Cooperative Learning

Last week in class, we did a number of activities as an introduction to cooperative learning. It was fun, but I was struggling with how I would want to incorporate it into my classroom. I think it would be really great in classrooms with especially dynamic abilities and motivations but envisioning a classroom of high achievers, I wonder how well/how useful cooperative learning strategies are. I know that during our first activity with the squares, I felt useless. Yes, I had to move my colors and no one else could, thus making me important, but I was not quick enough to envision the squares and so I was only following orders. It was frustrating for me because I wanted to contribute my fair share but couldn't and thus felt bad for being a "useless" group member. I think knowing how to work together is really important. People need to learn how to accept the help of others and know how to ask for it as well. I think people need to know how to step back and let other people have their chance. But that second part I think is the hardest part for people. We live in a society where being number one is highly valued. It's expected that we always strive to be the best one with the best ideas and the best results. Being a fairly passive person, I will often give other people the chance to do what I could easily do myself. But in the world of school, where I constantly worry about what my peers think and what my professors will think and how that will affect peoples' perception of me (and perhaps my grades), I'm constantly worried about proving myself to be smart, a hard worker, someone who can stand on their own and is capable. But with the activity we had and the cooperative learning strategy involved, I just felt incapable and useless, like a pawn for the smarter people in the group. And so I do not know if this is a result of me not knowing how cooperative learning functions or if it is a result of a perception that cooperative learning is not always best.

At last at last, I teach at last!

Monday and Tuesday of this week mark the first days that I have had a chance to put my last four years of higher education to use! If you had told me last semester that I would have gotten through it, I would've thought you were a liar. And if you asked me prior to 10:15 on Monday if I thought I could do it, I wouldn't have been able to give you an answer without going into a full-blown panic. It has been an incredibly long academic year and there have been many moments where I have questioned why I ever thought I would be able to to teach ELA. After this week though, I finally feel as confident as I did where I first chose the major. My lessons were not by any means perfect. On Monday, we got to our exit slip twenty minutes before the class period was up. Up till that point, things had been going really well. The kids had jigsawed a chapter of the novel they're reading, we'd figured out the definitions of two new words, and we questioned whether or not someone can survive without society. As it turns out, I was pronouncing one of the vocab words wrong, but that was an easy fix. And in the end, the kids shared some of their writing and did some silent reading on the section of the book we were going to discuss the next day. I was elated that nothing major had gone wrong, not to mention the teacher told me that she could tell the kids liked me- one of the girls even wrote "you were awesome!" on her exit slip, much to my joy. I was more nervous yesterday- things could only be better or worse this time around. There were a few kids who showed up who hadn't been there the day before and as a whole, the class was much rowdier. But rowdy didn't really hurt me, in the end. We read the chapter out loud, stopping when we found "Thoreau-isms" and I couldn't help grinning every time one of the students said "Miss, stop! That was one!" Not everyone read aloud (I wasn't expecting they all would) but so many kids did, much to my surprise. And when afterwards I had the kids pass notes pretending to be HDT and Chris McCandless, they were near impossible to keep quiet, but the conversations they read out loud afterwards were priceless and showed how much they had been absorbing from their previous lessons. Afterwards when they did their constructed responses, they all wrote something, but I was sad that one girl in particular wouldn't write more than two sentences. The class was nearly over and she handed in her writing, so I didn't say anything. If I had the students for longer than two days, I might've tried to get more writing out of her but I didn't. This was my only disappointment. I know I probably shouldn't be as proud of myself as I am, but I am quite pleased. My mini-lessons in 406 were awful and my lesson plans in our special ed component were not things I was proud of, despite the effort I put in. I was beginning to believe that I had no right to be pursuing this field and I'm glad that despite the end of semester stress that I'm feeling, I don't feel like it's all for nothing.

