week 3

Week 3

                I apologize for the lateness of this post. Week three was interesting. Two important things happened during this week. I’ll start of by saying that this was during spring break so I found myself there less than we normally would.

                The first thing was that the students performed their debate. One thing I loved about our cooperating teacher is that she really let us control a lot of the unit planning while we are here. She asked us specifically what we’d like to see the students do and said as long as it fit in the curriculum (this quarter they’re on developing argumentative skills) then she was perfectly happy letting us have a say in the design of the class. This was really cool, I think I can speak for both myself and Danielle when I say it was really empowering to have an actual say in what the students got to do in class. We both really wanted to see them do a debate (both our 6^th and 7^th graders) and so we really pushed for that to happen.

                Seeing the debate happen was something else. Our cooperating teacher requires her students to dress up for them as she put it “They have to dress up for sports why shouldn’t they be expected to do in English class too” which I totally get. It’s a good way to give the kids the opportunity to act professional, something they need a few times in their young lives. That being said I have to say nothing is cuter than seeing a group of 6^th graders dressed up in ties and vests and debating like lawyers. They had a lot of fun with it and they seemed engaged, if not a bit too focused on minute details of the debate.

                That being said it was so awesome to see something we helped design come into being. I was so proud when I watched them debate. I kept thinking this is so cool! We helped make this! I hope feelings like this last because that was definitely a rewarding experience.

                Something else that happened that I thgout was worth noting was that I got to help one of the special ed teachers input parc ( or maybe it was kneecap) data during cpt (common practice time). It was really interesting to learn about that stuff. I recognized some of the names on the list as some of our students (that’s another thing that was so cool, I actually started remembering all their names. That and referring to them as ‘my students’ was awesome) and it was interesting to see their performance in class and their scores on the tests. Not all of them matched the effort I saw in the students and even still I found myself feeling bad when I saw some students with low grades, even the ones I didn’t know, mostly I think because of how little I agree with the tests anyway. It was interesting to see it on the other side though, I’m so used to only hearing people bash standardized testing it was nice to actually get to hold some data in my hand from it and realize it was real and not just this ghoulish thing people yell about.