The extra mile...

I have learned a lot this year about many different things in education. The one thing that I believe makes one teacher different from another is how much she or he cares for their individual students. I have witnessed many teachers who wait the whole day for that final bell to ring and they can finally go home. The very few teachers who I look up to are the ones who come early to school and stay after to provide one student with the extra help they need. The difference between a good teacher and an ok teacher is the amount of effort that is put into their job. Being a teacher is not just a job, it is the way to the future for many of that teacher's students. A teacher can either make a good impression, or a bad one, and hopefully I am going to one of the few teachers that wants and desires to go the extra mile.

How do you deal with problem children?

What are teachers supposed to do with problem children? I have had much experience at an afterschool program where I have definitely seem the quintessential problem child. What my boss decided to do with one of the worst of them, was ask the parent of that child to discontinue enrollment at the end of the month. My boss said it was better for the group as a whole if that child was not there. I do not know if I completely agree with that but even so I do not know what to think about it. At an elementary school, a teacher can not just as a child to leave the school! After talking to a teacher about the subject, she suggested to put that child in charge of special activities. For instance, if the teacher was going out of the room, the “problem child” would be in charge of writing down names of the children who disobeyed the rules. I have also heard of the problem child being in charge of many jobs in the classroom. The particular teacher said she recalled an incident when one of the other children came up to her and asked, “Why did ****** get to have a job this week when he already had one last week and the week before that?” She had given him many jobs because he concentrated more on the jobs than making trouble in the classroom. Also I have seen teachers who when there children get in trouble in the classroom, they have to go sit in another teacher’s classroom. By doing this, it creates a lot of embarrassment for the child but also keeps him away from valuable instructional time. There has to be a better way of reaching those children who are just a little bit harder to deal with. Do you have any suggestions?

Is Elearning the way of the future?

I have had the opportunity of taking Elearning classes in the past during the summers in between Spring and Fall classes at Auburn. It was definitely a good experience because I did not have to go to class, I could choose my own study times, I had flexibility on when I completed my assignments, I could balance working and taking a class, and transferring credits was extremely easy. When I saw the word e-learning, I only thought about college classes. Now, I understand that even students in elementary and middle school can take Elearning classes. Somehow that baffles me because I can foresee troubles with students not having enough discipline to complete assignments on their own time and keeping up with homework. It was even hard for me to keep it all straight. I had to train myself to schedule time to complete all of my assignments for class. It was hard for me to do all of the work without having someone to remind me to do it. For students, teachers can remind their students five times about an assignment and sometimes it still does not get completed. Do not get me wrong, I love that Elearning is being offered to students below the college level. For some students who need advanced classes and they are not offered at their school, I believe it is wonderful! I am so glad someone came up with the idea that students can have a way to challenge themselves even if it is not at their particular school. Without having the hassle of changing schools, these students are offered a way to better themselves with disturbance. I believe these classes are teaching students discipline and I think more should be offered. What do you think about Elearning? Is it going to take the place of schools some day?

Tinkerplots!

After working with a marvelous math program for the past week, I would definitely like to use it in my classroom. For the past four days I have spent 10 hours playing with this particular math program called Tinkerplots. It is absolutely amazing! There are different groups of data that can be displayed in different plots with the program. There is a plot where students can analyze all of the different multiplication facts and look at the similarities between them. For instance, the similarities between 5’s and 10’s on the times table. It is a very good way to make math investigative and fascinating. I also looked at data collected for the different weights of backpacks compared the the weights of children who carried them. My thinking was the higher the grade, the more the backpack weighed. I was correct for the most part, but the interesting thing I learned was that a child’s backpack is not supposed to weight more than 15% of their body weight. I changed the graph and looked at weight of the backpack compared to the appropriate backpack weight for each child. This is a great program to make children interested in math. I spend hours on the program learning things just through investigation, without being told. There is a button on the program that can instantly give the mean of any group of numbers. Students can also sort the data by gender or any category available. Some of the other data I looked at compared men and women and their times in the 100 meter dash in every year the Olympics had been recorded. From the different graphs I studied, I could see that the men have stayed about a second faster than women ever since the Olympics began. There are so many different things to look at with the program and most of the data sets than students can look at are already programed in. Students can also record data themselves and enter it into the program. This program is a wonderful piece of technology that every teacher should have the chance to have in their classroom. If you ever have the chance to explore Tinkerplots, please do because it was an amazing experience and I truly hope I can acquire it for my classroom!

