Failure Is Just Success In Progress

If you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.

--Woody Allen

My name is Mel, or the very official-sounding "Miss Mel" in my professional circles. I am a 23-year old from London, England, running and teaching elementary in the weird and wonderful town of Eugene, Oregon. Unfortunately, I am not hugely competent at either. Yet.

I am, however, a big believer in learning from mistakes, and since I make a lot of them in all areas of my life, I have learned and will continue to learn rather a lot. And so I thought that it might be helpful to document this learning in a blog. Torn between focusing on my steeplechase exploits or educational endeavors, I decided that there really is only so much you can learn and write about from falling face first into a water pit or slipping off the edge of a cliff in a trail race. And so "Miss Mel Made a Mistake" was born.

After a lesson that I deem to have been a particularly spectacular disaster, I go away and develop new and improved curriculum material that I, and others, can use to reteach or revamp a lesson. This is then available to purchase on my teacherspayteachers website:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Teach-Run-Repeat

Much as we all love a success story that tells of how a teacher comes into a classroom and immediately ignites a passion for learning in every student, making every concept crystal clear in one smooth and snappy lesson after the other, the harsh reality is that this is seldom the case.

Working first as a student teacher, and now as a substitute, while I love the job, I believe that for every time that I try something and truly feel that this was the "Eureka" moment, there are many more times where it falls flat. That is not to say that these lessons don't produce hilarious and academically enriching results, but they certainly pan out rather differently from how I had intended.

Such is the glorious nature of teaching elementary. Young children are fantastically unpredictable, and there is no magic formula for guiding them towards understanding. And so while I cannot tell you what you should be doing, I can at least start you off with some things you should not do.

I am a huge proponent of a writing activity called a "squiggle story", in which students are presented with a non-descript squiggle that they transform into a picture, and then write a story about what they have drawn. The kids love it, I have a blast reading them, and there is a huge range of writing produced, because each student sees something different that they can turn the squiggle into. Foolproof, right? Wrong.

Teaching first grade writing can be trying, since for one, there is the challenge of motivating students to express their ideas when they still find the motor skill of actually forming the letters so effortful. Much more stressful, however, is the pressure and panic of interpreting guess-and-go spelling when your authors have phonemic awareness that is shaky at best, often with the complete absence of spacing to mark separation between words, all while a wide-eye first grader looks up at you and says "YOU know what it says, right Miss Mel?"

In that moment, you have two choices; admit defeat and crush the spirit of a six-year-old, undermining his or her confidence in writing, or make a bloody good educated guess. This can be made based on what you know about the interests and personality of the child in question, perhaps using a few key letters as guidance.

But when you, like a blithering idiot, have decided to distribute these squiggle stories in the first week, as a "Fun Friday" activity, before you have got to know your students and their writing styles very well, your Friday becomes much more frightening, and much less fun.

Having unwittingly done just this, as I circulate, one of my students, a real character who sported a leather jacket and red leather gloves every day without fail, never without his comb to preen his slicked-back hair, shouted to me, "Miss Mel, get over here, you gotta read this!". He was so excited about what he had written, and I was so excited about his excitement, and so I raced over to have a look. And here it was:

Panic set in. What was it he had drawn? What was it doing? What did these strange hieroglyphs say? I couldn't even use the picture as a clue!

First grade writing is most certainly a dialect of the English language in its own right, and deciphering it sometimes requires some fairly intensive detective work. I might be British, but I am no Sherlock Holmes.

I used what I knew about this student. He was a self-proclaimed "greaser", as was his father, and often wrote in "greaser handwriting", meaning that many of his letters had their own quiff. Now, I love letters of the alphabet with individualized hairdos as much as the next person, but it does further complicate an already rather tricky process of decoding.

I stared at the first line, flipped some letters around, inserted some others, and BOOM! A greaser dog! Of course! And then I was able to use my favorite teacher tactic. I crossed my fingers, smiled, and said,

"What a wonderful greaser dog! I love how he is doing the talking! Ok, so you be the greaser dog and tell me what he is saying."

It worked! He contorted his face into the smoldering scowl that I am guessing befits a greaser dog, and read his work aloud. This, readers, is a greaser dog who carries switchblades. And is a greaser dog. (He put that in again at the end just for good measure.) Slightly taken aback by the dangerous weapon reference but also mightily impressed by his attempt to sound out and spell such a long and tricky word, I breathed a sigh of relief and began to give him a high five for a super creative piece.

He stopped me, corrected me, and we instead did something that I think he called a "fist bump". I'm so behind the times. I did suggest that he could substitute a slightly more school-appropriate item for the switchblade, and with a notable eye roll, he informed me that it was a “water switchblade”. Confused, I asked him to explain, and he said, with world-weariness far beyond his six years, “Every time I draw a picture with a gun in it, the teacher tells me it has to be a water gun at school. So this is a water switchblade.” So that was that.

I had a blast reading everything that they had written, but the problem was that this was one of 24 squiggle stories, all of which were unique and all of which required a similarly lengthy and involved decrypting. I can genuinely say that I have nothing but love for the process, but in a 30 minute writing period, it is simply not feasible to get to every student.

And so what I have learned from this experience is that squiggle stories can be wonderful, but should be used with caution. In the first week or two, it might be better to use a prompt.

I say this for two reasons. Firstly, it limits the scope somewhat so that you may have a better shot at decoding these initial pieces of work, and can get a sense of your students as writers. Secondly, it means that before students begin, you can have a discussion of some words that they might want to use in their writing, and put these up on the board, complete with pictures. This expedites both the writing and the reading processes- everybody wins!

I have been rather disappointed with the available prompts, drawn from various curricula, and so I have created my own fun fantasy writing pages! Available to purchase on my TpT store, you will have three options to choose from: If I could fly, If I went to the moon, and If I had a pet unicorn. Because who wouldn’t want to be in any of those situations, really?

I hope that the teachers among you will try these out and leave me some feedback about how it went! I always encourage my students to close their eyes and imagine what they would do in this situation for a minute first, then share out at their tables! It really gets those creative juices flowing! Happy Teaching!