Modal verbs, confidence and writing to explore

 

'Nay it is; I know not 'seems.' Hamlet

 

I would love to say I am a confident person, but I am not. It has cause me ruin many times during my short time on this planet. Once I failed big time. This was when I worked for a year in a call centre. I had the ‘delight’ of selling car insurance and I was bad at it. Exceptionally, bad. So bad that I never earned commission or won any prizes. Part of the problem was my confidence. I couldn’t sell car insurance, partly because it was overpriced car insurance, and partly because I couldn’t confidently sell insurance. My voice would wobble and I would hesitate and stumble often in conversations.  There would be lot of awkward pauses and I didn’t exactly exude confidence about the company or the product.  I think I may even struggle to sell chocolate, if I had to.

My confidence levels go up and down. For some things, I am a bumbling fool.  For other things, I am confident as a smarmy TV presenter, which a cheesy grin and catchphrases. Therefore, it is interesting that confidence plays a big part in the classroom. The seas of faces before the teacher are often a mixture of confident, arrogant, uncertain and doubtful students. The process of learning is tracked by the level of confidence a student has. Students start off being uncertain and then develop to being confident at a skill. We even have the vocabulary in marking schemes that have this inbuilt ‘confidence’ aspect. As a teacher, I have to comment on whether a student is secure or insecure about a writing skill. Often, I hear myself say that I want students to be ‘confident’ so when they leave school they can blah and blah and possibly become a blah blah. This confidence is steeped in the classroom language and psychology of students.

However, I would like to raise an interesting point: is there a stage after the confident stage? Do we really want out students to be very confident? Personally, I think there is an extra stage in this process of learning: The Confident Plus Stage. Or, as I like to call it, The Doubting Thomas Stage. In English, for example, there is a time when students have to explore a text for ‘layers of meaning’. This is when they stop asserting themselves. They start doubting themselves. Nay it seems; I know not 'it'. It goes something like this:

The writer is showing us how love is inconsistent.

The writer might be showing us how love is inconsistent.

The first sentence is confident. The second isn’t so confident. It has the ‘Doubting Thomas’ factor. It teases out meaning. It shows that the student has a greater understanding of the text and how there is much more going on in the lesson. It shows that the student has understood that this text is complex. But, interestingly, it lacks confidence.

 

Over the last few years, I have taught the language of exploring texts / ideas by referring to tentative comments. However, it is almost as if I am teaching students to write like they lack confidence.  It is under the term of ‘exploring’ that we do this, but some of the things I teach them are the following. I thank Geoff Barton for the inspiration initially.

Modal verbs like

Might
Could
May

(Main) Verbs  like

Seems
Suggests
Hints
Implies

Adverbs like

Perhaps

Maybe

Possibly

Probably

Obviously, there are a lot more examples than these, but they make a good starting point.  

Perhaps, the writer suggests to us how love is inconsistent.

Maybe the writer could be showing us how love is inconsistent.

 

Then, to make them seem even more doubtful and lacking in confidence, I get them to add another point by using a structure like this.

 Maybe the writer could be showing us how love is inconsistent or the writer might be...

 

On one hand the writer could be showing us how love is inconsistent while on the other hand the writer might be suggesting to us that…

Overall, I help students return to the state of uncertain they once started off with.  It is a funny journey.  It is almost as if I am teaching them to be 'unconfident', except that we call it ‘exploring’ or ‘teasing out layers of meaning’. I think this has applications for other subjects, especially when you are analysing a text.  We often don’t want students to say one thing about some data on a graph or a geographical feature and its causes. We want them to explain in detail and offer more than one suggestion or idea. In fact, we want them to be a bit doubtful so that they offer all the possible ideas. Therefore, we need to teach them the grammar of being tentative.

 Erm… ummm.…erm…maybe, we have a case for teaching our students to lack confidence. That, however, wouldn’t look good in the eyes of some newspapers:  TEACHERS SHATTER STUDENTS’ CONFIDENCE.  Somewhere there will be a  dubious reference as to the reducing of a student’s confidence being an attack on the nation’s pride. Perhaps, we should just call it being tentative or being a ‘doubting Thomas’ , Tim, Jenny, Henry or any other name of a student in your class.

