Week 1
My mind was blown. I sat in the classroom with my jaw scraping the floor. My cooperating teacher had her students reading To Kill A Mockingbird aloud. Popcorn reading in a tenth grade class? To me, this was the equivalent of killing the classics, one painful syllable at a time. I came home after the first day of witnessing this and vented to anyone who would listen. How could this be happening? "Did this happen in your classes in high school?" I asked my friends, aghast.
I don't want to reflect upon my experience like it was a Cinderella story; I still hate popcorn readings, but I will say that I became more open towards the read alouds after seeing students actively engage in them.
That's just one of the valuable lessons I learned this week: be willing to try new things. Don't let your prior opinions cloud what you do or do not include in your classroom until you have evidence that it won't work. Be open to new ideas. Be flexible.
Rather than let the popcorn reading bother me, I sat and quietly observed how the students responded to it. Were they bored? Were they sleeping? Were they unfocused?
As near as I could tell, they were none of these things! In fact, quite the opposite. The students were actually engaged and focused. In fact, the read alouds made the book a shared, social experience among the students. They loved talking about it with one another. They legitimately looked forward to class so that they could read more of the book. Additionally, since everyone was going at the same pace, following along in their own copies of the book, everyone was quite literally on the same page. The book became a communal artifact that all the students had equal ownership over. The class investigated questions about the text in a safe, nurturing discussions. While I assumed they all hated having to read aloud, many of the students actually enjoyed the popcorn reading.
This experience was quite interesting, because it made me realize how I need to open my mind to alternative techniques as a teacher. I cannot just assume something will not work. I have to try it with my students. I have to suit my lessons to my classes, not my classes to my lessons.
Sunday, March 24, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Kozol/Week 2 reflections.
Chapters 8 and 9 were my favorite chapters so far in Letters to a Young Teacher. The chapter on teacher jargon was hilariously relevant to the types of word-trends I feel that we are all coaxed into when immersed in education study. I have found that these latinized verbs-that-stand-for-shorter-verbs-that-mean-the-same-thing have almost fully taken over my professional writing style. I am not sure if it is necessarily a bad thing. It is just a different code to speak in. However, if we are using these terms with our students in an attempt to be transparent in our teaching practices, we should make sure they know what they mean. Utilize means use, for example.
We should also be sure that we are not using these terms simply for their abstractive qualities. In other words, we should not use these words to help us say something when we really don't have anything to say.
Remember what Camus says in The Plague:
But tell us, Tarrou, what is it that causes all the troubles of the world? "Language. We don’t have clear, plain language."
This is not always the easiest thing to do, but it is what I believe what Francesca and Kozol are really pushing back against.
Chapter 9 was beautiful. If teachers can find ways to let children feel comfortable with experiencing merriment in the school setting, they are doing their job. School cannot be all about content learning and objective-reaching. Kids need time to look out the window. I love that Francesca realizes this but also sees how the kids can help to enlighten her within these moments.
This type of thing seems to lend itself more to younger kids. How can we inspire aesthetic merriment in seventeen year-olds, kids who are often much more worried about being grown up than being young?
So this past week I decided I needed to try something new with my Freshman periods (especially period 8) so I came up with something I thought was pretty cool. We are studying Fahrenheit 451. My colleague Eliot White emailed me this article (http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html) written about censorship and book burning by Kurt Vonnegut. His book Slaughterhouse Five was actually burned in a school's furnace by the Drake school board in North Dakota. He wrote this letter to the president of the school board to explain that writers, including himself, were real people--people with pure and moral purposes. So I printed out this article for my kids to read. Afterward I was going to have them break into groups of four and each group would act as though they were their own school. These little school boards had to make decisions about how they would deal with censorship. What books would they allow? What would be the factors that would keep books from being allowed in their school? How would they deal with a teacher or student reading a book in school that wasn't "appropriate"? How would they deal with parents?
