The Great Typo Hunt_ Two Friends Changing the World, One Correction at a Time - Jeff Deck [112]
“My turn,” the teacher said loudly and clearly, raising her hand in front of her as if she had called on herself. “Eyes on me.” That’s where the eyes went; it was almost like a game. She gave them a simple definition of disappear. This she read from the script she cradled in an arm while walking among the students, leading the children through their phonics-based reading lesson. Benjamin had found us a school that used Direct Instruction (DI), a teaching model with a scripted curriculum. The teacher’s authority is explicit, the children respond when signaled, and feedback is both positive and immediate.
With a “your turn” the teacher let them know they’d be expected to answer again. Before each response, the teacher let them know exactly what they were supposed to do, paused for a beat, then said “Get ready!” It wasn’t the “get ready” of “ready, set, Go!” but the wind-up of the ball being pitched, and the kids knocked it out of the park: “D-I-S-A-P-P-E-A-R.” Well, I’d thought they’d hit it out of the park, but the teacher heard some hesitation and had them spell it again.
In my own school days, I’d answered questions about twice an hour. In this hour-and-a-half Reading Mastery lesson, these kids easily surpassed one hundred responses each. As they moved to the next word list, the teacher began asking the class to identify each word’s first syllable before reading the whole words. They cruised along until they hit remove; an mmm slipped into one quadrant of the classroom. The teacher immediately took back over with “my turn” to explain that the first syllable of remove is just re.
Once the class had made it through all the words, the teacher switched to calling on kids by name to review them. “Good sounding it out, Arlene,” the teacher said. “Good sticking with it, Bret.” “Nice smooth reading, Cindy.” She’d been inserting comments like these all along, albeit not as often, when they were reading things together. “Good knowing these hard words,” she’d told them. To close this part of the lesson, the teacher mentioned that there’d been one word they’d need to return to tomorrow. Could anyone guess what their one “goodbye word” was? More than two-thirds of the kids raised their hands. “Yes, Don?” Don thought monthly, which hadn’t sounded crisp even on the class’s second try, was the culprit. Sure enough, monthly went up onto the board under drank, a previous goodbye word.
Pointing fingers went to the beginning of a story. “I like how Emily’s pointing. I like how Franklin’s pointing.” Each child read three sentences aloud. Their story was no absurdly repetitive narrative like See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! Oh! Oh! We can run and run and run! These stories actually made sense (even if you took the pictures away). Ms. McKinnon, our administrator tour guide, explained that the writers did try to keep the text unpredictable. After a sentence about two people, a next sentence might start with They, but it starts with That instead. Thus the reader must be actually reading and not guessing from context. We were treated to the tale of a beagle who had lost a little weight so he could bound higher up into the air. We watched the boy who got to read a punch line pause to mug for everyone as the class cracked up.
Ms. McKinnon directed our attention to the teacher and her book. She took quick notes of how many errors the class made. She’d said they would read this story making “less than nine errors,” but she counted even the hesitations as errors, so I didn’t think they were going to make it. We had to move on, though.
As we left the room, Benjamin asked, “Those were first graders?” We visited on September 15, so the school year had only begun three weeks earlier. I tried to remember when I’d first heard the word syllable.
The kindergarten class down the hall had been divided into three groups.