Week Two 10-2-2005
Curiosity.
The Hackensack school district had Tuesday and Wednesday off this week for the Jewish holidays. I asked to come in on Thursday instead my usual Wednesday and was allowed to without a fuss. After hearing about some of the experiences and situations other practicum students found themselves in I consider myself really fortunate in my placement. Everyone in the school has treated me very well, with courtesy and curiosity. When I go into the teacher’s lounge to retrieve my lunch, everybody wants to know who I am and, once satisfied with my explanation, they inevitably want to know what grade I want to teach. No matter what I answer, I get some variation on the “not enough men in the lower grades” speech. I usually respond with some variation on the “I will do whatever my principal wants, I am not tenured” speech. In reality it is much too early for me to answer that question with sense of its eventual veracity. While I like the little ones (I worked for two years in a pre-school) I like the idea of being able to talk to them about some thing with a little depth. I am curious to see what middle school students have to say.
Endorsement.
The spinning roulette wheel of rules about what the State of New Jersey will license us to teach at the conclusion of all of this is currently set to K-5. If your undergraduate degree is in a meaningful subject (english, mathematics, any hard science, others) you can get a middle school endorsement, which means you can teach in your particular subject in 6, 7 or 8th grade in addition to all subjects K-5. In my case, I would be able to teach social studies in the middle school after passing the Social Studies Praxis test(pdf).
Mrs. Koenig has been very accommodating and gave me a chance to do some small group instruction in math today. Mrs. Koenig is working on number sense topics and has gotten up to five with her class. The activities include worksheets with little illustrations and the children are to count the illustrations and write in the correct number. There are other similar activities and the occasional homework which includes practice writing the numerals and drawing the specific number of something. Mrs. Koenig and I talked about which kids were struggling with their numbers and those four students were given to me to work with. Using 20 cards (4 each displaying 0-4) I had the students take turns flipping them over in turn and say the number on the card and then put that number of counters on the card. As we went through them I arranged them in a grid face down and when they were all done I had them work through a matching game. Even after explaining the game and why paying attention to the cards that other students turned over would give them clues as to which cards they could match, they were looking around the room and not focusing on the game. It may have been the fact that it was after 2:00 when we did this, or maybe there is a reason these kids are struggling. It felt pretty good doing it, especially since it might actually help Mrs. Koenig and the children with their math.
Its a tie.
I tied a whole bunch more shoes today and am getting pretty good at it. I even double knot my own dress shoes now and can’t get the knots undone by myself. I have two suggestions for Mrs. Koenig’s class: Velcro and a collection of shoe tying lesson plans. Mrs. Koenig uses every opportunity to give her students more opportunities to enhance their number sense. For example, there are a number of ongoing graphing projects including daily weather, children’s height, the apple graph from last week and others. There is also a number line that goes up to 144 (I think…it may have been 130) and larger cards on the wall (from 1 to 10) with number written as a word, as a digit and with that number of brightly colored objects (in this case, fruit). From peeking into other classrooms, from my own visits to classrooms and from what I have read, these types of displays are very common. I have now seen how these displays actually get used. For one language arts lesson, Mrs. Koenig asked the children to write down (copy) some word or words from anywhere around the room. Because everything is labeled and there are books everywhere, you would think it would be easy for the students to find something…and most of them did. Others needed to be reminded. The adults in the room also needed to be reminded of the developmental levels of children. The children are 5 years old in this class. After six hours of being asked to go here and write this and sit down and be quiet and clean up and pay attention, they are done. The 50 minutes from 2:00 to 2:50 is a struggle for them. Mrs. Koenig has designated the end of the day as play time (when the “end of the day” starts is a moving target) and she can use the withholding of it a behavior modifier, though she seldom does.
1492.
The Jackson Avenue school had its Columbus day assembly on Thursday in the gym because the auditorium is being renovated. It was a little awkward though pretty well planned. The music teacher had coached and taught the costumed second graders to sing several songs about Columbus and to hold up numbers and signs at the right time. It was a lot of fun and, being new and male I was an object of some curiosity. It’s a whole new world out there for me.