Tag Archives: Teachers Pay Teachers

by

What’s Schwa Got to Do with It?

Ooh, schwa. Sounds exotic. What is it?

Unless you teach elementary-aged kids, sing chorally, or are a word nerd (word nerds, unite!), you may not know what in the world a schwa is. Why should you care? Well, if you play Wordle, it’s a fantastic word to know (you’re welcome). And if you’ve ever thought that English is a ridiculously hard language to learn, you can thank the schwa—it’s a big part of why this is such a difficult language to read and spell.

Merriam-Webster defines schwa as “an unstressed mid-central vowel (such as the usual sound of the first and last vowels of the English word America),” wherein “mid-central” refers to the placement of the vowel in the mouth. The Oxford Dictionary definition is, “the unstressed central vowel (as in a moment ago), represented by the symbol /ә/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet.”

What does all this mean? Even though we know there are five vowels (a, e, i, o, and u) and sometimes a sixth (y), the schwa sound can be made by any of them. The key is identifying where it falls in a word (unstressed syllables in multisyllabic words). What, to the naked ear, may sound like a short u or i could actually be spelled with any of the vowels—and often not the ones you expect.

Learn from My Mistakes

It was time to teach the schwa sound to my students, and we practiced “calling words home” (a trick that helps them identify stressed and unstressed syllables), and then I set them loose with a worksheet to find the schwa in a bunch of different words. I’m not proud of it, but it was one of those lessons when I just needed an activity to fill the time, so I did what (some) teachers do in this type of situation: I looked for a free worksheet online. One that didn’t require my students to cut out and glue anything because, even though I have a very cute chicken-shaped receptacle for my glue sticks, I absolutely abhor using them. More glue gets on the table than on the paper, and what little does get on the paper doesn’t hold, so there are scraps of paper everywhere and a sticky table. But I digress.

The nice lady who created the worksheet explained that she had vetted every single word to ensure they all had a schwa syllable. Indeed, all were schwa words. But many of them are what I call hiding-in-plain-sight schwa words, and I did an inadequate job preparing my students for these. Within a few minutes of turning them loose with what should have been an independent activity, I was getting called to help them left and right because they were able to find the unstressed syllables, but then it appeared that many of the unstressed syllables had the vowels they were expecting. So how could they be schwas? I had missed one important detail about the schwa, which was right there in my teacher’s manual. UFLI Foundations defines schwa as a “quick, unstressed neutral vowel pronunciation, noted by the symbol /ә/. The purpose of schwa is to allow unstressed syllables to be said more quickly” (p. 371, emphasis added).

I had neglected to tell my students that, sometimes, the schwa vowel is, in fact, the one you think it is (depending on regional pronunciation, of course). What I mean by this is that I can sound out a word like muffin and figure out that its vowels are u and i (in that order). Does this word have a schwa? Yes, it’s the i. Say it. Which syllable gets the stress? muf Now, say the whole word, and when you do, really listen for that second vowel. Does is sound like a pure i (“ih”), or do you say it so quickly that its sound is indistinct? (I hope you said it’s indistinct, but if you think differently, I’ll get to that in a sec.)

Every multisyllable word has at least one unstressed syllable, and chances are, that unstressed syllable has the schwa sound. Try some more words: across, chicken, dentist, dragon, upon. Unstressed syllables make the schwa lazy; the vowel is kind of taking a nap and not doing its proper job. This was a hard concept for me to grasp because I am a trained singer, and when singing, I often modify the schwa sound to make it more palatable to the ear.

For example, when singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” I pronounce the i in perilous as the pure short /i/, not /ә/. Even though no one goes around saying per-ih-lous, this is a choice that many singers make because the schwa sound is, quite frankly, ugly when it’s sung (especially when a note/vowel is sustained for any length). Because I’ve been singing for a lot longer than I’ve been teaching, I sometimes (unintentionally) speak in an affected way, making the schwa hard for me to detect. This happens even more when I’m sounding out a word in isolation with my students. Note to self: when teaching, take off your singer hat. When my students were trying to find the schwa in a syllable that clearly sounded like /ә/ and just as clearly was spelled with a u (like until), it’s no wonder they were confused. They thought that the schwa could never be the vowel that typically makes that sound. It’s important to teach that, even though it may sound like a short u (or i, as the case may be), the schwa prevents it from having its purest sound. In other words, when trying to be a schwa detective, be the opposite of a good singer.

