Dragons to Dinosaurs

The teacher was experienced.  Her beautiful face was evidence of that, but then she told us her work story.  Ms. Judy knew her stuff.  We sat in the pre-K classroom and let the wonder roll out.  We learned the “vocabulary of art” and we got to actually say the words.  We became fluent with the circle and the dot, the line and all the cousins of these patriarchs.  The family of art vocabulary words was friendly, and we were able to learn their names and represent their faces fluently, as our dragons would latter prove.

After we drew and analyzed our drawings, the conversation became less structured while everyone colored in the black line drawings.  One student asked the teacher to explain about how dinosaurs had feathers.  An inexperienced teacher would have done this:

“We are not talking about dinosaurs, these are dragons. You need to focus on the lesson.  Have you taken your meds today, honey?”

Teachers who know the gifted lit, do what Ms. Judy did.  She answered the question because she made the connection between dinosaurs and dragons.  Had the student felt more comfortable she would have asked if dinosaurs and humans could have been alive at the same time.  She would have asked if the Mexican deity, Quetzalcoatl, (the plumed serpent) could have been a real creature?  A feathered dinosaur? 

Last year I had a student just like that.  He had so many problems at school.  He struggled to fit into discussions, and to read by himself without wanting to discuss things immediately, to help others connect his thought to the topics at hand – and he was always in detention, on meds, in fights.  His socialization, “male” didn’t help any.  I fought to keep him from being kicked out.  His mother knew how much I wanted to be his teacher, and so did he.  I miss him, all of them. 

Our dragon-drawing teacher knew human beings.  She knew about wonder, curiosity, about how to use an economy of terms to help fledglings get the courage to fly.  I wish I had been Ms. Judy’s student when I was little.  And I am so glad she was there in the classroom for the kids here.

Readability Stats

Counts

            Words                            371  (brief, not demanding too much from the audience, a considerate text)

            Paragraphs                          7

            Sentences                          28

Averages

            Ss per para                           5.6

            Words per S                       12.9

            Characters per word                 4.4  (no big words!)

Readability

            Passive sentences                         7%

            Flesch Reading Ease                    75.1

            Flesch Kincaid Grade level            5.9

You can set your spell check in MS Word to give you these stats.  Gotta be the older version of word, this feature is not available after MetaMetrics stepped into education, and used Flesch to invent the LEXILE and put up a site you can use to get the “L”  Just an extra step, but oh, the data they will gather!