Since my Co-op doesn't like most of my ideas or give me much freedom, I decided to try the project without really giving her a full description of what it was I would be doing. So after we read the article, I broke the kids into groups and started explaining. When I began to walk around and facilitate the small group discussions, my co-op pulled me aside and said she didn't like the idea. "I wish you would have told me about this: I don't think it serves a purpose in their understanding of the novel," she said.
She's entitled to her opinion.
And yes, I probably should have told her what I was planning on doing first. But, I knew she wouldn't probably like it, and I really wanted to try it. I don't know if I made the right decision.
So she told me that instead of giving them the 20 minutes to work on this project, I should give them 5 and then have them get back to their seats so she could play a recording of Ray Bradbury reading an excerpt from the novel...
I was very annoyed but I did what she wanted. So for the final 15 minutes of the week, the students sat and payed no attention to a CD that my co-op played for them. I sat in the front and watched them not paying attention and watching the clock.
I thought: this is a missed opportunity.
We should also be sure that we are not using these terms simply for their abstractive qualities. In other words, we should not use these words to help us say something when we really don't have anything to say.
Remember what Camus says in The Plague:
But tell us, Tarrou, what is it that causes all the troubles of the world? "Language. We don’t have clear, plain language."
This is not always the easiest thing to do, but it is what I believe what Francesca and Kozol are really pushing back against.
Chapter 9 was beautiful. If teachers can find ways to let children feel comfortable with experiencing merriment in the school setting, they are doing their job. School cannot be all about content learning and objective-reaching. Kids need time to look out the window. I love that Francesca realizes this but also sees how the kids can help to enlighten her within these moments.
This type of thing seems to lend itself more to younger kids. How can we inspire aesthetic merriment in seventeen year-olds, kids who are often much more worried about being grown up than being young?
So this past week I decided I needed to try something new with my Freshman periods (especially period 8) so I came up with something I thought was pretty cool. We are studying Fahrenheit 451. My colleague Eliot White emailed me this article (http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/03/i-am-very-real.html) written about censorship and book burning by Kurt Vonnegut. His book Slaughterhouse Five was actually burned in a school's furnace by the Drake school board in North Dakota. He wrote this letter to the president of the school board to explain that writers, including himself, were real people--people with pure and moral purposes. So I printed out this article for my kids to read. Afterward I was going to have them break into groups of four and each group would act as though they were their own school. These little school boards had to make decisions about how they would deal with censorship. What books would they allow? What would be the factors that would keep books from being allowed in their school? How would they deal with a teacher or student reading a book in school that wasn't "appropriate"? How would they deal with parents?
Since my Co-op doesn't like most of my ideas or give me much freedom, I decided to try the project without really giving her a full description of what it was I would be doing. So after we read the article, I broke the kids into groups and started explaining. When I began to walk around and facilitate the small group discussions, my co-op pulled me aside and said she didn't like the idea. "I wish you would have told me about this: I don't think it serves a purpose in their understanding of the novel," she said.
She's entitled to her opinion.
And yes, I probably should have told her what I was planning on doing first. But, I knew she wouldn't probably like it, and I really wanted to try it. I don't know if I made the right decision.
So she told me that instead of giving them the 20 minutes to work on this project, I should give them 5 and then have them get back to their seats so she could play a recording of Ray Bradbury reading an excerpt from the novel...
I was very annoyed but I did what she wanted. So for the final 15 minutes of the week, the students sat and payed no attention to a CD that my co-op played for them. I sat in the front and watched them not paying attention and watching the clock.
I thought: this is a missed opportunity.
