#that i taught 6th grade language arts

[mythalism]

call me crazy but there is a difference between treating your adult players like they are new to the world and treating your adult players like they have the memory of a goldfish and the vocabulary of a 9 year old

[fishmech]

cursive wasn't an everyday art, it was just a way to write things. and frankly treating it as inherently more artful than other hands is a lil offensive lol. and like no, cursive DIDN'T celebrate personality and individual style? in schooling you were supposed to do just the opposite. my father and most of my grandparents could tell you of being hit in school because their hand wasn't closely attuned enough to whatever their particular school said was "correct" cursive (and none of those schools, across decades and locales, agreed with each other tbh). luckily my mom's school wasn't that harsh, nor was mine.

perhaps more importantly though, there are many different kinds of cursive hands that have been taught in different places at different times even in the same language. the kind of cursive i was taught in elemenatary school until the district halted it in 6th grade was a lot different than, for example, my great-grandmother's cursive or my grandfather's cursive on the other side of the family. i needed additional time to study the style both of those relatives used because they used different letterforms from me, and from each other! and these relatives were ones who were still born in the 20th century and who I actually met and knew in life!!

when i start getting into stuff from my much older relatives in the late 19th century, after they learned english even, the hands get very very difficult for me to read. my grandma who is still alive and met many of those people if only briefly while they were alive, who has been the family's center for tracking the genealogy and keeping the family trees - she also has trouble reading them. obviously half the issue is the hand being heavily influenced by styles used in other languages, but the other half is they're just plain archaic styles, thoroughly acceptable to use over a hundred years ago but if I had tried writing in that style during the grades where we still had to put up with cursive I'd have had grades knocked off for fucking up the lessons!

also there's literally nothing stopping people from still using cursive if they like to use cursive for their personal use. though frankly it kind of sucks for that and full on calligraphy looks a lot nicer and is more fun.

and you know, stating that it was removed to streamline things? it had also been introduced to streamline things, in a world with rather significant differences in what you were using to write. and it was ultimately like many other common hands, just a passing fad on the long historical trend.

On one hand I understand not teaching cursive in school anymore, because it actually is slower than regular handwriting and almost everything is typed on a keyboard now anyways.

On the other hand, so much of our (even recent!) history was written in cursive, and having a whole generation of kids who can't read letters written by their grandparents, momentos saved by their great-grandparents, or even photo albums from theur immediate family seems like a dangerously quick way to detach us from previous generations.

And on the third, related but slightly malformed hand, I feel bad that yet another form of small, everyday art that brings joy in the middle of mundane tasks, which celebrates personality and individual style and self-expression, is about to fade into obscurity because it wasn't efficient enough for today's world to put up with.

Like... if we continue to whittle away the small arts out of every day life, what's going to be left except stark, ruthless pragmatism?

Maybe writing a grocery list is less mundane when you get to feel elegant for a moment. Maybe you're a little more proud of what you write when you see it flow together like a painting

[danielleurbansblog]

Meet This Author: Fern Brady

Q: What gave you the inspiration for the Thyreins Galactic Wall Series?  Thyrein’s Galactic Wall was born in my 6th grade classroom. As part of the 6th grade curriculum, I taught world cultures along with my English Language Arts class. So, as we learned about geography and its connection to human development, we also created our own planets with their geography and their humans. As we…

[lyllith]

what class do you teach?

this upcoming year i will just be teaching 7th grade language arts!!!

last school year i taught...

6th grade language arts

6th grade social studies

8th grade English 1

so this is a welcome break from the chaos of my first year!

[quartz-the-cosmic-manta]

ooo story time!

I went to a (private) catholic school for elementary and middle school. for kindergarten to 4th grade we had the normal specials as a class (art, music, pe, library/media, and computer), and a different special for each day of the week. after 5th grade, the media special was replaced with a language for each grade:

5th grade: ASL

6th grade: Greek & Latin roots (counting that as a language[s?])

7th grade: Italian

8th grade: Chinese

there was one teacher who taught the 5th-7th grade languages (I guess because she was able to. Greek & Latin and Italian were removed after the teacher got a better job.), and there was a chinese lady who taught Chinese.

my grade/class was the reason why that school stopped teaching Chinese.

