Random Thoughts About Teaching, Twitter, and Life
Dear Internet,
Yvette Nicole Brown replied to one of my tweets today! I'm pretty excited. The more I learn about her, the more I admire her. It can't be easy to be a Christian in Hollywood. Even the Community cast gives her a hard time about it sometimes (though always in fun, of course). It's just so refreshing and nice to see someone stick to their convictions in a town where those convictions are not popular. It's like a Karen Kingsbury novel come true!
The second thing I want to talk about is teaching. I'm thinking about starting an education blog, but until I do, this will suffice. I started my second field placement this week. Oddly, I've been placed in an English/Special Needs class. This is weird because 1) English is my minor, not my major, and 2) I'm not going into special ed. I guess I'll start with the positives first. I really like my cooperating teacher, Dianne. She is very nice, and seems to have a great relationship with her students. Many of them eat breakfast and lunch in her classroom, and she seems like a good adult mentor for many students who need that kind of person in their life. She listens to their problems, and tries to help them. She jokes around with them, and generally models good student/teacher relationships. I also really like the woman Dianne co-teaches with first hour. Her name is Sam (Sam and Dianne, I know, right?), and she has a Master's degree in teaching. She seems like a really great teacher. Both of them model things that I've been learning about in my Teaching Reading in the Content Area class, such as the Reading Minute. I definitely want to use the Reading Minute in my own classroom. I think that's a really good way to start each class period.
Now the negatives. I really hate remedial classes. I call the "special needs" classes that Dianne teaches "remedial" to differentiate them from the general ed classes, but also from the cognitively imparied, or "CI," classes for the kids with severe disabilities. While the students in Dianne's classes are obviously reading significantly below grade level (they didn't know the word "tomb," for example), they're clearly able to function in normal society. (All of this sounds really harsh. I'm so sorry about that. I don't know all of the right terminology). While I see the value in remedial classes, and agree that they're very necessary, I just don't like teaching them. I find them very frustrating, because very little real teaching seems to happen. My other gripe is that this school (which shall remain nameless) has just given up the battle against cell phones in class. The let the kids have their cell phones and iPods out during class. Supposedly, the kids are only allowed to use them during "down time" after they finish their assignments or when the teacher's not talking, but of course that's not what happens. The kids have them out all the time, and don't pay attention to the lesson. Yesterday the 1st hour class was watching MacBeth and Lady MacBeth was covered with blood, and the servant peed in the sink, but they didn't even notice. They weren't even looking at the screen. If they weren't texting or listening to music, then they were sleeping. And Sam and Dianne (wah, wah) didn't even care. I would not allow that in my classroom.
Other schools have relaxed their cell phone policies without sacrificing classroom environment. At my alma mater, students are now allowed to use their phones during passing time between classes or at lunch, but not in class. While I still disagree with this policy on principle because I think it makes it too easy for students to cheat by sending answers or text questions to their friends in other hours, I can't really complain because I definitely snuck texts to my mom during lunch or in choir class.
So, while I'm not really enjoying my field placement very much, I am enjoying my reading class a lot. I'm learning so many fun, and creative ways to incorporate reading into my content area. History was always a reading-heavy content area, but now I'm learning how to teach reading to my students. You can't expect that your students will automatically know how to read a history textbook or a primary source document when they enter your class. You also can't expect that the skills they've acquired for reading a novel in an English class will translate to reading historical writing (or scientific or mathematical writing). You're an expert in your content area, but your students are not. You job as a teacher is to make your students into little junior historians or scientists or mathematicians.
A passage from my textbook, Real Reading, Real Writing: Content-Area Strategies really put this into perspective for me. The passage basically said that learning and teaching is the process of moving from dependence for independence. This was a major light-bulb moment for me! Whenever I imagine myself teaching I get really excited, but also really nervous. There's so much information to cover. How do I actually go about conveying this information to my students in a way that they can understand? It seems overwhelming, but I think that if I can keep the process of gradually moving from dependence to independence in mind, then I will have a framework on which I can base my lessons. Over the course of the year, my students should go from relying on me to tell them analyze an historical document or guide their thinking about the cause and effect of a particular historical event, to being able to go through those mental processes on their own. By June, students should be able to go through the steps for writing an essay without my help. This can also be applied on a micro scale to each chapter and unit that I teach, and on a macro scale to students' K-12 education as a whole. I'm going to let this concept guide my teaching philosophy and methodology going forward. I have yet to actually attach practical steps to this framework, but I think it's a good way to think about things.
Discoveries like this one make me really excited to be a teacher. I just wish I had a better field placement in which to test these theories.