Blog #7

All in all, I enjoyed my student teaching placement. It was an educational experience to see the day to day interactions amongst the students themselves and the students and teachers. I have always felt that the best way to learn anything is to just do it. Classes can only teach you so much. You need to be there, in the moment, because experience is priceless.

Discipline issues were not really a problem for me especially since this school was very supportive in this respect. For example: if a student is caught using vulgar language in the classroom, they were automatically suspended for two days. Since I am old enough to parent any one of them, students did not view me as being on their level. They accepted my authority in the classroom.

I am glad that I had the reading class. Although, as an avid reader, I would have noticed certain things about students anyway; this class gave me more tools to assess students reading comprehension abilities. That knowledge is very helpful. I believe that students who learn well and do not have problems with the material, are highly likely to be good readers and students who struggle do not read well either. The only exception to this in my mind, might be the student who is great at math but struggles to read. This would not be an everyday occurence though. Reading well plays a huge part in every aspect of schooling. It makes the difference between being a successful student who goes to college and gets a good job and the student who does not.

I really liked Readicide. I consider this book to be an essential handbook for my teaching career. There are so many suggestions to help students with reading and abstract thinking. I noticed in my student teaching that students rarely read instructions (they would rather ask questions then read what is in front of them). I found this a bit frustrating. In addition, students cannot think outside the box. They have to have every little detail explained to them. I felt like saying "think for a minute, use your head". I say this to my children all the time, but they are 9 and 10. I had hoped that teenagers would have outgrown that by now!!