As an
elementary trained teacher working in The Middle, I frequently find myself making
my lessons too “cutesy.” But the funny thing
is, the supposedly too cool for school
6th graders LOVE them! Their eyes light up when they see scissors
and markers and glue sticks coming out instead of pens and paper. They get so
excited, they fail to notice how much work and new learning I manage to hide
beneath the fun. It’s a win-win
And then
there are the times things backfire, and guess who winds up the loser?
Every year,
my students read a realistic fiction novel about a young Jewish girl who escapes
from Russia and travels to America. To help the students grasp all the history
and background knowledge needed to really understand the story, I created a
unit that mimicked an immigrant’s journey.
It was
cutesy, complete with passports that I stamped each time they completed an
activity. When we created the passports, I had them choose Russian names from a
long list of popular boys’ and girls’ names. A few were able to find the
Russian version of their own name, but most picked new ones for themselves.
When it came
to last names, I explained the history of how the Russian government basically
assigned names to the citizens by taking their father’s first name and adding –ov to the end of it, so all the people who
had dads named Ivan, would have Ivanov as a last name. Anton would be Antonov,
and so on.
“So, I said
to the class, “if your dad is Mark, your new last name would be Markov. Got a
dad named Steve? Drop the last vowel, and yours would be Stevov. Understand?”
They did,
and seemed to like this little tidbit of information as they eagerly went back
to the list to find THEIR dad’s names so that they could create a last name for
themselves.
I was so busy patting myself on the back for such a
well-crafted lesson, that I neglected to walk around the room to observe what
it was they were actually writing, so it came as quite a shock when I asked for
volunteers to share their new names.
Hands shot
up.
“I am Sergei
Jackov!” one boy exclaimed.
“And I’m Dimitri
Jurgov!” another shouted, after he found the Russian equivalent of his dad’s
name, George, on the list.
I did my
best to keep a straight face, but I couldn’t hold it. When you’re in The
Middle, you learn pretty quickly that it’s usually best to just laugh along.