It Takes A Village

While reading this article I saw it as a great way of teaching students. I think that students achieve more responsibility when they have projects dealing with the community. When they do projects like this, the question of, when I am going to use this, pops up rarely and students have more of an appreciation for the subject that they are learning. Projects that deal with the community also can bring in the subject integration that we are all learning is a great way to teach. I thought this article was awesome, because it actually reminded me of Teach With Your Heart, but on a smaller scale. When we were reading teach with your heart, a lot of us kept thinking, we are never going to be able to do this, but this article shows us that we can change our students lives, maybe not as big of an impact as Erin was, but we can get close. I’ve always believed that community involvement is a great thing for students, because it draws students closer to their community.
Angela had an opposing view about the article. She thought that the whole big idea of it was just about teaching hands- on, and how we keep learning about that over and over again. She liked the idea that projects like this are more important than just an A to a lot of students. She wasn’t big on the article because she felt like it had been taught to us over and over again and she believes that it is getting old.

Classroom Climate

Classroom Organization-
For my classroom I would like to have tables, not desks but tables, preferably rounded or the half octagon table that you can put together. I really like those tables because you can set them up in the common rows set up, or put them together for groups, or shape them together for a discussion circle. I don’t want my classroom to be the typical math décor classroom. I want to find posters of things that my students enjoy but hidden in it there will be some sort of math. For example I have a poster of someone playing music, along with the person playing a guitar there is a sin curve along with it showing different amplitudes of her playing. Along with my physical set up I have to worry about my curriculum set up too. I’m going to be teaching in Maine so of course my curriculum is going to match in some ways to the MLR’s but it’s not going to be completely based around it. I want my students to learn things that are going to be important to them in the real world. I will still have some of the content where they will be wondering why they are doing this math, but the bigger emphasis will be on the real- world aspect of the math. Right now as an education student I would like to think that I will use creative and exciting assessments for the students to show me what they have learned, but at the same time I may have to squeeze a test or a quiz or two in once and a while. I don’t plan on using test as my major assessment. I don’t want the students so think that if they don’t do well on the tests then they fail. I want them to realize that if they don’t do well testing they will have some other way to show their understanding of the content.

Motivation-
NEVER USE GRADES AS MOTIVATION. I had teachers who did that and it would freak kids out. Some kids get a lot of baggage from their parents if they don’t do well with their grades, so using grades as a motivator can sometimes freak kids out. As a teacher I want to motivate students to do their work by having them do engaging activities. If I motivate them by giving them fun and creative activities to do, that way I don’t need to bribe them with something in order for them to want to learn.

Discipline-
When it comes to my thoughts on discipline in the classroom I have a hard time thinking about my opinion. I hate disciplining, because I have a hard time finding the middle. At the beginning of the year I would like to have my students along with myself come up with the classroom rules. I think that students should be involved with this because it will help them; 1.) Remember the rules better, 2) Respect the Rules more, 3) and maybe adjust them when they see something going wrong in the classroom.

Classroom Setup-
One part of my teaching style that I’ve never been quite sure on is how to group my students when we do activities. On one hand I believe that you should mix students because it is good to have all types of learners mixed together. They can all bring something different to the activity. On the other side of things, sometimes students that are at the higher level of thinking may take over and not give the other students a chance to share their ideas towards the activity that they are working on.

Constructivism/ Reconstructivism

From the first section of this chapter I have learned that I am definitely big on student-centered education. The biggest theory that appealed to me was constructivism. In practicum Beth told me that she could totally see me as being a group activity, hands- on teacher. I like doing things with my hands and I think that is the best way I learned, so I’m sure that’s why I would like to teach this way. It seems a lot of the time students learn very well from looking at things through an activity based lesson. If students are learning about the related rate problems they may remember it better if they see it “in action” compared to just being on the paper.
After class I learned that I like the idea of reconstructivism. I want my students to look into what’s going on with their world around them besides school. Reconstuctivism seems to me like the “ism” that wants the students to build bridges and move mountains. I believe strongly in my students doing extra-curricular activities especially ones that deal with community service or dealing with the community in some way.
One thing that the book discusses is the physical setting of the classroom. I’ve always wanted to have one of those comfy relaxing classrooms but if you’ve ever been in a public high school most of the time they aren’t exactly what I would call “homey”. I plan on having posters of not just math stuff but of bands, and beaches and maybe books or movies. The kids don’t need to repeatedly see math quotes, or formulas all over their classroom walls. Another thing is I’d like to have my teachers help me set the rules for the class and of course if I believe that there are some that they missed that are important then I’m going to write them down and ask their ideas on them. Maybe together we can have the same rules but the students can have them written in their own way.
Two of the types of “discipline” that I liked were the Discipline with Dignity approach and the Conflict Resolution approach. I like the idea of having the students look into what they did and see what they should have done differently. I also like the idea of talking to the students about it and not just throwing a detention their way.

