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. 

I had my first field placement on Friday, and it went extremely well! I got to speak with the teacher for twenty minutes before the students came back from Spanish, and I was immediately able to tell how much she loves to teach and how much she adores this school. She has a great deal of experience, and she was very eager to have me help out in the classroom (she is co-teaching with a teacher who I have not met yet). The children (first and second grade) came back and, after introducing me to the students and having the students introduce themselves to me, the teacher gave them a spelling test. This gave me the opportunity to see what level the children are at in their spelling, and to learn a new way to set up a spelling test: the teacher glued illustrations of Native Americans on the top of the page to remind the students about what they are studying (each year they alternate between studying Native Americans and People of the World).

One thing that I did notice was, when the teacher read a story, there was a part that read, “You fight like women! Can’t you fight like a man?” I was a bit concerned that the teacher did not have a metaconversation with the students about gender stereotyping, as that simple sentence can have a serious impact on the way students think about their own strength in relation to their gender.

During one of discussions last week, we talked about how teachers often get frustrated with their students when they aren't doing they things they are asked to do. We also talked about students who are demotivated, not unmotivated, but demotivated from school work because they are struggling to connect. Thus, the challenge that I would like to focus on is how does learning happen when there are so many other situations that the learner faces outside of the class. Here, the learner is both the teacher and the students. 

Teachers and students are both people and sometimes when our basic needs aren't met we tend to feel frustrated about other things that we think we can control. For example, in our small group discussions we talked about how teachers have no bathroom or snack breaks. Even the students have a bathroom visit limit and a restriction from eating in class. As we all know, these are some basic calls to nature that we all must abide by to be healthy. Yet, students and teachers are often shackled down from these needs. Without energy from the food, our inhibitions go down and we can't learn. So, is there really a point even to be in class if no one can focus? Without our inhiitions, we get frustrated easily and channel anger towards those who aren't even part of the situation. As outsiders, we can judge and say that the angry person is incensitive, but how will that solve that fact there's something else in the lives of the students and teacher that requires more immediate attention?

(I'm sorry if this is long, my real journal entry is longer).

I wrote my post this week on chapter 3 of the book our class is reading Teaching for Social Justice by Connie North. In one of the chapters one of the characters, Joe, acquires his social studies gig as a teacher and it is clear that he would not have gotten it if he wasn’t a minority. The district didn’t want a “blond, blue-eyed woman” despite the fact that she had masters in African American history and Joe did not. The idea of reverse racism is a prevalent one these days as I have heard some of my friends wonder if they actually have to fight harder because they are white, and some councilors joke about how colleges need minority students so that can make it more likely that a student who is a minority will be accepted into a school of their choice. I’m not sure where I stand with this issue. I am a political science major and last semester we talked about descriptive and substantive representation. In the first, constituents want their politician to not only stand up for their beliefs but also look like them, and in substantive constituents also want a representative who will advocate for their best interests, but the person doesn’t have to look like them.

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Through my observations in the classroom and the subsequent examination I have made of myself as a possible future educator, I have thought a lot about the specific role of compassion in the school environment. I often tend to have a negative initial reaction to teachers who are brusque with students, even though I consciously recognize that it is part of maintaining discipline in a classroom that they, but not I, spend hours in every single day. I think it is easy from an outsider’s perspective to expect that every classroom interaction should be compassionate, and to think this isn’t happening when a teacher is short with a student who keeps asking to go to the bathroom, for example. I think that there is something to be said for focusing on creating relationships of caring and concern in a broad sense within a classroom environment, which is something that takes time and energy on parts of the student and teacher. A truly compassionate educational relationship, like any relationship, would be characterized by being able to deliver and accept criticism while also feeling safe and ultimately supported in one’s endeavors. I think this speaks to Margaret’s point that deeper relationships exist where the desire to please is put aside.