November 14, 2013--This afternoon for writing the students began working on prewriting for their descriptive essays. The topic for the descriptive essay was a personal hero, someone they knew personally who they admired. They were given a prewriting graphic organizer that had three columns for physical, personality, and character traits of their hero. The teacher told them they had to list at least 3 traits for each category. When the students began working on their organizer, I began walking around the classroom answering questions about how to spell words and other things.
One of the students had a question that stumped me. She asked what the difference is between personality and character traits. Even though the teacher modeled when she was giving instructions, the difference between the two was unclear to the students and to me. The teacher had a difficult time articulating the difference herself. She ended up referring to the teacher manual of the writing textbook before giving the students a definitive answer.
This experience was unsettling to me because usually when a student asks me a question I have a basic idea of the answer, I just have to find age-appropriate words to communicate my answer. But this time I didn't have the basic idea. It was uncomfortable for me. What made it worse was that I didn't come straight out and say "I don't know, let me ask the teacher," or "I don't know, let me check the textbook." I don't usually have a problem admitting that I don't know, but for some reason I didn't come clean and admit it. I think it may have something to do with the subject. I tend to think I can BS my way through writing and English. If the question had been in math or science, I would probably have been more straightforward at admitting I didn't know.
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