Field Experience Reflection

All of my field experience activities took about six hours. Mainly, I changed my perspective of using trade books in a math classroom. This experience helped me improve KTS 1.2: Connects content to life experiences of student. Trying new things in the classroom is risky, but you never know when you’ll strike gold!

I enjoyed talking to my friend about her school library. She is so excited and has plans to improve many things about the school media center. Particularly, she enjoys using technology like Glogster, Voki, and Animoto. She teaches students to "teach" others through Web 2.0 Tools.

She has a lot of freedom to choose books and materials for the library. Her only limitation is budget. Time is a big factor for her, too. There are so many little jobs to be done and she seeks parent volunteers to re-shelf books, print bar codes/spine labels and coding stickers, pull books for teachers, help with Book Fair, and do book repair. She would also love more help with checking-out classes while she’s teaching. The school does 4-day rotations, so with 800 students if she didn't allow the classes to come during other times, each child would only get to check out 4 times between August and December!  This forces me to consider doing more for the librarian at my own children’s’ school.

On a lark, I happened upon a great young adult novel that contains math. It is difficult for math teachers to include reading and writing in the curriculum. My high school does have a writing policy and every staff member is trained on the policy before school starts. Basically, content areas must include at least one of the following each year:

a.       Extended response questions for assessment

b.      Instruction of content vocabulary

c.       In class reading time

d.      Journaling about the content

Math is exempt from this, but other content area must have students produce a publication piece to add to a portfolio.

At this training, we evaluated our school’s proficiency in reading and writing as a whole. As a math teacher, I struggled with the rating because we don’t often see a student’s writing. The Language Arts teachers at my school are in charge of the writing committee and although it was a tough thing to ask all teachers to do, I see the importance. Of all the skills people need coming out of school, good writing skills create good job candidates. I worry that with the shorthand seen in texting, students don’t know how to use proper grammar.

That brings me back to my lesson plan. John Green is a very popular young adult author. In An Abundance of Katherines, the protagonist, Colin, has just been dumped for the 19^th time by yet another woman named Katherine. Colin is a genius, but wallowing in self-pity. He channels his frustrations into developing The Theory of Underlying Katherine Predictability. He graphically models the course of his romantic relationships so he can prove or disprove if he will ever get to keep the girl.

The math department forms a Planned Learning Cooperative (PLC) for each subject, and using this novel fits into our unit on functions and graphing. My Algebra 1 is a general class, so most of the students are there because they haven’t been successful with math. I’m hopeful that a different approach, using this novel, will “catch” a student who would have otherwise slept through the notes.

I talked this over with my high school librarian and she showed me other math books and some online resources that are linked to the new CIITS database. I’m fortunate that our school media specialist wants to help teachers try new things, especially new technology, in our classes. She turned me onto a website that has great math video clips. That might be a nice change of pace over listening to me!

Since I have children of my own, I spend a lot of time monitoring their reading skills. I believe in letting them choose, but I read aloud anything I want them to try. My son loves the Origami Yoda series by Tom Angleberger. We’ve spent several afternoons folding origami yodas, jawas, and wookies. For fun, we went to a book signing of Jabba the Puppett: An Origami Yoda Book, the author’s latest. I was just as excited as my son to meet a real, live author. He drew a yoda picture inside my son’s book and signed it. Tom Angleberger enjoyed talking to the kids and the bookstore had origami stations everywhere. They also had a full cast of characters available for photo ops: Darth Vader, Storm Troopers, Captain Rex, and the Jawas. Several months ago, my son had stopped reading the Fortune Wookie book because it wasn’t as exciting as the others in the series. Do you know that my son went home that day, picked up that book and began to read it?

My sons’school helps parents understand the curriculum used in their child’s classroom by holding grade-level meetings. They introduced a new reading program in the lower grades that will gradually phase into upper grades. It combines many methods that have been used in the past such as phonics, shared reading, reading groups, reading aloud, and silent reading. The biggest difference is that sight words are taught for mastery, meaning the students must spell them from memory via written test. This has been frustrating for my son who has poor fine motor skills, but the teacher has allowed him to spell the words aloud in spelling-bee fashion. The other big difference is a listening component, where the teacher says sounds aloud and the students write the letter. They wind up spelling short words in the same sound family such as “bat-cat-hat” or “chug-bug-hug”. I can only hope that my reluctant reader will catch on and get a chance to read his books on rocks and reptiles.