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Chapter One: Megan learns that schools can be shut down when they are too small and she is forced to move schools. 
Chapter Two: Megan attends English public school and spends most of her time pretending to twist her ankle at playtime to escape the cold outside
Chapter Three: Megan moves to the U.S. and learns the ‘Pledge of Allegiance.
Chapter Four: Megan goes to her first summer camp.
Chapter Five: Megan enrols at a Steiner school.
Chapter Six: Megan goes to ‘Hawk Circle’ with her class to learn how to survive in the wild.
Chapter Seven: Megan joins the ‘Midnight Run’ and is awakened to how the homeless live.
Chapter Eight: Megan does a ‘study abroad’ in Paris during her sophomore year of high-school.
Chapter Nine: Megan visits ‘Camphill’ which is a Steiner community and school for severely mentally handicapped children and adults. 
Chapter Ten: Megan writes a letter to a teacher after finding a class the teacher taught to be inappropriate and incorrect and the teacher redoes the class the next day. 
Chapter Eleven: Megan does shoemaking for her senior project and learns a trade.
Chapter Twelve: Megan learns in her Emily Balch Seminar Freshmen year from another student that the idea of being ‘color-blind’ is not a good thing like her all-white environment had previously taught her.

Chapter Thirteen: Megan learns that not everyone thinks that a Liberal Arts education is a good thing, or even the idea of going to college. She struggles with the privilege of these opportunities.

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Field Notes – Week 7

More than a week away and the students are really excited about Winter Break – making them somewhat distracted at doing work.            - I wonder if there is a way to involve holiday festivities in student assignments/work? Maybe if the break was acknowledge in class rather than ignored it might make the students more excited about some of their work?

Students are working more on grammar – reading from packets together as a class  - These workbook packets always kind of bother me. I realize that they are necessary but I wonder if maybe they could just be graded to see how the students are doing rather than have them as the driving activity because students ere clearly bored going through this and didn’t seem to really be learning so much as just reciting things. 

Only the same student keeps raising his hand to answer. Mrs. Smith keeps calling on him asking, “how come no one else is awake today?” - I think this also speaks to the set up of the packet and the student’s interest. I talked with the student who was really excited to answer later in the class and he said that he wanted to impress Mrs. Smith. He didn’t talk about his love or enjoyment of the class material.

For my first reading response (on the first half of the Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed text) I took a broader look at the text, instead of picking a specific passage.  Therefore, I will be responding to the first half of the text as a whole. 

            Having read Freire excerpts in previous classes I was prepared for ‘Pedagogy of the oppressed’ to be a dense text.  In reading the first half I was confused by his argument in relation to his text.  It appeared almost hypocritical.  Freire spends the first few chapters discussing the relationship between the oppressed, and the oppressors, the relationship between teachers and students, and finally the purpose and characteristics of dialogue. 

During a Curriculum and Pedagogy Seminar last semester we were required to teach a lesson in our field placement. I was placed in a first grade classroom at Bayside School with fifty first graders and two teachers. These are my field notes from that experience. 

Lesson Objectives: To teach students how to write a list, why lists are used, and to provide them with prompts to write lists of their own 

Number of students: Four

Four students gather at a table towards the back of the room while the rest of the class is split up into other stations that they will be working at for the next twenty minutes. Behind our table is the computer cluster where stuents are working quietly on reading and math activities. Next to us is a group of three students reading a large poetry picture book outloud to each other. There are not enough teachers for each station to have a supervisor so the computer cluster and the poetry cluster are working independently. On the other side of the room, two separate groups of students (about 6 kids each) work with each of the head teachers on writing and vocabulary. There is another group of four students in the library nook doing independent reading. 

Christine Calderon

01/29/13

Field Post #1

Notes for first visit Friday 25th, 2013:

I was planning on just having a meeting with Ms. Teller but found myself being introduced to the principal along with the 4th grade students I will be working with. The first day at the Madison Elementary[1] was a bit impromptu but the students where very welcoming. I should say that I have been to this placement before my sophomore year for special education in a pull out classroom as well as last semester in an ELL classroom. I enjoyed both times at this elementary school although I was placed here twice I still have yet to be in a regular classroom. I am excited to continue in the same school especially since there are students in this current classroom that where also in special education and ELL this has now given me a better standing point. A lot of the students recognize me as they were filling in the classroom.

6th Visit; 1st grade inclusive classroom; 5 students with autism, all high functioning. Worked directly with two of them today.

Before entering the classroom, I always arrive during recess.I join Mrs. T, talk with her and observe the students.

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Help Mrs. T plan a lesson; putting words like forest, tree, rivers, sister, brother, mother, kind into categories like "mother nature", "family", "actions" to begin a lesson plan on Native Americans

-Observed Mrs. T read the book "Brother Eagle, Sister Sky" to the students; she had them to a picture tour (looking thorugh at the pictures and sharing their observations)

-Completed an "I Know (K), What I Want to Know (W), & What I Learned (L)" chart.

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Switched to do sensory wok with Mary; assisted her in using the blue ball and trampoline.

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Observed Mrs. T do reading activities with Mary

Mrs. T asks "Is your brain ready?" to see if the sensory work was enough for Mary to continue with her academic work. Mrs. T does reading from a large book. Ask Mary to sound out the letter. Points to each one with the end of a pencil.

These notes are from my first day of praxis this semester that took place this morning. This semester I am placed in a 6th grade langauge arts classroom at Spring Charter School.* This is the same classroom that I was placed in last semester for another education course, so half of the students that I worked with today were the same as the students that I worked with last semester. 

I was in classroom from 8AM-1PMand during this time the class engaged in morning meeting, a period of reading, a period of writing, and then the other class came in and repeated the reading period before I left.

Observations:

There were three different teachers that filtered in and out of the classoom. One of these teachers was the main 6th grade language arts teacher. This teacher is responsible for teaching language arts to 5th and 6th graders, using a looping system where they start with the students in 5th grade and then move up with them to 6th grade.