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"I have to do this for every sentence?" N. said, his forehead wrinkled. While I miss seeing whole faces, the emotions people can communicate through the space between their nose bridges and hairlines is impressive.
"You do," I said. "Every sentence."
I was teaching N. a protocol for using talk to text. While I recognize the value of speaking thoughts and ideas, I also see the disasters of unplanned and garbled output. If he gets good at one sentence at a time, I'd open it up to two or three, but I wasn't going to tell him that yet.
He couldn't see me smile as he repeated his next sentence twice, then a third time with punctuation, and then record it.
He continued the process, and the next few sentences came out perfectly. When he played his piece back for himself, he was smiling, too.
"It makes sense," he said.
"Yeah," I said. I laughed out loud, so there was no missing my smile for N. "It makes a lot of sense."
Yeah, it's funny when kids have the aha that sometimes teachers have a reason for what they ask kids to do. I like this protocol. I have several kids using talk to text. I may not be able to retrain them this year...but next year.
ReplyDeleteYour title is just perfect for this post. Sometimes it takes a while but when it finally makes sense, it makes you smile on the inside and the outside!
ReplyDeleteSense is critical. It often cannot be rushed or skipped over! The power of learning something new and doing the practice WELL!
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this! Helping students through protocols like this can be so difficult and time consuming, but they're so important. I applaud your student for sticking with it!
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