A repost from 2010:
I sent this to my principal last week:
Today Luis came to class for the third straight day, which may be a record. [The social worker] and I are working on how we can help Luis save his year, because as we speak he is facing truancy charges.
Luis is lost in all of his classes because he can’t make up all the work. He is not lost in French. I have not focused on what he has missed, but on what he can do in my class. I would rather help Luis achieve success in my class than have a student get a five on the AP French exam.
Luis did something great and unexpected today. He sat in the front where I have him seated, and the class did some writing. Luis is already good at decoding spoken French, but today he showed me that he is good at writing. He took out his Blackberry, without permission, and started inputting surprisingly accurate answers to the questions we were working on (our goal in this class was grammatical accuracy and spelling).
I let him continue. The other kids said nothing, because they saw Luis working in a way that he never had all year – such a change! In that way, they showed their empathy for Luis, who was locked onto the process, to the learning. He was so proud of himself! He went very slowly, but accurately.
Then, when we moved to a reading activity, Luis did that just fine, and then at the bell – this is the cool part – he followed me to my office and asked for a hard copy of the questions that he had not finished in his Blackberry. He wanted to go home and work on them. He asked for my email address to email me the correct answers. In class, he had also used his Blackberry to take a photo of a bunch of verbs that we are learning. Again, the class knew the deal and said nothing about the Blackberry. We were all kind of amazed. Then, also after school, Luis asked me to give the English for all those verbs, which the other kids knew because they had been coming to class. Luis seemed excited to be working on those verbs – he knew many of them simply from sitting in class listening to spoken French on the days he was in class.
Had I faulted him for missed work, had I taken his Blackberry, none of the above would have happened. It makes me think about the downside of homework, and of shaming kids for not making up homework. Just yesterday I overheard a teacher talking to a kid about what they had to make up after a two day absence. It was daunting. I’m sure I could not have done it, nor would I have wanted to, because it didn’t feel like learning – it felt and sounded like punishment.
We can keep kids in school if we make them feel that they can succeed. We must do what we can to let the child know that they can succeed, and we need to avoid forcing kids to compete with each other, and realize how each of our East High School Angels have unique situations that they bring to our classrooms. I have a lot to learn about this, because I have always agreed in principle to the above ideas, but only talked the talk. Today, I actually walked the differentiation walk. I didn’t play only to the smart ones.
The reason for this success was that I put my curricular demands as a teacher aside, and worked with Luis exactly where he was, with all his missed classes. I didn’t let all those missed classes keep him from feeling successful today. I don’t know if this is possible in other classes, where curricula are based on a progressive chronology of instruction, but, in a foreign language, it is possible, especially with the new CO state standards.
Ideally, Heather [counselor] succeeds in helping Luis with his overall schedule, he finishes the year with whatever credits left that he can grab at this point (he proudly told me has a C in gym!), and, in French next year, he continues to enjoy learning. Will Luis keep up with the AP tracked kids in the room? Probably not. Will he reach the level of novice mid at the end of two years of French, as the state, in its new World Language document, suggests would be expected? Probably not. But he will be in the classroom and not on the streets, getting credit towards his diploma. This aligns with one of the four core assumptions built into the new CO state standards document (ital. mine): “All students can be successful language and culture learners, and they … acquire proficiency at varied rates.”
The implication for us in Denver Public Schools is that whether Luis never even gets past the novice mid classification doesn’t matter. So what if it takes him four years to do that, when other kids are moving all the way up to the intermediate mid classification? What matters is that Luis feel successful at what he does. He may never be an AP student, but if he is sitting in my French class for the next four years, having fun and learning, then we at East High School will have properly aligned with the new state standards, which is our professional responsibility. Please view the standards for more details about the new classification levels, which replace the old terms levels 1, 2, 3, and 4, at
Any time a student is in class, they can learn – the more they hear, the more they learn. That fact worked for Luis today, and it worked for me, because I got a deeper appreciation for how the new standards represent a positive shift in how we can continue to best serve the kids of DPS.