My co-teaching experience went fairly well.  I did a lesson on writing paragraphs and a lesson on finding a good news article.  The second was a pretty standard lesson, and I only taught for about 15 minutes.  The students seemed moderately interested in what I was saying, and some of the new stuff I showed them about how to use wikipedia and other search tools.  There were, however, only seven students in the class so it was very easy to keep their attention,

The other lesson was a bit different.  Mr. Homan had prepared a slide show with some paragraphs on it, and we went through as a group and critiqued them.  The students were supposed to give the paragraph a check mark for each criteria it met, such as conclusion sentence or supporting evidence.  The students were talkative, like they always are, but when I asked them a question they were able to answer.  I’m not sure if they were humoring me, but they seemed to understand the lesson, even if it wasn’t particularly exciting.

There was, however, an incident.  I recorded this lesson, and about three minutes into the recording you can see a student put a piece of paper over the lens of my phone.  I saw the paper, but only after I was done teaching.  There was only one student sitting near the desk where my phone was, and I made him stay after class during the recess hour where we had a long discussion about his behavior.  The conversation went something like this:

“Did you do this?”

“Yeah”

“Was that an ok thing to do?”

“No”

“So what do you think the consequences should be for your actions?”

“Nothing”

I assured him that there would absolutely be consequences for his actions, and we got into a good discussion about how your behavior has repercussions.  He started off the conversation really cocky, but by then end I think he realized that he had screwed up more than he thought, and that I wasn’t going to let it go.  Mr. Homan was extremely unhappy with him, and made a call home to mom and filed some sort of disciplinary report.

In the end, I think we got through to the student, but I’m not sure if it will stick.  He certainly came to comprehend that he had really messed up, but I don’t know if it will change any future behavior.

In Mr. Homan’s explore hour he has a class of average or slightly above average readers.  They’re in here because they don’t excel at reading, but they don’t need any particular help.  In this class there is a particular student who threw a fit because she wanted to be in AVID.  It was the first day of the new quarter, and this was her first day in the class, and she said over and over that ‘I hate reading.  It’s boring.  There ain’t nothing I like to read.’  She instead wanted to do math.

The project today was to find a news article from the website newsela.com, and take the quiz associated with it.  This particular student decided she was going to get her class changed to a math one, so she didn’t want to participate.  Despite Mr. Homan’s insistence that no, you can’t change your class, and yes, you’re stuck here all quarter, I think she firmly believed if she made the class miserable enough for Mr. Homan he would let her change.  She spent 20 minutes complaining about not having a computer login.  Once Mr. Homan dealt with that, she took another 20 minutes to get to the website.  She then decided there was nothing on there that interested her, despite there being thousands of articles and she just had to pick one.

Mr. Homan stood his ground and was very patient with her for the entire class, but also very firm about what his expectations were.  Unfortunately, I won’t be able to see the rest of the quarter to find out if Mr. Homan was able to motivate her or not.  Nevertheless, I found the whole situation unnerving.  I can deal with students not caring, or with class disruptions or struggling students, but I don’t know if I’d be able to deal with a student who just refused to do anything.  This student wasn’t even being a distraction, she just flat out refused everything.  Logical argument, asking nicely, threats to call home,  all got the same blank stared response.  I don’t know what I would have done in that situation.

I like to think that I am a pretty level headed person, as most teachers are, but there is one thing that middle school students do that really gets on my nerves.  Today in class one of the students would not stop talking while Mr. Homan was presenting, so he told him to take a break.  This meant he had to go sit in the tab chair, examine his behavior, and then rejoin the class.  Well, the student stood up real slowly, stretched his arms, then. walked. over. to. the. chair.  One step at a time, leaned against the wall, slid down, sat in the chair for less than a second, stood up, then. walked. real. slow. like. back. to his desk, making sure to stop and talk to a couple of people on the way.  The whole process probably took 4 minutes, and he made sure he was a distraction the whole time.

The most infuriating part is that Mr. Homan just left it.  I couldn’t believe he didn’t say anything, especially after the amount of disrespect that the student showed him.  I would have had that student down to behavior support in two seconds.  There were other instance where this happened, and Mr. Homan ignored it, but this was by far the most egregious.

Is this just something that bothers me, or is it actually an important issue in the classroom?  When I ask a student to do something, I really expect them to do it right away, but is this one of the battles not worth fighting?

In one of the 8th grade classes today there was a fire drill.  The class was going well before that, and the students were paying a moderate amount of attention, but after the drill in the middle of class they were completely lost.  They wouldn’t stop talking, they didn’t follow along in the text, and they didn’t seem to care.  Is this normal for a fire drill day?  Does a disruption to the class really affect the mood of the class that much?

Keewaydin school uses the take a break system, which seems to not work well with their students.  The idea is that if a student’s behavior becomes a problem, you ask them to take a break.  They go to the chair in the back of the class, sit for an amount of time that they think is appropriate to reflect on their actions, then rejoin the discussion,  If their behavior continues to be a problem, they TAB out, where they go to the teachers room next door, fill out a sheet with some questions about their behavior on it, and then rejoin the class.