New Technology

I was helping a 3rd grade student at an after school program the other day and she said she needed to go to the computer lab to make a powerpoint presentation. I was a little blown away that a 3rd grader would have to make a powerpoint presentation in one of her classes but it was not stretching my mind too far. We started working and she dowloaded a sound clip from her e-mail that she pulled up and added it to her powerpoint. That is when I was trully baffled. I had no idea what to think. I then proceded to ask her how she did it and she went step-by-step with me of how she learned to put sound clips in her powerpoint presentations. When I was in third grade, hunt and peck was definitely around and powerpoint, internet, or e-mail was no where in sight. She has successfully mastered all three of them. I do not even know why I went in the computer lab to help her because she was the one teaching me! Anyway, I wanted to tell you that story to let you see how much technology has changed since I was in school. It is really amazing the programs children are learning at such an early age now. I went in one school where first graders were learning how to type poems on Microsoft Word. Students are learning more about the internet, and ways to navigate it than ever before. There are now SmartBoards in classrooms where projectors used to be. Now teachers can be thousands of miles apart from their students and still teach over the internet. There are so many things that are changing that I can not keep up with them. If i had all of those technologies when I was in primary school, I can not fathom where I would be now. If this is how far we have reached in ten years, then I can not imagine how much more the technology is going to grow in the next few years.

Do I have to go to school?

There is at least a little something you can do for parents who do no help their children with homework. I would come before school or stay after school with the children to make sure they understand the concepts I am teaching in class. But, what do you do with a parent that does not make their child come to school, or lets them leave school for a haircut or just to go home? This particular child misses about one day a week from school. After talking with her mother it doesn’t seem as if it is a problem to her. Her grades are not suffering. She just does not want to come to school because it is boring for her. She asks her mother if she can stay home, and she says “yes”. For instance, at the end of the school year last year, this girl did not want to go to school for the last week in school because she said they would not be doing anything. Her mother let her stay home for a week. It has gotten to the point where she is keeping count of the days she goes to school so she will have enough days to move on the next grade. Truancy charges obviously do not threaten her. How do you convince a parent that it is important for their child to go to school to learn? When she arrives at college and sees that if she does not go to class, her grade drops or she does not pass the class, then it might be evident that going to school is important. Nothing anyone says has been able to convince this parent that school attendance is important. It has gotten so bad that other students are noticing and not wanting to come to school either. “If ******* does not have to come to school, why should I?” I do not know what else to tell her or her mother. If you have any suggestions, they would be greatly appreciated.

Horror Story

A few weeks ago I made a trip to a school about 30 minutes away for to go observe in a 3rd grade classroom. I already knew upon arriving that this particular school was going to be very small because the town was made up of around 12,000 people. I went in very optimistic. That was definitely no the way I came out. The building was in very good condition and was built only about three years ago because their last school burned to the ground. The actual school was not the problem. The sad thing is that the teacher ended up to be the horror story I came back with. One of my colleagues and I were very excited when we came to “Ms. Good’s” classroom. We walked in and there were only five students in there. I knew the school was small but I did not realize it was that small. Anyway, I saw Ms. Good in the corner of the room and half expected her to invite us in to her classroom. She said “I didn’t know yall’d be coming till about five minutes ago.” My colleague and I walked in and went to the table Ms. Good was sitting. She did not even stand up to welcome us or introduce herself. I gathered her name from the name plate on the door. We told her how glad we were to be here and were wondering if she would give us a list of the children’s names so we can make nametags for them to know their names better. We realized we needed the names written down after we heard the students calling each other’s names. I had no idea how their names were spelled. She replied “I would get up and get you a list, but that’s just how lazy I am.” My jaw dropped and I was baffled. We asked if we could talk to her for a couple of minutes to have some information on her classroom and students. She told her five students to go play games on the computer (as they were doing when we arrived). It was horrendous. The room was in complete disarray. The desks were in no particular formation, there were cubby holes on one wall that were packed so full you could not fit another piece of paper in them, and we had to tip-toe just to be able to walk around. You can imagine that the interview did not get any better. I came out of there completely shocked because I did not know there were teachers like her that existed in the world. It made me completely grateful for the school system in Auburn. If I were her, I would have been delighted to only have five students to concentrate on and give more undivided attention to. She did not see it that way. She saw having only five students as a waste because there were only five instead of fifteen or twenty? Why only teach to five students? I absolutely could not believe it. This was definitely a learning experience and made me see why some students do fall through the cracks when they come from teachers as Ms. Good. I felt horrible for those students. That particular day I learned definitely was teaching was not and by meeting her, it made me more fired up about teaching than ever.