“I hate this class!” Jessica* said frowning while looking down at her assignment. Those were the words that sparked the first grade mutiny. Like any good leader I had to deal with this quickly and decisively. I was a student teacher and this was my first grade ESL (English as a second language) class. I already had experience teaching so the cooperating teacher split the class in two and left me in charge of seven students all of whom had their attention now intently fixed on me. My next step was crucial, my every word and facial expression was being meticulously studied by those young but misleadingly sharp minds. What is he going to do now? How is he going to handle this? Is this teacher just a chump? I knew these questions were all running through their minds.

To be fair it is important to know that I was working these kids really hard. In the group my cooperating teacher was dealing with she had no choice but to religiously adhere to the curriculum. This means lots of coloring, drawing, gluing things together; really “educational” exercises from which they learned those crucial skills that will help them succeed in life. So while my students are looking at that “strenuous learning” going on a few feet away they were meticulously copying verses from poems by Alfred Lloyd Tennyson and J.R.R. Tolkien until their fingers got numb. They also liked to write four words in one line so I began insisting that one line in the poem had to be copied on exactly one line and if they went over they would have to erase the whole line and start again. In two days I had their paper wasting habit corrected. After they wrote the verses several times for practice, I would test them by having them write the verses out flawlessly from dictation. One mistake regarding the spelling or my oral vocabulary test and they were back to writing the verses five times each. Maybe I was naïve but, considering the working conditions, I should have seen this mutiny coming.

“Why do you hate this class, Jessica?” I asked calmly. “In P.S. 99 we got to color and draw and cut pictures, here we work a lot.” She responded without looking at me. “So you want to color and draw and cut out shapes?” asked I, a little too devilishly. She nodded her head. So I snatched away the notebook from in front of her and said, “Okay I’ll let you draw and color if you want, that’s not a problem. But first, can you spell ‘hear’ with your ear?” So she got the courage to look at me and said, “That’s easy! It’s h-e-a-r.” “Good, can you spell ‘beneath’?” I inquired. “Yeah,” she said, “b-e-n-e-a-t-h.” “Great!” I responded, still grinning quite mischievously. So then I called over Derrick from the other group and asked him to spell hear with your ear he gave me a big “I don’t know” shrug, and when I asked him to spell beneath he gave me a repeat performance. I thanked him for his time and returned to face my little mutineer and said, “See, because you work hard, you learn a lot. If you want to color and draw you won’t learn anything. Now why don’t you go and sit over there in that corner and I will get you crayons and scissors.” She relented with an exasperated exhale, rolled her eyes, looked away and stretched her arm out to me to take back the notebook. All of this was executed with an air of silent shame.

Victory was mine! But just to rub it in I asked the other students if they liked working hard and learning a lot to which they all responded enthusiastically and positively. I turned to her with a big victory smirk. I had won this round decisively. I had pit my wits against that of a first grader and won. Did I feel satisfied? Very! But who wouldn’t?

It is important to understand the moral of the story though. Here we have a first grade girl who understands the value of hard work and education. Once I had demonstrated her superiority to those who were just playing around and linked it to her rigorous training regimen she chose for herself the course of action that was in her best interests though it was the more difficult one. All this was done without any sort of coercion or threat that could translate into resentment towards education in general. It is also important to note that I gave her a choice and that had she still chosen to color and draw I would have let her do so but not without forgetting to update her on the excellence of my young scholars and how much they were learning and how far she was falling behind them. I am confident that given the choice most children will make the right one so long as they come to understand the benefits and rewards of what they are learning.

And what were the fruits of their labor? Well, when I had finished my fifteen weeks as a student teacher the slowest learner amongst them had memorized six lines of poetry and could write four more lines from dictation. The fastest learner had memorized twelve lines and could do eight more from dictation. The students had naturally memorized parts of the poem without me requiring or asking them to. They would also spontaneously start singing it while on line. Take into account that I had very limited time with these students in the course of the fifteen weeks I spent maybe an average of 40 minutes a day after subtracting the time it takes to pick them up, get them settled, take out their books, and of course subtracting time for field trips, assemblies and fire drills.

What model did I use to teach them, you ask? What techniques did I implement with them, you ask? Stay tuned to themanoffewwords.com for more good stuff in the future.

*note that names of people and places changed.

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