FOOT: Firestone

 My student’s biggest weakness was vocabulary and literature comprehension. It’s very common to have vocabulary problems in high school, in fact it is the number one noticed problem among students in high school, but my student’s problem was paralyzing.  I have never seen someone give up on a story or article after running into only one word they did not know, but this is the exact problem I witnessed. No matter what or where the word was within the piece of literature, if she didn’t know it, the piece didn’t get read. I attempted to teach her how to read between the lines and look at the context clues and nothing seemed to work. We tried different reading strategies, like sticky notes, highlighting and annotating, again with little results in understanding. It was not until I realized what her biggest strength was that we were able to make some progress on this issue. An issue I am sure will completely isolate her from any type of literature and from any passing grade on her reading OGT, maybe even other subjects that require analyzing. This absolutely petrified me for her, and I knew I had to do something to help her prepare for the test that could keep her from graduating.

            My student loves music. Even the songs with words she doesn’t know in them.  There is a song by Kanye West out that uses a form of the word aristocratic,  aristocracy, which is word my student became paralyzed by in one of our tutoring sessions. When I heard her singing along to this song on her mp3 player one day I asked what the song meant. She said it was about people who were really high in society, socially, which is a very close description of the word aristocratic. When I asked her how she knew that she said something to the effect of Kanye is always talking about people who have money in the song and what they buy with it, money is power and is what everyone wants, so he must be talking about someone high up in society. This led me to help her use that definition to find aristocracy's definition. She essentially read the context clues around the word in the song and figured out the definition of the word accordingly. After this instance of enlightenment both for her and me we began turning most of the OGT passages into songs or stories so she could relate to them and she successfully demonstrated the knowledge to answer most of the questions about the passage correctly. Her biggest strength is her ability to transpose literature from one form to another in order to understand it. She is a very fluent reader and enjoys the more creative styles of writing, such as poetry; she just had not been given the tools to make things she couldn’t understand into activities or forms she could understand. If she learns how to look for the same clues in literature, other than poetry and music, using the same tools she will succeed in school, but a teacher is going to have to tap into her musicality in order to even get her interested in the material.

            I think this is the case for many students nowadays. They just don’t see the point of understanding the material we give them, or the tests they must take. This is the challenge we face as teachers when trying to prepare students for a test that could change their grade or even their life. We have to make things important and we have to do some of the creative thinking for them. By presenting methods of literature analysis in another form, such as the example I gave with my student, we make them think differently and approach tests differently. This can be used in the classroom for anything, even if it’s not test preparation.

            I plan to use many of these methods in my classroom quite a bit. There is a teacher at Firestone that I observed last semester who was very good at utilizing multi-modal literature. She used music videos, movies and music to help her students prepare for a text or analyze it. Then there is the program the whole school uses to check students’ writing for plagiarism. It is an amazing piece of technology that helps keep students honest. All these things in the classroom will expose students to media and help them connect it to the literature and connect the ways they analyze and read all forms. Some things we have learned in class could also be useful. If there is a Facebook page or Twitter page set up for the students they could easily ask questions and make comments regarding the test at hand. The teacher could even post little sneak peeks or practice questions on the page, giving the students who utilize the technology good practice for the test.

            The only problems I see with using this type of literature in the classroom are the legalities surrounding what material we use and the ratings surrounding the materials and the time spent on material outside of what tests require students read. Along with time spent on possibly useless, at least for standardized testing, material, there exists a problem with the deletion of materials that may be covered on tests in order to teach more multi-modal lessons. There has to be a connection between using media and teaching necessary information. Also you must give students information in both forms, testing form and multi-modal forms. If they think the test will help them like you have in class with media compared to or paired with literature and analysis, they will go into the test already behind. And if they have a personality like my student this may make them instantly give up. Also if they are not taught the language and form of the test, they will not be prepared for it. You have to make everything equally important. Unfortunately our school systems are very heavily based in testing. Yes we want our students to be diverse readers of all literature, but the fact remains that they must pass tests to pass through, graduate and possibly attend college. Even if we do not like the tests, they are not changing anytime soon. Finally, there is a flaw in the tests. They are not at all multi-modal. I can’t remember ever seeing a test ask about a literary work that is not a play, poem, story or essay. What about the literature we see everyday, television, movies and music? There must be a way to test the students’ knowledge of interpretation on these forms. I can’t say I have any ideas now on what that may be but with some thought and a lot of minds there can be a way.

            Overall I believe test preparation can be easily paired with multi-modal literature, it is simply a lot of cautionary work on the teacher’s part, much like young adult literature or graphic novels. I have seen many forms of media inclusion in the classroom and have utilized it myself in test preparation. This form of teaching allows the teacher to know their students and teach them on another level. That is the most important way to get students engaged today, we need to utilize this form.