*for non americans, that’s what you attend between the ages ~11-14 btw

[mormoncoverup]

My middle school Language Arts teacher saved my life

Share a story about someone who had a positive impact on your life. Ms. Alan* enters our lives Our school district had 6th, 7th and 8th grade in the middle school I attended. my sister’s Stefanie* and Courtney* both attended the middle school before I did. Courtney had the gifted-class teacher, Ms. Alan*. Ms. Alan taught language arts and reading to the middle school “gifted kids”. Ms. Alan…

[bugtransport]

sorry to bitch at my grown age but yeah re: last post i have so many issues with the way english ("language arts") is taught or at least was taught to me. and i can really only assume that it's gotten worse since then. like if i were to tell you that i, the guy who has Apparently made a name for himself [checks notes] yelling in public about how every single thing in kamen rider x ties back to jin keisuke's father whether they meant it to or not, very nearly failed pretty much every english class i had to take in school from 6th grade on because you could not pay me to waste my time analyzing a piece of writing that i didn't care about or find remotely compelling... would you believe me or do i need to crack into my old school district's dusty old site and retrieve my transcripts

[sagau-my-beloved]

You + Me

= Writers who bs their essays with high grades because we have better presentation than anyone else /j

Honestly though!!!

Language arts has always been my favorite subject since like middle school, I've only ever taken one non honors english class from 6th-12th grade and it wasn't even of my own free will, it was cause my guidance counselor screwed up and I decided to just go with it

I have a funny story, and basically it's that in my 11th grade ap English class, which was taught by a teacher who had never even taught an honors english class before, I actually got referenced by name because I was apparently the first person that had ever used a semi colon correctly, without being told to, on a writing assignment in her class

And then for the rest of that year whenever there was a semi colon used in some example work everybody would look at me, and then the people who sat close to me would ask "Is that yours?" and it never was 💀

But honestly I never had to try in any of those classes because it always at least looked like I knew what I was talking about

Sadly for college I only had to take one semester of a language arts class in order to get the last Gen Ed credit I needed, so no more of that

That one class was pretty cool though, the professor was pretty young and for the final all we had to do was compile the work that we did for that semester in a Zine, I drew a really cool skeleton on the front of mine in white pen, it was awesome 👌

[donnasweett]

“YA should be taught in schools” crowd what do you have to say about my 6th grade language arts teacher banning the clique book series from our reading log because they weren’t “real literature” i really wanna know i’m curious to get the temperature of the room

[alittlelife]

The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too) by Hannah Gamble. Published March 5th, 2013

While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.

When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasn't expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my students' folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.

Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:

"The life of my heart is crimson.”

[Writing about a family member's recent death:]

"My brother went down/ to the river and put dirt on.” "Peace be a song, silver pool of sadness” "Away went a dull winter wind that rocked harshly, and bent you said, 'Father, father'.”

[Writing about a terminal illness:]

"I am feeling burdened and I taste milk…… I mumble, ‘Please, please run away.’ But it lives where I live.” "The owls of midnight hoot like me shutting the door to nothing.”

[Writing about life as a movie:]

"The choir enters, and the director screams 'Sing with more terror!!!'”

"I have provisions. Binary muffins. It's an in/out/in/out kind of universe. We cannot help you, this is a universe factory. A sound of rolling symbols. Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards. Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not."

"I, the star god, take bones from the underworlds of past times to create mankind.”

These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refuge…and they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasn't been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by “it” I mean talk about the world) any other way.

Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibility—not because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.

Anecdote that I hope you'll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]

So let's look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:

Snacking on this and that my friends and I keep the party going even when it is over”

"Whispers of a secret crush being unraveled”

"I’m trapped in this hole that I can’t break through”

"Barack Obama in the White House. I can feel the inspiration Can you feel it?”

"Now I feel secure with my head held high.

Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable—the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.

While the average older student's poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writer's vision of the world is nimble and surprising—bizarre, yet true.

Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (“to flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal to”) she wrote this sentence: “The blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.”

The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.

The poet’s job is to forget how people do it.

