Scratch. Tick. Scratch. It was seventh period, and I was alone in the classroom. I wistfully eyed the clock, listening to the combined rhythm of its ticks and the sounds of my pen scrawling large, obnoxious, hot pink X's on multiple choice tests. As I tallied the next student's grade, I crossly mumbled to myself, "Has my supervising teacher never heard of Scantrons?" It wasn't that manually grading a multiple choice test was an exhausting task. What was taxing (and somewhat psychologically damaging for a student teacher) was having to scratch down F after F after D after F on 11th-grade papers.
When Ms. Starr, my supervising teacher, entered the room to check on my progress (It was Friday. She hoped to have all tests graded before the 2:30 bell, so we wouldn't have to take them home over the weekend), she could tell I was disturbed.
"I don't get it," I moaned. "Why are the students failing this test? There are so many F's. Some of them didn't even get half of the questions right."
"Why do you think, Elaine?" she replied caustically. "Because they didn't bother to read the damned book."
The "damned book" Ms. Starr was referring to was Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As an avid Twain scholar, Ms. Starr would have never mentioned this novel with such a sneer in any other context. But on that Friday afternoon, she and I were united in our frustration over the students' poor performance. The test I was grading was what Ms. Starr called a "reading check" test. The students (the majority of whom are labeled gifted) were given about four weeks to read Huckleberry Finn outside of class. The reading check test marked the deadline, and appropriately named, it tested whether the students read the book or not. It contained no complicated questions on themes or literary devices. It simply checked whether the students were familiar with basic plot events and character descriptions.
Ms. Starr and I ended up staying at school about 20 minutes late to finish grading the tests. As I trudged across the emptying parking lot that afternoon and miserably plopped into my driver's seat, I worried about the rest of the semester. I felt disillusioned by the students' lackadaisical attitude towards completing the assigned reading, and I dreaded the negative climate of the classroom on Monday when Ms. Starr revealed their abysmal grades.
Sure enough, the D's and F's were received with grumbles and gripes. Ms. Starr proclaimed that the students would be retested on Friday, not to replace the grades they just received but to be added to those grades.
"If you failed it once, you better read the book, or you're going to fail it again. Then you'll have two F's instead of one," Ms. Starr warned.
It was after this proclamation that one of the most awkward moments of my student teaching experience occurred.
A student turned to me and said, "Ms. Broussard, this book really sucks. Why do we have to read this?"
I froze. I had no idea what to say. I could think of several reasons why I appreciated Mark Twain and why I found value in Huckleberry Finn. But how do you articulate this to a 16-year-old kid?
"Umm, ask Ms. Starr, hon," I replied. "She assigned the reading."
The student rolled his eyes at my cop out, and I turned away frustrated and flustered. That brief exchange left me feeling more befuddled than any of my previous student interactions. I had failed to articulate an intelligent rationale for the class objectives. Even though it wasn't my class, as a student teacher, I still felt responsible for helping the students understand why their schoolwork was important. The "why" is important to children, both small and nearly grown, and as a teacher, if you cannot provide it, you cannot expect your students to take your assignments seriously. It's the answer to this "why" that I am determined to develop for myself.