Jonathan Paul Loomis

February 18, 1999

Independent Study: Education

Mona Wineberg

When I arrived around 10:00 in the morning the class was divided into two groups for reading. Mary Ann had one group and Ms. Moffitt (spelling uncertain) was instructing the second who is the student teacher there this semester. Naturally I did not want to interrupt what was going on so I joined in the perused over the work of individual students until Mary Ann singled me out with a particular question. She was interested to know if I wanted to teach a lesson on some of the later explorers of the Americas during the afternoon.

This was no news to me as I have been helping run this series of lessons since Christmas break. I did a lesson on Marco Polo, Iban Battuta, the Crusaders, the Vikings, and others about a month ago. One week past I helped designed a lesson in which the students wrote letters to the King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella under the assumed identity of Columbus to convince them to lone money for a voyage of discovery. The design was to make them think critically about Columbus' needs at that particular period in history while at the same time forcing them to develop their ability to write convincing arguments. Writing is always a good activity in and of itself. I was particularly proud of this assignment because it brought together these two seemingly separate skills.

To begin my planning of the new lesson I went over the letters that the students had produced for the Columbus assignment. Six of the letters demonstrated enough understanding of the time period and gave strong enough arguments with few enough writing errors that I decided that the there was no need for the students to do a second draft. I hung up these letters on one of the classroom's bulletin boards. I made minor notes on the other letters. Most of my comments were along the lines of "Why would all this be good for Spain?" or "Make sure this is in correct letter format." By in large the letters were very good and I was satisfied that with a second draft the vast majority of the students would have grasped both the historical concept and the purpose of persuasive writing.

I chose to focus on seven of the later explorers: Cortés, Pizarro, Ponce de Leon, Coronado, Cartier, La Salle, and Hudson. I felt that these seven would give the students a strong image of what happened when the Americas were explored and conquered. I made copies of a blank North America map and an overhead. My intention was to use the overhead to show were Spain, England, and France established their territories and then to make a chart on the back of the seven explorers, what nations they were from, and where they went. In retrospect I think this was probably a bit too much for one day's lesson with fifth graders. But then again, one of my great pet peeves with Mary Ann is that I don't feel that she pushes the students enough, so when I have the chance to teach I think I overcompensate for this by pushing too much.

I worked briefly with two of our boys on the story that they were reading. They had been in the group and I think they were just being disruptive, so Mary Ann asked me if I would take them out into the hall to read. They were pretty good for me, although I never have been able to find a good way of getting them to follow along while other people are reading. I know that this is an incredibly helpful learning devise, but the students don't seem to be interested in that much. I find this to be accentuated when the student reading out loud is much faster than the ones who are supposed to be following along. I noticed that the slower of the two students was reading by running his pencil smoothly along the lines of type and trying to say the words as his eye followed the pencil. I stopped them after a period of this and asked them if the really thought that when they read they read word by word, line by line, or in chucks of words. After a brief discussion we came to the conclusion that we read in chucks of words (that name for which I couldn't remember at the time but have since looked up: fixations).

Given this new realization, I asked my "pencil reader" to follow along with his pencil while the faster reader was reading out loud, but to follow the fixations as he read them to himself. This worked briefly and at first I though I had made a helpful break though in improving this students reading, but it wasn't long before he fell behind and stopped following along all together. Implementing concepts is also one of this student's weak points. Another lesson, another time; more practice. Eventually he will become a good reader. Maybe fifth grade just isn't time for him.

I ate lunch with the teachers, which is always an educational experience. Generally they complain about the administration, the students, or just gossip about events in general. I enjoy eating with them because I feel that I get a good sense of what teaching in the district is like, not to mention the basic day to day of being a professional teacher. This particular day brought about no new revelations however.

After eating I joined the students on the playground for their noon recess. I got myself wrapped up in a basketball game going on with most of the fifth grade boys, a few of the girls, and a few random students from the lower grades. I enjoyed being a part of the game, but being inside of it is an all-together different position from the one I usually take which is that of a distant onlooker. Normally we watch the goings on of recess with a benevolent but nearsighted gaze. That is to say that we notice conflicts but would rather let the students handle them themselves as a sort of exercise in self regulation (not to mention break for the teachers). However, within the course of the half an hour I was with the students on the court I managed to mediate what seemed like six or seven conflicts. Most of these dealt with simple hurt feelings but I had, and always have the sense that our students will erupt into violent confrontation over even the smallest misunderstandings. I have on more than several occasions seen this happen with the perpetrators ranging between our generally well-behaved students to those who usually cause us trouble.