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
My Thoughts on Kozol
Recently, I had a discussion with my one cousin about schools. He is getting ready to send his three triplet boys to school and is still deciding where to send them. He lives in the Red Lion School district however, he went to Dallastown (rival of Red Lion). He refuses to send his boys to Red Lion because he went to Dallastown. He also refuses to send his kids to Central York because they recently built a new high school and the day the high school opened it was already overcrowded. So, he is looking at sending them to a private school. This really upsets me because I feel as though he has lost faith in the public school system. Red Lion is a great school and his boys would do fine there. However, he is going to spend lots of money a year to send his kids to a private school because when he went to high school Red Lion was full of nothing but "rednecks". To be fair when I went to high school there was still a fair share of them, but there was more to Red Lion then that. This is the problem with our society. People don't want there kids around certain people and so they pay to send their kids to a private school. Why not let your kids learn to deal with different kinds of people? What makes your kids so much better that they can't go to the same schools as everyone else? Why not support those public schools and make them better rather then just avoiding them? Why not support Central if they need to expand their school instead of just getting upset that they were not able to predict the increase in students? It makes me so mad that everyone isn't offered an equal education!! It makes me mad that private schools exist to give some kids more of a leg up than others! Kozol talked about how this was a way to keep the poor, poor and the schools segregated. I 100% agree with this and I believe that it may take another Civil Rights movement to change it. I do not know exactly where I will be teaching but if I am in an urban school I will make sure that my students are aware of how they are being kept down by our society. This should not be a secret. Parents need to start demanding an equal and AUTHENTIC education. No more teaching for the test! It is really frustrating how much reform needs to take place in education. I know it won't be changed overnight, but I am just glad that we are learning how to teach around the standards and provide students with authentic learning. My goal is to make a difference in as many students' lives as I can and maybe if we all have that same goal education will change for the better someday.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Learning from students
My
two weeks at Donegal High/Junior High have been amazing! Maybe it's because I
was homeschooled, and so I'm unfamiliar with public schools, but it seems that
every day brought lesson after lesson for me to learn. The very best part was
that I finally got some experience in teaching full lessons to real classrooms.
My co-op allowed me to teach with whatever methods I wanted to use, so I was able to integrate
many of the things that we've been learning in class into my lessons. At the
junior high, I taught a gifted-seminar pullout class a series of lessons on
short films. I used Paperman, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore and
other film shorts from Pixar before leading the class into a discussion on the
"deeper meaning(s)" that can be found within each piece. What
surprised me the most was how engaged the eighth-graders would get during each
discussion. The Paperman discussion led
to a talk about the authenticity of technology in today's world, and students
shared their thoughts about why texting and messaging does or doesn't promote
authentic relationships. Some of the things that the students said were really
deep, and I impressed by the critical thinking that each student showed. I
admit, after my field experience last year, I was not expecting that kind of
engagement or respectful behavior in a discussion between junior high school
students. This experience was probably the most valuable lesson during my
two-week placement: don't under estimate your student's capabilities! I also
learned that just because a discussion stray off of the planned course doesn't
necessarily mean that it's headed in the wrong direction.
Two Amazing Weeks
Lucky for me, I have been blessed with a great cooperating teacher. From day one he has said he was open to trying anything I wanted to try and he wanted to hear my ideas. He admits that after for teaching for 20 years he knows he gets stuck in ruts on how to do things and so he welcomes change.
The only thing that I can say really bothered me in his class was how many worksheet exercises they did. I am not a huge fan of worksheets everyday type learning. Despite this, I think he is a great teacher. He has a great personality and the all the kids absolutely love him. He is humorous and so he is able to make learning fun despite the numerous worksheets. The other thing I disagree with is that often all the language arts teachers pass out the same unit tests. So my cooperating teacher may not have had any part in making a test depending on if he had time to meet up with the group or not. I think each teacher needs to have their own tests if that is the way they choose to assess. Not every teacher taught the unit the same way or with the same information. He also doesn't plan his units using backward design. He said that the language arts teachers were going to start doing that, but that it got put on the back burner as they were focusing more on making sure they were hitting the Common Core standards. He is against the standards, but unfortunately he has to incorporate them into his teaching as we all know.
To introduce me into the classroom he had me write a bio to the students and then they wrote a bio of themselves back to me. On the back of their bios they wrote questions they had about my bio. I answered all the questions they asked and passed back a worksheet with the answers on it. My cooperating teacher asked me to come up with a rubric for a poem they could write based off of my answers to their questions. They asked a wide variety of questions and so they had a wide variety of topics they could write about. I gave them the creative freedom to write a poem about any topic I talked about in the answers to their questions. This is when I realized just how creative these 7th graders were. I absolutely loved their poems and the variety of creativity I saw.
