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Two Stars and a Moon

Walt,

The grand experiment of teaching six and seven year olds continues for this old man….

I recently discovered something that experienced primary teachers already know, and that is this: A star, drawn on the top of a paper, is as good as elaborate, concrete rewards, like certificates, trophies, food treats, or any other of the endless incentives teachers have come up with over the years.

When the novelty of the “star” thing seemed to be wearing out recently, I just added another star, and exclaimed to a student, “This is really good work. This is two star work.” and with that I made a big gesture out of drawing another star.

When the two stars lost their “glitter”, I magnanimously added a moon to the two stars to the paper Andrew brought me.

He proudly waved his paper to the rest of the class and announced, “Look, I got two stars and moon on mine!”

I am eventually going to have to come up with another heavenly body or two, for extra pizzazz, but for now the stellar/lunar gambit continues to work well.

Lara came up to me this morning holding a piece of paper.
”Look!” she said with great excitement in her voice, “Look what I wrote!”

This is what I saw: poomylloH

I knew a couple of the girls had been playing “school”, and they were copying words from the wall, even though they couldn’t read them. They always make a big deal of wanting me to look at the words they have written. It is very important to them that I look. Sometimes I can even read a word or two. When I can’t read the word, I start looking around the walls to see from where they might have copied it.

Lara’s word stumped me. I’m the one who puts the stuff on the wall, so I knew there wasn’t anything like that up there to copy.

”Where did you get this word?” I asked.

”From here,” she said, pointing at her chest.
Printed across her pink top was the word “Hollywood”, surrounded by just the sort of glamorous designs you might expect surrounding that word. Uh oh, a speechless moment arriving, I thought.

”Watch,” she said, as she pulled the bottom of her t-shirt out with one hand, looked down, and pointed with her finger as she spelled out the word, as she saw it from her vantage point (correctly going from left to right, by the way, as she had been trained, which was, from the up side down perspective, also backwards).

An interesting thing (maybe to a teacher only) is she turned the “y” the right way. All the other letters work, no matter how you turn them. There’s a name for that, but I don’t know what it is. The “d” and “w” become other letters when they are turned this way or that, but they still work as real letters. Evidently she realized the “Y” should not stand on its head and so turned it over, but she didn’t bother to examine what the others had become. She even preserved the capital “H”, which was now at the end of the word.

I had to give her credit though, after all, she did a good job of copying. That’s about all they can do at this stage. I wanted to come up with a good “Hollywood” quip, but I couldn’t think of one. Still can’t, so I paid her the ultimate compliment...... yep, two stars and a moon.

So Lara went away happy with her accomplishment while I scribbled her word into my PDA so I wouldn’t forget it, and I am further bolstered in my “practical relativism” stand in the educational motivation debate between the “intrinsic value of learning” camp and the shameless bribery adherents. (This is just a highfalutin way of saying I do whatever works.)

Jim

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