Summative FInal!!

                Taking SED 407 this semester has been really unique. We had class on a school bus for one thing. But besides this, SED 407 also offered something that I was not expecting when I enrolled, an almost completely observation based class where instead of the traditional read for homework and do this assignment, I was able to observe students and learn by seeing how they learned and how they interacted with the teacher, it was a more natural way to learn because I was making real world connections and coming to various realizations rather than saying, “well, if the book says so, it must be true.” During this time, I have learned a number of valuable things, a number of which I couldn’t learn from a book, for example, teenage students love stickers, candy and any other little prize a teacher gives for a job well done. Through the teaching of my two lessons, I learned that sometimes, if a student refuses to pay attention, in certain circumstances, you just have to let it go so that you can teach the other students who are, as tough as that may be. There are two particular things that I learned during this semester that have really stuck out in mind. The fact that in order to be a good educator, you not only have to know your content, but also your community, and that in order to be able to teach every one of your students, especially in an environment like District C, a teacher has to be flexible, differentiated and able to interact with every student personally.

                As a future teacher, I have come to the conclusion that when I get a job, wherever it may be, an affluent, wealthy, prosperous town, or a poverty stricken, high crime rate inner city, it is very important that I learn about my community. After attending the Kids Count seminar, I was surprised at some of the information that I learned about poverty rates, teen pregnancy and crime rates in the big cities in RI, and I think a teacher who teaches in one of these cities, and doesn’t know about this, or pretends it doesn’t exist, is not going to be able to teach effectively. In order to know your students, it is important to know in what kind of environment it is that they live. If a student comes into class with a black eye, is it because they were messing around with a friend and ended up catching an elbow to the eye, or were they jumped on their way home from school yesterday by a gang for their wallet? A teacher should visit the stores in the city or town they teach in, drive around for a while and see how they feel and connect it to their students. Besides getting to know the town they are teaching in, it is very important to get to know what the home life of the students is like. Visiting a home not only allows a teacher to meet parents and speak to them, but at a more simple level, a teacher can look around and see what kind of house a student lives in, is it a nice, big house, or does the student live in a small one bedroom apartment with five relatives? I don’t mean to make students sound like objects, but it’s important to know what a teacher is working with, students are our material, not just the content we learned in college, and knowing what their life is like can give us answers to questions that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to answer.

                Being a teacher requires a person to have a lot of characteristics and abilities. A teacher has to be a mentor, tutor, instructor, authoritarian, they have to be approachable, respected, smart, patient, among a number of other things. The most important thing to be, in my opinion, is flexible, and by flexible I mean a teacher has to be able to reach out to every one of their students. During my observations at District C, I saw a math teacher speak Spanish to her students in order for them to understand the lesson. Her Spanish wasn’t great, but that doesn’t matter, what matters is that she used that skill to include the students who didn’t speak English. In this way, a teacher should know if the city they are teaching in has a predominantly Spanish, or Portuguese, or Italian student body. A teacher has to be emotionally flexible as well, I saw a teacher who handled a student argument by threatening to call the fathers of the students, then when another student was acting out, she went over, crouched beside the student and spoke to them one on one to see what was wrong. There has to be a flexibility in terms of student treatment. In a classroom with 20 students, sometimes the teacher has to be able to handle a problem 20 different ways in order to get the desired result. Flexibility in instruction is vital, not every student learns the same. This was made clear when we saw the panel of student speak about what they liked and disliked in instruction. Some liked packets…some liked group work, there has to be this differentiation in teaching if every student is going to be included.

                This semester has really affected me as a future instructor, it has given me a number of tools and ideas that could only come with in the field observations, not from a book. If I had to pick something that disappointed me, I would say that I could have perhaps spoken more to students, during my observations I didn’t really want to interrupt the lessons, but when I did speak to students, the info they gave me was amazing at times because that’s probably the only way to get real, uncensored, raw information about what it’s like to be a student at the High School, it has to come from the students themselves. 

