal. We were to write a response and to include a picture about what we were thinking about. Generally the practice seemed to stop us from falling asleep so I assumed that it was doing its job.
Quickly this became one of my favourite parts of the day. We talked about the characters, we wrote about the characters. We sat back and were able to enjoy what we were listening to. My classroom was taken away from its location on the military base, away from the idea of (most of our parents) away at sea, away from the kids on the playground, from the interschool rivalry between the kids in French immersion and us. I remember talking with other people in the classroom and feeling how strange it was that we ALL seemed to be enjoying this book. We coloured, and thought, and talked about how we were experiencing the book.
Taking our work and gluing it onto construction paper, making title pages, and comic strips explaining our favourite chapter or two of the book and including it in the book didn’t seem like work to me. We were able to explain our reasoning any way we wanted to, using poetry, written work, photographs and charts. I was having fun thinking about this book, because my opinions weren’t wrong, they were just different.
Taking my reflection a little bit further, I feel like the discussions were quite guided by my teacher, but still really open to the opinions of the class. Our book reports got put up on the board outside our classroom to share with the rest of the school. I remember being pretty proud of the ‘adult’ like work that we had produced- look how grown up we were! Writing proper reports!
The approach that I think my teacher took was more of an inquiry-based approach. We were guided to think about certain areas of chapters and encouraged to think about and reflect on themes, but ultimately it was up to us as individuals and as a class to get our own knowledge out of this book. At the same time, we were building off of our prior knowledge- thinking about what was being said, writing and drawing in our journals, and discussing with our classmates. We had opinions that we used to interpret the material and that was reflected in our journals.
Speaking for myself, I was in a place where I was exploring a new concept (animals in books! And they talked!) but I was doing so from a place I understood- bringing in emotions and my real life experiences. My understanding of Jean Piaget’s theory of learning (as from Language Arts: Content and Teaching Strategies 5th Edition) backs this up- we were learning new material, but using our previously gained knowledge to make it easier to accommodate the new material, and to include it into what we already knew or understood.
After a little bit of googling, I re-discovered the title of the book we read: The Incident at Hawks Hill. I sort of want to go back and re-read it, just to see how I interpret it now as an ‘adult.’ Thinking back about this activity really makes me realize what a good teacher he was. I’m really grateful for his calm insight, his patience in walking me through long division over and over and over again, and his book choice amongst other things. Not that he was perfect, but that we were able to try things outside of our own personal ‘worlds’. And for me, that is one of the signs of a good ELA teacher.
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