Hello again,

I'm overwhelmed by your various kindnesses.  Several of you have asked for
more information about my class and school.  Here is everything you want to
know and MORE! I teach middle school Language Arts (and some years medieval
European and Asian history) in a small private school smack dab in the middle
of Silicon Valley.  I have two 55-minute periods a day with each class of my
sixth graders next year, and our administrator is trying to block them for
me.  I integrate literature, vocab study, grammar, and writing into one
grand, glorious Language Arts clump - er, melange.

My students are mostly of European or Asian descent, and even those for whom
English is a second language are fluent and skilled speakers and writers of
English.  Most of the parents are professionals (engineers, tech writers,
teachers, etc.)  I have almost total control of the curriculum, although I
tie what I do to the California standards as much as I can.

When I first came here, I inherited a class set of ragged Wariner's.  I went
through any number of standard texts, and I now have Write Source 2000 as a
handbook, but no grammar text.  I have 15 PC's in my classroom that my
husband and I built (average class size 13 last year).  We have Internet
access, and I have rented a domain name so my kids can publish online.  (Some
of our work is at http://gretchenle.com - be kind!)

Some of my observations (sorry - this is purely anecdotal - no studies at all
to back it up!):

Sixth graders need help learning to think well before they can write well.
Much of what I do as an LA teacher at the beginning of the year deals with
structure and organization - how does this chunk of words relate to this
chunk?  Does this really support what you are trying to prove?  Why did you
put in/leave out this area?  Why is your character doing this here? I use
lots of graphic organizers.

I have been criticized for not copyediting their papers for traditional
grammar errors.  I try to identify one or two major errors I see in the class
as a whole and concentrate on those in each set of papers.  Too much
red/green/teacher ink intimidates more than it teaches, so I am selective.

I teach a minilesson, conference, and help kids look up references in the
handbook during workshop.

My frustration is this:
Because of the nature of the errors, what I'm teaching seems rather random to
me.  (I'm interested in what Connie said about her 22 lessons - that's the
sort of thing that "feels" better to me.  Maybe I'm just backsliding into the
patterns of my youth when, come hell or high water, we marched through the
text, one chapter at a time.)  I try to conference with each child as often
as possible because that's where I see the learning take place, but I never
seem to have enough time.

Sixth graders are also terrible peer editors! I haven't found a way to help
them focus on specifics.  I had hoped that they could help each other, but
those who are intuitively good at editing edit, and those who aren't scrawl
"good paper - nice job" on the editing sheets.  I don't see growth here.

The result of this is that when my kids leave, I see enormous growth in their
writing - the structure, flow, transitions, word choice, etc. are all much
improved, but the mechanics, to coin a phrase, still suck.  They never saw a
comma splice they didn't like.  Tense shifts 'r us . . . . etc., etc., etc.

Okay - so what am I doing wrong?  Or at least, can you give me some
perspective on what to add to make it better?  My kids do fine on
standardized tests (their parents all speak flawless standard English - I'm
not trying to take credit!), so that's not the problem.  I just want to
figure this out!

If you are still with me (pant, pant!), here's how I try to make the writing
authentic.  My favorite unit last year was mythology.  We read the myths from
_Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek World by Bernard Eveslin, took an
online class during which we wrote emails to the gods/goddesses (and got
answers!), wrote poetry, rap songs, interviews with the gods, newspaper
articles, campaign speeches, monologues, and stories.  (The unit is on the
website.)  We posted those to the webpage.  Next we studied Greek theater,
wrote three act plays in groups, submitted scripts, made masks and costumes,
and performed the plays for the younger kids.  The grammar instruction came
during the creative writing and the script writing in the form of minilessons
as points came up during the writing.

I'm sorry to take up so much bandwidth.  Your kindness in offering to help is
most welcome.  I'm a survivor of the NCTE listserv's grammar and 5 paragraph
essay wars, so I'm bloody, but so far unbowed.  Thanks for any help you can
give me.  I need a framework and a structure to hang this stuff on, and I
don't know quite where to start.

Gretchen (madly fanning her exhausted audience back to consciousness)
[log in to unmask]


**********************
Texts:
Summer reading:  Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament
The Watsons Go to Birmingham - Curtis
Beowulf - Nye
Heroes, Gods, and Monsters of the Greek World - Eveslin
The Giver - Lowry
Poetry workshop
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Twain
The Daybook of Critical Thinking and Writing (may not be exact title) -
Claggett
Vocabulary from Classical Roots (our kids take Latin as the foreign lang -
next year I'm using Janet Allen's methods a lot more than I did this year)
WriteSource 2000
Image Grammar - Noden
Sentence Combining - Strong (selected parts)
READ Magazines
Mythos Online Classroom - mythology unit on the Internet