Straight Talk is a great book. It has also made me beat my head against the wall by pointing out so many of the dumb, bone-headed mistakes I've made as a teacher this year. According the author, I have done some things right, but I'm just the type of individual that dwells on his mistakes and beats himself up over them.
Things I do wrong, that I plan to correct starting with my next unit:

- I fall very short of giving pre-assessments. Why? To be honest, I just get all excited about the unit/subject and forget about doing it. What a great tool that I have left just laying there. I've got to start doing this with my next unit this next month.

- I fall short on formative assessments. I'm pretty good at giving informal feedback, but that's about it. I hereby pledge to give more formal, concrete formative assessments from now on.

- Timely grading/feedback. With all the things lumped on teachers, combined with graduate school assignments, and just "real life" I sometimes find myself overwhelmed with too few hours in the day it seems. Too often, that stack of papers staring at me at 10:00 to 10:30 at night gets put off, and then put off, and . . . well, you get the picture.

OK, enough with the negative waves Moriarity, how about some positives:

- Calling on raised hands. This was something I picked up on from my professors in the past. I seldom call on the first hand raised, and try to wait if only one or two raise their hands in response to a question. I am almost always looking for the kid who never offers up an answer, and that is one of the few times I will call on the first hand raised. I want to make sure that I encourage that risk-taking.
- Wait time. I try to give any/all students time to answer, and I often wait for them to tell me to call on someone else. However, sometimes that wait time can become an embarrassment to them, and I sometimes say "Would you like for me to come back to you?" in order to give them and "out".
- Responding to incorrect answers. Unless the answer is just really totally out there or "Chucky Cheese"* I try to make the student feel valued. I often say "Well, that's not quite what I was looking for, but I like your logic on that, let's look at your answer again later in the unit" or "Wow! That's not quite correct, but I really like your thinking on that, I want to talk with you more on that later". My point in all this being, I do not want to kill their thinking or learning. I have found with sixth graders especially, that they are in that netherworld of going from concrete "there's the definition in that paragraph" to higher order, more abstract thinking, and I want them to know that it is possible to go from incorrect to correct by just a small shift at times.

I want so badly to be that perfect social studies teacher. However, I know consciously that I have so very much to learn. I wish I had more time to interact with my sixth grade team besides at lunch in the teacher work room, but they have so much lumped on them I feel that I am an imposition.

* Last year I had a few minutes of "dead air" at the end of a period, and I asked my kids what else they wanted to know about history. A young lady raised her hand and said "I want to know the history of Chucky Cheese." LOL! That phrase became a watchword for off-topic, class-derailing questions in my classes last year and this year as well. I told her that no matter where I went or taught she would always live in my heart for creating that unintentionally. To this day I can call on a kid "Do you have a question?" They will say "Yes sir, but it's kinda Chucky Cheese." I usually say "That's OK, but we're kind of pressed for time, let's save it for later."