Jamal’s problem is even more difficult. His arms are stiffly crossed in front of his chest and the sour look on his face brings out his dimple. It is another normal school day at Newsome Park Elementary, in Newport News, Virginia, and Mrs. Swords has just picked up her second graders after their science lesson. The science teacher, she discovers, had just corrected Jamal: "'Ain’t' isn’t a word." Just thinking about it, Jamal’s innocent brown eyes tear up. Swords asks around to see if any of the other students had heard an exchange involving Jamal and the science teacher. One student jumps at the opportunity and gives her an instant replay. Jamal fills in the gaps.
Swords knew the confrontation called for a class meeting. Nearly every morning, the students gather on Mrs. Swords’s ruby red carpet for "morning meetings" and most often they are about things the students are thankful for or upcoming events in their lives that they wanted to share. Swords isn’t too tall, but her heeled boots add to her height this morning. She is slender, and has short, spunky blonde hair, and bright blue eyes that gently that gaze down at her kids. Unfortunately, this morning Swords’s blue eyes are filled with distress as Jamal tells her how the science teacher made him feel stupid.
JAMAL'S & NATHAN'S STORIES ILLUSTRATE how the common ways of teaching language tend to damage children’s self-esteem, as well as confuse them. The correctionist model that most teachers implement in their classrooms has been around for ages. But how effective are those ain’t-isn’t-a-word teaching tactics?
Back on the ruby red carpet sometime later, Swords asks her students how her own repeated correction of their speech makes them feel. The classroom was silent until the first brave speaker said, "It embarrasses me." After that comment, another student says, "It makes me feel like I don’t know what you want me to say."
It was horrible to hear: "I thought I was helping them," Swords says. After that class meeting, it became clear to Swords that she needed a new way of teaching formal language. The age-old correctionist model was failing Swords and her students.
FOR AS LONG AS RACHEL SWORDS CAN REMEMBER, she has wanted to be a teacher. Her mother still treasures an assignment from kindergarten in which Rachel wrote about her goals of teaching one day. For the last few years, Rachel has been living out her dreams.
Like many teachers, Swords empathizes with her students. When she was in school she was very shy and barely spoke in the classroom. She recalls a particularly painful incident in first grade when she was wrongly accused of speaking out of turn. These incidents have impacted the relationships she has with her own students—she tries hard to be fair.
