teaching kids where they are at

From To Kill a Mockingbird:

Miss Caroline began the day by reading us a story about cats. The cats had long conversations with one another, they wore cunning little clothes and lived in a warm house beneath a kitchen stove. By the time Mrs Cat called the drugstore for an order of chocolate malted mice the class was wriggling like a bucketful of catawba worms. Miss Caroline seemed unaware that the ragged, denim-shirted and floursack-skirted first grade, most of whom had chopped cotton and fed hogs from the time they were able to walk, were immune to imaginative literature. Miss Caroline came to the end of the story and said, 'Oh, my, wasn't that nice?'
Then she went to the blackboard and printed the alphabet in enormous square captials, turned to the class and asked, 'Does anybody know what these are?'
Everybody did; most of the first grade had failed it last year.
I suppose she chose me because she knew my name; as I read the alphabet a faint line appeared between her eyebrows, and after making me read most of My First Reader and the stock-market quotations from The Mobile Register aloud, she discovered that I was literate and looked at me with more than faint distaste. Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interface with my reading.
'Teach me?' I said in surprise. 'He hasn't taught me anything, Miss Caroline. Atticus ain't got time to teach me anything,' I added, when Miss Caroline smiled and shook her head. 'Why, he's so tired at night he just sits in the living-room and reads.'
'If he didn't teach you, who did?' Miss Caroline asked good-naturedly. 'Somebody did. You weren't born reading The Mobile Register.'
'Jem says I was. He read in a book where I was a Bullfinch instead of a Finch. Jem says my name's really Jean Louise Bullfinch, that I got swapped when I was born and I'm really a --'
Miss Caroline apparently thought I was lying. 'Let's not let our imaginations run away with us, dear.' she said. 'Now tell your father not to teach you any more. It's best to begin reading with a fresh mind. You tell him I'll take over from here and try to undo the damage --'
'Ma'am?'
'Your father does not know how to teach. You can have a seat now.'
I mumbled that I was sorry and retired meditating upon my crime. I never deliberately learned to read, but somehow I had been wallowing illicitly in the daily papers. In the long hours of church - was it then I learned? I could not remember not being able to read hymns. Now that I was compelled to think about it, reading was something that just came to me, as learning to fasten the seat of my union suit without looking around, or achieving two bows from a snarl of shoelaces. I could not remember when the lines above Atticus's moving finger separated into words, but I had stared at them all the evenings in my memory, listening to the news of the day, Bills To Be Enacted into Laws, the diaries of Lorenzo Dow - anything Atticus happened to be reading when I crawled into his lap every night. Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.
I knew I had annoyed Miss Caroline, so I let well enough alone and stared out of the window until recess when Jem, cut me from the covey of first-graders in the school yard. He asked how I was getting along, I told him.
'If I didn't have to stay I'd leave, Jem, that damn lady says Atticus's been teaching me to read and for him to stop it --'
'Don't worry Scout,' Jem comforted me. 'Our teacher says Miss Caroline's introducing a new way of teaching. She learned about it in college. It'll be in all the grades soon. You don't have to learn much out of the books that way - it's like if you wanta learn about cows, you go milk one, see?'
'Yeah Jem, but I don't wanta study cows, I -'
'Sure you do. You hafta know about cows, they're a big part of life in Maycomb Country.'
I contented myself with asking Jem if he'd lost his mind.
'I'm just trying to tell you the new way they're teachin' the first grade, stubborn. It's the Dewey Decimal System.'
Having never questioned Jem's pronouncements, I saw no reason to begin now. The Dewey Decimal System consisted, in part, of Miss Carolin waving cards at us on which were printed 'the', 'cat', 'rat', 'man', and 'you'. No comment seemed to be expected of us, and the class received these impressionistic revelations in silence. I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me.
'Besides,' she said. 'We don't write in the first grade, we print. You won't learn to write until you're in the third grade.'
Calpurnia was to blame for this. It kept me from driving her crazy on rainy days, I guess. She would set me a writing task by scrawling the alphabet firmly across the top of a tablet, then copying out a chapter of the Bible beneath. If I reproduced her penmanship satisfactorily, she rewarded me with an open-faced sandwich of bread and butter and sugar. In Calpurnia's teaching, there was no sentimentality: I seldom pleased her and she seldom rewarded me.

My thoughts on this and teaching today:

• Teachers now aim for what we call differentiated learning, meaning we cater for the different abilities in the classroom and have group activities teaching the same content but at different levels. I have groups for spelling, maths, writing and reading. There's only so much I can do but I can't ever imagine telling my brighter kids to stop learning and letting them get bored - I would like to challenge them and extend them. Likewise for my struggling kids - I wouldn't leave them to struggle, I aim to make activities for them at their level. It's a lot of work and it's hard and sometimes I feel I am never doing enough but that's part of my philosophy of teaching and I will keep aiming to teaching kids where they are at and not where 'people' say they should be at.
• Phonics are stupid - our language is very hard to learn, there are so many rules, exceptions and different sounds for the same letter or the same sounds for many different combination of letters, and dependent on the content they are used in. So the politicians who stress the importance of phonics - bah!! Scout learned, although she wasn't aware of it, from being read to. This helped her to learn the structure of the English language, increased her vocabulary and helped her understand the meaning because no doubt Atticus talked to her about it as I imagine Scout would ask questions. I haven't worked out how to teach this in the classroom - yes, there is room for learning sounds and rules but it's no ultimate skill to have when it comes to reading. Read, read, read, read to kids, all the time, get them to love books, talk about books and pore over books. Some of my kids aren't getting that at home, for a number of different reasons, and now I'm trying to get them to love reading with the limited time I have with them. There's only so much time a teacher has when they have 24 students, other key learning areas to teach. My aim is to explicitly teach the reading strategies that come naturally to good readers. Skills of predicting, getting an idea of what the story is about, using structure, reading phrased and fluently, deciding if something makes sense, decoding where necessary, etc, etc. And I strongly believe that a lot of these skills are picked up by kids without them or their parents realising it just from being read to, watching parents read, reading themselves and talking about the books.
• Teaching in context - Miss Caroline didn't seem to be aware of her cohort of kids, their home lives, their backgrounds, interests, etc. It makes a huge impact on their education, what these kids bring to them to school in terms of attitudes, interests, life experiences. It affects their engagement in learning, may affect their ability to learn and may have emotional and social needs which are far more important to address in the immediate future. This is one of my gripes about Sch*ool Le*ague Tab*les. I'm not opposed to N*APL*AN - it can be used as a very effective diagnostic tool to a degree. But it's professional educators who can read the data and interpret it properly. We understand context and it's impact on kids more than the media or general public do. My kids, kids from a country school, kids from Eastern suburbs school, kids from a private school - they are all unique, have different backgrounds, opportunities, and access to equal education. Those Tables are misleading, inaccurate, damaging, demoralising and unnecessary.
  

I'll get off my soapbox now...