Tiny Teaching Stories: My First Teacher

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Today's Tiny Teaching Story is by Pamela Childers, a lifelong secondary, undergraduate and graduate school educator, writer, editor, and consultant. She enjoys collaborating with colleagues and students.

 

My First Teacher

Letitia, my Welsh Grammie, took me at three to the circus in Philadelphia, while Mother worked at a switchboard and Dad was still overseas after the war. She read me poetry and prose long after I had started teaching English and recited Shakespeare for the Princeton Women’s Club in her late seventies, an age I am close to reaching. When I last visited her in the dementia ward of the nursing home, she looked up at me from her wrinkled pillow, smiled and said, “I raised you, didn’t I?” I nodded, and we both shared an unforgotten memory.

 

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1 Comment
Lukefoster
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Children of different ethnic or multi-ethnic or international adoptive families tend to struggle with their racial identity. Teachers need to listen to the ideas from child and be responsible for children of ethnic families or children of different families. Teachers must help the children in the form of development level to complete their own thoughts and feelings, help to find out each of the families with children use the term to describe their identity. Teachers should also help parents organize their thoughts and feelings, understand their names, and their children with his or her identity. Teachers could use the same terminology as possible at home. It is difficult for parents to understand their child 's physical characteristics. Parents should let these children know the difference between a family and an adoptive family. Then parents can help them in a similar way, helping children and families of race or race. In addition, parents can describe the differences racial when they read. Monkey Cool

About the Author
Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed writing programs for more than thirty years, now teaches in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles “Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers” and “Responding to Student Writing” are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition. She has also created three films—Shaped by Writing, Across the Drafts, and Beyond the Red Ink—to bring the voices of student writers into a larger discussion about writing instruction. Nancy Sommers is currently the coauthor of Diana Hacker’s best-selling handbooks: The Bedford Handbook, A Writer’s Reference, Rules for Writers, A Pocket Style Manual, and Writer’s Help (see hackerhandbooks.com). Her newest instructor resource, Responding to Student Writers, offers a model for thinking about response as a dialogue between students and teachers.