[luvdsc]

what’s something you want to do once covid dies down and you can go out again?

ohhh omg I have so many things I want to do, honey bee !!!! 💓

traveling & visiting art museums — I love love love traveling, and my family takes summer trips to visit two different countries every year, except for last year because of covid. Every trip, I beg my parents and sister to let me go to the art museums there, and that’s my favorite part of traveling (besides the yummy food we try) !!!! I’ve gotten to see so many of my favorite artists’ paintings and art that I vividly remember being taught about in my elementary school days during art class. I buy postcards from every museum, and they’re now all hung up in my room 💞

seeing my friends in person — I had to cancel my spring break trip to chicago and nyc that I wanted to go to so badly to revisit the art museums and see my friends there ): I also had an Asia trip planned with my friends for post grad that I really wanted to go on 🤧 I went on a lot of weekend trips to the city with my friends that I desperately miss now too ): I also just really miss seeing them everyday and having weekly brunches and daily boba runs aaaaa I miss college 😔 I wanna go to Disneyland and art museums with my friends and take hot pics at the club with them again shidkdndd for now, I’ve been writing letters back and forth with my friends, so that’s been really fun tho! I pinned up a few of their letters on my cork board in my room :’)

volunteering — I miss this so much 😭 I loved being able to meet new people and talk with them. I volunteered with my mom from 6th to 8th grade at a local soup kitchen weekly and wrapped presents for kids at a non profit with my family every year, and then I volunteered in hospital patient services weekly in all four years of hs and I got to talk to patients and play the piano for them! 💘 it was really nice to talk to vietnamese patients especially and converse in my native language 💕 in college, I volunteered at another soup kitchen weekly. I also did a year long volunteering fellowship my junior year and worked 25 hours a week for a non profit trade school where I helped adults create resumes and prepare for interviews! I also got to plan two career fairs for them, and I’m still friends with some of the (now graduated) students there, and it makes me so happy when they tell me that they still have the same job from the interviews we were practicing for and are doing well there 🥺 the last time I ever volunteered was a beach clean up with my firm a year ago, and I miss it now 😭

[ri-ahhh]

wait what I’m shook lmao was it hard to become a kindergarten teacher?

Haha I think it varies state to state on what they require but I live in Texas and it wasn’t really hard at all, just time consuming. I did alternative certification online but you do have to have a 4 year degree or maybe some equivalent amount of experience /education to get into it. My degree is in speech-language pathology and audiology and I have a specialization in child development w that, and I taught preschool for years during college so I had a lot of background knowledge about kids going into it without majoring in education.

You have to pass a state certification test depending on the grades you want to teach too, so mine was over all core subjects (math/language arts/science/social studies/music/PE), early childhood-6th grade. You couldn’t pay me enough to teach middle school and above so Idk what the tests are for those groups.

[drgamenstein]

Why I stopped  Drawing.

So I’m struggling right now to re-learn how to draw. I used to draw all the time when I was in High school, but then a teacher kind of crushed my desire to do anything creative ever again. This is that story.

When I was a Junior (16 years old), I was cleaning up my required credits to graduate, basically just taking the easy classes I didn’t care about, but was needed to graduate. One of these classes was foreign languages, which I needed two semesters of. I chose Spanish since, growing up in the south, high school Spanish is a joke. Chances are high you either know it through friends or learned it at a much younger age, and for the most part I was right. I passed every test, completed all my homework and class assignments during class and was able to fuck around and do what I wanted after that. It was basically a free period.

Thing is, apparently my teacher didn’t like that I was breezing through his class. That or he just hated me in general, probably both. By junior year, I had a reputation for being hard to control. I wasn’t a bad kid, I just didn’t care much. I spent a lot of time keeping to myself, drawing or napping, and still completed all my work. My Biology teacher once made a joke that I learned through osmosis, because even though I slept through his class, I remembered the lessons and passed. I also used this trick in English, I would listen to audiobooks at home when I went to bed and leave it on loop all night, then when I woke up I could remember the book because my dreams were influenced by it. Turns out Dexter’s Lab was spot on in terms of easy learning, I don’t know.

