Module 1: Instructional Challenge

      Hocked gems financing him, our hero defied the scornful laughter. “Think of it as an egg, not a table,” he said. Then three sturdy sisters sought proof, forging over vast calmness, and sometimes over turbulent peaks and valleys, until at last welcome winged creatures appeared, signifying monumental success.

1. What are the hocked gems?

            If the hocked gems are something that are “financing him”, then that means they are something of worth that he could use somehow for personal support. However, because he has “defied the scornful laughter” I think that the gems came from an immoral source as if the gems were stolen and either sold for money or kept.

2. What should we think of as an egg and not a table?

            I see him referring to the stealing or selling of the gems with the phrase “think of it as an egg, not a table” because he could have done something much worse or seen as a “bigger” deal than selling gems for money. The egg is being compared to the smaller things in life on a crime level, while the table is signifying something that is looked down upon because it is considered “harder” to looked past.

3. Who are the three sturdy sisters?

            The three sturdy sisters are the various groups of people looking for the truth behind the crime. The groups of people could be family, government/police and the people who might have been fooled by the crime. When people are looking for someone who is important to them for whatever reason, they will not back down and not give up until justice has been service meaning they are “sturdy” in their quest. As well as not giving up on their search, these people would go to whatever lengths, “vast calmness, and sometimes over turbulent peaks and valleys”, to bring the investigation to an end.

4. What kind of winged creatures appeared?

            The winged creatures are truth, justice and peace. When I think of truth, I think of John 8:32 which says, “Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free”. Imagining setting something free makes me think of some sort of bird, particularly a dove. Therefore, the truth of the crime was now out in the open, leaving the “sturdy sisters” in peace. 

           If I were to read this passage with my students, I would need to determine its exact meaning before conveying my blind opinions of the passage to them. So, after I went through the passage on my own and answered the questions, I went to the internet to find out what that passage was truly about. After discovering the passage was about Christopher Columbus, everything in the passage made much more sense! Trying to figure out something like that on your own is difficult if there is not a true indication as to the main topic of the passage. So, first if Christopher Columbus is someone my students had not learned about then it would be important to give the students a mini-lesson on his goals, voyage and outcome which could be done through a short video or other lesson. However, an activity that would be neat to assign would be to allow the students to see this passage before talking about explorers, and then give it to them again to see if the things in the passage make more sense. That activity would be optimal because then the students are activating their own background knowledge with limited assistance.

            It is a much harder process if the student’s schema and the context do no match. Weaver (2002, p. 21) speaks of this while referring to a passage about washing clothes, “Clearly these ideas can be inferred from the passage, but only if you know or think that the passage, is about washing clothes- and if you know something about that process”. Therefore, if the child has no schema about explorers or Christopher Columbus then he/she is not going to be able to come up with the correct answers for the questions we answered about the passage earlier. It will be important for me to teach the students about Christopher Columbus before allowing them to go any further with the text or else the purpose of the text will not be understood.

            In my opinion, students should not spend very much time with texts that do not match their interests or schema because then reading will become more of a chore than something of pleasure. If the child does not understand what the topic is about, then he/she definitely needs to get a new text because the child really is not reading at that point; he/she is simply identifying words on a page and not understanding a meaning. There will be things within the classroom that the students may not want to learn about because it is not something of interest to them, but that is when as a teacher one must make lesson fun and interactive for the students to want to get involved.