The week at school went well overall. Of course there were high points and
low points and I continue to remind myself of these daily so as not to get hung
up on the disasters. Many of you
ask me about what the teaching here is like and what the students are like so I
want to talk about some of the frustrations I have encountered so far. I should say though that there are a
lot of high moments that I can save for another day and remember that if it
were only the bad things that I were telling you about then I would probably
have already been on a plane home.
My first frustration is about feeling stretched thin. I feel like I can’t be a good
enough teacher and devote my time to the subject matter and development of
student learning when I am teaching atleast 6 different lessons a day,
sometimes more. If I could teach
the same lesson a few times in a day then I would be able to devote more time
to developing it and be sure that it is what will help my students succeed and
gain the most from. Inevitably
some of my classes have taken priority and those of course are the ones with
subject matter and students that I enjoy the most. No doubt biology is one of these and my lessons for that
class are more valuable and worth repeating than what I can come up with for
any other class. The lack of time
to prepare great lessons for each individual class leads me to teach more from
the book. I use only that as a
source for their information and often use the questions from the tests and
quizzes that are in the teacher’s book to develop their assessment (of course
we have yet to receive our chemistry books for this year, so that is an
experiment in and of itself). It
is not the curriculum I would use and it is definitely not the order I would go
in for any of the books, but going it alone in this situation doesn’t make
sense.
This combined with the lack of resources I have often makes
me feel as if I am not being a great teacher for my students. Often times I will think of something
creative, exciting and guarenteed to stimulate student learning, but I realize
that the materials are nowhere to be found. We have a library with about 18 laptops, but the internet
connection is slow and our bandwidth and daily usage limits get used up quickly
that way. I also have stepped
outside of the technology realm when compared to my student-teaching
placement. There I had 2 screens
and projectors, one of which was a smartboard, computer, document camera and
convenient ways of switching between technology modes. It isn’t even the technology though
that it is the frustrating part. (Lets be honest, I don’t even have technology
in my homeroom class yet).
Teaching without technology takes creativity and that is something I was
excited to work on developing while here, but teaching without resources is
just beyond my thought processes.
For example, one of my science classes was learning about clouds and I
thought they could make some using cotton balls so as to be reminded what they
looked like…the problem is there are no cotton balls in La Union. It was crazy to me that something so
simple, that I thought for sure I would be able to find, I mean they’re a basic
beauty product, was not present here.
My whiteboard lecturing style takes me back to my biology class and I
chuckle that I have turned into the same teacher I had, since that was always a
dream of mine.
The rest of my frustrations lie in the students
learning. As we have been through
the first round of tests in most classes and multiple quizzes, I have gained a
knowledge for how they study and how they have learned in the past. The hardest thing about learning
this…it all needs to change. They
spend their time memorizing the bolded terms in the book and memorizing
anything else important. They
don’t truly learn it and can not answer questions that go deeper than the first
levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy. They
wouldn’t be able to relate information to new topics, solve problems with the
information they learned or explain anything. All they can do is regurgitate the information (often word
for word) from the book. My goal
over this year is to change that somewhat. This might be a lofty goal, considering the other things I
have already discussed, but I want to teach them how to think even before I
want them to understand the principles of science. I understand why they do rote memorization, I mean could you
imagine learning biology, chemistry or other tricky disciplines in something
other than your first language?
They don’t have the language skills or time to compare, contrast or
problem solve because first they have to figure out what a word means something
I have always taken for granted in my learning and education. For example, in 9th grade we
were learning about air masses and to me they aren’t something you have to
memorize because they’re names tell you about them. A few are maritime tropical (wet and warm), Arctic (very
cold) and continental polar (dry and cold). All of those definitions come from understanding the English
word and knowing what it means.
They did not have any prior experience with the word maritime and didn’t
understand that continental meant continent (developed over land instead of
water so it is dry). So they’re
lack of understanding and experience in the English language puts them at a
disadvantage to begin with in learning new vocabulary, so they resort to
memorization.
This week I gave the 8th graders a quiz and I had
only one student pass it. I
thought I had written a fairly easy quiz, it came straight from my notes, which
are the same ones that I give the students. As I looked closer I realized several things. The quiz was not straight definitions it
required them to think about how things ineract and to remember things not as
definitions but as relationships.
Also, this was the first time I had done two different versions in their
class and I actually saw students look to their neighbor and erase all of their
matching and write in the opposite…so I once again caught more cheaters. I was prepared to start from scratch on
these two sections of the chapter, but then I realized that the 8th
graders have had terrible behavior, so bad that Mr. Perdomo has been sitting in
on some of their classes to remind them to straighten up. So I decided to use the quiz as a
teachable moment. I used all of
yesterday’s class to discuss respect, study habits and good notetaking and then
gave them back their quizzes. I
explained to them that it is very possible and probable that most of them will
come back from this 1 bad score since it is only quiz and not a test and we
discussed not just studying vocab but looking at the larger concepts. I’m hoping that this will have a
positive affect, my only concern was with the culture here. I had a student who asked if I put the
scores in their weekly report and I had.
She began to cry and went on to explain that her dad was going to beat
her! I had heard from Jake that
this was fairly normal and was just part of the culture. I couldn’t get over it
though, how do I allow a student to go home to their father knowing that they
are going to get a belt or firm hand?
I wanted to tell her to stay at my house for the weekend and desperately
wanted to call child services, as if such a think existed here.
I continue to learn a lot about teaching and to develop new
strategies to teach my students. I
pray that they will stick with it and continue to learn and not get
discouraged. Sometime I will have
to comment on all of the good and smile worthy things that have happened in the
classroom.
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