The shape of the Snow White Story

Snow white starts off as a princess with a stepmother. Gets chased out of the castle by a huntsman contracted to kill her. Finds a cottage in the woods, where she makes seven new friends. Eats poisoned apple and dies. Kissed by a prince and lives happily ever after!

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Back in March I wrote about how geeky my family is, after we visited Parson Weems’ house. For teachinghistory.org I thought more about what it means as a teacher to visit historical location such as this one.

The best part of this story is that I sent off the post along with a few pictures I had taken during our visit. The wonderful folks at teachinghistory.org did a bit of searching for better pictures of Parson Weems’ house. They found some fabulous ones on flickr and contacted the photographer. As it turns out, those pictures were taken by my husband. He was quite amused to receive an email explaining who they were and why they wanted the pictures. Fortunately, he gave permission.

Thinking about thinking has been a mild passion of mine for the past couple of years. It began when I had the opportunity to learn about Derek Cabrera’s work with the Patterns of Thinking. I’ve written about it before and continue to think about it in planning and teaching.

One of the things Derek often talks about is the need to focus on the content we are teaching AND the way students are thinking about that content. It seems he is not alone in this sentiment:

Helping my students learn about their own thinking and reflect on it is one of my greatest goals as a teacher. Helping them think better, whether that means becoming a more critical consumer of information, asking questions as they observe the world, defending their own ideas, or trying different perspectives, is the greatest gift I can give them.

I came across this through Dot Physics, a blog written by physics professor Rhett Alain. I read (or at least skim) every post because of his fascination with the world around him, his willingness to ask any question and try to figure out the answer, and his fabulous writing. The physics goes way over my head.

One of the pluses of teaching in the upper grades, as I did for ten years, is that retention is not an issue you face. The only time I ever considered retaining a student was a sweet boy who had not had glasses for many years and, we realized in fifth grade, had hearing issues so he had not been able to access most of his schooling. We didn’t end up retaining him but did require summer school. (Not a perfect solution but retention would not have been either.)

As a first grade teacher the possibility of retention is something I face more often. This year, however, was the first time I’ve seriously considered it for a student. He is young, a June birthday, and struggling academically. He is also very mature for his age, a factor that ultimately made me argue against retention and he will be going on to second grade. I hope that is the right decision for him.

At the end of that day, my brilliant colleague wrote about our retention committee. Her thoughts are, as always, well worth reading but this question struck me hard:

Would it give a student confidence and build them up or would it send the message that her hard work was being rewarded by being held back?

 A couple of days later I read a piece by Diane Ravitch on this same topic. Her post is titled, Is School Retention Child Abuse? so you can see her thoughts. Again it is worth reading. She writes about the school psychologists’ perspective on retention and it isn’t pretty.

My colleague’s question and Ravitch’s thoughts are driving my stand on retention. I have been against it (not across the board but in general) for years and now I feel more strongly.