Blog, Week 4

This week has been an interesting week, between the classes with student interaction (literacy and math) and in our dyad placement where it was conference week.

Tuesday was full of interesting events, from meeting with our Kindergarten buddy to interviewing first and fifth graders about math.  Our kindergarten buddy literacy session had seemed to go much more smoothly than it had in the past, since we used one of our buddy’s favorite things to approach our literacy activity – Spongebob.  After reading him part of a Spongebob book, we asked him to write in a booklet that we created for him, filling in the blanks “Spongebob is…” and “Patrick is…”  When he thought of a word, we had him stretch the word and write down the sounds that he heard.  He was very open to this approach and worked well stretching out his words, and would write down the sounds that he heard.  We didn’t correct him too much, even when he wanted to write “Spongebob is a cleaning utinsle” as long as he stretched his words and wrote the letters he heard.  Our objective of having him stretch out his words and come up with beginning sounds was successful.

Then, we were on to our math interviews with first and fifth graders.  As soon as my partner and I walked into the first grade classroom we were drawn to a student that was saying, “oh my gosh!” and dropping his jaw as the number of adults in his classroom quickly grew.  Seeing him react this way made my partner and I want to work with him.  When we were told to find a student to work with, we rushed to his side before anyone else could choose him to work with.  Choosing him was an interesting choice, especially once we got into our interview.  At first, when we asked him an addition problem, then asked why he knew that, he said “because my brain knows the answer.”  Then, after asking another problem and getting an incorrect response, he said that his brain wasn’t working right.  After the third problem and receiving a correct response, the student proceeded to tell us that he knew the answer because there was a little guy living in his brain and when his brain wasn’t working correctly, the guy would fix it.  That was not the explanation we were expecting, but it sure was amusing!  The rest of the interview continued to be interesting, as the student talked more and more about video games that he like to play, but most of them were violent and he would say things like, “you want to shoot them in the spine with a sniper rifle, so it’ll be more painful.”  This kind of talk, especially for a first grader, was quite disturbing, but gave us insight to the kinds of things that our potential students will likely be exposed to in their early lives.

Our next interview was with a fifth grader that had mastered the concepts that we were asking him about.  Because these multiplication and division problems were so easy for him, he had a hard time articulating the reasons that he knew them.  I was quickly running out of questions to ask him, and he was becoming rather bored with them, so I had to think of new types of questions to ask him.  I used visual clues around the classroom, to see what they were working on, and then proceeded with new questions about inch to foot conversions and areas and perimeters of shapes.  I was finally able to think of some questions that would make the student think harder and had him explain the thought processes he was going through as he was trying to solve the problems.  Though the student said that he liked to come up with math problems to solve on his own, he seemed to give up quite quickly on the problems that challenged him.

During my dyad placement we had short days because it was conference week.  The conferences were an interesting experience, especially because they were all student lead.  Each student had created a portfolio with examples of their work and also set goals for themselves.  The students had practiced the steps of conducting their conference, but most students did not take it seriously.  This lack of preparation was shown during their conference when they would rush through the material and skip over parts.  When the student led part of the conference was over, we would step in and help them develop S.M.A.R.T. goals for themselves – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevent, Timely.  Many students struggled with this on their only, coming up with goals that did not fit these requirements.  After asking questions about their original goal (using their planner, for example), we mainly found that their overall goal was to get good grades.  We were able to take these new goals and turn them into S.M.A.R.T. goals and use their previous goals as stepping stones in order to reach their goals.

Meeting parents, and seeing their interaction with the students, was an interesting experience.  One example was of a parent that had talked about a student setting their goals now, so they could get into Julliard later on.  The way she said it made me questions whether this was a goal of the student or of the parent.  In further discussions, I learned that it was the student’s goal to go to this prestigious school and her mom was simply encouraging her towards her goal.  Later, there was a mom that kept on correcting her son’s spelling and telling him that he can do better than that.  I was appalled when parents would flat out say that their child was simply being lazy.  If I were that student, I would quickly become discouraged by my parents’ description of my and feel that I should live up to their “lazy” expectations and would then stop trying.  Though this was hard to see, it made me realize how important it is for the teacher to be encouraging in everything that the students do because they may not be getting that positive encouragement elsewhere.