No one is confused! Everything is fine!
The first two and a half weeks of school, I was convinced that everything was smooth sailing in my English 9 class.
We were speeding through our memoir/personal narrative unit, reading and analyzing a story and an author’s craft move every two days. Wednesday was for vocab and sentence study. We sometimes used breakout rooms for very focused things like writing imagery, and those were going well, too. At the end of our 10 minute work time, groups had slides to present that turned out well. And! There were about 6 kids giving me facial expressions of understanding, smiles and thumbs up, and typing in the chat.
Engagement?! What magic!
“My goodness!” I thought to myself. “Everything is fine! No one is confused!”
Enter our dialogue lesson.
As English teachers know, there are so many things to teach about dialogue. Its purpose, what it adds to characterization and tone, how to punctuate it, how it needs a variation of tags and formatting to keep the eye interested… the list goes on. Perhaps naively, I taught only 3 major rules for punctuating dialogue and, after a successful group activity with punctuation, assigned an individual activity of the same caliber.
Well, friends, tragedy struck.
Never in my life — even as a teacher of 6th graders — have I seen dialogue punctuated in such bizarre ways by completely misinterpreted (or even made-up!) rules. When I looked further into who did what, I realized that those 6 kids’ feedback I was relying on were the high-flyers in the class, carrying the whole group on their wave of understanding. I was completely moving on and assuming understanding after hearing from less than half of the class!
After sobbing on the rug for a few minutes, I pulled myself together, looked into my own eyes (through a mirror, obviously), and had a very stern talk with me.
“You gotta. Slow. Down,” I punctuated each word with a finger jab at my disheveled visage. “You gotta MAKE them ask questions! Everything is NOT fine, and people NEED to be confused!”
Since this fateful day, we have slowed our pace. I have leaned into the joy of spinning my mom’s records and having writing time together. Every day, I open up the chat and narrate my students’(more than 6 of them now, slowly gaining momentum as we go) anecdotes to the class. Once in a while, more kids will turn their cameras as they wave goodbye, or show me their pet in a small group room.
More and more, I’m listening. I’m giving confusion time to be aired, and time to be ironed out with humor and humility. This whole virtual experience is littered with new confusions for ALL of us (perhaps myself most of all?), and creating a space where confusion is okay is the best thing I can do both for me and my students.
