Community Disunity

Our integrated unit on Communties was an uncooperative mess.




I have to acknowledge that in general, I am not always as comfortable a collaborator as I know I should be. This is almost scandalous to admit, especially in educational circles, where such group effort is all the rage, in the classroom and amongst staff developers. Supposed to prepare us all for the real world, where "there is no 'I' in team." But I tend to have divergent views on things, and I thrive in a quiet room. I do not always find that people firmly hold their end of the network of mutuality. Joany, I'm afraid, does not always work well with others.  So I was leery of this assignment on which 45% of our grade would be based  -- but not proud, and willing to suspend skepticism.   

But as the real world injected itself, in all its gnarly self-interest, my teammates and I found the 'I' in ignoring, avoidance, resignation and irate.  In the end I couldn't bear to let our group final project and presentation, for "Methods of Teaching ELA to ELLs", fail as miserably as it should have, so I pulled it out of the fire.  But our not-so-joint efforts revealed an ironic failure to model the way people come together to share resources and support each other's needs.

Yennie, a young high school paraprofessional, had me worried right from the start.  Her English wasn't strong, and I had mixed feelings about how sympathetically I needed to walk the walk over this issue in a graduate class.  As an aspiring ESL expert, I felt sheepish about my concerns.  But she wasn't studying English, she was preparing to become an elementary school teacher, and she had difficulty understanding and expressing the most basic concepts. When I said we should wait to see what literature we gathered before we started to plan the unit in-depth, for example, she didn't know what I meant by "literature." When Edelisa explained it to her patiently but incredulously, she still couldn't understand why it mattered so much. Yennie also rarely came to class on time, if at all, and when she did make it, she would slump whinily into her seat, and ask weakly for aspirin.

Edelisa tried, hard, but she was understandably overwhelmed. She was the only current classroom teacher in our little group, and she had a baby at home. On the few occasions when we were given class time to prepare, she offered smart, experienced advice.  She brought, from her second-grade class, literacy curriculum maps, nonfiction books on community, and profiles of actual students and their needs. She scheduled our group planning time of fifty minutes before our weekly class.


And then never came.


No one did, except me, until I gave up.  I was lucky if they made it to class at all.

So I wrote our unit overview and rationale, and enthusiastically gathered a stack of wide-ranging children's genres on the topic. I bulleted teaching points for each, carefully scaffolded for second language learners, and tapped out three out the five sections of our group paper.   

For our final presentation, I created a Power Point, and developed a shared reading lesson on Nikki Giovanni's poem Knoxville, Tennessee , which my classmates in the guise of second graders, would visualize to determine the type of community in which it was lovingly set.  I leveled with my cohort that I was worried about our progress, and that I would be willing to do more than my share since I wasn't working, as long as they committed to timely completion of the remaining sections. As soon as they emailed me their contributions, I would copy, paste, edit and format our unified effort into one cohesive whole.  


I grappled uneasily with my options as days turned into weeks, the deadline approached, and nothing was forthcoming. With just a few days to go, I heard from Yennie that she was sick, and nothing from Edelisa.  Was it all a test -- if I ratted out my ne'er-do-well groupmates to the professor, would I reveal myself to be sorely lacking in collegial heroism? What to do?


So Saturday night before the Monday it was due, I wrote the vaguest of pleas to the professor, simply saying that "some of us" were having trouble meeting the deadline, and asking for advice on how to proceed. I felt -- the whole situation seemed -- juvenile, unprofessional.  She wrote back saying that she appreciated my professionalism (!), and that we should hand in what we had and speak to her after class if need be.


In the mean time, Edelisa's contributions trickled slowly in, with sizable last-minute flaws, and too few minutes to polish them.  On Sunday afternoon, Yennie left a whiny, congested phone message that I should call her, despite the fact that I told her I would be out.I returned her call later and left a message that I could hear she wasn't feeling well,  but it was too late for us to talk things through. Would she please be in touch with the professor to let her know that was going on? But on the Monday the project was due, Yennie emailed me her paltry contributions, I spruced them up a bit, and rehearsed my shared reading presentation.  We were, no matter how it had happened, ready.


But as I slid in -- with a sigh and a forced smile -- next to Yennie and Edelisa in class, I overheard them explaining that neither one of them had completed their individual projects, which included the presentation.  My jaw tightened and I flushed, but I no really longer felt the weight of the team responsibilty -- they had carelessly snipped us all into individual orbit. While another team presented their unit, my team reviewed the Power Point, and quickly patched together demo lessons for their read-aloud and guided reading portions. The class applauded for the first presentation, asked a few good, polite questions, and we were on.


We made our way through the pre-planned slides just fine. As we had agreed on beforehand, I explained to the class that instead of telling about our lessons, we were going to actually deliver them as if they were our second grade class. This, at least, would spice up our sorry proceedings a bit. Edelisa tried, self-consciously and with little preparation, to teach her guided reading lesson.  But she couldn't pull it off for long, and slumped into a dry but reasonable explanation of it instead. Yennie just announced, defiantly, "I'm not going to do any acting," and simply told us what her read-aloud would consist of.


I posted my poem, with illustrations, on the board.  I told my "little-ones" that poets chose their genre to express a feeling, often with imagery.  I wanted them to relax and listen, visualize the speaker, details about the community in the poem, and the feelings the poet expressed about it.  I posted captioned pictures of some of the trickier vocabulary, okrah and barbecue, gospel and barefooted.  We visualized, smiled, it was over and it was good.  The professor talked about what a valuable unit was, rich with varied literature and important concepts, like resources and responsibility. She invited the class to ask questions.  


Jose wanted to know (and I think I quote him verbatim), "Don't you think you tried to do too much with the poem? Shouldn't you have broken it up a little -- I felt kind of overwhelmed."


Jose couldn't have known what a martyr I felt like at that moment, whether deservedly, gracefully or not -- and that I was tempted to hurtle over the desk and smack him.  I held my tongue and answered his question with humble consideration, while wondering venomously if this was the kind of unsupportive feedback he planned to give his young students some day.


That's what I learned in school today.

Knoxville, Tennessee I always like summer Best you can eat fresh corn From daddy's garden And okra And greens And cabbage And lots of Barbeque And buttermilk And homemade ice-cream At the church picnic And listen to Gospel music Outside At the church Homecoming And go to the mountains with Your grandmother And go barefooted And be warm All the time Not only when you go to bed And sleep Nikki Giovanni