I read an article in Change English this weekend about a student in a class who was interesting in challenging the teacher's script for the lesson with her own questions designed to derail the discussion. The author of the piece noted that the girl was quite good at doing this. She raised reasonable and legitimate objections to the teacher's or the lesson's assertions. The teacher engaged her questions and was able to allow them to lead to significant learning for both the young girl and her classmates.
In my eleventh grade classes there are some boys who regularly ask questions that are subtle attempts to derail the lesson. They are also adept at doing so, and point out inconsistencies in what I'm saying or what the text is presenting, or what the task is demanding. These boys are smart, dynamic, and engaged. They are able to ask such questions because they're paying attention. These are some of the highest value students in the class, both in terms of my development as a teacher, and as quality control officers for the rest of the class. If they weren't there, the others would get a less complete product. They catalyse lots of unforeseen learning.
However, their questions are hard to field. I used to just shut them down all the time. "Not the time, A. Ask me after class." But when A. asked me during a discussion of a passage of Macbeth what the difference is between ' and ", I took a few moments to answer the question. I didn't really think about responding, I just did. Looking back on it later, I thought, "That question had nothing to do with the discussion at the time. Should I have engaged it or told him to ask me later?" I concluded that it was probably good to take a few minutes, because the class might not otherwise have ever learned the difference between the two marks. I'm not planning to include that point in any future lesson. And everyone was paying absolutely full attention when I was describing the difference in their use, probably because it wasn't part of my original lesson, but they saw that I deemed it important enough to cover together.
What was strange was that later that same class, A. raised his hand during another intense moment of discussion and asked the meanings of all the thou/thee/thy variations. I completely shut it down, saying "A., let's stick to the question we're pursuing right now. That's not relevant to our understanding of this part." Anyone could have legitimately argued that the understanding of what thou/thy/thee means is far more relevant to their comprehension of the text than their understanding of the difference between ' and ". I think by the time he asked the second question I had run out of extra minutes I was willing to dedicate to anything outside my lesson plan.
Today in the Macbeth discussion, what I had planned on being a very quick conversation about the distinction between saying someone is "mentally unstable" which some had claimed for Macbeth in last week's writing, and "emotionally unstable", turned into a much longer conversation about whether Macbeth is crazy or not. Does it make you crazy just to think about murdering someone? Is using "crazy talk" the same as "being crazy"? With each passing comment I was concerned that the rest of my lesson was getting squeezed, and wondered where to cut it off. But each comment was closely enough tied to Macbeth that I didn't want to close it down. Eventually we moved on, and even though the activity surrounding Macbeth's dagger monologue was not as lengthy as I hoped it would be, I don't think I would do things differently the next time around.
I'm still struggling to know how to get more voices from this class involved. Perhaps it's unrealistic, but when there are 17 people in the class, (several absent today) I want to hear from everyone. At least i know that during pair work they're all talking to each other about the text.
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