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I am a first grade teacher at Rowe (Bucktown/Wicker Park, Chicago). My school is a big believer in goals. Every single part of the day has a goal and the students are told that goal in a way they understand. The students' days start with objectives and each lesson starts with a goal. • My school is AMAZING. The staff are all young, so the room to try new ideas is present. In addition, there are two teachers in every room, grades K-2, . . . much needed. Our school believes in team building, so we went on a staff camping trip last week. I thought about how much getting to know each other is going to help me my first year teaching because, lets face it, I am not perfect and will make mistakes. In addition, knowing your coworkers provides a team-like atmosphere, which is what needs to be present in schools. The staff truly works together for the betterment of every child, and it is amazing to be part of a school with this set up. :) My school's mission is to close the achievement gap. Students in our building come from very diverse backgrounds. This year, I will have four students with severe behavior problems because of issues in the home, or scenes they have witnessed. I know it will be a challenge, but I am looking forward to starting. • My students come next Tuesday! We have our room set up and our curriculum ready to go! :) I hope that all is well with the 14s . . . just tell them to breathe :) and good luck!!! (Courtney Wills, ’13)
Do the lessons as planned unless you have plans to change them. You may want to please your co-op and agree to any suggestions she has, but not all suggestions will help you, especially if they are last minute and your mentor is coming to observe you. Last minute changes may result in a lesson that looks unorganized and not very well thought out. • Don’t talk down to your students. They can have a conversation like anyone else. Take the time to ask them about their day or what they like to do or future plans, because they love to talk and know that you are interested in their lives. During your investigation make sure you talk to them all the time. It’ll get them thinking, and you can gauge their progress about what they are learning. • When your co-op gives you advice, sometimes you just have to take it. I know it’s your takeover and you want to do everything, but remember this is your first time doing this and any help would be great. My co-op gave me the suggestion to do baking as my investigation, and it was a great idea. She also helped with some things throughout those few weeks. Every little bit helps. And if you don’t agree with your co-op, graciously take the advice even if you don’t plan to use it.
Michele • “in my family, TEACHER is spelled with capital letters” • Miss Harper—the “quiet way” she fought the system • “we tend to be overlooked & unsung… incapable of teaching our own…. I’ve never seen any better than these 3 heroic, master teachers, each a black woman, & yet I’ve never seen them held up as models….” • “I’m not that good, and you know it.”
culture: who are “we”? • culture is shared. • culture is shared by a significant group, a “we.” • cultures contain wide variation. • cultures contain many subcultures, groups nested within the larger group.
Everyone has a culture. Everyone lives a deeply cultural life. • Culture shapes who we are, what we do, what we do, what we do with whom, why we do what we do, how we do what we do, how we see the world, and so on. • Culture compresses people as they develop within and into culture. This cultural compression necessary for development into culture.
wednesday learning is what occurs after you think you already know everything (John Wooden)
(diary of a novice teacher in Mozambique cont) • We met at the soccer field and divided the 130 REDES girls into 22 groups for painting the murals on the stadium wall. The morning went well. We were able to keep people not in REDES off the soccer field and away from the wall. Then at 1pm a bunch of men soccer players showed up to play a game. We politely informed them that there were no soccer games today. We had arranged with the Chief of Sports to have the field from 7am-4pm. They didn’t respond as politely, and things got a little heated. We called the Chief of Sports to come tell these guys to leave, and we continued to tell them there was not going to be a soccer game today. But Ann and I couldn’t do much to physically stop 30 grown men from coming on the field, so I despaired a little—we might lose this battle. But I had forgotten that I had 130 girls on my side. That’s when something amazing happened! Completely on their own, with no encouragement or instruction from any PCVs, the girls took it upon themselves to make sure that there would be no soccer game. They began singing and dancing in the middle of the field. Then they grabbed the soccer balls from the men and brought them to Ann. At one point a man, out of frustration, picked up his soccer ball and ran away with a group of laughing girls chasing him. Ladies and gentlemen, the birth of rugby. One man with whom we were having head-on confrontations with the most said, “Screw this, we’re just going to play.” All of the REDES girls responded by starting a chant, “Mark up the goal, I want to play too!” They chanted, stomped and clapped in circles around him. I don’t care how manly you are, having 100 girls chanting and circling you is pretty disarming. Soon the men went away.
The new teacher realizes she did not choose her students; they are assigned to her, but she can choose how she thinks about them. She can choose to think beyond what they appear to be at the moment to what they can become. What they are at the moment is disconcertingly noisy, troublesome, and impudent—all temptations to her to correct, to order, to make rules. Then the teacher notices a particular student whose facial expression appears to question the teacher in fundamental ways: “Who are you? Do you know something that concerns me? Do you bring me something? What do you bring?” (based on Zurmuehlen, 1990, p. 32)
Ch. 6: What is said and what is meant • do children given strange answers for reasons other than being unable to conserve or decenter. • can language have meaning independent of the context? (57) • "sheer linguistic form"? (61) kids not able to use language totally out of context • "possible, without invoking inability to decenter, to allow that something like 'domination by the look of the thing' may occur." (63).
“We do not just sit and wait for the world to impinge upon us. We try actively to interpret it, to make sense of it. We grapple with it, we construe it intellectually, we represent it to ourselves…we are, by nature, questioners.” (67) • young kids • less knowledge about language • haven’t learned when to give primacy to language and when not • find it difficult to pay scrupulous attention to language in its own right (69)
Ch. 7: Disembedded thought & social values • moving beyond the bounds of human sense (75). • embedded—tied directly to experience • disembedded—moving beyond direct experience • the better you are at tackling problems without having to be sustained by human sense the more likely you are to succeed in [school] (77) • he imported new premises of his own—frequently basing them on human sense—or he ignored part of what was “given.” (78)
to master any formal system you have to take at least some steps beyond the bounds of human sense. The problem of helping young children begin to do this has not be properly recognized. (82) • change the value system without denying the significance of intellectual skills (83) • while we each may possess some genetically determined “intellectual potential,” in which case individuals will surely differ, there is no reason to suppose that most of us—or any of us for that matter—manage to come even close to realizing what we are capable of (86)
Hi Daniel- got a resource for the 14 cohort. Brett Brown (my co-op/now Literacy mentor/and now friend) writes a blog about read alouds/relevant and meaningful children's literature. Great resource, great ideas for classroom. Please share this site. • http://readaloudpicturebooks.wordpress.com Hannah Moyer, ‘12
