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May 31, 2006

The Shower

“Ms. Seiler, here’s my homework.” It was Bessie, one of my 7th graders. She stood there with a folded piece of paper in her outstretched hand.

It was only the second day of my teaching career. It was 7:10 AM and I was taking a shower in the girl’s locker room because I had no running water at my house. The school and the laundromat were the only places in town with running water. Many of the teachers showered at school, but none of us ever expected to be doing so with our students.

Well, I quickly decided to wrap a towel around my naked self to avoid any more embarrassment. Bessie seemed to see nothing wrong with catching her teacher perform her morning bathing ritual. I, on the other hand, had never taken a class in college that covered this sort of situation.

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Posted by Gabi at 11:09 AM | | Comments (3)

March 10, 2006

One-Eyed Cousin

My first year of teaching was in a tiny village in Northwestern Alaska. It included half a day of 7th grade and three periods of high school English. One of those classes was Technical Writing and Oral Communications – affectionately known as TWOC (but pronounced like "talk" with a Jewish NYC accent). The intent of the class was to provide students with the more practical aspects of writing: filling out applications, writing resumes, writing instructions, public speaking, etc.

An obvious unit for TWOC would need to be one on giving and following written instructions. So I asked my students to partner up and write out a set of instructions to something they knew how to do well. I also asked them to be able to go through the motions of following the directions exactly as they were written. I thought I was being pretty clever by allowing the students to select the activity they wanted to describe.

It was during this unit that I became fully aware of the importance of clarity in my own instructions. Shortly after we began this unit, I realized that I had failed to give one crucially important instruction: “Everything you teach the class must be legal.”

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Posted by Gabi at 6:31 PM | | Comments (2)