I had a personal conflict about being so intrusive in each of these cases during the game. On one hand I would like to see them learn to settle their differences between themselves without the constant interference of adults. There are specific students who I know are good mediators which was proven in one case when I did leave the problem up to the students. The boy who owned the basketball felt he'd been insulted by another student (which is likely, knowing them both) and was upset to the point of tears. When he came to me I asked him what he thought he could do about the situation. This was not the vindictive response he was looking for and he demanded his ball and marched out of the game. Naturally the twenty or so other students who were in the game had a particular stake in the outcome of this problem and I wanted to see what they would do. To my surprise one of the few girls whom was playing interceded in the case and the game resumed in less than a minute. In that particular episode I was pleased to find that the students solved the problem with fewer hurt feelings and faster than I could ever have done.

In other cases I just broke in instantly and got the game moving again. My hope was that they would realize that agreeing to the proposal of an arbitrator would get the game going faster while allowing both parties to save face and in the end making everyone happier because they got to play more and fight less. Who knows if that lesson will ever sink in? I also felt that if I did not do something in these situations when I was so connected and close at hand it would erode my image as a teacher and limit my ability to handle such situations in the future.

During the afternoon I perused about the room while the students worked on a two-digit long division. Most of the students were handling this lesson well with only the usual sort of confusion about how to complete the process. Ms. Moffitt sat down to help one of our students, who is yet to learn his multiplication tables. I was personally glad that she took over this position, as I am often dragged into it and eventually get frustrated. Although I have mentioned this option on more than one occasion to Mary Ann I still can not understand why she will not just have one of us take him aside during math and drill him on these facts. He is really very intelligent and would be very good at math if this problem was not standing in his way. It seems to me that he would benefit more in the long run if he missed a few lessons now to learn these essential facts instead of getting farther and farther behind.

As it was I ended up working with a more difficult problem. One of our students is a mass of energy whenever he can find something deceiving to do, but would rather sit and stare at a wall for hours than lift his pencil to do schoolwork. The result is that he is our token "bad boy" and he knows it. He is in more trouble than anyone else (for good reason) although he is really one of our brightest students, but I think his education suffers because of his constantly being reprimanded. In any case, on this particular day he began working on the first problem but couldn't do it because he'd been ill the day the skill was taught. He informed me of this so I sat down with him to try to work it out. We got as far as the first subtraction step and before he clamed up. I tried all sorts of methods of convincing him to actually do the subtraction: humor, reason, conniving, etc. Pretty much everything short of bribing is in my book.

He refused to do it. I took a break to work with another student but returned to see if he'd done anything when I ignored him. He hadn't. At this point he became rather offensive, saying things like "Mr. Loomis is so mean," and a collection of other comments directed at me that were meant to be overheard by the rest of the table. If it had been just about any other student I would have done something about it but in this case I decided that he must think that if he insults me to my face he'll get disciplined, which will not involve math, and he'll get out doing any work. Because he is being disciplined so much as it is anyway I concluded that it would be more to his benefit if I kept a level head and focused on math, albeit difficult in a hail of personal attacks.

Eventually I told him firmly that subtraction was a skill he should have learned in second grade and that if he really couldn't do this problem maybe he should join the second grade for a while so that he could figure it out. It was the best I could come up with at the moment and I hated to use it because it's a fallback that Mary Ann uses with the kids. However she usually uses it when they're misbehaving and she wants to sham them into acting like "fifth graders." In this case I felt that ignoring his behavior and focusing on his ability to perform made a difference. Although I really don't think that he ever finished the problem (the lesson ended too soon afterward) I did notice a change in his demeanor. I think that I'll try this tactic again with him in the future to see if I can get further positive results. The only problem is that I fear the other students will see that he is getting away with certain activities and will think that I have a double standard, which I do, but for educational purposes.

In the late afternoon I took over the class and taught my lesson on the explorers. It took more time than I had expected to complete the map demonstrating where the French, English, and Spanish claims were, but I tried to push things along. Another one of my pet peeves is that I think Mary Ann moves too slowly. Then again, when looking back on my lesson perhaps I moved too fast. I had the students switch over the to back side of their paper to make the chart of the seven explorers I had selected, but there was no real opportunity for them to interact with any material. In general I was simply feeding them empty information. I got the sense that not much of it would sink in. The map maybe because it was a clear graphic and I had them color it themselves, but not the information about the explorers, except perhaps to later recognize that they'd once heard the names. The best part of the activity was at the end when I had some students pass around atlases and we looked for place names in the United States with Spanish or French origins. They got into this brainstorming activity I think mostly because they were given the freedom to scan over the entire page of the map. Although to me this seemed like a minor bit of freedom was obviously enough for them at the time because we worked on this particular aspect of the project for about twenty minutes without losing anyone to their daydreams. All in all, I felt that the lesson had presented itself with more successes than failures. It was not the best I'd ever done, but it was also not the worst.

On the whole, the day was very active, more than most, and I felt like I dealt with a range of problems, large and small, educational, emotional, and behavioral: just what I have come to expect from a day of teaching.