Placement Update

In the last few weeks of my placement, I’ve gotten to see a lot of the ups and downs inherent in the day-to-day running of a 7^th grade English class. The teacher, Lisa, has an incredibly diverse group of students in terms of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and ability, which adds to the difficulty of keeping 30 middle school students engaged and focused on a lesson. She does her best to hold students to high expectations and check in with the students falling behind, but with so many students, I think it’s difficult for her to follow through all the time. For example, there are two students (a boy and a girl) in one of the classes I’m in that should not sit next to each other. They clearly like each other and spend the entire class talking and engaging in the middle school version of flirting (which is hilarious). Their constant chatter is disruptive to other students and to themselves—every time they receive instructions for something, both students miss what is going on, and then don’t do it. Lisa is frustrated by them and mentioned to me that she has spoken to them a few times and wants to move them, but when I was at Ramsey on Friday, the two were still next to each other. I guess figuring out how to move the two students without messing up the seating order for other students was a task that couldn’t be considered a priority with so much else to do.

The whole time I’ve been in the classroom, the students have been working on a poetry unit. While I know Lisa is trying to make it as engaging as possible, asking middle school students to write poetry seems to me like pulling teeth. Half the class will usually at least humor or her, but there are students in every class (I see three classes) who flat out refuse to write poetry because it’s “stupid.” Even when Lisa has a particularly fun and novel lesson planned, the students don’t take it seriously. She had the students do an activity with orange slices and saltine crackers to talk about “juicy words” (exciting, interesting words that you remember). First, the students crumbled the saltines onto paper plates. Lisa asked them what was left on their hands afterwards (the answer was, some cracker dust but not much else). The cracker represented “dusty” words. Then the students squeezed orange slices, which looked really fun to me. It was messy and sticky and they were supposed to squeeze as much juice out as they could. Lisa asked again what was left on their hands, and the students complained about how sticky their hands remained from the orange juice (I then gave them all wet wipes). The orange slices represented “juicy” words that (literally) stick with you and leave a lasting impression.

I thought this was such a cool way to talk about vocabulary with students but when the next part of the activity came, it was clear many of them had not been paying attention to anything but the act of smashing foods, and still did not understand what she meant by “juicy” words, which was unfortunate because those who had were doing the next part of the activity (a "Juicy Words" Taxonomy) really well and were not recognized for their efforts. I think this lesson was somewhat constructivist in that it was hands-on, involved natural curiosity and novelty, and a bit of social inquiry, though it was more guided by teacher then I think a true constructivist lesson would have been. I see though why it is so difficult to have lessons like that in a public school classroom with so many students, because often they detract from rather than enhance learning. I’m still pondering how that lesson could have been structured and/or executed so that it would have gone better, but I keep coming back to the problem of the over-crowded classroom and I’m not sure how to solve that.