Hello all and welcome to my first blog post of the semester! *High five!* *Sparkles!* Okay, now to get serious...
Considering the fact that I am not yet teaching from my own lesson plans, nor have I begun my research yet (but I will begin shortly after taking over completely in the classroom) I will not be able to make any observations that correspond to my research topic. However, my plan for these first few blog posts will be to treat them like my old Researcher Notebook. For this specific post, I want to discuss something that I found highly interesting that happened in my class yesterday.
The first day I walked into school about two weeks ago, a bad taste was put into my mouth by my mentor teacher about one of my classes. Apparently, this was going to be the "problem class" of the year and going to be the one with the highest amount of "low level kids". (Please ignore the quotation marks. They are not actual quotes from my mentor teacher, I am just trying to emphasize a point here.) Anyway, when I began teaching the class, I could tell right away that the rumors had been true and I didn't think I was going to get anywhere with the class. I let myself give up on the kids from day one and I shouldn't have done that. Alas, I came back and was determined to get them to respond to me and to work to the best of their abilities (which is a lot higher than I was originally told, by the way).
Even though it's only been just over a week now with the students, I already am beginning to see a difference from the first day. Now, I know that's barely any time and there probably wouldn't be much of a difference, but believe me, there really was. The first few days I spent with them, I couldn't get a single answer out of anyone. I'd ask a question and they would just sit there staring at me or their notebooks. After prying them, I'd finally get a few short responses and that was it; they'd shut down and not speak again. But yesterday, something changed. Yesterday, something was different.
I had asked them on Wednesday to annotate a story about a Cuban boxer named Paret. While some struggled with it, I helped them through it and they actually did a pretty decent job pulling out various forms of diction, imagery, and tone. But yesterday, I asked them to take what they had pulled out of the story and write a paragraph explaining how the literary device they wanted to write about (tone, diction, imagery, etc.) effected the reader as they read the story of Paret and his fatal match. And I was completely taken aback when I read their responses. They completely grasped the concept and were able to pull excellent quotes from the story and not only explain the effect the quote would have on a reader, but they even went as far as to try to explain the text itself.
I must say that I am now excited to be working with these students for the rest of the semester and I'm looking forward to see what they bring to the table when I actually begin teaching from my own lesson plans. In conclusion, I guess one thing that I would be able to take away from this experience is never give up on your students, no matter what. Even if they seem like they will be the toughest eggs to crack, there is a bit of brilliance inside of each and every kid that walks through your classroom doors.
-Mr. T
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