How to Teach Schwa and Why It’s Important

First, being able to identify which syllables are stressed and unstressed is a great tool for readers to have in their literacy toolboxes. Because I have a very long last name that starts with an unstressed syllable, I’m familiar with people attempting to lead with a stressed syllable. And once they start pronouncing it incorrectly, they get stuck. I teach my students what stressed and unstressed syllables are by using their names. I pretend they’re very far away, then call them in a sing-song voice. When I do, which syllable do I naturally stretch out? That’s the stressed syllable. (Kids love this because they discover that many of them have one or more schwa sounds in their names.) We can use this same exercise with multisyllabic words. If emergent readers are decoding a word for the first time and it sounds wrong, they’re likely emphasizing the wrong syllable. They need to “call” it the other way, with the stress on the other syllable. Then all kinds of light bulbs start to go off. (To see exactly what I mean, here’s a FREE video of me teaching the schwa sound.)

Second, if students don’t learn about the schwa, they might be prone to spell words like nickul (nickel) or baskit (basket). And while spell check is out there to fix a lot of these mistakes, it can’t help when someone is wildly off. I teach with the simple view of reading approach, in which sounds (phonemes) and word parts (syllables) are taught in an explicit, systematic manner. The spelling patterns are more important than the individual words because they’re like keys, and once readers have the keys to decode, they can “open up” all kinds of new words. Once I’ve taught a spelling pattern (like the schwa sound), I include it in word work, games, and texts, and students gain reading comprehension. It’s a formula that looks like this:

RC = D x LC

in which Reading Comprehension is the product of Decoding and Language Comprehension.

Why It Matters (My Soapbox Moment)

The more students engage with and experience these words, the better they will understand and retain them. The better readers they will be. The better spellers and writers. But what about those students who struggle? They may have the reading strategies down cold, but they just can’t get the hang of spelling, no matter how hard they try. They are the kids who routinely fail spelling tests (in the schools that still give them) or who lose a letter grade because their essays, while including all the right content, look like they were written by a three-year-old. If you’ve read my blog before, you know how I feel about tests (don’t like them one bit), although I grudgingly understand why we do have to have some way to quantify what students know.

I am a formative assessment kind of gal, and one great way to give this kind of assessment was introduced to me in a math workshop, of all things. While I was attending in the hopes of helping my kiddos who struggle with math (and I did get a lot of great tips for that—never fear!), I came away with a much stronger sense of how to help all my students in any subject.

When we throw concepts at students and expect them to swallow (and regurgitate) them with no opportunity for reflection, how much are they getting out of the lesson? How much do they retain? The answer is often just enough to get them through the unit test—if that. What I learned from Dr. Yeap Ban Har from [Math]odology is that the answer does not matter nearly as much as the journey to searching for the answer. He uses the analogy of going to the airport. Some students are on their way there (need assistance). Some have arrived at the airport and are ready to board (emergent). Others are at cruising altitude (independent). One way to gauge which level of “airport” readiness students have achieved is by giving them the opportunity to show their learning through reflective journals. These can take many different forms, from simply describing what they learned to turning it into a story or letter to a friend to… well, whatever way a student needs to express him- or herself. If education across the board could shift in this direction, I think great things could happen for our young minds.

Bringing it back to the schwa sound, I would much rather a student explore and find words in texts they’re reading, write them out, and play with syllable stresses than memorize a list of words for a spelling test. If they get the vowel wrong, at least they’re thinking. We’ll read some great literature together, and they’ll suddenly start seeing words with schwas everywhere, and the dots will start to connect. If you’re a teacher, wouldn’t you much rather spend your time reading great texts to your students than drilling them for a test? If you’re a parent, doesn’t that sound like the kind of education you’d like your child(ren) to have? With the right exposure, the right techniques, they’ll become much more competent and confident readers, writers, learners, and thinkers.

For more about schwa and all kinds of other spelling patterns, check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store, Mrs C Loves to Read. For two days only (August 6-7, 2024), get up to 25% off everything in my TpT store using the code below.

by

Is AI Making Us Dumber?

In February 2023, I attended a conference for academic support teachers, and one of the workshops addressed ChatGPT. As an elementary school teacher, it wasn’t on my radar at all. The stance that the workshop leaders took wasn’t exactly “if you can’t beat them, join them,” but it wasn’t far off. If kids are going to be exploring ChatGPT anyway, they reasoned, we teachers need to make it our job to learn about it and any benefits it might have in the classroom.

I didn’t give ChatGPT another thought until last year’s preplanning, when one of our admin gave a ChatGPT demonstration by having it write her presentation. Were there some gaffes? Yes, but it did a decent job of covering her topic.

That was my only taste of ChatGPT until one day a few months later when I was completely burnt out and needed to write a lesson plan for my 3rd graders. One of my colleagues said, “Have ChatGPT write it for you.” So I thought, why not? I pulled it up and asked it to write my lesson plan. At the beginning of ChatGPT’s lesson plan, it gave instructions for whichever spelling pattern I was teaching (I wish I’d saved it—I can’t remember what pattern it was now), and while the structure of the lesson plan was fine, the explanation of the spelling pattern was incorrect. In ChatGPT’s defense, it is difficult to give printed instructions for a lesson that is dependent on sounds and articulation. I can imagine it being just as difficult to read a speech therapist’s lesson plan. Even so, the fundamental principals were just wrong. It concerned me that other teachers who are lost and looking to ChatGPT to help them might assume that it’s correct and teach it verbatim. You may think it doesn’t matter if kids don’t learn how to spell (after all, they can just have AI write it for them—yeesh), but what if it writes an incorrect chemistry or algebra lesson?