When I finally got to go in for a whole week the first thing I was put in charge of was freewrites. My cooperating teacher had actually never heard of the freewrites we did in teaching writing where you write for 5 minutes without stopping. He also had never heard of mentor texts. He really loved my idea and so I am in charge of the freewrites we do almost everyday. The kids are loving it and I think their favorite prompt has been 'What would your last meal be'. Anything that has to do with food gets them sharing and talking.
The next thing I did was introduce their persuasive writing unit. For this I had them start by sharing a time they wanted something from their parents or asked their parents to let them do something. Then they wrote a letter to their parents persuading them to let them do/have something. As a class, we then shared our letters and discussed the different ways we tried to persuade our parents. The next day I passed out envelopes full of different persuasive techniques and their definitions. Before giving any explanation of the techniques I had the students work in pairs to try and match up the techniques with their definitions. They really are smart and did pretty well with it. We went over the answers as a class and then talked about how the different techniques matched up with the techniques they used in their letters. On the third day, I had them individually go through a Prezi I had created with different examples of the persuasive techniques used in advertisements. They were then put into groups and given two techniques. They had to either draw or act out the two techniques in their own advertisements for the class. My goal (which I explained to them) was for them to make very creative advertisements that would help all of them remember all the different techniques because some of the techniques were hard (and there were 16 of them!). They really loved the project. They were excited to create the advertisements and told me so. Some choose to draw the advertisement and some acted them out for the class. When they presented whether they drew the advertisement or acted it out they had to tell us how they used the technique. All of them were very creative and some had us laughing a lot. It was a great experience and another English teacher even stole the project from me to use! It made me feel really great!
I am so glad that my field placement is going so well for me. I honestly was questioning whether or not I wanted to still be a teacher. After working with the students these past two weeks I now know without a doubt that this is what I was meant to do. After talking with a student about school he made the comment, "I know we have to learn, but why can't school be fun?". I told him it was my goal to make school more fun and after the project he told me I was doing a great job! I am so happy that I finally feel like I know for sure that this is my calling.
My cooperating teacher is now reading the book "Live Assessments" (that I gave him to borrow after reading it) and considering doing a debate as the final test for students. He also is considering using my idea of revising the letter to their parents as they move through the unit and having that be their final paper for the unit. I am really happy that he is so open to my ideas and that he has loved all of the ideas I have brought to the table so far.
The only thing that I can say really bothered me in his class was how many worksheet exercises they did. I am not a huge fan of worksheets everyday type learning. Despite this, I think he is a great teacher. He has a great personality and the all the kids absolutely love him. He is humorous and so he is able to make learning fun despite the numerous worksheets. The other thing I disagree with is that often all the language arts teachers pass out the same unit tests. So my cooperating teacher may not have had any part in making a test depending on if he had time to meet up with the group or not. I think each teacher needs to have their own tests if that is the way they choose to assess. Not every teacher taught the unit the same way or with the same information. He also doesn't plan his units using backward design. He said that the language arts teachers were going to start doing that, but that it got put on the back burner as they were focusing more on making sure they were hitting the Common Core standards. He is against the standards, but unfortunately he has to incorporate them into his teaching as we all know.
To introduce me into the classroom he had me write a bio to the students and then they wrote a bio of themselves back to me. On the back of their bios they wrote questions they had about my bio. I answered all the questions they asked and passed back a worksheet with the answers on it. My cooperating teacher asked me to come up with a rubric for a poem they could write based off of my answers to their questions. They asked a wide variety of questions and so they had a wide variety of topics they could write about. I gave them the creative freedom to write a poem about any topic I talked about in the answers to their questions. This is when I realized just how creative these 7th graders were. I absolutely loved their poems and the variety of creativity I saw.
