It Depends

Teaching often requires making decisions regarding instructional strategies that are tailored to individual student needs, While we know general principles regarding pedagogy and practice, the readiness levels, interests, and learning profiles of the students we serve often change what we need to do so that we can include the individuals who make up our classes. During the professional development sessions regarding Writer's Workshop and the Six Traits of Writing, we have tried to ensure that lesson plans, no matter how comprehensive, allow latitude to change and differentiate instruction based upon what we see from our students. Unlike the mantra of the popular press, there is no "silver bullet," no single instructional strategy that will work for all students, that will solve all of the problems facing an underperforming school, or that will certainly raise achievement. Instead, we try to emphasize that teaching is a combination of knowing one's craft, watching one's students, and then making critical decisions about what will work best at a given moment in time. How one proceeds depends on the instructional objective, the instructional strategy selected, and the students' response to that strategy. Sometimes things work out as one plans. Other times one needs to make changes. It depends.

S.T.S

Who said the T-Word?

A knock on the door, two adult Dine people, male and female are at the door. Maurice and I approach the door, we have recently been approached by more people hanging around the mission and it is often best to be with another person. At 11 at night, I'm bringing the former Knox Prairie Fire defensive player. The couple is very kind and respectful as we say hello, followed by a simple statement "Has anyone told you about the flood?" As we look at each other they begin to explain the situation, "A reservoir burst, and a tornado came in Chinle, the water could come and flood us down here. There is high ground up by the garbage dump, so when you hear the siren you should go up that way to avoid the flooding." After a couple of thanks we proceed to get everyone together and tell them what we heard, we gather Steve and Diana and in a short amount of time we are following advice and directions and loading food into the cars, turning them so that we can make a quick exit because once the siren sounds, it means an evacuation should be immediate. Water projected to be knee high would be flowing through the wash and flooding the mission and other parts of the area. At a meeting of all people in the mission, Lynn the Pastor told us that it could come at anytime, an hour, 3 hours or not at all. When the siren came we had to be ready to go, and so we waited. And played spades, and waited, and finally went to bed.

When morning breaks finally, there is no water, merely a lot of tired eyes and people happy that there wasn't a mass exodus towards the mesa. We carried on with lessons and planning, working with teachers, reviewing information and working on the core knowledge curriculum that is now essential to their work at the school. After the lunch break, we come back to find out that the dam in Many Farms,a town about 40 minutes to an hour from us, had broken and so the water could still be working its way to us here in Rock Point, so we were back to considering evacuation. After all of this and the threat of more danger all that one can remember is that, in the Dine culture, the word Tornado when spoken has the power to summon a tornado. So what we had to find out was, who said the T-word?

J.L.