End of the year thoughts

I’m still in the processing stage of my Yearlong plan. I have some idea of what I want to do and achieve in my year but I haven’t sat down to do the legwork. Creating the outline is a lot more exciting and less daunting that I thought it would be. Maybe I’m letting my nerd flag fly here but I like how it is a blank slate and full of possibilities. The tricky part, for me, is going to be making all of the dots connect. There are a lot of different things I am interested in teaching but I need to make sure they flow and aren’t disconnected and random. So that is definitely something I have to keep in mind while I go ahead with my plan.

I finished at ARS last week. It was a bit bittersweet. I really enjoyed my time there. The girls were wonderful. I said a little goodbye to them at the end of class and one of the girls gave me a big hug and wished me good luck. It was too cute! I’ve had a great time getting to know them and reading alongside with them. I’ve read three of the books they're reading and it’s been so interesting to have my questions shared by the students and hearing their answers. I feel like I learned a lot from my conversation with my CT and my facilitator. They have great advice for me for my student teaching and beyond and I feel really confident about next semester. I’m really ready to commit more time and energy in the classroom! I can’t wait to see my students every day and become a major fixture in their lives as they will in mine. Bring it student teaching!

The Final Countdown

The Final Countdown

Well, I did it! I finished teaching for the semester. It was trickier to squeeze in eight teaches with my CT’s schedule but substitute teaching helped me catch up. Overall my last lesson went really well. As usual, the girls at ARS were well mannered and actively participating in my lesson. The lesson was about how to make good discussion questions and what makes some questions better than others. It was a fun lesson to teach, the girls came to class prepared to share three questions they wrote about the book they just finished, The House of the Scorpion. I was ready to talk a bit about what makes a question open ended or close ended but the girls all seemed to have a really good grasp on what they are already. A few of them even realized they had closed ended questions before they shared with their friends and went about changing them before we even discussed them.

One thing Kelly mentioned after observing me that I thought was interesting was that she noticed that at ARS I just jumped right in to the heart of the lesson. While she’s never observed me before, she mentioned how at Akins Christine would start a lesson with an anecdote to hook the students. After talking with Kelly I realized I started all of my lessons at Akins with an anecdote too. I would talk about my life or things I know the kids can relate to make them perk up. When I started teaching at ARS I never used an anecdote and I never see my CT using them either. There is a different environment at ARS and it doesn’t call for anecdotes and the students don’t quite need to be pushed to be as engaged as the kiddos I worked with last semester. I just found it interesting that I made that sort of “code switch” on my own without even realizing it. It probably has to do with watching the different styles of my CT’s and pursuing their model of teaching. How important is it to use anecdotes, or any other kind of entertaining tool to make sure our students are engaged? I think it differs from class to class but there is a fine line between engaging the kids and putting on a show.

When I taught in Thailand I felt like I was kind of a sideshow act that would amuse the kids for an hour a week with games and word searches. I think it made me feel more liked as a teacher but I eventually started wondering how much they were learning. As a teacher I want to make sure my kids are engaged and enjoying the lesson but the major concern can’t be that the kids are entertained but that they are learning some thing valuable and that they will use in the future. Anecdotes are a good way to go to relate to your students and to reel them in at the start of a lesson but if that is solely what you focus on and your lessons and activities become more about fun than learning you’ve got to re-evaluate what you’re doing as a teacher.

On the other hand, though, if you take yourself too seriously, and drone on when your students clearly don’t care, you have a whole other problem… 

Critical Inquiry Unit

Do you remember that Invisible Children campaign last year about finding the Ugandan warlord Kony? Yeah, I hardly do either. They launched a phenomenal YouTube video that tugged heartstrings and called for April 20^th of 2012 to be a day where people “decorated the night” to make people aware of Kony and what he’s done.  While the video was deemed a huge success and gained millions of views in a matter of days ultimately this campaign fell to criticism of how the charity spends it’s donations and the necessity of finding Kony over other pressing issues in Uganda. I bring this up because there was a HUGE following on Facebook for a few weeks but before the April 20^th deadline even came, the enthusiasm had fizzled out. I saw one or two Kony 2012 signs around Austin but nothing like Invisible Children had hoped or expected.