Pragmatist, Existentialist or Both?

After reading on the different philosophies of education I came to the conclusion that I’m definitely a student- centered teacher. I kind of knew this before I took the little quiz or anything because last year during practicum Beth told me after she saw me teach that I would realize that my teaching is based around my students. I came to the conclusion that my philosophy of education is based around the Pragmatist and the Existentialist, (they tied on the quiz). Whenever I planned my lesson plans in Practicum or in Content Lit, a lot of my activities dealt with the students working together in groups, and not a whole lot of the class, if any, dealt with lecturing. I want my students to be able to have a notebook that isn’t filled with my thoughts or information that I feed to them. I want their notebook to be filled with things they have discovered, pictures of things they have worked with, formulas that they have derived themselves with maybe a little bit of my help on the side. I want to be a guide to my students, not a talking website. I want my students to learn through experiments, outdoor activities. I want my classroom to be outside on the soccer field, or in the computer center, or on a gym court or maybe out in the woods behind the school. I want my students to turn into detectives, and explorers when they walk in to my classroom. That would be the reason I am on the pragmatist side of educational philosophy. The existentialist in me comes out because this is how I learned. As a teacher I love having the students work in groups but as a student I wanted to do stuff on my own. When it came to projects and we had the choice of a partner or doing it on your own, I always liked to do it by myself. I liked making my own choices and doing things on my own. It could be the baby of the family in me, because I have always been independent. I also felt like my relationships with my teachers were a bit more personal because I didn’t mind going to see them on my own. I believe that as a teacher it will be good that I am so closely related to both of these philosophies, because I think they are both have very important qualities that will help run a fun, creative classroom.

Experiential Learning

I have to admit I don't know if I learned a bunch today that will stick in my head but I do have to admit I believe strongly in experiential learning. Coming from the math perspective, this is how I learned math. I never did just the straight forward sit down math, we did investigations to learn our math. We would observe different things, we would do different experiments to derive a formula, we would look at pictures and graphs to derive different things, we would build stuff on our own to show that we understood what we were learning. Experiential Learning is a lot of the way that I was taught and, me, personally as a student loved it. I know I learned so much better about math concepts through this style of teaching more than I have been in a traditional classroom. I am hoping that the school that I work at allows me to teach in this manner. I believe it's hard and time consuming to teach this way all of the time, but it definitely should be a part a teaching style.

Experiential Learning

TWYH (the end)

This section of the story really showed me how people cope a lot differently dealing with situations. I’m glad that we touched upon this in class because before we talked I though, ‘Wow, Erin… is not healthy anymore.’ But it’s just that her way of coping and my way of coping are completely different. If my mother who is completely my support system died while I was away I would have done anything to get back home. I would not be able to stand in front of thousands of people and give a motivational speech about education. I’m glad we talked about this though because like Steve said in class, it’s just the way people cope with situations A lot of people who are big time workaholics dive into their work to cope with things and almost to help forget about things, but when I want to cope with something I like to talk to someone and get it out. For example, when my best friend died I needed my mom, I called in sick to work for the rest of the week and I just needed my time with friends and family. I wanted to talk about her and remember her, I didn’t want to go to work and try and forget about her while I waited on people. I think that I would have done a horrible job if I went in to work after she past away.

TWYH 177-227

This section was when I really saw that the students in room 203 had really turned around. When Erin left a lot of the trip stuff up to the students, not so much the planning but like the rules and regulations they acted very grown up. They were the giddy little kids that they were when Erin first started doing all of this HUGE activities with them. They were still really excited but they acted more like college students that were excited to go and knew that they had to plan a lot of things on their own. They knew that they had to prepare for the trip to really appreciate the trip that they were going on. The only thing is that I’m starting to think about what Stacey said in class, John is Erin’s money tree. There is a part in the book on page 192 where Erin and John have conversation that goes like this after she found out that they couldn’t get any sponsors for the trip, “ ‘Why didn’t you come to me earlier?’ John asked,
‘I wanted to prove to you that we could pull this one off without your help’
‘Can you?’
‘No.’
‘How many Freedom Writers are planning on going?’
‘About fifty…’
‘How much are you short?’
‘About two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.’
Without hesitation, John Tu took out his checkbook and wrote a check for $250,000.”
Okay… that’s a quarter of a million dollars. Yes I know the man has money but she didn’t have to tell him that much did she??