The idea is that it gives students time to reflect on their behavior and it gives them an amount of control over it.  In theory it should work out, but in practice you mostly have students walk over to the chair, sit down for a second, then get up again and rejoin the class.  They have obviously not reflected on their behavior at all, and sure enough start it up again as soon as they get back to their seat.

For TABbing out, the questions on the sheet are

1)What happened?

2)What Keewaydin expectation of S.O.A.R. was not followed?

3) Do you need help solving the problem? Yes or No

Yes: Who could help you restore the community? _______________________

No: What is your plan to restore the community?

As you can see, most of these questions are something a middle schooler doesn’t care about at all.  They’ll just write whatever they think will get the teacher off their back, and be done with it.  The students don’t seem to care about taking a break or tabbing at all, and barely view it as a punishment.  One of them even said, when Mr. Homan asked her to take a break, ‘I’ve done this 1,000 times and it doesn’t solve anything.’  Even the students seem to realize this doesn’t work

There was a student, however, who refused to put any answers on the sheet and just scribbled IDK for every questions.  That student did get a call home, and she did not seem to like that.

While we were discussing Native American in class today, one of the students made the whooping ‘Indian Yell’ noise that you hear in old movies.  There were several Native students in the class, and it was difficult to tell if they were offended or not, but I was not impressed by the way Mr. Homan handled the situation.  Of course, the student who made the noise got a nice big laugh out of half the class, but Mr. Homan just said ‘Hey, that’s not appropriate.  Stop.’  This seems not a harsh enough response to derogatory remarks in the classroom.  It’s possible that the student didn’t really think about it, and thought the sound would just be funny, but I tend to take a little bit harder stance on racism in the classroom.  I would have definitely had a discussion with the student after about why that was not ok.  Now the student is going to think only about the big laugh he received, and not the slight remark he received from the teacher.  It’s especially important to be hard on things like that if you have native students in the class, as you want them to feel comfortable in that environment.

In the 7th grade class, Mr. Homan frequently would use exit slips at the end of the period.  It seemed like this is a good way to get students to reflect on what they’ve learned today, and it has the added benefit of seeing who was there and paying attention.  What I thought was a bit crazy was that he now had 75 exit slips to grade, and that was just for the seventh grade.  Even going through and giving each of them a check plus or minus and recording the grade would take a long time, and it’s for a grade that maybe isn’t that important.  Does the benefit of assigning exit slips outweigh the time that the teacher has to invest in grading them?

Since the session today was a Monday, it started out with a review of last weeks class.  Mr. Homan had prepared a small review activity to help the students re-engage, and I thought the activity was done very well.  However, most of the students were not paying attention and were just talking to each other.  When Mr. Homan asked a question, there were no voluntary responses, but when he called on a student they were mostly able to answer the question.  I wasn’t sure what caused the missed connection between him and his students.  Clearly the students were understanding the material, and the review activity seemed engaging enough and well thought out, but they didn’t care.  Was this just because it was a monday, and early in the morning?  Or is that an easy way out, and there is some other explanation for why a whole class isn’t paying attention to a good lesson?

For the most part, Mr. Homan will only use two methods to call on the students.  The first is to take volunteers, and the second is destiny sticks.  For silent reading and particularly tough questions, he would always take volunteers, but for other questions he would use the destiny sticks.  I noticed that once the destiny sticks are pulled out, the students who were causing problems before quiet down a little bit.  It isn’t a whole lot, usually just enough to hear if their name is being called, but it helps out nonetheless.  They also seem to pay enough attention to respond when he asks, although the immediate response is almost always ‘I don’t know.’

What Mr. Homan did that was really good was not accept this as an answer.  He would either wait for the student to answer the question for real instead of the knee jerk response, or he would provide a bit more context for the question if he thought the student wasn’t getting it.  This made the students accountable for their answers, and they couldn’t get away with an ‘I don’t know.’  This didn’t stop them from trying, however.

I don’t know if Mr. Homan’s last technique is pedagogically sound, but I like it and I do it too.  If a student was particularly not paying attention when he asked a question he would single that student out and ask what the answer was.  Usually this resulted in the student muttering and ‘I don’t know,’ and then Mr. Homan asking if they heard the question.  They seemed slightly embarrassed, and their behavior improved, but over the course of the the time I was there these students kept having to be dealt with.  I’m curious if that’s a long term solution, and if the embarrassment does them any good.

There is a beginning advisory hour that the students have to go to on Mondays, where they get all of their homework straightened out and their grades taken care of.  Mr. Homan would always start with a warm up game, like follow the clap or some type of simon says.  I noticed a stark contrast when the kids play these games; they do not want to seem like they’re enjoying it and participating, but at the same time they actually like them.  When they had to stand for a game, they would get up real slow and draw it out forever, and when it was there turn they would pretend like they had forgotten the rules, but they all were laughing and having a good time.

I think this carries over into a lot of their other work as well, especially for middle schoolers, where their image in front of their peers is more important than what the teacher wants.  Is there a way around this, where we can have students participate in class and still look ‘cool?’  I’d like to think so.