For the Survival of the Whole Community, You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do..

*Note: the title is a quote my teacher said to her students during AK Studies--each student is assigned to a "community" and they choose a type of Alaska Native to study in their group i.e. Tlingit or Athabaskan. Also, this blog will probably be a lot longer than usual due to the fact that I took notes in previous classes on students' writing & requirements regarding particular writing assignments.

One of the more frustrating things to deal with in my practicum is the lack of actual beginning-to-end teacher instruction. This is not to say that my teacher does not in fact teach, but rather does not have a set lesson plan with which she goes by. Also, the first period in which I "shadow" is a study hall for the students and not an actual class like say, Alaska Studies (the 2nd period in which I shadow). This is where the students work on different subjects ranging from History (World & American) to English and Mathematics. On the second/third day of my practicum, my teacher asked that I oversee some work that one of the Hmong students was doing--forming a topic that he wanted to research for his English class.

This student has been previously pointed out by my teacher as being extremely self-sufficient and self-motivated in the sense of accomplishing the task of having his homework finished using the full amount of time given in a class period. For this particular period, the student was given the assignment of finding a "controversial topic" and then forming questions particular to the topic and I'm assuming, writing an entire essay using the information they have gathered about the topic--My student chose violent video games and the affects they have on children and took the stance that violent games in a sense, influence children to become violent or more aggressive in the real world. While he was forming research questions about his topic I got a chance to look at the grading rubric for the essay and jotted down a few notes I found particularly interesting:

FORM
-Correct MLA Format
-5 or more pages, not including works cited page
-5 different sources
-Sources correctly introduced & cited correctly using MLA parenthetical citations

CONTENT
-Engaging introduction & "hook"
-Clearly stated overview
-Background information clearly conveyed
-Thorough discussion of pros & cons
-Direct quotes & paraphrases
-Uses transitions smoothly to connect paragraphs
-Final paragraph draws conclusions about topic analyzed
-Writing easy to follow & understand

After James was finished filling out the form he was required to finish before as a step prior to writing the essay, I observed another assignment he was working on for English. This time, he was required to read a news article and then write a brief synopsis of the article and also take a stance on whether he agreed with the author or not and why. The article he had to read dealt with comprehensive sex education and whether we should allow it in our schools. I personally, have done much research on this topic in my own experience of writing controversial essays so I was curious as to what James would say on the subject. He did an excellent job of taking what he read from the article and reproducing it in his own words, listing key points the author made. He also had a very well developed standpoint on the subject, agreeing with the author that students should be exposed to comprehensive sex education [I think school should have a class that educate about premarital sex. School should teach teenagers about the hardships they have to face and some inevitable consequences after getting pregnant] although there were little things I noticed within his writing.

While he did a good job as a whole, he tended to miss inflections such as in the sentence in italics above where he says educate instead educates. We went back and "walked" through his paper together, pointing out the different usage between the two words and how by missing something as silly as a little letter, you could change the entire meaning of a sentence.

In my second period, I worked with a particular student that I recently learned can speak little to no English at all--his name is Armand. Armand, from what I observed in previous classes relies heavily on the other Dominican students to communicate not only with the teacher but with other students that are not of his ethnicity (if he chooses to speak to them at all!) One of my tasks for the class was to take a worksheet and whiteout some interesting/important facts about the Iditarod and then copy it so it would appear as a "fill-in-the-blank". The students would then log onto the website where Ms. E found the article and fill in the missing word(s). Ms. E voiced some concern to me that she did not think Armand could do this on his own (and obviously some of his peers did not either as they continuously came over and gave him answers against mine and Ms. E's instructions). She asked that I oversee his progress but not straight out give him the answers, & I agreed. While it at first (based on what Ms. E told me)appeared that he did not understand English at all, Armand changed my initial opinion when he began reading the article out loud--he did understand. While he was slower than most of the other students and needed to use his finger to guide him through a sentence, Armand was identifying and pronouncing words well despite his thick accent, and even getting all of his answers on the worksheet correct with little interference from me. When he came to a word in which he could not pronounce, I would have him break the word into individual sounds and once he got those correctly, slowly begin putting them together into an entire word. Also he would sometimes lose his place as he was writing down the answer, so I had him go back to the beginning of the sentence/paragraph and see if he could recognize the same sentence he was reading on his paper with the one on the screen—this seemed to work best, and he managed to finish his worksheet in the time given by Mrs. E.

Slowly but surely, I feel like I am making progress with my students, bringing up my “classroom confidence” & what I wonderful feeling it is!