Blogs

In my placement at a Middle School in an 8th-grade science classroom, I am struck by the amount of disengagement the teacher, Mrs. Lampe has with the subject material. It seems as though she is merely running through lesson plans to get her class from one assessment to the next. As my role in the classroom is strictly an observer by district policy, I have been able to critique Mrs. Lampe’s approaches to teaching in the two classes I observe. While I see the how the lesson evolves as she teaches it a second time, I also am able to notice her apathy towards the material, and how her students might perceive this lack of interest a pass for themselves to not care about their learning. I am aware that there might be an underlying system to the class that I am not seeing, but as an observer who cannot participate in the class, I can only see the actions of Mrs. Lampe and the reactions of the students, and vice versa.

            For my field placement, I mentor a third grade student, Anna, at an elementary school in West Philadelphia.  One week, as part of the mentoring program, the mentors and their mentees, along with a chaperone from the school, took a field trip to Chinatown.  As the students had lived in Philadelphia their whole lives, I was surprised to learn they had never been to Chinatown. 

            The first place we visited was a Chinese bakery.  Using the five dollars given to her by the school, Anna bought a fried shrimp dumpling.  Upon seeing what she had chosen, the chaperone congratulated Anna for “trying something strange.”  This comment made me uncomfortable, but as I had met the chaperone an hour before I did not feel as though I could say anything. 

            Although Anna did not respond to the comment and seemed to quickly forget it, this moment has stuck with me.  It reminded me of times in my own education when we learned about different cultures and the tone of these lessons. 

I spend every Thursday afternoon at an after-school tutoring program at North Elementary School. I, along with other a few other college students, spend about an hour and a half with a group of 2nd and 3rd graders that have been identified by the school as students that need additional help with homework and reading. I was assigned one boy, Jason, and I work with him every week.

Jason is incredibly energetic, talkative, and bright. He has often finished his homework in class and asks me to create math problems on a small dry erase board for him to complete. He picks out books to read without complaint, and is able to read them aloud with an expected level of difficulty.

However, he does not like working at the computer. There is a reading program on the computer that each student is supposed to spend approximately 10 - 15 minutes on each afternoon, but Jason tries his best to get out of it. He haggles with me over the amount of time he is supposed to work, asking me if he can stop when the "big hand" on the clock is at a certain number. When we have agreed on a place where the "big hand" will indiciate he can quit the computer program, Jason often dawdles, speaks to other students, or asks to go to the restroom, hoping he can waste time.

Just wanted to share an interesting segment I saw on Ben Swann's Reality Check on Ohio's recent state mandated reading laws (these laws are in place in other states, as he points out, but this news station is based in Cincinnati, OH).  He questions their effectiveness and points to the issue of teaching to the test. 

http://www.fox19.com/story/21752012/3rd-grade-reading-guarantee-means-teaching-for-the-test?autoStart=true&topVideoCatNo=default&clipId=8671495

In my time in class and at my field placement I have discovered what has been most interesting to me is the interaction between student and teacher and the unspoken structure and relationship in the classroom. What I didn’t notice until the editing of this paper was the subliminal use of language, body language, and expectation that creates an interpretation and characterization of a classroom.

            In my first day at the field placement my notes had a lot of interpretation that followed what we discussed as “note-making”. In class when we discovered the difference of note-taking and note-making I looked back at my notes and realized I passed a lot of judgments that I assumed were objective observations. I observe two different class periods in my time at my placement.  Each class has different characteristics but the way I described them was very subjective to “normal” class assumptions. The following is a summarization of what my notes described:

   On Monday, Mr. Rhea’s history class discussed “The African Scramble.” After discussing the papers he had just handed back, Rhea lectured while sitting at the table of around fourteen students. Capitol High School charges tuition of over $30,000 a year, and socioeconomic privilege is a very present factor in all of the classes I’ve observed so far. So when Rhea started to discuss Africa, I decided to pay close attention to his framing, as in how does he present the topic of imperialism? Who is the focus? Are moral implications discussed or are the facts passed on unemotionally? Does he recognize the sensitivity of the topic? How do the students respond in body language and words, and can I make a statement about the raced nature of these reactions by white students versus the two students of color?”

            Rhea opened the lesson with a question. “What was the first European country to go to Africa?” I decided to use this as a slice of Rhea’s classroom because it is a perfect example of the way we tell stories about imperialism and in history classes in general. By closely analyzing the subject, verb, and object of each sentence, we can see through a benign, well-meaning question to really a statement that totters dangerously near ethnocentrism.

for the discipline group? http://www.tolerance.org/blog/mindfulness-helps-reduce-unequal-discipline

This semester, my two field placements are non-traditional in the sense that they are not observational, but spaces in which I take on a role as a tutor or mentor to young students, which can be a daunting responsibility. One of my placements is at Oliver Elementary School, working with several members of Bryn Mawr’s Art Club to teach art lessons to 1st and 5th grade students in a school where funding for arts programs was cut years ago. The student coordinators plan and teach the lessons, and I, as one of several teaching assistants, supervise and help students with their projects once they’ve gotten their materials and directions.

            The focus of the curriculum that the Bryn Mawr coordinators have planned this semester is art as a profession, in a variety of fields. We have done projects that have put the kids in the shoes of advertisers, fashion designers, and, this week, cartographers. Miss Rose, as the kids call the student coordinator in Mrs. Dryer’s classroom, started the lesson with projections of several pictures of maps, of varied scale and magnitude. One was immediately familiar to me, and likely the rest of the classroom. The Mercator world map is something that we take for granted, having seen it, like Mrs. Dryer’s 5th graders, early and often. We don’t stop to call it into question, because why would we? The world is the world is the world. How could literally millions of people be wrong about something so fundamental?