Missiles aren't people.

Today I taught my class about the Cuban missile crisis. I give them a quiz at the end of every class to make sure they all learned what they were supposed to learn during the hour. It's a couple multiple choice and a couple single-sentence answers. Most of my kids got 9s or 10s today. But one student wrote this as an answer to the question 'Why was the U.S. worried about missiles in Cuba?': "Because the missles thought USSR had weapons + USSR thought missle had weapons."

It hadn't even occurred to me that I might have to teach my kids what the word "Missile" means. Most of them knew it, but this one student clearly had no idea what the word meant, and so just wasn't able to make the connection throughout the lesson that "missiles" WERE the nuclear weapons we were talking about, and not some group of people living in Cuba. This next week and the one after I'm going to just take a big step back and go over the vocab in everything we read. No wonder so many of these kids can't get through an article on their own with any idea what it's saying - if you don't know what half the words mean, how can you be expected to have any clue about the content?

On the one hand, I continue to be impressed and amazed by some of the stuff my kids show me they know, but on the other hand, I keep being surprised and kind of horrified at the things they've been allowed to get this far without knowing. One student asked me last week if the people who blew up the twin towers were sent here from another country. He legitimately had no idea why they did what they did. Then he wanted to know if we took any revenge on anyone, and kind of had no clue about how we wound up in the war we've been in for the last 9 years.

We have six more class days of summer school before we give them their end-of-class assessment and leave Mississippi. Part of me keeps thinking how much these kids deserve the world's best teacher to get them up to speed, instead of someone who's pretty much learning as she goes. And then part of me realizes that whatever teachers they've had up till now didn't really do their job to the extent it needed to be done, and then I wish I could have them for a whole year because at least I'd be trying my damnedest. Four weeks of class with pre-determined objectives where we're more or less teaching to a test isn't close to being enough to get these kids on the track they deserve to be on.