Anyway, this guy was a hard ass, he also worked as the school’s basketball coach, but taught Spanish in the mornings. Now because this was first period, and I had just woken up and was full of coffee, I didn’t sleep in this class, ever. I was actually probably my most attentive during this time. The teacher was a hands off kind of teacher, he would basically tell us which part of the book to study, give us a work sheet, our homework, and then tell us to group up, and learn the material. Because I was more socially reclusive then than I am now, I never paired up, instead I studied, finished the worksheet, and the homework right there. All in all it took about twenty minutes, leaving forty to do what I wanted.

The first sign of trouble, was when I was just reading one day, he asked me if I was done. I told him yes, and that I had even finished the homework too. When I proved myself, he yelled at me that homework was meant to be done at home, and that if I have free time I should work on other school work, not goof off. The next day the same thing, when I told him I had no other assignments and I had even finished his homework again to make sure I had no extra work, he told me to join a group and see if they needed help. The next day again, I was drawing this time, and he yelled at me that I wasn’t helping, when I retorted that nobody needed or wanted my help, he got more mad, asked the class to raise their hands if they needed my help and nobody did. He told me that his class wasn’t for free time, and that I needed to keep working while I was in there. Now I was in Art class at the time, so drawing did count as working in my mind, but this being a sports man, he didn’t agree, so the next day when I was drawing again, he came to my desk and told me to pull out all my drawings I had on me.

It’s also important to note here that because I had puppies I was carrying my entire portfolio with me. Everything I had drawn since 6th grade, all tucked away in my backpack to keep the dogs from tearing them up. This was SIX YEARS worth of work I had cultivated and added to. This mother fucker took all of it, looked at some of the earliest work I had done, and said I should try to find something I had talent in instead of wasting my time at something that bad. Then he confiscated it all and told me I could have it all back if I passed his final and didn’t draw or read during his class. Fuck it, fine I thought, so for the next month I just did my work, and sat quietly, when other students refused my help. at the end of the term, Spanish was one of two finals I had gotten a full 100% on, the other being English/literature. When I demanded my portfolio back, this piece of shit told me he had used it as kindling when his kids asked him to make a fire at home. When I asked him if he was serious he didn’t answer, and instead told me that it didn’t matter what he did, I was never going to make a living of my art if I had no talent, that he’d done me a favor getting rid of it, and that I needed to focus on a real career and stop goofing off with worthless hobbies.

I’ll be 26 this month, meaning that it will have been almost ten years since this all happened, and I quit drawing altogether. The idea of losing so much time and effort, and being called worthless by a teacher really stuck with me. I know that the way schools work, any extra-curriculars  not sports related are considered not worth any time, and that’s the schools fault not mine, but still. Losing so much is a huge blow no matter what. I never drew again during school. I spent the rest of Junior and senior year worried that the same thing would happen again, so I didn’t bother, and by the time I got to college and started working I didn’t have enough time to do it anymore.

So yeah, that’s the full story. Fuck I lost a lot that day, I remember one of the paintings in that folder had been adopted by a local museum for a year to showcase local artists, and had just been returned to me that year. So yeah, that’s why I want to overcome that shit, and get back into drawing regularly. If I can, I want to start doing it for a couple hours every night. If anyone reading this has any suggestions for classes, tips or tricks I can find or use, I would be very grateful. I used to only do traditional artwork, with graphite or paint, but lately I’ve been using Spray paints, and Digital art, since even though the tablet cost a lot, the cost in supplies overall is much lower. I don’t remember if I already showed off my paintings in a previous post, but for digital art I’m using Clip Studio Paint, and it’s all new to me, so yeah, any help would be appreciated if offered, but mainly this was a story I needed to get off my chest and put out there so I can move on without it weighing me down. If I could give any advice to anyone around that age, going through some shit, it would be this. Nothing that makes you happy, is a waste of time or effort.