When I finally got to go in for a whole week the first thing I was put in charge of was freewrites. My cooperating teacher had actually never heard of the freewrites we did in teaching writing where you write for 5 minutes without stopping. He also had never heard of mentor texts. He really loved my idea and so I am in charge of the freewrites we do almost everyday. The kids are loving it and I think their favorite prompt has been 'What would your last meal be'. Anything that has to do with food gets them sharing and talking.
The next thing I did was introduce their persuasive writing unit. For this I had them start by sharing a time they wanted something from their parents or asked their parents to let them do something. Then they wrote a letter to their parents persuading them to let them do/have something. As a class, we then shared our letters and discussed the different ways we tried to persuade our parents. The next day I passed out envelopes full of different persuasive techniques and their definitions. Before giving any explanation of the techniques I had the students work in pairs to try and match up the techniques with their definitions. They really are smart and did pretty well with it. We went over the answers as a class and then talked about how the different techniques matched up with the techniques they used in their letters. On the third day, I had them individually go through a Prezi I had created with different examples of the persuasive techniques used in advertisements. They were then put into groups and given two techniques. They had to either draw or act out the two techniques in their own advertisements for the class. My goal (which I explained to them) was for them to make very creative advertisements that would help all of them remember all the different techniques because some of the techniques were hard (and there were 16 of them!). They really loved the project. They were excited to create the advertisements and told me so. Some choose to draw the advertisement and some acted them out for the class. When they presented whether they drew the advertisement or acted it out they had to tell us how they used the technique. All of them were very creative and some had us laughing a lot. It was a great experience and another English teacher even stole the project from me to use! It made me feel really great!
I am so glad that my field placement is going so well for me. I honestly was questioning whether or not I wanted to still be a teacher. After working with the students these past two weeks I now know without a doubt that this is what I was meant to do. After talking with a student about school he made the comment, "I know we have to learn, but why can't school be fun?". I told him it was my goal to make school more fun and after the project he told me I was doing a great job! I am so happy that I finally feel like I know for sure that this is my calling.
My cooperating teacher is now reading the book "Live Assessments" (that I gave him to borrow after reading it) and considering doing a debate as the final test for students. He also is considering using my idea of revising the letter to their parents as they move through the unit and having that be their final paper for the unit. I am really happy that he is so open to my ideas and that he has loved all of the ideas I have brought to the table so far.
Friday, March 15, 2013
Losing Control
I've always been told that I have a lack of respect for authority. I don't agree with that statement. If you want to reword it to say, I have a lack of respect for overly controlling authority- I'll fully admit to that. My father has raised, and continues to raise, me with a very hands off approach. In education, we'd call it a cognitive approach. When I get told when, how, and why I need to do something I feel isn't for my benefit, my drawbridge goes up. By drawbridge I mean the 5,500 mile high, Great Wall of China-sized barricade, I create once I feel overly controlled. My feet shake, my teeth bite my upper lip, and my hands search for something to hold onto. If I feel it's something I can't handle without losing my composure, I usually leave the room to regroup.
After twenty years, I've learned how to flip the switch in different settings. My kids in my co-op's classroom haven't quite acknowledged this is what they're feeling. What they do know is they're frustrated. Take Will for example. On Tuesday his one teacher told him she didn't care if he learned another thing from her for the rest of the year. During the team meeting, she talked about how he's going to get to the high school, and he will be alt ed-ed. The math teacher on my team turned to me and asked, "Kristen, when you were in school, did you know a class clown?" Since my opinion was asked, I shared my story...
Senior year of high school, I was a hot mess- I even believe that's putting it euphemistically. I skipped school; I slept, talked, and texted in class; and I roamed the halls, a lot. There was no shortage of sarcasm or friends for me. When I realized my sarcastic remarks to teachers increased peoples' interest level in me, I ran with it. Discipline wise, I had a well-respected father in the building, who every teacher would report to instead of the principal. One time my AP Calculus teacher wrote me up for texting in class. I got a detention, which I attended for 20 minutes before the wrestling coach in charge asked me to run errands for him. No one really questioned me. The truth was I had nothing under control. I was so far out of control that everyone's attempts to save me weren't taken at face value. Why was I the worst behaved in calculus? She was a second year teacher, with whom it was my second year in her class. She constantly yelled at me and kicked me out. Whenever she questioned me, she cited the previous year. I was always told how much more she had liked having me the previous year. Never once did she ask WHY I acted this way. Senior year I was court appointed to spend 10 hours a week with my schizophrenic mother. Child services later decided it was a bad decision, but only after they met with me in school. When? Right before calculus. Luckily, I didn't associate the two things at all...