 As I am a Cyberman, I have bypassed the emotional aspect of this topic because human emotions are illogical and a weakness. I am only joking. This blog is devoid of emotion because it might cause a bout of uncontrollable weeping from me, which will only lead to me writing a lengthy anecdote about how I had my confidence crushed by a teacher a long, long time ago.  Or, maybe, I am a Cyberman.

Agonising over adverbs with the hope of absorbing an article

I am facing that age old situation of having a class taking an exam in a few days’ time and I only have two lessons to prepare them with some golden nuggets of helpful information. Again, I am left with that conundrum of what to do. Do I go through a quiz to revise key aspects? Do I get them to go through another practice question? Do I go through some example answers? Do I try to consolidate what they have learnt in some way? Or, do I teach them something new ? Nah.  I have found that the longer I teach, the less I try to squeeze into those very important few lessons before an exam. I used to cram so much that I virtually used the department’s photocopying allowance for one lesson alone.

Like all good ideas, the inspiration doesn’t come to when you want it to happen. It comes to you at odd moments in your life like washing the pots or while watching the end of Eastenders. I thought about adverbs, as you do, and how I could use them to teach students how to analyse a text even more effectively than they currently do. I thought about actively teaching students to use them in their writing and teach them quickly how to use them correctly. This will be helpful as my Year 11 class prepare themselves for the English Language Unit 1 exam.

The Examboard says in the mark scheme:

 

•         offers evidence that the text is fully understood

•         shows a detailed engagement with the text

•         makes perceptive connections and comments

•         engages in detail with the events described in the text

 

 

Recently, I marked a set of Year 7 descriptions and it was very obvious that one of the grammatical structures they were taught to use in Year 6 was one that started with an adverb. In fact, almost every other sentence started like ‘Slowly, I walked…’ or ‘Hesitantly, I paused’. We do, as English teachers, tend to teach adverbs in descriptive writing and occasionally we use them for developing writing with some kind of adverbial phrases, depending of the genre. But, during exam preparation, I haven’t really used them or taught them explicitly. However, this week I am going to.

Adverbs, as we all know, tend to describe a verb and they usually end with an ‘ly’. But in analysing a text, they can be the words that give us a reader’s opinion. Look at these following lines:

It shows that there is a need to teach students about adverbs

Surprisingly, it shows that there is a need to teach students about adverbs.

It shows there is a need, surprisingly, to teach students about adverbs.

 

The first line is giving you the information that the question could be asking for: What do you learn from this article? Yet the second line adds some opinion from the reader and, dare I say it, it is evaluating the information given. It shows that ‘absorbing’ that examiners love to see. It shows that the writer is surprised by this piece of information that they have regurgitated out from the text. In the next sentence, they could write: ‘It is surprising because…’ . In the past, I have tried to get students to evaluate when responding to questions on the reading paper, but too often I have ended up with students saying what bits they liked and the bits they didn’t like. Looking at adverbs, I think will do this in a much more effective way.

But what adverbs could they use?

Interestingly,

Confusingly,

Shockingly,

Funnily,

Strangely,

Bizarrely,

Worryingly,

Ironically,

Intriguingly, 

I looked at the above list and I thought it could read like a poem about teacher’s day. Interestingly, the class that is always noisy decided to be quiet today for some reason. I’ll stop there, as poetry writing isn’t my thing. Anyway, with this list of adverbs I can get students to do something with some information that is more than just reading between the lines and possibly moving towards that interpreting and absorbing the information that the examiners wish to see.

In my first lesson back with my Year 11 class, I am going to try this with an article and get them to come up with some sentences in response to the article.

Worryingly, the writer feels that students need to know more about adverbs.

Interestingly, the writer hasn’t done this before.

Funnily, the writer's attempt to write poetry isn’t that successful.

Then, I will get them to expand and justify their opinion, by reusing that adverb in the next sentence.  Furthermore, I might even show them how placing the adverb in different places can affect the overall meaning and opinion of the reader.

Nervously, I leave you as I plan my lessons for the week ahead. Hesitantly, I approach the piles and piles of work to do. Joyously, I haven’t got to go to work on Monday. Surprisingly, it was going to be an INSET day, but it has been changed to some twilight sessions. Luckily, that gives me an extra day to plan and mark work. Disapprovingly, my wife, also a teacher, has to work. Smugly, I don’t.

Thanks for reading,

Xris32