Stooping to their level.

I had the following conversation with a student today after I handed her back her rough draft with my comments:

Student: What's H?
Me: It's not an H.
Student: Then what is it?
Me: The paragraph symbol.
Student: Paragraph...paragraph...paragraph...whatchu tryin' to say?
Me: I'm tryin' to say that your whole paper is one long paragraph.
Entire class: Oooooooh...
Student: That's just because I didn't break it up into paragraphs.
Me: And I was just showin' you WHERE to break it up into paragraphs.

Another student came to me with the "Research Paper MLA Cheat Sheet" I had handed out. He put the sheet on the desk and pointed to the top, which showed them how to put in in-text citations step by step. This is literally what I put on their sheet:

First: put quotation marks around the words you're using that are from somewhere else.
Second: at the end of the sentence, put a parenthesis --> (
Third: put the last name of the textbook/article's author inside the parenthesis
Fourth: put the page number of the book/article you got that quote from
Fifth: put the other parenthesis --> )
Sixth: put a period.

It seems this student was offended that I had felt the need to break it down quite so simply. This was our conversation:

Student: Miss Melchione, we're not in second grade.
Me: I just wanted to make sure you got it.
Student: I think I know where to put my quotation marks. I can't believe you think we're that stupid.

And then I reached over and just circled the "put a period" on his paper. We had a good chuckle.

I initiated something today called "silent day." What the kids don't know yet is that it's going to evolve into "silent week." I walked into school this week - this wonderful week before spring break when the kids are going on field trips and attending assemblies at the end of the week and they're on Week 6 of a research paper they hate - and decided I can't do it. I can't handle them running around and screaming and tearing my stuff up for another week. So when silent reading time ended I passed out their folders and told them in whispers that they can choose to either keep reading or work on their papers, but they may not talk. And by golly, it worked. So I did it with my other classes too. Didn't work quite as well for 5th block, but it worked better than letting them run wild. Silence, my friends, is glorious. It's my new favorite thing. Hence: the birth of "silent week."