The end of the Week

                The end of week two of teaching has come.  It’s been a week full of ups and downs, but I was able to end on a pretty high not today, which I was very thankful for.  Here are a few bits of information about the school side of things this week.

                This week, grade 1 students were still a part of the class.  This has been an adventure with much tension and misunderstanding coming between my teacher and I as a result.  Today, the grade 2 teacher did not come to school, so they joined as well.  The more, the merrier, right?  

                But my relationship with my teacher is going well.  We are slowly beginning to understand each other more and more.  Despite the differences we have, we still share lunch every day, share stories, hugs, and joys of each day.  I am learning so much about professional communication and creating beneficial working relationships.  That may be a focus of the next blog post.  

                 I wrote my first examination for the students this week. I began the week by introducing spelling words that they had struggled with during some times of writing last week, so I tried to introduce them to the students.  We focused on soft and hard c sounds, as well as soft and hard g sounds.  This concept was new to them, so it was fun to be able to work through it with the students.  I had planned on giving a spelling test to them come Friday.  I mentioned this to my teacher, and in her mind she assumed test meant a big time exam.  So come Thursday at the end of the day, she asks if I have the exam written.  I did not, since to me a spelling test is simply having the students spell the words correctly, possibly define them, and use them in a sentence.  She quickly told me a list of everything I must include on the test.  It must be 100 marks.  It must be this, that, and this other thing as well.  The school is pushing the upcoming ANA assessments, so I took sample questions and tried to recreate those for the exam.  Then I come to school Friday, ready to print it off.  It turns out there is an understood rule that you must submit a document for printing 1 to 2 days in advance.  The test is now postponed until Monday.  

           I am not sure if I have stated this yet in this blog, but here, the scores for passing and failing are a little different than back home.  Students are pushed to receive “distinctions” in all of their subject areas.  This means that they receive above and 80% in their overall total.  This is a difficult thing for many students to achieve.  80% is an A, 70% is a B, 60% is a C, 50% is a D, and anything below a 40% means being held back for another year.  The national rule is 30%, but this school is trying to raise the standard.  This being stated, when it comes to grading papers, I have much to change.  A red mark is given for every correct answer, and the marks are counted, and that is the score.  There have been assignments where a student has written 6 correct sentences, receiving 6 marks, plus one mark for punctuation, and still they receive a 7 out of 10.  I am trying my best to understand how this all works, its just taking a bit of adjustment for me.

                Grouping in the class is also quite an issue.  Students are seated in groups ranging from 4 to 7 students.  They are grouped by gender and ability level, which makes many of the behavioral issues only become worse.  This seating is something that is not to be changed, so it is difficult to work through unnecessary behavior problems.  Today, however, I was able to split the class in half, trying my best to split up and diversify my groups based on gender and ability level.  If the seats cannot be changed, then we might as well get up and out of the seats to help, right?

                Today, I took one half of the class outside, while the other half stayed in and wrote 4 creative math story problems utilizing addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  These students need a great amount of help with creativity in their writing.  Currently, they only know how to write one sentence per line, not using conjunctions or varying sentence structure whatsoever.  Verb tenses are wrong, spelling is difficult, and ideas do not come across very clearly.  This is no surprise, however.  Students are learning in their second language, it must be so difficult to master a new language while learning a hundred other new concepts at the same time.  Combining the creative writing into math makes many of them not realize that we are focusing on writing, so the stress and pressure to perform is no longer there.  Students were very into their problems, which helped me be able to spend much time outside with the other group.  While outside, we created story problems with new characters and plots, included actions into the stories, and sounds and snips of songs as well.  Then, using stones outside on a bench, each student solved the story problems.  This allowed me to watch their thought process, talk to them one on one, and praise them individually when they were correct.  One student who gives me more grief than I can explain and never seems to know what is going on completed the problems in his own time and own way, but he had them correct.  I loved being able to see his thought process and give him a reason to be proud.  The smile melted my heart. 

                But, to keep this from simply being a log of my experiences, I want to share my thoughts this week about combining subject areas and fine arts. Going off of the story from earlier, I find great success in the classroom when I incorporate reading, writing, math, dance, singing, and movement into each lesson.  I understand that there is a time and a place for fine arts, but here at this school, there is no PE class, no art class, no music class, no computer class, no extra class at all.  The life skills portion of the curriculum is to make up for this.  I understand that in this situation and culture, the ability to understand music or to draw a picture pale in comparison to the ability to read and compute problems, but I believe we would all argue the fine arts will benefit students in these areas. 

                The incorporation of multiple subject areas and fine arts into a single lesson is nothing new to many new teachers.  However, I would argue that few teachers truly understand how necessary and beneficial this truly is.  My students can move, make noise, run around, jump, talk, play the drum, and do flips in the courtyard all while relating these movements and songs to new material and concepts.  The best part is they often don’t realize how much they are learning.  I taught the students a “multiples of 3” song two days ago.  Monday through Wednesday, my teacher had been complaining about their ability to count by multiples.  After they learned this song and added some clapping, every child has learned these multiples.  Now, when they were creating their charts, I heard quite a bit of singing, but the point is that the children learned.  This may not be “by the book” teaching, but the learning that results from this is wonderful.  Fine arts transcend cultural and language barriers, all the while being beautiful displays of culture as well.  I learn so much about these students whenever they sing. 

             This being said, I am still far from being a master of teaching.  I still plan lessons where I realize I am talking way too much and losing student attention.  But the important part to me is that I am coming to understand that classes like “Fine Arts in Education” and “Reading in the Content Areas” are not a waste of time.  There are real-life, applicable strategies and knowledge that I gained from those classes.  Creating an environment open to this sort of collaboration in the classroom may take some time, but it sure makes lessons more fun for me as well!

            Sorry for the lengthy posts, there is simply too much to reflect on!  I love hearing responses from anyone reading, your support is so appreciated!  To all my fellow student teachers as well, keep me posted on your experiences as well.  I wish the best for every one of you!