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YES Prep Teacher Prepares students for rigorous college literature classes

January 25, 2010 by Jeremy Jones

I have two main objectives in teaching English Literature to high school juniors: first and foremost, to enable students to write analytically at a college level; and secondly, to increase their scores on the SAT exam thereby improving their chances at being accepted to the college of their choice.

After two years of teaching middle school in a seriously low performing school, teaching high school—especially juniors—seemed like a huge leap. At first, being able to ask my students to write essays at all seemed to be such a satisfying feat. Our students think really well. They identify universal themes, select appropriate supporting quotes, and defend their choices with basic analysis. What they don’t do, unfortunately, is write fluently. Their ideas are disjointedly lumped together. Fragments are prevalent. Semi colons are nonexistent. Our students learn skills in a vacuum, and then have trouble applying these grammatical and organizational skills in their own writing. To combat these problems, throughout the year, we use a hybrid of the AP analytical writing rubric and an objective mastery rubric. Students track their improvements in necessary writing skills: Organization and Structure, Thesis Statements, Introductions and Conclusions, Depth of Analysis, Evidence from Primary and Secondary Sources. Using these and other specific categories, students are pushing themselves to write more fluidly at a greater depth than ever before. This also helps prepare students to confront a text with a critical eye, synthesize it in a timely manner, and write about what they have ascertained in a passage.

Low income students enter elementary school 7,000 words behind their wealthier classmates. They spend the entirety of their school years playing a serious game of catch up, and unfortunately, rarely catch up. This is an astonishing reality that becomes blatantly clear when our students begin taking practice SAT exams. With such limited vocabulary, as well as having certain phrases lost in translation for our nonnative speakers, our students struggle to score beyond the 500 level. In AP English and English III, students learn 300 words explicitly. We make flash cards, quiz each other, learn to change the words to different parts of speech. But even if our students learn around 300 words each year of high school, they are still more than 6,000 words behind other children who take the SAT. Also, because so many of our students are language learners, this presents its own challenge. Last week, we attacked SAT questions on parallelism. Parallelism appears frequently on the exam. By the end of class, every single student could identify an error in parallelism and correct it. However, when given actual SAT practice questions, they struggled. One question had two answer choices that both corrected the parallelism error. But one answer choice was worded “instills in students a love of learning.” The other answer was worded “instills in students a love to learn.” Students chose the latter. In Spanish, our students would use that infinitive—a love to learn, so it makes sense that they missed this question. As evidenced, we still have a long way to go to improve our scores. Thankfully, YES Prep is working really diligently to align high school English more. We have already started teaching vocabulary and SAT prep skills earlier in high school, and we will continue working until we find our students mastering the SAT.

Ultimately, with a little bit more alignment in explicitly teaching writing fluency skills, a little bit more focus on teaching specific vocabulary-building skills, and a sharper focus on analytical skills, our students will increase their competitive edge in applying to college. In the end, our students will be more college ready and more successful when they enter the school of their choice. Every day in English III and AP English presents its own challenges, but I could not imagine attacking these challenges in a more exciting, motivating school environment than YES Prep.

Emily Shisler is an 11^th grade English teacher at YES Prep North Central. Emily is a 2006 graduate of Northwestern University where she majored in English. She’s a 2006 Teach For America corps member. Emily grew up outside of Chicago.