When I first drove up to Green Path Elementary School it was a very nice brick building with two floors, gated parking lot for the faculty, decent houses around the school. The neighborhood seemed to be a little bit run down but nothing to write home about. I had to be buzzed into the school and the secretary asks who you are and what your buisness at the school was before you entered the building. When I walked into the school there were a lot of children walking around and what seemed to be unsupervised. The school seemed to be clean, but a much older building that is decorated like it was built in the nineteen sixties. I met the principal, who is a very nice man and actually looks exactly like our current president Barrack Obama if you ask me, he told me what an honor it was having VIP's tutors in his school and what a great service we were doing.
When I walked into my first grade classroom my first impression was it was very cluttered. To my right there was a red carpet underneath a black board on the wall and an easel with white paper draped over it. The desks were set up in groups of four, making about five squares in the classroom. There were also a couple of desks alone facing the wall, my first guess was those desks belonged to misbehaving children. All the children were very excited to see a new face in their classroom and were whispering to each other and giggling. My teacher Mrs. Grump introduced herself to me and welcomed me with a smile and then immediatley gave me the children I was going to be working with and sent me into the hall with one desk and four chairs. She then quickly started yelling at a misbehaving child for figiting in his chair.
I introuduced myself to the children that had my attention, Charlie, Ann, and Shannon. They were very outspoken individuals to say the least. Ann didn't seem to need any reading help when we started the activities, she read everything in a reading level higher than any other student I had. She was very easily frustrated with other students like Charlie who had a hard time keeping up with the rest of the kids. He was at a reading level of a kindergartener if not worse. Shannon was intermediate, she was at a first grade level of reading it seemed but struggled with some words.
The vaules in this classroom did not seem to be equality, Mrs. Grump definetally seemed to be trying her best with a diverse group of students and I can imagine the struggles she must endure but she looses her cool very easily with this loud bunch of children. I feel like in this classroom students are treated as they treat the teacher. If they interrupt or shout out something exciting that has happened in their lives they seem to be scolded for it. The students do not seem eager to learn as much as I had hoped. They loose focus easily when they are doing their work at their desks and also during carpet time when Mrs. Grump reads to them. I feel like this classroom is a little caotic and needs to be managed in a calming and more encouraging way.
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Hey Holly,
ReplyDeleteIt is an interesting experience to say the least when first thrown into some else's classroom. Actually, when I first entered the room I was assigned to, the teacher, Mrs. Smith, acted some what surprised to see me. I was met with the same attitude the first four or five times I went, Mrs. Smith was always surprised to see me. As you said, it is a quick hello, here are your children. Except it took the school I went to, Led Zeppelin Elementary, about five weeks to give me the proper materials to tutor the children with. During this time, I read to a few children on the carpeted group reading area for an hour each time, then I would send the child back to his seat so I could observe.I also had each child I worked with read each page back to me, revealing their need for help. They read very slowly, and with no confidence. Thinking back to Kanhe and Westheimer, I was thinking, how am I going to create any change in an environment where I have not even got the proper materials to work with. Furthermore, I did not mind reading to children, but things were pretty unorganized.Mrs. Smith's lessons and class schedule went smoothly, but for a while I had no clue what was going on, just doing my best to teach the kids something. This is probably a challenge for many teachers who try to apply the change over charity model, which I really intended to apply to my VIPS experience. After five weeks I was given the proper tutoring materials, and began tutoring four male students, Mac, Denis, Frank, and Charlie. The guys could get very excited during the sessions, and often misbehaved. Somehow, by the last two weeks, I noticed improvements. As I needed to find interesting ways to use the same four phonic games, I tutored the students on their spelling word, boosting their weekly spelling test scores. In relation to the condition of the school, mine sounded similar to the building you were assigned to. I think my teacher sounded about the same too, many of the kids in Mrs. Smith's class misbehaved throughout my visits, but she had relaxed methods of getting them back to work. I did not hear her raise her voice once. To comment on your observation that the students were not that excited to learn as you hoped, my students were the same way. They thought we were going to play games, and throw dice, and just not have to work. This was a very beneficial experience, but challenging non the less. These guys could not stay focused for more than ten minutes, with me constantly asking them to sit in their seat, and not to pay attention to other students in the room. There is just so much going on with them, that they cannot sit still. This was a very enlightening experience, and reveal the challenges one must face when working to change children's learning environment.
Hi Holly
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you are talking about seeing how we had the same exact group of children in our reading buddy group. I feel that we helped the students expand their knowledge in reading. Like Kahne and Westheimer stated in there article " In the service of what? The Politics of Service Learning" i feel we are making a change and not just doing a charitable deed. I feel we had critically analysed what we had to do before we entered into our VIP's assigned school. We had read multiple articles and done many different assignments to better increase our knowledge on the experiences that we were going to endure. By taking these extra steps to learn about certain aspects in the school system such as ethnic backgrounds, privilege, class etc we transformed our volunteering or charitable deed into a social change not only for us and our class but our students and their school. This is a change that will someday blossom into our career as teachers. This is also a change students can take what we have given and allow themsleves to blossom into better readers and students. We also transformed ourselfs and hopefully our students into lifelong learners. And in return they can change that into a career and a life style for themselves and they will be able to make a change in another persons life so that the cycle keeps repeating.
My teacher for the first few weeks forgot every time that I was even supposed to be going there! So she never really had anything planned. I found myself just reading books the whole time with students. I mean it’s not a bad thing but honestly the kids were so bored by the end it was sad. They really just wanted to go to their center with their friends! A few weeks in she started to give me games and such and I found the kids were more interested in learning through the games!
ReplyDelete"You’re either part of the solution or you’re part of the problem" from Kozol’s article, I honestly felt like I was being more of a problem at first then a solution because I had no clue what to do with the kids and the teacher was most certainly not helping the situation! Overall I do feel like even though I had some troubles in the beginning I wouldn't have changed my experience for anything, and I hope to enroll in VIPS to help more students!
In the children you worked with did you see a slight improvement in them? Do you wish anything has been different about your experience?