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March 6th, 2013

Ms. Gander’s class – 5th grade music

I arrived for my visit with fairly few expectations, feeling open.  I knew I'd be with 5th graders (a new age group for me) and that we'd be doing music, and that was about it.  We jumped right in: the class entered, and Jim, my classmate, led them in an initial name game. The children went around in a circle and said their name along with a gesture (a swoop of the arm, a snap, jumping into in “x” shape, etc.).  Momentum built as they went around the circle; laughter bubbled up as the kids (obviously very comfortable with each other) shared nick-names, made gestures more active, and generally had a good time with it.

On Tuesday, I worked with Erica again on both reading and homework. “Work with me, work with me,” she asked, so I agreed to come upstairs and work with her. After 20 minutes of reading, we switched to work on homework.

Looking back over my notes, I was surprised by the number of distractions we had. While we were reading, a tutor and a student came upstairs and started reading out loud too; another student had a tantrum in the corner and the director, Mariah, and 2 other tutors were talking to him for 5-10 minutes to get him to settle down. Erica was, for the most part, able to stay focused during that time. However, when we were doing homework, she was more prone to distraction – both of her own making, and others.

Erica had one double-sided worksheet of math problems. She wanted to work upstairs instead of downstairs, where students usually do homework – I assumed this was because it was a little quieter and less hectic upstairs. We sat down on a couch, and Erica took out two whiteboards, and put her paper on top of them. She also got a sharpened pencil and a dry-erase marker.

InClass/OutClassed arrives this week @ the Supreme Court:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/sunday-review/the-liberals-against-affirmative-action.html
"elite public and private colleges remain dominated by affluent students. Some colleges probably have more students from the top 2 percent of the income distribution than the bottom 50 percent....Racial discrimination obviously continues to exist. But the disadvantages of class, by most measures, are larger today. A class-based system would be more expensive, forcing colleges to devote some money now spent on buildings and other items to financial aid instead, but it would also arguably be more meritocratic."

...I am hearing echoes, this Sunday morning, of our conversations together 3 semesters ago..

Dear women, now unwalled--
I realize that you are on spring break, so unlikely to be around for this event,
but it seemed so relevant to our conversations in-and-about The Cannery (and leaving it),
that I wanted to share. Perhaps you'd like to get hold of the video, if you can't
attend the screening and conversation?

Thinking of you all,
always,
Anne

Please join us on 3/14/13 at the Fitts Auditorium at UPenn Law School at 5:30 p.m. for a
Screening of this Amazing Philadelphia Documentary, Pull of Gravity:
http://www.pullofgravityfilm.com/

700,000 Inmates are Released Each Year in the U.S.
What Happens When They Come Home?

The film will be followed by a panel discussion with the Directors of the film, the Participants in the film, United States Magistrate Judge Timothy Rice (from federal reentry court), the US Attorney for the Easter District of Pennsylvania Zane Memeger and Professor Regina Austin of Penn Law School.

This is free and open to the public. The last two showings have sold out, so please go to www.pullofgravityfilm.com to reserve your tickets (for free).
 
Sponsored by the Women's Legal Assistance Project, the Prisoners Education and Advocacy Project and the Criminal Record Expungement Project

For my journal entry this week, I wrote about my first visit to my field placement.  Expectation and preparation are words that frame how I am thinking of this first experiences.  For this first visit, I traveled with students from the women’s mental health class. I had no idea what kind of program I’d be walking into, or what sort of participation would be expected of me.  I knew only that I would be getting ‘oriented’ to a program geared at teaching functional spoken and written English to  the mothers of children who attend preschool at the center.  The four college student-volunteers were placed in different “offices” and rooms of the prefabricated building, we each worked with two or three mothers.   The day’s lesson was intended to prepare the moms to order food in restaurants.  The program’s leader had formulated a series of questions she thought would be at an appropriate conversational level for the mothers.  

Math Centers (lesson on how to read a clock): The students are broken up into their "center groups" (groups of 5-6 kids). For math, there are three different centers: one group works on math activities on the computer. Another group works at the back table with Ms. B doing activities in the workbook. And the last group works with me on a worksheet and then play games of Concentration, matching up pictures of clock faces with their written out time in numbers. V is completing his worksheet and yells to Ms. Barba "A is making fun of me, saying that I'm going on a date with M." A complains that it's not true and that is was really another classmate, N, who was saying that. Ms. B says that V and A should not sit together and that A needs to keep her comments to herself because she has been getting into a lot of trouble lately with gossipping. Right as Center Time is finishing up, the students are asked to return to their seats in order to move onto Writing. A and N are sitting next to each other when suddenly N yells "Ms. B, A is trying to stab me with her pencil!". A calmly says that that's not true. Ms. B yells "cut it out, A. You've been having a bad time with lying lately and I can tell when you're lying. Show me your hands." A shows her hands to Ms. B and her hands are empty. It's important to note that Ms. B is standing on the other side of the table where A is seated while this is happening. Nothing is physically forceful in the sense that Ms. B is not in physical contact with A. A says "I wasn't poking him" and Ms.

Field Notes- 3/1/13 

Cross-Visit

Today I went joined Jomaira at Stonewood High School. She is working this semester with the Mayor’s new college access initiative, and is gathering information about various schools in the city and their college programs. She tells me that they are looking for a neighborhood school in a low-income community with high college access rates, but that has been hard to find. So far she has noticed that many of the college programs are separate or extra features of the school, but they are not implicit in the curriculum or culture. Additionally, Jomaira tells me that some schools have multiple programs that overlap or do not communicate with one another, because they have grants or funding coming from a variety of sources.

We enter the massive doors to Stonewood High School and there is only about foot between us a metal detector. We put our bags through and sign in with the security officer. The building is classic and beautiful inside, and clearly has history. We are told to go up to the Student Success Center to meet with Alisha, the manager of the center. We walk into the center, which is also a computer lab. I notice a few students waiting to use the computers. Alisha takes us to a separate office to talk. I typed up the main points of our conversation in bullet point form because I talked about them more in depth in my cross-visit paper (and I also did field notes for my placement this same week so these were a little more brief).

This post is about my cross-visitation experience at the English School.

Before the class started, the teacher, Linda and I talked about the nature of the class, the students in it, her approach to teaching the classroom, and my own interests in education.

12:30pm

The girls walk in and sit around 3 tables. They immediately take out their lunch, but three girls get up to ask their teachers if they can get spoons. They seem to like standing up a lot

Then as the students eat, the teacher come up to us to explain the lesson for the day, she tells us that the girls are learning algebra and that she's a little anxious about it being too difficult for them.

two girls walk in late

The teacher then goes up to a table where a group of girls are having a conversation and she starts engaging with them, asking them questions etc.

Then she claps and sings (seems to be a class song) to get the student's attention, but she forgets how to do the clap and the students quickly show her how to do it. The teacher tells students that they have two minutes to finish their lunch.

One of the students begins passing out pencils after the teacher prompts her, and two other girls begin passing out a paper with a math problem. Students seem to be a big part of the classroom, not just as students but as helpers.

The overall theme that I noticed today that was striking to me were my own conceptions of "ability" as it pertains to the classroom. I see ability in the classroom in two ways: the first is the teacher's perception of what the students are capable of and the second is what the students themselves feel that they are capable of.