In my critical inquiry unit I’m showing my students examples of different opinions about the same topic to assert that it is important that they form their own opinions and make their own choices about the social issue they will research. By making them see two sides to a story and being open to other’s ideas while keeping a critical eye my hope is that my students will find an issue they are passionate about and have looked at all sides of the issue. By doing this, they will become truly engaged in the issue they research and will want to continue to fight for social justice after they turn in their final project. I want my students to not feel an immediate emotional surge that fizzles out when something else more pressing comes up. Being critical will make them create their own opinion which will make them more interested and involved instead of being told how to think or feel.

I’m interested in learning what everyone thinks about this. Do you think it’s important to look critically at an issue like social justice? I feel like there are many topics everyone can agree on when it comes to equality and social justice but at the same time there are many people who would disagree with things I think should be universal rights. Just go read comments on any news story about education or health insurance debates. There are some people out there with opinions that surprise me. So I think that being open minded and seeing both sides of an issue is still important for something like social justice. If our students can learn why someone disagrees with them about an issue they can know how to try to persuade that person.

Culture Circles and the Three Little Pigs

“…Reading and writing are not neutral acts; rather, they are linked to cultural practices that make political, epistemic, and moral claims on our lives” (Freire, 2000, P.69). Ah, it’s good to read Freire again! It never ceases to amaze me how he can put into words exactly how I view what an ELA classroom should be. He places immense value in the reflective practices of teachers and the participation in discussion of everyone in the class. For me, reflection is key to always teaching to the best of my ability. I’ve seen teachers get stuck in a rut with their practices because “it’s worked for years, why wouldn’t it work now?” but this is a horrible attitude. In all honesty it’s incredibly lazy and ineffective. Teachers should reflect about their teaching on a daily basis, if it didn’t work today, it probably won’t work tomorrow.  There’s no reason to beat a dead horse when it comes to your pedagogy. I admire my teachers I’ve observed over the past year. They are continuously searching for ways to make their classes more meaningful and engaging for their students.

Souto-Manning’s chapters we read for this week do a wonderful job of expanding and clearly explaining Freire’s concept of culture circles and the process they enact. It is my goal to have these phases occur in my classroom. I have already started my critical inquiry unit. As my first two units have been about social issues, I’ve decided that my final unit will involve advocacy and bringing social justice to areas in need here in Austin. My goal is that my students become “critically meta-aware of larger discourse and influences shaping these issues” (Souto-Manning, p.  41). As of right now, I envision my unit using mentor texts, like newspaper editorials, for example about the same topic but with varying opinions. I want my students to think critically about the reasons behind the author’s position and I want them to decide for themselves what their position is on that issue and others they will research about during this unit of study. I want the students to see that no issue is black or white, they need to analyze the situation and problematize it to come to their own conclusions and make their decisions their own and not what someone else is telling them to believe.

It was interesting reading about the implementation of culture circles with 1^st graders. We don’t often read about younger students and when I first started reading that chapter I thought that they were young for this kind of discussion but I realized this is the perfect age to start these kinds of conversations. This age group has a great idea of what is fair and what is not and they easily get upset if fairness is not enacted. Their desire to have everything be equal is seen on the playground at the lunch table and at home when it comes to who chooses the channel and who gets the bigger dessert. By having them think about what is fair and what is not in their classroom they are prepared to discuss how they can make classroom practices equal. Using the three little pigs written by different authors is gen.i.us. Genius.

I’m honestly contemplating using Jon Scieszka’s The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs for my 9^th graders critical inquiry unit. I read it often last year with my elementary students and it is a clear way to understand voice and authorship of a piece. Have yall read this story? I honestly think I enjoy it more now as an adult than I did then but even when I was a child it made me reconsider who was telling the story I was hearing and why. That’s it, I’m stealing it. Thanks Souto-Manning!