In Order To Learn

This morning in 6th grade English the students were learning about how to rewrite sentences using “in order to” and “so that.”

The teacher began by walking the students through a few examples:
Farmers use manure to grow good crops.
Farmers use manure IN ORDER TO grow good crops.
Farmers use manure SO THAT they can grow good crops.

She asked a few students to come up to the blackboard and rewrite a few more example sentences, and then wrote a list of five new sentences on the board.

Most classes at Chumbageni consist of an example problem, a class work-through problem, and then ten exercises. Since the five sentences need to be written out in two different ways, that is 10 exercises. No big deal.

So when the teacher walked up to me and handed me a piece of chalk after she had finished writing the exercises out on the board, I had absolutely no clue what she wanted me to do. I had been drifting off in to lala land (probably like most of the students in the class) and just looked at her like…..huh?

I asked her: Do you want me to ask the children to do the exercises in their workbooks? Do you want me to ask them to come up to the board and do them? Do you want me to do them? Her response with all the kids watching us? “Please…teach us.”

Well great. What the heck am I supposed to do now? I don’t have a book to work with, just 5 very easy sentences on the board that require a slight tweaking.

Having graded many exercise books at Chumbageni, I know that it is very rare for a group of students to get most of their exercises correct. And given that this was probably the easiest exercise ever, I got it in my head that I would attempt to explain it so well that no student in the class would get the answers wrong.

I started by showing them that you just have to add “in order” in front of the word “to” when you want to rewrite the sentence using “in order to.”

Students go to school to learn.
Students go to school IN ORDER TO learn.

After reading all of the sentences on the board out loud using “in order to” we switched to “so that.” I asked the students to change the sentence to get a sense of how well they knew it and where they would mess up. The first student took the sentence: We boil drinking water to kill germs, and turned it into:

We boil drinking water SO THAT to kill germs.

I wrote his answer on the board, asked the class if it was correct, and let another student help him:

We boil drinking water SO THAT we can to kill germs.

And finally:

We boil drinking water SO THAT we can kill germs.

After letting them work through one on their own, I showed them how to go about it more methodically.

I explained: “So that” does not have the word “to” in it the same way that “in order to” does, so every time we came across “to” in the sentence, we must cross it out and replace it with “so that.” After that we have to add: Pronoun ¬+ Can. And then, Voila! You’ve done it!

The kids struggled a bit to select the correct pronoun when the sentence wasn’t in the “we” form, but we talked it through and they figured it out.

After that, we let them take those same sentences and write them out as complete sentences (rather than my chicken scratch slash marks and carrots for inserting new words) and then went to teach the same lecture to the second 6th grade class in the room next door.

While the teacher tried to have me teach the lesson entirely from the beginning, I told her it would be better if she started and then I would pitch in again. We went through the whole routine again, but a little better since I knew what I was doing this time.

Since we finished early I thought I’d give them a few curve balls for practice. Rather than giving them the sentence and asking them to modify it, I just asked them a question: Why do we use a ruler?

The students have seen the example sentence, “We use a ruler to draw straight lines” about a thousand times since it is a readily available prop in the class. However, no one was able to answer my question. Knowing that the example answer “We go to school (to/so that we can/in order to) learn” was written on the board behind me I then asked them, “Why do we go to school?” They had no problem finding this one on the board and reading it to me making me wonder how much just showing them the methodical way to rewrite sentences using “in order to” and “so that” is actually helping them.

In any case, when I was given the exercise books to grade later in the day about 80% of the kids got the answers correct. The remaining 20% forgot to write in pronoun + can after “so that” or just chose not to write the “so that” form of the sentence at all. But by far my favorite was the one kid who just wrote the sentence out once and put hash marks and carrots on the page in exactly the way I had explained to them how to reconstruct the sentence. Oh well.