Parent Walkthrough

So last class, we had to walk through the high school with a parent. One of the parents did not really speak English, so I walked through with her in order to avoid a language barrier issue. We went to a Spanish/French classroom and observed the ending of a French class and the beginning of a Spanish class. I must say, it is a bit frustrating that we didn't observe an entire class because it is difficult to measure the performance of students and the teacher when there is a five minute interruption and change of class and topic, but that's just the nature of the scheduling. More was seen in the Spanish class, during the French class the students worked on an assignment and there was not much interaction other than that. During the Spanish class, one particular student stood out. This student came in and immediately started to listen to her Ipod and not really pay attention at all. The teacher let this go for a little while, but eventually called on the student to participate. The student had a rather negative reaction to this which caused the teacher to speak to her at her desk about what was wrong. It was obvious that the student was either having a bad day or having some kind of issue because they were not into being in the class at all. This had me thinking about the difficulty of having every student in a class paying attention and happy. How can we make 20 students, all different and going through different problems, challenges and issues, happy and attentive? One day, you might have 10 happy students who are willing to learn and pay attention, 2 students who are arguing with each other, 1 student who went to a concert yesterday and is now falling asleep in class, 2 students who are having problems at home, and 1 student who hates the subject you are teaching and so doesn't want to be involved. It's the teacher's job to find a way to make it work, and this is where you have to be creative. Teachers due to the nature of the job have to have so many different characteristics in order to make it all work, they have to be: creative, kind, stern, authoritative and respected, but also approachable, knowledgeable. Some of these are contradictory, like how can we be kind and approachable but respected and authoritative and stern? Going back to the walk through, the parent certainly seemed to grasp the difficulty and challenges of the job, she told me that she liked the teacher and her teaching style.
http://alove4teaching.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-many-hats-teacher-wears.html

High School Observations "so far"

I am currently in the process of observing the teacher that I am going to teach the two lessons with. So far, it's been interesting comparing the high school with district C's high school. The high school that I am teaching the two lessons in is located in a middle class town, primarily white, primarily I would say college educated. Driving around one sees small business that look like they're doing well, nice houses, a lot of nice green grass, it's very...safe. Compared to district C, it is almost the opposite. I think this brings up a pretty interesting dynamic, comparing what you see in a well to do, affluent school district, and what you see when the finances and other factors aren't there. It's a lie when people say that money doesn't matter, of course it does, this high school has nice computers, new looking classes, technology and even a new "wellness center" which is a completely separate building, there is another separate building connected by a catwalk, so this high school is a complex of three buildings, different from the one building in district C. The Spanish classes in this high school are full of American born, non heritage speakers. Every high school has it's own challenges. I believe this high school, despite it's advantage financially, I believe the lack of diversity and maybe a sense of some students being jaded by the ease of having money is a challenge. These students are not able to identify with poorer people, with different races and ethnicities, when 99% of the students are white and wearing abercrombie and fitch, well, while there's nothing wrong with this, it takes a toll on one's perception of what really happens in other cities. I listened in on the students conversations and a lot of the topics were not very important, shallow and basically what one associates with a typical teenager conversation, a lot of gossip. In district C, the challenges are much different. Financially, there are definitely problems, students are coming from low income families, and this has a long list of problems: nutrition, family life, stress, lack of motivation for education and instead wanting to work to help financially, these all affect students negatively. There are schools that are safer than others, if I were to teach at the high school I'm observing in, I wouldn't be worried about money, crime, or anything like that. There isn't much room to help students improve their lives, they are already comfortable, likely to go to college and likely to be more motivated to learn. Students in district C are going to require much more work, they need to see that they can improve their lives through college and through hard work, they need someone to show them, to mentor them, and this is the kind of challenge I want. I think it's a bit boring to work in a safe school, where the students are already molded into good students, why not work somewhere that's challenging, where there's more room to make a difference?  
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/02/nation/na-schools2

 

Social Automation/Lack of personal interaction

Last week I observed for the first time at the school that I'm going to teach my two lessons at. I heard a lot of things throughout the day, but one thing really stuck in my head. A teacher told me that if she had any advice for me, it would to get involved with online teaching. She believed that future generations would be educated online with online teachers, reducing the classroom aspect. I started to think about this and it started to worry me. As a teacher, I want to speak to students and interact with them on a personal level, not through a computer. I do believe that year after year, there will be more computer based instruction, but it would be a shame to automate the educational process. Today, there are Self Check Out lanes, automated ATMs, online shopping, etc. I feel like there is less and less human interaction, texting has resulted in people not liking to speak on the phone, all of this can have a negative effect on speech ability and interaction. I worry that fifty years from now, there won't be any reason to leave the house. You can wake up, go to school/work on the computer, order food/groceries on the computer, text your friends and maybe video chat, do some online banking and then watch T.V to finish up your day. People won't see the sun for weeks, we will speak no more than ten words per day "through video chat", and yeah, that's it, eventually only text will be used, resulting in future people not having vocal cords and being completely incapable of speaking....just kidding, I hope. If this is our future, well, I don't know how pleasant it will be. I'm obviously being extreme, but it's heading that way for sure, a person can honestly and realistically live completely at home without the need to go outside. Anything can be delivered, bought, or requested online. I hope that when I get a job as a teacher, that I will have actual, physical students. The link I included is a great infographic. Enjoy, and if you want to try something fun, try not to text your friends for a couple days, instead, call them whenever you need to talk...
http://www.forkparty.com/17565/could-you-survive-without-ever-leaving-the-house-infographic

