Friday, March 28, 2008

Someone remind me of this

... when I'm all cranky and hating my job in the near future:

Two of my students got a 30 on the Reading portion of the recent practice ACT. Two 30s! I focus way too much on the English portion of the test, so I didn't want to take any of the credit for their Reading scores. So today I asked if they wanted to make a short presentation to the class about how they were able to do so well. For extra credit.

"Sure, I'll do it," the boy said, "but all I really did was follow your advice."

"Me too," the girl said. "Your strategy really helped."

"Really?" I said. Really! That's incredible, I thought. But ... what strategy were they talking about? I had no idea what I might have told them, so I asked, "Which strategy are you talking about?"

"OPP," he said.

"Yeah," she agreed. "Order of personal preference."

"Before starting on the test, I did what you said," the boy continued. "I read the first sentence of each passage. I decided which one was most interesting, which one was least interesting, and I worked in order."

I said, "Really? So you got down with OPP?" Wow, they listened. And it worked.

"I started with the prose fiction, that was the easiest," the boy said, then asked the girl, "How about you?"

"I don't remember. I just know that the strategy works."

1 comment:

teacherman said...

I'm still not necessarily taking the credit for their success, except for this: Sometimes the best thing a teacher can do is make students believe ... in themselves, in something. The strategy itself isn't what makes their score jump by six or seven points. But sitting down with a plan in mind helps keep them stay focused and calm. And I'm hoping that if these two spread the word, others will realize they too can succeed ...