"Don't Say That"

Yesterdays discussion was hard but important. Though I kept silent throughout, I was thinking a lot. To be honest, I was quite emotionally drained after but still, I was glad for it. Now, I'm gonna ramble a bit so try to follow along. I have a lot of faith that by the time I am a more adult-y adult, my generation will have helped move society forward- to be more open, more accepting, less judgmental. I have been fielding racist complaints at my summer job since I was 17 and been fighting hard against them since, particularly ever since that first summer when I was told, "trust me, after a couple years here you'll be racist, too." It has always made me mad and sad to see this but I have no plans to ever give in. It has been obvious to me more than a few times during this semester that these sentiments are pervasive throughout. I don't think it's intentional, nor to I think it is right to attack people for their mistakes. Attacking only makes people defensive and nothing good will come from it. There are many tricky terrains we must tread not just as people but as teachers, as well. In a personal example, I am someone who sometimes mixes up with "people first" language. Not because I think that someone's conditions define them but because that is the language I have been used to hearing throughout my life. But also as an English major, I understand that it's not meaning that affects us, so much as connotation. Words that might have once been acceptable are used negatively and thus the negative connotation follows. Words acceptable in one time might not be in others, or in other places. We talked a lot about culture last class and whether it is right or wrong to assume that everyone shares the same culture. This gets to be a very awkward subject when we talk about the people of a race other than our own, but I think maybe I can make it a little easier. I spent five months studying in Ireland last year. This was a fabulous experience and I am doing everything in my power to go back as soon as possible. But even though I was in an English-speaking country, there were more than a few situations where cultures clashed. For example, in Ireland to call someone a "spaz" is as bad as saying "retarded". I did not know this- how could I when spaz is a word that is often used affectionately here in America, equivalent to calling someone hyper? But one time when I said it, I was sharply reprimanded by an Irish boy who said "don't say that." I couldn't tell if he was being serious or not and it was a really uncomfortable situation. Later I asked my Irish roommates if the boys were being serious and they explained to me the connotation in Ireland. I was careful not to use the word again, but I wish the boys had understood that I wasn't saying it to be rude, I just didn't know. Additionally, I often struggled with being known as "The American." In my small dance classes, most never learned my name, just asked "is the American here today?"Or, even better, once a kid said, "You're American? Well, I'll forgive ya." It was embarrassing and confusing to know people had an idea of what to expect from me because of the idea they had from what they thought about my country and so I would never want to do that to a student. I want to be aware of where my students are from, and what that might mean, but not ever assume they know something or are something or act a certain way because. I came away from this class with three things: connotation, situation, and most of all, to never ever asssume. I want to see my student as people- multi-faceted people who have been built up a definition of themselves by all sorts of things. Maybe they are a person who's black, or a woman, or a man, or has dyslexia, or has a hard time at home, or is a great student, or who's brother died from cancer, or who has a father in the military, or a mother in jail. They could be any or all of these things, and to know these things will help us understand. But first, and always first, they are people. They are teenagers. They are students.

Observations

Doing my observations, I was reminded by how much I love learning. Sometimes I forget because I'm not necessarily someone who loves school, but watching the 11th graders in the classroom I've been invited into has been a great reminder. I chose the classroom I'm in because not only is it well-organized, the kids seem engaged, even when they're just quietly writing. One thing I've noticed is that there's lots of calling kids at random in this classroom and aside from keeping kids on their toes, in case they might drift off, I think it does something to support the kids in their value. The students are valued in so many quiet ways in this classroom- in that they always start learning their vocab words by giving a guess and they aren't ever told that they're wrong but instead their logic is identified in a "I see why you thought that because a, b, c right?" Giving kids the chance to hazard guesses not only creates a safe, curious environment, but teaches kids how to give educated guesses. These kids are definitely learning in this class and even though they are not my students (at least not until next week for a couple days!) I wanted to applaud when one student used the vocabulary word from earlier in the week, when one girl decoded the meaning of "privy" by saying it sounded like "private", and when two boys discussed their reading in excitement. Knowing things you didn't know before can be so exciting and seeing the zest in these kids is so reassuring.