Weekly Blog #2

This has been a little bit of a challenging week for me. I basically lost my placement in my current classroom because my cooperating teacher is so overwhelmed with MAPS testing and the MSP test that is coming up in the next couple of weeks. My cooperating teacher teaches both math and social studies which I have mentioned in a previous blog and he is currently on a time crunch to get all of the students ready for the math portion of the MAPS section of testing. Because of this he doesn’t feel that he has the time for me to teach any social studies lessons during the next several weeks. He himself is only concentrating on the math portion of his class and will be using his allotted social studies time in addition to his math periods to get all of the kids ready for testing. This was a little discouraging to see how much of an emphasis these teachers are required to give to the standardized testing through MAPS and MSP testing. I have been hearing quite a bit in my education classes about how teachers are being required to teach more and more to a test, but this was my first encounter of just how intense the situation really is. My teacher openly admitted that he has to teach the students specific math areas and problems that will be on the test, in order to get them ready. I really find that unfortunate because I am unsure of how much the students are actually learning, because it seems to be more of a memorization practice than a learning one. I am confident that the EWU staff will find me another placement soon, so I can get back at teaching my lessons and learning as much as possible from my cooperating teacher.

I spent a couple class periods in my seventh grade class this last week that went very well. It was very fun introducing myself to both classes and taking the little bit of razzing that they dished out to me, being the “new teacher”. One practice that really stood out to me with this teacher was the entry tasks that he has his students perform each class and every day. So basically he has a quote on the board every day, and the quote could be anything from words to live by, to a well known philosopher. He has the students read it and then write a short paragraph about how they interpret the quote and what it means to them individually. I really like this task, because it teaches the students a little bit of history by explaining who the quote is by and the history behind it etc. But also it gets the students thinking in an intuitive way right at the start of class and so their minds are alert and ready to learn his future lesson. The students really seem to like the task and it also helps build the relationship with each individual student because he gets a little insight of how they think and what things seem important to each of them.