Midway through my story, the woman who yelled at Will told me she never had kids like me in her classes in high school. "By the time I was in high school, all the classes I had were with other AP students. They all cared about their learning," she told me. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "I was in all AP classes and dually enrolled at Penn State York." When I finished the rest of story, I posed the question, "What does Will have going on at home?" To which I received the answer, "Well, I know he has stuff going on with his sister's boyfriend. I know they don't get along, but it isn't anything as bad as other kids on our team. Many of them have it a lot worse." As I mentioned earlier, when I feel like I'm losing my composure, I walk away. Thirty seconds of silence followed. I then left the room to get a drink.
One of my core beliefs is problems are subjective. I believe everyone has issues in their lives, but the severity of the problems differs. What is a catastrophe in one person's life could be nothing more than a mishap in another's. By not acknowledging this, we're essentially telling kids they don't understand what matters to them. Will is no fool. Whenever I tell him I know he knows how much he manipulates the system, a smile creeps across his face. The teachers are fed up with him because they just see him as manipulative trouble-maker. I see him as a challenge. The kid has personality for days. He dresses head to toe in the latest fashions with Jordans adorning his feet; homeboy screams leader. His outbursts in class and refusal to sit in a seat just highlight his need for attention. He thrives on it. I totally get it, and I believe, if redirected, he could become a beneficial role model. He already is great, but I believe it's my goal to push him further. Empowering him to become something, he doesn't yet know he wants to become.
A quote from Johnathon Kozol really stuck out to me. He said, "Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs." He emphasizes something I buy into in this quote- all kids have something to offer the world. When we oppress kids voices, they only seem to come out stronger in other ways. In the eighth grade, it comes out in the form of constant chatter. The teachers on the team call this year's group, the "chattiest bunch". All Will does is talk. Bet him he can't interrupt a class for a day, and he won't distract the class once. From my observation in my co-op's classroom, the more she tries to control, the more she loses the kids. Every day I sit with a boy named Dawon in the period 5/7 class. Yesterday, after my co-op finished giving directions, he saluted her. Honestly, it took everything in me not to smile.
After twenty years, I've learned how to flip the switch in different settings. My kids in my co-op's classroom haven't quite acknowledged this is what they're feeling. What they do know is they're frustrated. Take Will for example. On Tuesday his one teacher told him she didn't care if he learned another thing from her for the rest of the year. During the team meeting, she talked about how he's going to get to the high school, and he will be alt ed-ed. The math teacher on my team turned to me and asked, "Kristen, when you were in school, did you know a class clown?" Since my opinion was asked, I shared my story...
Senior year of high school, I was a hot mess- I even believe that's putting it euphemistically. I skipped school; I slept, talked, and texted in class; and I roamed the halls, a lot. There was no shortage of sarcasm or friends for me. When I realized my sarcastic remarks to teachers increased peoples' interest level in me, I ran with it. Discipline wise, I had a well-respected father in the building, who every teacher would report to instead of the principal. One time my AP Calculus teacher wrote me up for texting in class. I got a detention, which I attended for 20 minutes before the wrestling coach in charge asked me to run errands for him. No one really questioned me. The truth was I had nothing under control. I was so far out of control that everyone's attempts to save me weren't taken at face value. Why was I the worst behaved in calculus? She was a second year teacher, with whom it was my second year in her class. She constantly yelled at me and kicked me out. Whenever she questioned me, she cited the previous year. I was always told how much more she had liked having me the previous year. Never once did she ask WHY I acted this way. Senior year I was court appointed to spend 10 hours a week with my schizophrenic mother. Child services later decided it was a bad decision, but only after they met with me in school. When? Right before calculus. Luckily, I didn't associate the two things at all...
