Blog 5

Prompt: Field experiences relating to content literacy- observations, interactions, and questions. Response to Readicide. Suggestions for seminar topics on 2/22, inquiry project progress

I LOVE MY STUDENT TEACHING!!! To be fair, I have only been there for one week, since we had this week off, but still I LOVE IT! My teacher does a lot with content literacy which really took me by surprise. I have 4 World History classes and 1 U.S. History along with 1 Comparative Religions class. I plan on taking over all these except the C.R. class. She has taught me a lot in the few days that I have spent with her. I love her teaching style and she has great classroom management!

But, back to content literacy--she does this thing that she calls "story-time." I was really excited to learn about this considering we experienced our own story-times in our class in January, I wanted to see how she incorporated it into a high school classroom. Well, she uses her powerpoint and puts up all the main characters of the story for the students to write down, take notes about, and follow through her story. Then, she makes them put their pencils down, the lights go down, and the powerpoint is turned off. My host teacher goes into full character and begins telling the story to the class, in a character mode. For example she does the story of Rasputin during the Russian Revolution, which really grabs their attention. Anyway, I thought this was really interesting because listening to her I was even intrigued. It reminded me of what our text says about the Paul Revere ride and how the teacher introduces that to the class by encompassing the character and changing the whole "tone" of the class to meet the set up and storyline. I plan on implementing storytime when I take over teaching next week. I thought this idea was really cool, and the students love it as well!!

As far as Readicide goes, I still feel the same. Gallagher is making some really interesting points, and in some ways I agree and others I am sort of on the fence about. I really like his opinion however about standardized testing and the standards in school. I truly feel that we are overwhelmed coming into this profession with immense standards thrown at us and no way to teach all of them, in depth! I am planning my own lessons now and seeing how difficult it really is to plan these fun lessons, yet only teaching by the standards. This is especially true for my 11th grade class who I teach the U.S. History too. They have so much content they have to know for the GHSGHT, EOCT and for basic knowledge. Yet, as teachers, we struggle to find the right balance of teaching just the standards and getting "just" the right amoung of information across, or going more in depth and possibly not covering everything. It is a very overwhelming situation!

For Monday--I really want to hear about everyone's teaching experiences so far! I really miss seeing everybody and getting the 411! I hope all is well with everyone and everybody is enjoying their teaching. I would also like to talk about our inquiry projects...

I believe that is all for now!! Have a great weekend!!!