Drawing Inferences

Wednesday. Seventh grade English. 

This was a new-to-me teacher. (She's also new to the school, but she's not new to the district. Last year she was at the continuation high school. I saw some gigs pop up from her, but I always missed them.) The classroom she's in used to belong to an eighth grade history teacher (who retired at the end of the last school year). 

(For fun I went into the archives. I subbed for Mr. C in this room on this day and on this day.)

Ms. V had left very detailed lesson plans. She had written their detailed agenda on the board. What could go wrong? 

Seventh graders. 

They were to read a excerpt from the novel Feed in their textbook, and they had questions to go along with it. This is a very basic, very standard type of assignment for a sub day. It should have been easy. 

But nope. I offered to have us read the story as a class. No, they could read it on their own. But, they were not reading. I pointed out that reading requires them to not be talking, because one can't talk and read at the same time. I mean, I'm way old (compared to them), and I can't do it, so I know they can't do it. 

They did not see my point. They claimed they could read and talk. (If they were reading together, that would have been fine, but that sounds a whole lot different than random conversations that have nothing to do with the assignment.) 

But somehow, they got to the point where they were answering the questions. And I got the same question from several of them. Do we have to draw? 

Draw? I went to investigate. 

The question asked them to "draw an inference" from the text. Two of the characters were having a conversation, but the text explicitly stated that the two characters were not speaking. So, how were they having the conversation? 

The excerpt was from a sci-fi novel where everyone is implanted with a computer feed. I'm hazy on details as I haven't read the book, but I quickly inferred that they were using this computer feed to telepathically (or something) communicate, maybe like texting. 

The problem? They had no idea what "infer" meant. (Although, from the context of the question, it should have been clear they were writing an answer, not drawing a picture.) 

After explaining this three times, it was time to explain it to the whole class, as there comes a point when it's clear that most of the class will have the same question, and repeating the answer for each and every student gets tedious quickly. 

Were they able to infer? Well, kind of. When I explained that they had to figure it out even though it wasn't stated in the text, they got that. But, they were also seventh graders with a sub. They weren't working as diligently as they might with their teacher. 

Although, when I left my note about how many of them weren't making very good use of their time, Ms. V emailed back that she had similar problems with them not doing their work. 

I was very much not surprised at that. I could infer from their behavior that they were not in the habit of taking their schoolwork seriously. Seventh graders. Some of them will learn the hard way that they should really take their schoolwork seriously.