Midway through my story, the woman who yelled at Will told me she never had kids like me in her classes in high school. "By the time I was in high school, all the classes I had were with other AP students. They all cared about their learning," she told me. I shrugged my shoulders and said, "I was in all AP classes and dually enrolled at Penn State York." When I finished the rest of story, I posed the question, "What does Will have going on at home?" To which I received the answer, "Well, I know he has stuff going on with his sister's boyfriend. I know they don't get along, but it isn't anything as bad as other kids on our team. Many of them have it a lot worse." As I mentioned earlier, when I feel like I'm losing my composure, I walk away. Thirty seconds of silence followed. I then left the room to get a drink.
One of my core beliefs is problems are subjective. I believe everyone has issues in their lives, but the severity of the problems differs. What is a catastrophe in one person's life could be nothing more than a mishap in another's. By not acknowledging this, we're essentially telling kids they don't understand what matters to them. Will is no fool. Whenever I tell him I know he knows how much he manipulates the system, a smile creeps across his face. The teachers are fed up with him because they just see him as manipulative trouble-maker. I see him as a challenge. The kid has personality for days. He dresses head to toe in the latest fashions with Jordans adorning his feet; homeboy screams leader. His outbursts in class and refusal to sit in a seat just highlight his need for attention. He thrives on it. I totally get it, and I believe, if redirected, he could become a beneficial role model. He already is great, but I believe it's my goal to push him further. Empowering him to become something, he doesn't yet know he wants to become.
A quote from Johnathon Kozol really stuck out to me. He said, "Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs." He emphasizes something I buy into in this quote- all kids have something to offer the world. When we oppress kids voices, they only seem to come out stronger in other ways. In the eighth grade, it comes out in the form of constant chatter. The teachers on the team call this year's group, the "chattiest bunch". All Will does is talk. Bet him he can't interrupt a class for a day, and he won't distract the class once. From my observation in my co-op's classroom, the more she tries to control, the more she loses the kids. Every day I sit with a boy named Dawon in the period 5/7 class. Yesterday, after my co-op finished giving directions, he saluted her. Honestly, it took everything in me not to smile.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Detecting Crap and Failing To Do Anything About It
I'm in my second full week now at LCHS. Last week taught my first two classes, periods two and nine of freshman academic English. I left school today feeling pretty down on myself.
For the entire semester I've been watching my co-op, a teacher in her twetnty-sixth year of teaching, do lecture style lessons with little differentiation save for group-work on worksheets. She is good at lecturing and leading (and when I say leading I mean, controlling and commanding) whole-class discussion. Half of the class answers her questions and seems to learn the novel (Fahrenheit 451) although they may not be sure why they are learning the things they are. The other half does enough to get through these discussions by following along enough to answer her surprise questions when she calls on someone random. They also know who to group up with when it's time to break into groups. It is all very teacher-centered teaching. I have detected this crap from day 1.
So naturally, when she decided to being letting me take over the freshmen (who she claims, "can't handle" more innovative teaching styles), she told me what I should do. Today marks the third day that I spent pretending to be her, leading slow read-throughs of sections of the novel, teacher-centered IRE questioning, and lecturing. I am not good at it. But I don't have much experience with any form of teaching, and when I teach she sits in the back and interjects when the students are missing something she thinks is important, or when students point out things she doesn't agree with. She frowns when I begin talking about something that didn't come from her prepared notes. It makes me nervous and causes me to falter when speaking.
Second period seems to like me so they are very participatory in the discussions and we often end up having good conversations, some that even pull away from the very ingrained IRE format they know. (What i mean here is I, the teacher, asks a questions, the students respond, and I evaluate their responses). They enjoyed the poem I showed them last week and had fun writing their own stanza about abuses of technology. So, even though I teach them like a young male, Mrs. C, they seem to be learning (60% of them) and they seem interested (75% of them).
