Initiating a positive change (prompt 7)

Throughout my time at the school I have learned so much! Being around those kids has, I believe, made me a better person and hopefully the kids I was with benefited from me being there. It’s hard for me to believe that I was so nervous before this service learning experience started and now I don’t want it to stop. I wish I could start teaching right now!

            I consider myself extremely lucky and blessed that I was placed in such a great classroom. The teacher I worked with was exactly the type of teacher I want to be. She was respected, loved and made her physical science class the most interesting class I have ever been in. The students loved her and because of that my service learning experience was a very positive and educational experience.

            The reason I decided to be an education major was because I love to help people and I believe that there teaching is a way that I can help influence people to want to achieve higher goals and to help instill in themselves the confidence they need to go out into the world. Throughout the past couple weeks I have learned new strategies for helping students, such as working with them one on one or creating a more visual lesson that makes learning more enjoyable. The teacher I worked with, Ms. G, taught me that students just want to feel appreciated and want to be affirmed that they are doing well. I see the fruits of this in her classroom. Her students feel comfortable to speak what they are feeling even if it is not related to science. They feel comfortable to “be real” in the classroom which I love.

            As a future teacher I want to be able to have a personal relationship with my students while creating a need for respect as their teacher. I want to be able to teach my students that going against the status quo will be more rewarding in their lives then simply doing what their family members or relatives have done in the past. It is my responsibility to instill in my students a desire to learn and to pass that knowledge down. It is very hard in the lives of the children in these inner city schools to stay positive and enjoy school because so much at home is out of order and for most kids there is very little support to do well. That is why I want to be the teacher who is their for her students even outside if the classroom so that they will be able to pass that support on.

            Allan Johnson says that students should not just be in the classroom to pass. Meaning teachers should not just teach to test but we should help our students make a personal choice to take part in changing what has become the norm and challenge what has been accepted as the status quo. A good teacher will see his or her job not simply as the means to make a living but as the opportunity to change a life and better a society. I want to be that teacher. I do not want to teach for money because as we all know we won’t be getting paid much but life is much more then that! All I know is this, whatever I bring to my classroom, knowledge support, trust, respect, etc. will only be multiplied in the long run as those students will hopefully pass on what they have learned to their families, friends, and relatives which will initiate a positive change- that is the reason I want to teach and what this service learning experience has taught me. 

Bringing a home to the classroom (prompt 5)

A lot of the time when school meets the home life parents and teachers are not on the same page. As a future teacher I want to do everything in my power to help bridge the gap between parent and teacher. It is a hard situation when you tell your student one thing and their parent tells them another. When the child is around his or her parents for most of his or her life it is obvious to see that they will side with their parents. But the point of teaching is to not express one side but to teach from all different perspectives. This is where the education one gets at home is helpful.

            Students are able to bring their home life, education, background, ethnicity, etc., and by doing this, the classroom becomes a diverse place where not only the students can learn different views but we, as teachers, learn to teach alongside all those differences. I believe that the most important job of a teacher is to express when children are behaving and exceeding in the classroom. This means to send notes home on a regular basis rather then a report card, expressing to the parents the great work their child has been doing. But when a classroom is diverse with all different ethnicities and backgrounds how is a teacher going to express these thoughts? If the parents do not speak English well how will you have them understand when their child is doing very well or when he or she needs a little more help?

            As a future teacher I plan on spending sufficient time getting to know the background of my students and how I can work simultaneously with the parents. I want to be able to do this because so many times in school the biggest difficultly is going to be the parents. I think this because parents know their children and know what they want for their children. The teacher has a responsibility to understand where the parents are coming from but at the same time try to develop his or her own way to bring the home education to school.            