[littlecafe]

🍆🍑

at my k-8 school i think during 6th grade they started trying to make a mini middle school within the school so we could pretend to have the same experiences as a “normal” middle school so instead of having one classroom like how it’s always been they had the teachers focus on one or two topics each and gave us periods (like english for an hour then we go to math class, etc) but it’s a small school so like we’d literally just walk like two doors down to the next teacher and there were only 3 teachers per grade level but i guess??? and also we still had recess asjfhsuefheks

i think the best part of it was they also made a lot of extracurricular or miscellaneous classes for us since that’s also something middle school students get...i guess....like music! within my 3 years i “learned” keyboard, clarinet, and the flute (”learned” because i really could not play much of anything other than keyboard like at our recitals and stuff and i would just lip play 💀💀) i think keyboard we did as a class but the other instruments i picked, i also did art, sign language, and ballet (also things we could pick)

thinking about it now kinda wild they gave us all that for free just not the ballet shoes i have some vague memory of trying to go buy those

other than that, i’ve learned that learning the recorder in grade school was....a thing??? asjfhksdf why did we all get taught the recorder lmaooo seeing stuff on twitter about it is always so funny i thought it was just something my school made us do

[coindraws]

Random question that doesn't have to do with Coin and Harvey, but I'm really curious lol. How did you learn the different languages you know? Were you just taught them as you were growing up, did you take classes for them, did you do it on your own? Do you have any tips for somebody wanting or trying to learn a different language? Also, I absolutely adore your art like holy friggin frigg dude- I love Harvey so much and I love how you draw him, and him and Coin are just mMm aLso, happy holidays!

Okay, that ask was a surprise HAHA Didn’t know that people were curious about my life as well but I don’t mind at all 👀

Hm, well I only know three languages which are German, English and French. German is my native language and I had my first English classes at school in 3rd grade. (I don’t know if that’s normal for every state in Germany or school, but my elementary school did that) The “real” English classes started in 5th grade for me and I graduated in English in 12th grade, so I had 7 years of English lessons.

That being said, my English would never be that good if I only learnt it at school HAHA I joined the internet community at a very young age and since English was/is the main language, I learnt very fast and soon had A’s if you count grades as something concerning language level 🤷

As for French, I had to decide between Latin and that and chose the first option. I ALSO graduated in French and had lessons from 6th grade to 12th grade, so one year less. It’s very rusty, though and kind of embarrassing, oof. I had A’s as well but that’s nowhere near my knowledge NOW. I forgot a lot and the last time I properly spoke any French was almost three years ago. I still understand most of the things people say, I can watch children’s shows without any problems but I have a very hard time speaking it. I’m hoping that this’ll change soon since I’m probably going to study in France next year ✌️

I’m debating whether I should learn a 4th language because why not but I’m not sure yet. Might do it, might not, even if I won’t really need it. I can also read some Italian and Spanish because I know French and I understand some Dutch since it’s very similar to German.

I tried to learn Tagalog on my own but there’s basically no lessons for German native speakers. The only thing I found was a PDF that someone made but it only covered the very basics anyway. If I ever decide to try again I’d have to search for English - Tagalog books. Lol, I wouldn’t exactly say I’m fluent in English and I’m sorry to every native speaker that had to listen to my weird accent 😂

As for tips, watching videos on youtube helped me a lot with my English! That’s also what I used to do before any French exam, I watched a few episodes of cartoons and that was all I really did. It really depends, though which language you want to learn and what your native language is I think. For example, when we had to write essays in French I always translated what I wanted to say from English, since that was WAY easier for me than trying to translate it from German to French. Sounds weird and kind of complicated but that was what worked best for me and I’m in language chaos anyway, so I’m not sure if that’s an advice I would take HAHA

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s a lot easier to forget a language when you’re never confronted with it. I’m still good at English because I read and listen to it everyday but I almost never read or hear anything in French. That’s also one of the main reasons why I’m not really capable of speaking it anymore.

Yadda, yadda this got way too long but thank you so much for liking my art, I can’t stress that enough!! And happy holidays to you, too!

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

OH I NEVER TOLD THIS STORY!!! in 6th grade we had the best Language Arts/Social Studies teacher he was badass as fuck. one day he was like i flipped a coin to decide whether i wanted to be a teacher or an artists (he’s really good) and he taught us how to break someone’s arm and nose and he also told us that he bit of a kid’s ear when he was in middle school and he saw that kid again in uni and he knw cuz his ear was bit and we had the island of doritos and milk miss u mr johnson 🤠