Time To Say Goodbye

I can't believe another semester is over at Salem State. I've finally reached my senior year in college and I don't know if I'm ready to venture out into the real world.

I really got a lot out of this course. This is my second time taking the course. The first time, I got an incomplete that turned into an F because of an illness. This time I got to complete all my observations and I really enjoy being in a classroom.

I enjoyed doing blogs. I didn't really find them to be a pain at all. It was fun researching on topics such as social justice, Montessori schooling, and homework. I really enjoyed writing my blog on "how much homework is to much homework?" It was crazy how much homework some schools actually assign their students. I would never be able to finish all of that work.

I liked writing about the different types of schooling because it made me research something I had no idea about. I also liked writing about Vocational Schooling because so many of my friends had gone to one and I was always curious about what they entailed.

My favorite part of this entire course was the time I spent in my classroom. I really loved my students. They were all so hardworking and all they wanted to do was learn. Luckily, I still am able to see all of my children in my after school program. They always brag to all the other children, "Miss Cristina was our teacher and not yours!" It makes me really happy knowing that the students loved me that much. On my last day of observing they asked me when I would be teaching my own classroom and I told them probably not for another two years. They all frowned because by that time they would be sixth graders in middle school.

In concluding my blog, I really got a lot out of this class and I really hope it helps me in my own classroom some day!

Climbing a Rope in Gym Class

When the students shimmy up to the top of the rope they fully understand what is being taught of them.

When students begin something new in school all they have is their prior knowledge to help them in understanding the new concept. If they don't have much background knowledge of the subject they are being taught, then they probably won't succeed much in the new concept at hand.

A rope climb in gym class is a lot like an educational lesson. You first access the situation at hand; how to begin the lesson and how to physically get yourself on the rope. Once you figure out how to begin the lesson you must do it at a manner in which all of your students will understand what you are trying to say. Once you get on the rope, you must figure out how to hold on long enough to reach the top or you'll fall down to the bottom and have to start over again. Once you're halfway through the lesson, you may loose students as they may not understand the concept quite so well and they might want to give up. When you're climbing the rope you may reach a height in which you think is good enough because you're scared to go up any further. You may decide to give up but you realize you need to keep going. Once the lesson is over, you're going to have many students who feel confident in themselves and the way they handled the lesson. When a child reaches the top of the rope, all of their fears are gone and they realize that they in fact can handle gym class.

I chose a rope because I was always afraid of rope climb in gym because my little hands were never sturdy enough to let me hold on all the way to the top. While learning you need to be able to handle information all the way until the end of the lesson or you truely won't get anything out of it.

: )

Interact Club

For my second blog on social justice, I chose to talk about a club that we had in my High School. It was called the Interact Club. In the Interact Club, students from different ethnic backgrounds would all meet in the library once a week to discuss political issues within the school. We would talk about bullying, academics, and most importantly prejudism. Some of the non-American students would tell us stories about how their teachers seem to pay less attention to them when they try to answer questions in class. We were all astonished by this.

I was actually in class with a bunch of these kids and I noticed that a couple of our teachers would simply ignore that their hands were even up when they would answer a question. They would say, "Oh, nobody knows the answer to this question?" and they would just move on. It was crazy. These kids eventually went to administration and for a couple of days the principle ended up sitting in on some of our classes. The non-American kids finally got a chance to speak their voices in the classes and man were they happy about it!

Also in the Interact Club we got to do a job shadowing day. I always did something fun like be the mayor for a day, shadow a teacher, or one time I got to shadow a person from the State House. It was really cool and I learned a lot about politics. All the multi-cultured students got equal opportunites to go to all the same places that the white students got to go.

The Interact Club was really good in showing equality for everyone. It made all the students feel at home and everyone had different experiences depending on what exactly the topic of that day was.

Vocational Schooling

A vocational school (technical education) offers training in careers that require pre-excersise before college, if college is even needed after four years in a vocational school. Some careers include carpentry, electricity, auto-mechanic, esthetics, and hairdressing.

There is actually a vocational school in Wakefield, about fifteen minutes from Revere (where I live.) It is called Northeast Metropolitan Regional Vocational High School. At this particular school students perform one week in academics and then one week in their profession. This rotation continues for the entire school year. This vocational school also gets out two weeks earlier than any other high school in the district.

In the USA, vocational schools are secondary schools and classes can be offered within the school, in community colleges, or sometimes online. Also, many vocational schools are private and in some cities vocational schools are the only form of high school.

A couple of my friends attended this school. One of them was a girl and she decided to take up hairdressing. She did four years at the Northeast Metropolitican Regional Vocational High School and finished with a high school diploma and a license in hairdressing. She is a full-time hairdresser and didn't need to attend hair school after high school to further her profession.

Another friend of mine is a boy and he just recently graduated in 2008. He did four years of carpentry. He decided to do carepentry because he thought it would get him a high income job someday. He graduated the Voke with a high school diploma but he decided to further his education by going to Wentworth Institute of Technology. From there, he hopes to have a degree in carpentry by 2012.

Marie Montessori

Maria Montessori was a woman who was born in Italy. She was also the first female in Italy that the people considered a physician. Marie had a liking for childrens diseases as well as people who were hard to educate. These people were also known as "ineducable."

She then developed a teaching program that helped students who were confused with reading and writing to read and write. Her methods were different than a usual school. Instead of making children read and write constantly she made excersises for the students to perform.

I really agree with Maria Montessori's method of teaching. She was big on independence for children. She let them judge their own progress and she let them teach themselves how to do certain things. Her excersises really made children realize that if they keep at something that eventually they will succeed in understanding it.

She realized that before teaching a child, you must first understand how a child works. A child better understands something that is hands on. If you give children reading or writing excersises that are run, chances are your children will learn and have fun at the same time. They probably won't even realize that they're learning. Many of Montessori's students chose to work over play because they were playing while they were working.

I really agree with Montessori's way of teaching. As you already know, I work with children almost everyday and my kids need to see something to really understand it. They're doing MCAS right about now and we do many hands on activities with mathematics for the fourth graders. We use posters, pictures, figures and pretty much anything that can be hands on instead of repeatedly doing the skill over and over again. Sometimes, activity can really help in making a child succeed.

http://www.webster.edu/~woolflm/montessori2.html

Social Justice

Social justice is having the guts to teach your students the way that you feel is correct according to how you think your students will learn the best. You generally don't have any guidelines nor do you listen to other teachers views on how to teach.

Sometimes, it is good to go to others when you're first starting to teach. This can give you some idea on how you will teach your very own classroom. For example, I'm an afterschool teacher but if I hadn't observed within any classrooms, I wouldn't really know how to manage my children in my classroom.

After reading this article, I'm curious to know why some teachers are so nurturing and others are so care free with their students? I think maybe it really depends on the personality to begin with. If you start with a teacher who loves everyone and lives a very happy, loving life; you're going to get a nurturing teacher. If you start with someone mean or haggish, most likely you'll have a very unhappy year with this teacher.

To bring outside sources in, I'm actually going to talk about a show I watch on television that has social justice in it. There is a woman and she is a teacher in a high school. While in the classroom, the teacher assigns a writing contest to her class. Surprisingly, the rebel in the class wins the contest. The teacher knows that the principal really doesn't this student but she decides to publish the rebels piece in the newspaper. The principal says that if she publishes this piece then she will be fired. The teacher thinks this is crazy and just quits instead to show how she doesn't believe in the way the principal is acting.

I think social justice is very important because it can change an entire classroom depending on the way you feel about a certain situation.