One thing I will give ChatGPT is that it asks for feedback, and I did not hold back. I told it that I couldn’t use the lesson plan because there were errors, and it asked me what those errors were because, as AI, it has the ability to learn. I told it what was wrong, but again, if I didn’t know what I was talking about, I could fill ChatGPT with all kinds of nonsense that it would internalize and use in the next lesson plan that some unsuspecting teacher asks for. In that way, it reminds me of Wikipedia—which, by the way, my school teaches students not to use as a trusted source. Sure, you may find facts there, but it’s also been known to have bogus information, such as that Sinbad died in 2007 (he’s still alive and well 17 years later).

ChatGPT isn’t the only AI out there. It seems like there’s something new every day. I see commercials for Grammarly constantly. Do we really need AI to help us with our emails? (Okay, I’ll admit, some people need to get help from somewhere. Apparently, it’s too much to ask people to proofread a two-liner before hitting send.) Even WordPress is trying to get me to use AI to “improve” this blog. I’m sorry, if I reach a smaller audience because I’m not using AI, at least that audience is reading my words.

And AI doesn’t just write and edit for you—it can also take a candid photo and make it look like a professional headshot. While this is a nice alternative to having to spend big bucks on a photographer, it’s also a hop, skip, and a jump away from fudging reality. If AI can make a snapshot of me at Disney World look like a professional headshot, couldn’t it also make it look like I’m best friends with J.K. Rowling? Or like I spent two weeks at a fancy resort that I’ve never actually visited? If seeing is believing… what if we can’t believe what we see anymore?

Thinking I’m a dinosaur who needs to get with the times, I asked my 16-year-old what he thinks about ChatGPT. To my surprise, I know more about it than he does. The extent of his knowledge is that it’s AI, therefore he has no interest in it. I asked him why—after all, he’s my dyslexic kiddo who has legitimate access to all the assistive technology he could ever want. What Peter said is that AI is allowing people to get dumber because they don’t have to think. There you have it from a high schooler, folks.

And as if the universe was giving me extra incentive to tackle this topic, I read this the other day: “Calculating machines could provide swift answers to complex sums, but what happened when the human mind atrophied and forgot how to calculate?” (Sisterhood of Dune by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson—yep, this lecture brought to you by a sci-fi geek).

I am all for assistive technology. After all, I’m the same person who made this vision board in grad school:

Just as I have students with dyscalculia (a math disorder) who are allowed to use calculators on math tests, there are assistive technologies that help people with just about any learning disability you can imagine. The more research that comes out about different learners, the more we’re able to differentiate and allow people to learn according to how they are wired. But before assistive technology can be used, the people using it need to know why they’re using these tools and how to use them properly. Putting a calculator into a child’s hands does no good if she doesn’t know which functions to use or the order of operations. Only once she understands the basic principles of math can she use the calculator to free up some of her working memory so she can think through problems and solve them correctly. In other words, we still have to teach people how to think.

Before writing this post, I did go back to ChatGPT to have it write a lesson plan on r-controlled vowels. The activities that it outlined were okay, but it lumped ar, er, ir, or, and ur into one lesson without any explicit instruction about the different sounds or how to differentiate between er, ir, and ur, which all sound the same. I’m sure I care more about this than most because I’m a specialist, but that’s the point: I’m the specialist, not ChatGPT. The next time I’m feeling overwhelmed, I’ll just take a breather and remember that, even on my worst days, I’m a better teacher than AI.

Here’s the thing: generative AI should only be used to supplement what we already know. It should not be the only source we turn to for anything, and when it’s used at all, it should be with extreme caution and—dare I say?—skepticism. In a time when it’s so easy to let our minds atrophy in front of screens, AI gives us another excuse to let our thinking “muscles” go slack. It’s such an issue that, when submitting a piece of writing for publication, I have to check a box saying it’s my own creation and that no part of it was written by artificial intelligence. Plagiarism, while still an issue, is no longer the main way that people claim works that aren’t their own.

I’ll leave you with this:

I love creating teaching materials or having brainwaves that make me lose myself in a piece of writing for long stretches of time. Don’t let AI steal what you love to do and turn it into a cheap imitation of your original, hard work.

For worksheets, activities, reading passages, lesson plans, and more (that I created), please check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store, Mrs C loves to read: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/store/mrs-c-loves-to-read