Weekly Reflection 2

This week I went to class on Tuesday and Friday. Essentially, I got to see the students begin a narrative, and then I got to see the end result. It was incredible what some of them had accomplished. There was one student, however, who only had two paragraphs of loosely related material. He seemed so worried about typing everything correctly, the font, the spacing, and basically everything but the actual paper. I sat down with him and we talked about what he wanted to write. And I typed for him to speed this up. I know that I was attempting the "co-authoring" strategy that I read about last semester, but I fear that typing for a student might be helping them too much. This student had also not finished an essay out of the three he was assigned, so I also just wanted him to be able to turn something in. Success reinforces success, but when is scaffolding enabling? This student had good ideas and he dictated everything to me, he just wasn't able to get it down on paper himself. On a test he's not going to have someone to dictate to, so is it harmful to give him that scaffolding now? Apart from that, a lot of the students had really strong narratives to turn in. Even the students that seemed frustrated at the beginning of the week were able to turn in good work. For the students who had finished their essay, the teacher assigned a book cover to work on. I loved this idea because it engaged the students who love to draw. Many of the students struggled to come up with creative titles but Emma and I tried to get them past "My Morning Routine." A lot of the students seemed far more interested in writing a narrative about their own lives than writing an informative piece on cats and dogs. Initially I was surprised to hear that BHL had outstanding writing scores, but after working with these kids it really shows. I hate to admit it, but I'm starting to like 7th grade.