Week 8

This week at University I feel like I had one of the most productive days that I've had yet. Usually when it is my time to be in the classroom, my students are in their specials, and based off of what I witnessed last week, I am no longer going to observe their specials time simply because it makes me really upset to watch. So, I helped the teacher along with Tabitha and Adrian to grade the post-assessment on context clues. It was actually really interesting to see how students would select different words in the context to define the words that they didn't know, although it was also kind of disheartening because most of the students seemed like they were really struggling. Most of them were getting only about half of their answers correct, or maybe just a little more than half, but the scores were still very, very low.

When the students finally did come back into the classroom we had the opportunity to work with our kidwatching kid on a sketch-to-stretch activity which really helped me to get my kid a lot better. As it turns out, my kid is quite the artist and is also very good at articulating her thoughts. That's really been my first good conversation with her because I haven't had a lot of time with her.

Finally, the thing that's upsetting to me is now that we've figured out the best way to remedy the schedule issue with the specials thing, my teacher is going on leave for three weeks because of surgery. I feel like I'm really not quite getting all of the experiences that I was hoping to with the students or with the curriculum. I just want to have a part in the classroom! I am not a good by-stander.

Week 7

Ok, so the truth is I completely forgot to do this and we are now doing a blog for week 8. So, I am backtracking because I have something that I can't forget to write down that really bothered me last week. When I was observing the 4th graders in their specials last Wednesday I was absolutely shocked and appalled by the way the teacher was acting towards her students. To start off with, her class was barely being managed. Kids were running around, taking things from each other, screaming, and not listening to the teacher at all. Rather than correcting the situation, the teacher ignored what was happening and proceeded to talk over all of the students, which didn't solve the problem. The the teacher was talking about landscapes and brought up the artist T.C. Steele. The teacher began to question the class about the artist and as the children responded thoughtfully, she rolled her eyes at them, looking at them like they were stupid, saying things like, "yeah sure", and finally gave up on them. There was no guidance from her and it was really awkward because I don't think the students or myself understood what she was trying to get from the class. The teacher was also asking about some kind of order form that she sent home with the students, and when many of the students didn't have them to return to her, she said very condescendingly, "I knew you guys would do this to me" like it was a slap in the face to her. The teacher also was walking around the classroom and blatantly criticizing her students in front of other students. She walked up to a table of students and said to us "See this young lady here? I wish my entire class was just like her, then my life would be perfect." As soon as she walked away, the other students said to each other "I hate art, she's always criticizing us all the time." She also went around and said things like, "These trees are awful. I'm going to probably have to do a lesson just on drawing trees". I just think that its wrong for a teacher to make any child to feel like they are unintelligent. I also was extremely offended that the teacher was just writing off every student and their response and rolling her eyes. I don't know how that is ever ok to make students feel stupid for sharing their thoughts or opinions. I also don't know how a teacher like that has a secure job during such difficult times for teachers. I guess I was so shocked not only because that was the first bad teacher I had witnessed, but just the magnitude of how awful she was towards her students really made me want to say something. But then of course, I am only an IU student observing her classroom. That leads me to wonder, if I could even do anything about it at all?

Week 6

After thinking all week about what I was going to do for my multigenre research paper, I have now come to the conclusion that I am going to write about vegetarianism. I myself have been a vegetarian for the past four years and I am always asked "Why did you decide to become a vegetarian?", or "is that hard? I could never do that."I am hoping that by writing this paper and presenting all of the facts, I can help people to understand why I would make a lifestyle choice like that. Aside from the paper, I have been looking forward to observing an active writer's workshop this next week for our field observation. I think that although I remember doing it in elementary school, it will be a great refresher and will also help me to better understand how to apply all of the skills and tips we have been learning in our cluster classes. I also need to choose a child to kidwatch so I can start recording that student in class. I am still unsure who I want to select, but I'm thinking of one child who seems really intelligent, but also seems to get worked up really easily when he is stressed in the least. I think he will be really interesting to observe, and I feel like I can learn a lot of ways to work with his learning needs by learning more about his learning habits.

Week 5

For this weeks class, we had the opportunity to teach a lesson to our peers. I really liked my idea for my lesson, but I think once I was teaching it to the other members of the group and heard some of their ideas, I didn't feel as strongly about my lesson. I think that part of it was I simplified it a lot and just gave them the basic idea, so they didn't get the full idea, but I still didn't feel all that great about it. For the Multigenre research paper I was thinking about doing something about owls. I know that idea sounds somewhat random, but I was thinking the other day about a really great book called HOOT which is about saving owls from a construction site. I think that this could open up the topic of the affect of man on the environment, and also give me the opportunity to learn a little more about these unusual creatures. I guess I'll do a little more research to see if that's truly what I want to do, but I think it could be fun.