Introducing Mr. Chocintok, a Straw Man

Mr. Chocintok is a bad teacher. It doesn’t take much to be a bad teacher, and for Mr. Chocintok, it only takes two things. The first is what he does for the students, the second is what he gives the students to do. Despite his universal badness, Mr. Chocintok has been teaching for a very long time. In fact, some people say that’s the whole problem.

These days, teachers know better than Mr. Chocintok. While he will often spend entire lessons lecturing his students—who must take notes and remain silent unless called upon to answer one of his mechanical queries—we know that students must be more actively engaged in the learning process, and that they are not merely vessels to be filled by the bucket of Mr. Chocintok’s arbitrary knowledge.

When he does give the students something to do, Mr. Chocintok always assigns worksheets. Some of the worksheets are so old, Mr. Chocintok has made changes on them in pen and then copied them again: “Rockin’ in the U.S.S.R. Russia” and “God Superman Bless Us, Everyone!” are among his more venerable titles. Mr. Chocintok likes his fill-in-the-blank worksheets because all 120 of them can be scored by his wife during a single episode of primetime television.

Thank goodness the rest of us know better than Mr. Chocintok. We know that students must be constructively engaged in an activity, if the process of knowledge building is every going to amount to any kind of edifice at all. We know that we must ask them to do more than fill in worksheets, we must provide them with the strategies to make meaning of the things they read, and ultimately, strategies that to help them become lifelong learners.

Maybe Mr. Chocintok is just too old-fashioned to understand things like strategies. Strategies are things you use in your brain, where no one can see them. Nevertheless, they are there, or if they’re not, you’re not reading these words, anyway. To help you read them, I could show you some of the strategies I use as a certified proficient reader myself. To show you, we’ll need something to write on, like a big piece of chart paper or an overhead projector. Then, I’ll demonstrate something strategic, and provide you with a visual-tactile-kinesthetic manipulative by which you can experiment with the same strategy.

It’s that simple, and yet still Mr. Chocintok can be heard to complain: “The only difference between a worksheet and a graphic organizer is how big the blanks are.”