            Lisa Delpit says that, “children have the right to their own language, their own culture. We must fight cultural hegemony and fight the system by insisting that children be allowed to express themselves in their own language style. It is not they, the children, who must change, but the schools. To push children to do anything else is repressive and reactionary.” What she means by this is that each student has his or her own unique way of learning and when it comes to language it is important not to try to remove it but to work with it and promote a diverse classroom. 

creative teaching techniques (prompt 3)

In every classroom there are going to be students that learn differently. There will be the children who learn just by listening the lectures, the visual learners who will learn best with a video or demonstrations or there will be the hands on learner, who will learn best when working with the material being taught. It is the job of the teacher to be able to reach every kind of learner so that each individual student fully understands and grasps the material being taught.

            Along with the different types of learners there will be students depending on the school one teaches in where the students don’t fully understand English or have learning disabilities. What are we to do then? How do we help those students understand the subjects as well as the rest of the class? In the classroom I’m in there are a few students with learning disabilities. They act socially like the rest of the seventh grade students but during lesson these few students tend to get very upset and give up before really trying. I was able to work with these few students during my time at the school and we figured out ways for them to understand and follow the material the teacher taught.

            When I noticed that the kids were getting very discouraged with themselves I asked the teacher if I could take a few of them on my own and see if I could help them. She had no problem with it so I made a copy of her lesson plan and went over it briefly and developed a way to teach it to these kids that I thought would help them. They were learning about force and motion so I created a hands on activity where the kids could actually see what cause an object to move and made a chart where they could record their data about how far the objects went and how long it took to get to the end point. I also showed them a ten-minute video the teacher had about motion and the laws of motion. By the end of my time with these 3 students they understood the material and felt that they had enough confidence to go into the classroom and learn with the rest of the class. From that day on the kids have had a more positive attitude in the classroom and they know that when the material gets confusing they can always come to me and I can develop a way for them to understand.

            I was able to do that because when I was in school my teachers always taught their lessons in more then one way so that all the kids in the class could understand. Because I was able to bring that to this classroom the students have felt much more comfortable coming to me when they get confused and when they don’t want to hold back the rest of the class. When I begin to teach I plan on providing different ways to teach a lesson because I want my students to enjoy my subject, but more then anything I want them to feel confident in themselves and believe that they can do well no matter the circumstances. 

Sensitivity in the classroom (Prompt 6)

   Over the past couple weeks I have been able to get to know each individual student in my classroom. As I have gotten to know them I have been able to see the difficulties most of them face everyday. Most of the students come from a single parent house or have been raised by older siblings due to parents never being around. When I look at these seventh grade students I can't help but wish that they could be raised in a different area or with more positive influences because they have such great potential but due to their background they feel as though they are not going to succeed. 

         Since the day I started teaching at this middle school I thought that the students in my class had been getting along great and that they were a big support to one another. I realized on one Thursday that this was not the case at all. In this classroom alone there were more problems with relationships then I had ever seen. Between the boys disrespecting the girls and the girls reacting to the way they were treated I knew that something had to be done. I spoke to the head teacher and we both decided that it was very important to get across to these students the importance of a supportive classroom. We decided that we would spend the class period talking to the students about the importance of creating a safe space in the classroom where all the children felt support. As we were talking a lot of the kids started to cry and then began to talk about how they have been hurt at school both physically and emotionally. It was very hard to hear these 12 years old kids talk about all the terrible things they have been through at home and at school. I told the kids my experience with school and how I knew that when I stepped into my classrooms I was safe from anything outside, that in the 6 hours a day that I was in school I would be surrounded by people who cared about me and wanted me to succeed. 

         I kept thinking back to Megan Boler and how she always says that the classroom is designed to be a safe place for students to express their ideas and thoughts. The most important thing for the kids to understand was that school should be an escape from all the negativity at home and on the streets. It is not just for learning and testing but for personal growth and positive support.

My name is Genevieve. I'm a sophomore transfer at RIC and I'm a secondary education major with a focus on History/Social Studies. My family lives in New Jersey and thats where I was raised. I love to sing, play guitar and go to the beach with my friends:)