Third Observation

During the third observation, I was again frustrated while watching the students, but this time I just felt bad for the teacher. She said in 30 years of teaching, she has never had a class NOT respond to her the way this class does. All of her strategies that normally work with kindergarten children have not worked this year, and she was just telling me how amazed she is that there are children in her class who STILL do not even register that she is speaking to them. She said the variety of ability levels is so widespread that she basically has to plan about 10 different lessons to teach the same thing, in order to reach each student.

Frankly, this is overwhelming and scary to me as a future teacher. I'm not looking forward to doing 10x the work like that! How exhausting to go back day after day and face these children who do not respond at all to what you say as their teacher!

As for me right now, however, I still have to keep all of this in mind when teaching lessons for EDIS 488. On the day of observation #3, March 2nd, my teaching partner and I also administered our pre-assessment. We created three stations for students to rotate to: 1) guided exploration of money to determine student knowledge 2) independent work- drawing jobs in the community 3) needs/wants comparison with guidance. As the students rotated through the stations, I did notice that they were engaged in the material and interested about the subject: economics. This is encouraging for our unit teaching! I was at the money station and about 90-95% of students could identify a penny and its value, and about 1/3 of the students knew the rest of the coins. All students could count out 10 pennies, which I was impressed by, and the kids commented that they liked "playing" with the money. We'll see how the unit goes....