Summer School and Cold Calling

I am having a blast teaching English II and III at summer school. I won't lie; most mornings I am still a little tired- late night lesson planning and poor eating habits have definitely left me desiring a few more hours of sleep when that alarm goes off at 5:45 a.m. But, somehow, the pastoral morning bus ride along Highway 7 has proved so restorative; it allows me to re-center myself for the day's teaching and activities. By the time I step off the bus at Holly Springs, I almost always feel energetic and ready to teach, or to deal with whatever might arise, be it a computer outage, white bread for breakfast, or other unpredictable miscellanea -(shoes with no heel must be bought ASAP).

Teaching has proved to be a wonderful high. Although I question having us construct these insanely formal lesson plans, ultimately I see the correlation between the time and attention the teacher puts in beforehand and student understanding. Feeling that the class is with you on a particular subject, reading to them from one of my favorite short stories, 'A Good Man is Hard to Find' by Flannery O'Connor, crashing and burning with respect to issuing specific instructions: I can honestly say that I have learned something from every single lesson I've taught so far, and most of these highs or lows were reflected in the quality and thought behind my printed plan. And although I may slightly resent the nitpicking aspect of writing plans, I can say that I agree with their pedagogical value for beginning teachers (and their effect on student achievement).

Today, during a lesson on personification, I tried out the 'cold-calling' questioning technique on my unsuspecting class. Actually, I am an enormous fan of cold-calling because I think it provides a fairer way of informally assessing student understanding in the context of an entire class. Even as a neophyte teacher, I am already noticing that my method of calling on students has developed into the classic dichotomy I recognize from my student days: either I call on the actively engaged students or those who are clearly in a different universe. There is some thought that teachers who cold call are simply mean and are trying to catch the delinquents who don't pay attention, but now that I am a teacher myself (ha, I wonder how many times I will write that this year?), I realize that, when done for the right reasons, it can be very effective.

Let me be clear. I would never cold call to be mean, and I know very few people who would. Obviously, cold calling is ideal for involving more people in the discussion, which in turn becomes more interesting as more opinions/examples are offered and mixed into the lesson. Students who would never say anything of their own accord often have the chance to surprise everyone. The teacher can take a misguided comment or even a non-response and turn it into another question, another thought up for grabs. Particularly In English classes, I see the opinion and creative questions as ideal for cold calling because, in a sense, everyone can be right. In the fall, however, when the right/wrong aspect of Latin grammar kicks in, cold calling might prove too embarassing/choppy for frequent use. You either know the verb form or you don't.

Cold calling kept my lesson interesting, and it got more students involved, with the result I definitely had a better grasp on what the class as a whole understood about personification. Minus the classic punitive bent to it, I think cold calling is one of the most effective questioning strategies, and I definitely plan on incorporating it in my classroom.