Taking PE/Health students to CF

Last week, we took the Health and PE students to the School in order to expose them to what we were doing. It was interesting because it reminded me of our first trip and how I felt/thought. On the ride there, I asked the student sitting next to me what it was that he expected to see and experience when we got there. I figured that he might have some preconceptions and I was right, he said that he knew about District C's history and I agreed, but I reassured him that he would be surprised when we got there. I used the experience as almost like a day of research for my own personal use. I wanted to know how a persons preconceptions changed after experiencing something first hand. Anyway, so through out the day I asked him if he was surprised and he said yes, and even that his school was in some ways "worse" than this one, that his school was more rowdy and disorganized. This was a pleasant and interesting surprise. I remember on our first trip, wondering if the school would be like what I expected, and to be honest, some of the things that I thought I would see, I did. I knew the student body would be dominantly hispanic, I expected to hear a lot of Spanish, so in that regard, I was correct; however, it's important to realize that it's a High School, the students are all full of hormones and energy, so of course some students were going to be more boisterous and loud and of course they're going to swear, they're teenagers. I failed to look at the school through a non biased lens. I only looked at the location, not the people. There was that one altercation in the hallway, but you know what, now that I've changed my opinion, I realize that it's not because of the school or the location or the past history of the city, it's because "teenager", that's why. This experience is great in 407, but would be in my opinion even better for an FNED 346 class where race and gender and stereotypes are discussed. I truly hope that this program is adopted by FNED 346 because I wish I had these experiences when I took it. For that class, I worked at a High School in Providence and just from that, my preconceptions of inner city schools were changed, never mind if I had done this type of observation. In the link below, I recommend taking a look at the "How an area looks" paragraphs and think about our I-spy activity on the bus.

http://www.qualitydigest.com/inside/quality-insider-article/danger-preconceptions.html

Tutoring experience

So now that I'm in my sixth week of tutoring, I'd like to talk about what I've experienced and learned. It's been interesting comparing what I've learned in class and then trying to apply it to my tutoring and teaching..It's all a big experiment really. Anyways, so I tutor two students on a regular basis, at least two to three times per week, and it's been really good so far, I like to students that I tutor and, honestly, I've seen improvement lately. I've tried a number of different tactics, from telling them to study on their own, to drilling it into their heads with repetition, different exercises on the board, etc. Whenever I tutor, I use an empty classroom so I can utilize the board and open private space, it's nice. I would recommend tutoring to any education major because it's really good practice. So, over the last few weeks I've seen improvement in one particular student and it really does make me proud, of not only him, but also of myself. It's a great feeling and it's one of the reasons why I'm becoming a teacher. I feel like when I do my two lessons, that having tutored will help me because I am going to go in more confidently knowing that I have already improved my own student's proficiency and knowledge. I will continue to use my tutoring as almost like an education lab, where I get to try out new things and see how they work and what I prefer. It helps me to understand my own teaching style and expectations.
http://www.parentsleague.org/publications/selected_articles/does_tutoring_help_or_harm_your_childs_education/index.aspx

Essential Question

During this class, we have been asked a number of time what our essential question is. I feel like I have finally begun to construct a solid question that represents my personality, style and mentality, which is what I believe a good question should do. So with that, here it is...."How do I conduct an enjoyable class where the teaching and learning scaffolding is hidden, so that learning can naturally happen through enjoyment and interest instead of out of necessity?" I also have an essential question that has more to do with continued interest, and it goes like this, "How do I turn a foreign language, something that isn't really necessary in life, into a topic that the students will want to further pursue in life, not for necessity, but for enjoyment?". I believe as teachers, one of our jobs is to be an advocate for our subjects, we should try to "spread the love" for english, math, foreign language, history, etc. We should try to sell the subjects to our students so that they pursue them in college and in life. If I can influence a student so much that they decide to pursue a degree in a foreign language, be it Portuguese or Spanish, I will have done my job. Oh and if you were wondering what my picture is, it's a damaged wall where the bricks are showing...representing how good teaching can hide the main structures of a class.

http://linguagarden.com/2013/04/6-ways-to-motivate-your-students-in-the-foreign-language-classroom/