Why Kids Whine

I started teaching several sections of freshman humanities; my classes are mixed honors, which means I have students from a wide range of abilities and backgrounds. At this point in their academic careers (and lives, for that matter), these students have had very few opportunities to interact with adults as adults. Most of their interactions with adults have probably been with their parents.

In class this past week, I had an interesting moment with a student who had missed an assignment deadline. He asked if he could complete the assignment late, and I told him no; his voice immediately jumped an octave, and he said "But whyyyyy...". It was the most transparent, stereotypical whining voice I had heard in a long time, and I can imagine it working with parents.

I asked him if he was aware that his voice had changed, and he didn't seem to be; though I was initially taken aback by his tactic, I quickly realized that this is how he has learned to interact with adults. This is what works for him.

I stood my ground, and we chatted for a bit about how to ask for an extension in an adult way and how talking to teachers isn't the same as talking to parents. It was an interesting glimpse into the mind of my student and the importance of teaching life and communication skills as well as specific academic content.

- O+B

Some Important Lessons on Worksheet Design

As novice teachers, many of us will be creating much of our curriculum from scratch. The big picture of unit design can be tough enough, but I am learning that even small things like worksheets for class activities present important problems.

I designed a worksheet to guide in-class reading of Romeo and Juliet (act 3, scene 1, the fight scene between Mercutio, Tybalt, and Romeo). The worksheet focused the students on certain motifs, character motivations, and assigning/determining blame for the events of the scene. I felt the content of the worksheet was solid, and my instructions were clear to me. My class (ninth grade mixed-honors) did okay with the worksheet, but could've done much better. Here are the suggestions my mentoring teacher made:

1. Keep directions accessible to all students. Expanding their vocabulary is important, but if you do it in the directions of an assignment, you are stacking cognitive tasks on top of one another, and risking that the students become overwhelmed.

2. Use engaging language when writing directions. In addition to using a manageable vocabulary, avoid dry, academic language; try to write in an engaging way, just as you would speak in an engaging way.

3. Most importantly, provide examples of what you expect their work to look like. In the first worksheet, I asked for lines as examples of the motif discussed; the responses ranged from line numbers, to a few words from a line, to an entire line word for word. Which was right? I don't know; this was another benefit of writing example answers - it forced me to think more clearly about what I wanted students to be doing.

- O+B