125 (Spring 2000): 52-53
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HOT Classrooms
SHARON W. SAXTON
THE Santa Ana school district is a poor, predominantly Latino pocket in the midst of an area of great privilege. Our students are 97% Latino, 70% of whom speak Spanish as their first language; these numbers are more than twice as high as any area in Los Angeles. Years of partnership programs with the University of California, Irvine, have not yielded large numbers of eligible students attending the university. Every year Santa Ana High School sends one student to the Ivy League, and, thanks to the generosity of a local judge, about six graduating seniors go off to a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. Between two and five students matriculate at the various campuses of the University of California, and another dozen go to college in the California State University system. Most of the rest spend a certain amount of time at community colleges, although few transfer to a four-year institution. When our school became involved with the Humanities Out There program, we hoped that it would make a difference in our rate of college matriculation.
Julia Lupton and I chose to begin the HOT partnership with a class of juniors characterized by their ordinariness. When she and ten tutors packed into my classroom that first day, everyone was apprehensive. Some of the tutors were from minority groups and were only a few years older than my students. After a few opening remarks, slides, and some background information from Lupton, the tutors took seats next to the students and set about the arduous business of winning the confidence of teenagers.
For twelve weeks Lupton and the tutors came every Friday, armed with various versions of the story of Hercules and with various ways to organize student understanding of the material. Several times during the intervening weeks, Lupton and I exchanged e-mails about the ways the information was being presented and accepted, the difficulty of the material, and how the students were responding to the tutors. We exchanged suggestions for improvement and ideas about how I could reinforce the skills being taught. We discussed particular students and their relationships to particular tutors, hoping to accommodate everyone. We devised ways for me to review material with the students on the Thursdays just before HOT Fridays. We discussed both the student writing read by the tutors and the writing I corrected. As the lessons developed, it became clear that many of the characteristics of the Hercules myth could be related to Shakespeare's Othello. I began reading that play with students during the rest of the week, drawing parallels to Hercules. At the end of the semester, as part of the students' final essay exam, I asked them to write about the similarities between Hercules and Othello and to evaluate the effectiveness of the HOT program. The metacognitive writing seemed particularly poignant and positive. Several students wrote excitedly about their plans to attend college. They loved the personal interest their tutors took in their progress.
Yet I wondered if these sunny responses were manufactured for my benefit. Moreover, although both Lupton and I felt that students were writing more perceptive pieces and were connecting ideas across myths, we had no concrete evidence that these students were better readers or writers. Since no instrument used by the district would give us a picture of how our students' writing would stack up against university writing, we decided to enroll them in the university's mock Subject A composition test. Students wrote the test in my classroom without the tutors present. The pieces were then scored at the university, and I, along with other participating teachers, spent the day with the readers who scored the test talking about student writing. The results were telling. Fully one-third of the HOT students scored a passing grade, which was more than had passed the test from Santa Ana's entire senior class in any previous year. Had they been a group of gifted students, these results would have been stunning. One of the students from this class had scored a 5 out of 6 on the test, a feat performed by only three juniors in the entire county.
Although we felt quite pleased with the test results, there remained students about whom we were concerned. Will (not his real name) posed the greatest challenge. Mature, handsome, and affable, he had got along in school using charm and wit, never studying but always sliding by. His tutor immediately recognized his talent and thoughtfulness and took him on as a personal challenge. He called Will at home to encourage him with his reading and college planning. He gave Will his home phone number. He talked each week about life at the university, how easily Will could fit in, how well he could do academically. Will's grandmother, who worked at the school cafeteria, approached me to assure me that Will loved both my class and the UCI tutors. Grasping my hand in both of hers, she vowed to work "as long as it takes" so that Will could attend UCI. Soon thereafter, Will stopped attending my class. I alerted counseling, and they set out to discover what had become of him. I called his home to ask where he was but got only vague responses. When I pointedly asked his grandmother about him, she responded obliquely that he had been sick for a very long time. Toward the end of the year, I received paperwork confirming that Will had dropped out. Of course, there could be many reasons we lost Will, reasons that have nothing to do with what went on in the classroom. However, we know that the HOT intervention has the potential to transform a student's self-image.
Without question, the HOT program causes all participants to change. Many students who would not have considered going to college because they believed themselves academically unprepared began to identify the university as their goal as their grades and writing improved. A few of the students began to consider becoming teachers after this encounter, and we were pleased to see that many of the tutors also opted for careers in teaching. One of the tutors was so moved by the experience that she left academia entirely and got involved in social activism to work with underrepresented students more directly. Meanwhile, Lupton has not only enlarged her program to include more teachers at more sites but is also offering her course on world mythology to a group of teachers in the district through a specially funded grant. I myself am now working at the district office, where I articulate programs similar to HOT, ones that will help us build closer ties between the university and the high school.
The author is an English teacher at Santa Ana High School, California. This paper was presented at the 1999 CCCC Annual Convention in Atlanta.
© 2000 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
ADE Bulletin 125 (Spring 2000): 52-53 |
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