Period Nine is a different story. Today very few of them responded to questions and no one wanted to share the poems they wrote or didn't write last week. Half-way through the lesson I saw students looking at the clock, and I even looked myself, hoping it was closer to 3 than it was. I am not cut out to be a lecturer, at least not at this point in my life. Mrs. C blames the students and says they are tired and eager to get out of school. She also says, "these ones just aren't as bright". But I know it is my fault. I cannot blame these kids; I need to do something differently.
I am detecting my own crap. I am following a misdirected path and doing little to change it.
I am sitting down now to plan some things for my lessons in her Sophomore American Lit class tomorrow. She gave me her materials before I left and said, "here, do what you want with this". But "this" is what she wants me to do. I know I should do something different, but I don't know if I have the courage. I don't want to overstep my boundaries in this classroom and have her dislike what I am doing. But, I know I am full of crap when I am putting my own need to be liked by the teacher over the needs of the students.
But also, I don't know exactly what to do if I were to do things differently. Currently I have a model who is modeling the ways of teaching that I don't want to learn. One of my classmates told me, "Well, at least you are learning how not to teach," but I don't know if that's a good thing.
I have some things to figure out tonight, because I don't know if I can handle another period of awkward stares as I stand at the front of the room and stumble through prepared questions, looking for prepared answers.
For the entire semester I've been watching my co-op, a teacher in her twetnty-sixth year of teaching, do lecture style lessons with little differentiation save for group-work on worksheets. She is good at lecturing and leading (and when I say leading I mean, controlling and commanding) whole-class discussion. Half of the class answers her questions and seems to learn the novel (Fahrenheit 451) although they may not be sure why they are learning the things they are. The other half does enough to get through these discussions by following along enough to answer her surprise questions when she calls on someone random. They also know who to group up with when it's time to break into groups. It is all very teacher-centered teaching. I have detected this crap from day 1.
So naturally, when she decided to being letting me take over the freshmen (who she claims, "can't handle" more innovative teaching styles), she told me what I should do. Today marks the third day that I spent pretending to be her, leading slow read-throughs of sections of the novel, teacher-centered IRE questioning, and lecturing. I am not good at it. But I don't have much experience with any form of teaching, and when I teach she sits in the back and interjects when the students are missing something she thinks is important, or when students point out things she doesn't agree with. She frowns when I begin talking about something that didn't come from her prepared notes. It makes me nervous and causes me to falter when speaking.
Second period seems to like me so they are very participatory in the discussions and we often end up having good conversations, some that even pull away from the very ingrained IRE format they know. (What i mean here is I, the teacher, asks a questions, the students respond, and I evaluate their responses). They enjoyed the poem I showed them last week and had fun writing their own stanza about abuses of technology. So, even though I teach them like a young male, Mrs. C, they seem to be learning (60% of them) and they seem interested (75% of them).
Period Nine is a different story. Today very few of them responded to questions and no one wanted to share the poems they wrote or didn't write last week. Half-way through the lesson I saw students looking at the clock, and I even looked myself, hoping it was closer to 3 than it was. I am not cut out to be a lecturer, at least not at this point in my life. Mrs. C blames the students and says they are tired and eager to get out of school. She also says, "these ones just aren't as bright". But I know it is my fault. I cannot blame these kids; I need to do something differently.
I am detecting my own crap. I am following a misdirected path and doing little to change it.
I am sitting down now to plan some things for my lessons in her Sophomore American Lit class tomorrow. She gave me her materials before I left and said, "here, do what you want with this". But "this" is what she wants me to do. I know I should do something different, but I don't know if I have the courage. I don't want to overstep my boundaries in this classroom and have her dislike what I am doing. But, I know I am full of crap when I am putting my own need to be liked by the teacher over the needs of the students.
But also, I don't know exactly what to do if I were to do things differently. Currently I have a model who is modeling the ways of teaching that I don't want to learn. One of my classmates told me, "Well, at least you are learning how not to teach," but I don't know if that's a good thing.
I have some things to figure out tonight, because I don't know if I can handle another period of awkward stares as I stand at the front of the room and stumble through prepared questions, looking for prepared answers.
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