Friday, May 18, 2012

Don't tweet that....

I will be the first to admit that I am in love with my DVR.  Seriously, who has time anymore to center life around a favorite show?  The much awaited Grey's season finale was safely stored on my DVR so that I could watch it sometime over the weekend.  And then I made a crucial mistake:  I checked my twitter.  Seriously?  You gotta be kidding me!  Why did so many of you tweet the ending?  Oh the disappointment.

Yes, I will get over this and I will still watch the finale eventually.    I spent the day in classroom observations trying to forget about it and focus on some great teaching.  As I wrote up some notes from my observations I started to think about whether we spoil the ending too often for our students.  Do we get so excited about what we love in the lesson or what we find important, that we kill the excitement our students have?

I remember teaching a lesson and rotating between the small groups of students working on the assignment.  I don't remember if the reason was time or simply just my non-awareness, but as I was helping a group, I answered some questions.  Much to my surprise, the group working next to this group, looked up and stared at me in silence.  Completely confused I asked what was going on.
"You killed it Ms. Fatch."
"Killed what?" I asked.
"The point of our group's work.  You just gave us the answer and we were just about to come to that conclusion ourselves."

I just did the unthinkable.  I killed student desire to learn.  I buried alive student motivation.  I "tweeted the ending."

No tweet about the events of the season finale were  intended to rain on my parade.  No guidance I provided a group was ever intended to harness student motivation and learning.  But nonetheless,  I destroyed the ending my students were working so diligently to discover.  Especially as we approach the crazy, end-of-the year time crunch, we often find ourselves giving answers rather than letting our students figure it out.   We are all guilty of spoiling the ending for our students even if that was not our intention.  As we approach the end of the school year, let each of us be reminded that even in May and June, students can and will rise to the occasion.  Let's not spoil that!

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