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