Advising Undergrads And Teaching Elementary Kids

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ceme online terbaikA former student of mine and my wife’s is currently teaching English in Spain. (She studied Spanish in high school with Amy and took American Literature with me at UConn, and double-majored in English and Spanish). Although she was incredibly excited about the opportunity to live and teach in Spain, she was at times driven to madness by the labyrinthine administrative procedures she had to go through to get herself abroad. At one point I told her that, once she arrived, she’d love living abroad and love teaching, but that most likely she was going to continue to encounter bureaucratic challenges at every turn. The key, I said, was finding people with the knowledge and the willingness to help her get things done.

I thought of this today as the advising period at UConn came to an end and all I’m left with are a few stragglers among my many advisees. Oddly enough, in the last couple days I have had three advisees come to me with what they assumed were impossible situations. One dual degree student in English and Special Education assumed she would have to abandon the English degree because she only had one advanced study course to take but was faced with the scheduling conflict of student teaching. Another dual degree student in English and Secondary Education assumed she’d have to abandon the English degree because she had two general education classes and three English classes left entering her senior year. A third had completed her undergraduate degrees in English and Elementary Education but wanted to take a grammar class that would be the last course she’d need to pursue certification in secondary as well. But she really needed to take the class at the graduate level so it would count as one of her graduate electives for her MA in Education. Like the others, she assumed she would not be able to do this.

I did a little investigation into each situation. I talked to the undergraduate academic advisor, the head of graduate English, the associate department head, the professor who teaches the grammar course, and a couple other individuals, and we figured out solutions for each young woman that would allow her to accomplish what she wanted. It involved independent studies, course conversions, course substitutions, summer classes, and some courses that double-dip (meaning they fulfill more than one requirement).

I don’t take credit for these solutions. I did not know how to resolve the challenges each case presented, but I was confident that solutions existed, and I knew who to ask. Invariably, the students were amazed that we were able to devise ways to allow them to complete their degrees in the ways they desired.

It’s geeky to admit, but I find it exciting to be able to help students in these ways. It’s one of the things I really enjoy about advising.

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Meanwhile, as I attempt to help groom these undergraduates to become public school teachers, I am watching my own kids learn to read and write. This year Cormac is having a great time in third grade, and he loves his teacher. He said she never yells, she smiles a lot, and she makes learning fun. He also said she has cool clothes. He reads like crazy, and always has, but recently he’s also begun to write more in school. His latest piece is a story about a Tyrannosaurus Rex whose teeth were “the color of paper reflecting the glare of the sun,” and whose breath “smelled suspiciously like burgers.” This piece came out of a CMT prompt exercise that the teacher then embedded into a workshop where the class studied text features using a mentor text, and were asked to take their timed prompt response and revise it into a longer piece using the text features they learned about in the mentor text, and incorporating some sasaran vocabulary words from a word bank—a nice integration of test prep into a larger, more sound set of practices.

Then there’s my daughter, who’s still in preschool. She just completed her first journal of dictated stories. Her first entry reads, “She was a girl that was bad. She destroyed the whole town. She had rocket ship power.” A little disturbing, but she ends with a sweet entry about herself and her best girlfriend, Mary. Elsa wrote, “This is the earth. It has continents and countries. Mary and I live there. There is a sun, and a sky that is blue. And a flower that is magenta. The sun and the flower center are orange, and the grass is green.”