learn and serve week 5

Today in learn and serve it was a half day because the 8th grade math teachers had to attend a training session. this was kinda wierd for me to hear, I didnt think that after you get a career post-graduation that you still had to be "trained" as a teacher. all these realizations are making me re-think teaching. I knew that as a teacher, my responsibility rests in the states hands for the material that I need to cover throughout the school year. But what I wasnt aware of is all the interfering the state does in every school district multiple times a year. they pretty much monitor every move a teacher makes, and i'm not sure how to feel about that. good that they care about how the future congressman of the united states are being educated, or bad because they dont allow their teachers to use any diversity in their own classroom and actually teach their students....i guess i will have to find a happy medium.

anyway, today we worked on a packet and more vocabulary words. Congruent was the new word of the day and zero of the kids knew what it meant.(I guess they were suppossed to read before class and know the definition..) So as a result, while they were working on the packet I had to answer the question "what does this word mean?" about...13 and a half times. but I enjoyed it because I love helping students. something that made me laugh was when one of the students asked me "are you good at math?" before she allowed me to answer her question....I guess I made her believe that I am indeed good at math. lol

since it was a half day i got to sit through more than 2 classes, I was able to see her inclusion class and her honors class.(honors left, inclusion right) the honors class was working on solving equations with a variable while the inclusion class was 2 weeks behind her regular 8th graders, just beginning to learn complimentary and supplimentary. One of the kids in her inclusion class was an attention hog and was being very disruptive while the others were trying to work and she had to send him to detention, this was the first time I had ever seen mrs. roeser yell at a student. In our textbook in Chapter 2 it touches base on how students should be in a classroom with the least amount of resistance. This is important to reference because in the classroom I was just discussing (Roesser's inclusion) this is an example of how students with disabilities are being put through a classroom of least resistance. Shelley often tells us that she teachers to the "highest" level because it pushes those below that level to achieve greater things. This chapter discusses how this is possible through an inclusion classroom.

all in all it was an interesting day because Mrs. Roeser trusted me to manage the classroom alone for about 20minutes. which was nice because I got to feel like it was my classroom. I got to answer the student's questions and, as always, they were very accepting of me being in charge. It was great = ]