An Example of a Teaching Essay - Goddard College's Intranet

Teaching Essay, Ken Damerow
the dying. Haley’s story also has some of the elements (the tone, the mystery and quirkiness)
of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I have been reading to the class
in the afternoons. Perhaps, she is also using this as her model.
I am very happy with the results of this practicum experience. Spillover is happening
and the poetry discussions are generating a common language about writing that I am able to
access in the general writing lessons. When I ask them to add some noise here in their drafts
or to think of a metaphor there, they immediately know what I am talking about. Some
students this year walk through their school day thinking about writing. They carry their
Writers Notebook back and forth between school and home, home and soccer or dance
with an eye trained on writing down what they find interesting, gathering fodder for what
they might one day soon form into a good piece of writing. On the way to the busses last
month, one of my girls responded to the principal’s questions of Whose your teacher? and How’s
Mr. Damerow doing? This student unabashedly said, Mr. Damerow’s teaching how to be a writer!
The student evaluations tend to support this. Twenty-two out of twenty-three
students responded they have fun in my class. Eighteen out of twenty-three say they love
poetry. The one item in retrospect I wished I would have included is I learn a lot in Mr.
Damerow’s class. Item 6, Mr. Damerow makes me think of things I never thought of before, was
disappointing, and I think it may have been difficult for kids to understand. Most nine and
ten-year-olds when asked if they knew something you just taught them will invariably tell you
yes, they knew that already. But if you ask the question before the teaching, you will find
they don’t know much. Like revision, metacognition is very difficult to teach kids to do well.
Displaying and publishing student work has proven challenging and is the one area
that hasn’t worked out as well as I would have liked. Given all my other teaching
responsibilities throughout the week, displaying and publishing their work in the local
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