My time at Northfield High School started with a reminder that I’ve grown accustomed to a college sleep schedule. The only time that worked for me to do my tutoring was in the mornings, and my carefully planned schedule where I would never have to wake up before 9 has been thrown out. As much as I dislike waking up early, I have to remind myself that the students I’m working with are coming in even earlier. Northfield High feels very familiar to me. I’m also from a small Midwestern college town, and our school buildings, student demographics, and homecoming traditions all feel almost interchangeable. I am splitting my time between two classrooms. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m in Mrs. McDonald’s Global Studies class. Global Studies, as Mrs. McDonald described it, is the only non-tracked Senior requirement at the high school. While I was really excited by the prospect of getting to see and work with an entire cross-section of the high school, I have come to see how this classroom set up can present challenges. As Mrs. McDonald put it, there are some students who could write a 10 page paper on Haiti without any trouble and others who would struggle to point out which region of the world Haiti is on a map. She has to play a difficult role of moving quickly enough to keep her students engaged, but not so quickly that some begin to fall behind. She also has to contend with students who may be afraid to participate because they could be perceived as nerdy or show-offy and others with the same fears because they do not want to show their unfamiliarity with the material. I think that this will eventually be a rich environment for observation, but for the days I was there, the students were working independently on a country profile project, so I have yet to see them in a lecture or Q and A setting. The student who Mrs. McDonald identified as having fallen the farthest behind the others was resistant to working 1:1 with me, and she decided not to push it this early on. The other classroom I am in is 9th grade English with Mrs. McKay. The Wednesday that I was there, students were supposed to have a completed graphic organizer about a short story that they were turning into a complete paragraph. Mrs. McKay was attempting a difficult balancing act of trying to guide the students, many of whom had not completed the graphic organizer, through writing the paragraph. By the end of the hour, some students were proofreading each other’s finished paragraphs and others who still had largely uncompleted graphic organizers.

The thing I noticed above all else in the schools was the constant presence of technology. I don’t know the complete history of when Northfield Schools gave all of their students iPads, so it is hard to know how much of this is a pandemic hangover and how much of it is the way it has always been, but I felt that in all three days I was at the schools, the technology was more of a hindrance than a help. Mrs. McDonald was advised by one of the school technology specialists to have the students complete their country profile on Pages (Apple’s version of Word or Google Docs). Both Mrs. McDonald and the students were unfamiliar with this tool and spent the entire time on Tuesday battling with it. The actual content of the country profile was relatively simple (Pictures of the country flag, major exports, population data, etc), but Mrs. McDonald was bombarded with questions that she was largely unable to answer about how to use Pages. When I came to class on Thursday, Mrs. McDonald had a bowl of candy as a form of apology to her students. Although most of the students completed their assignments on Pages, Mrs. McDonald recognized how needlessly difficult it had been. Since they would be continuing to expand the country profile throughout the semester, she gave the students the day to transfer all of the information from Pages to a Google Doc. None of them were learning any new content that day, it was making up from a battle with technology. While innovations like Zoom made pandemic learning possible, what I witnessed in Mrs. McDonald’s class was a reminder that technology can still be a barrier to learning. Especially now that students can safely gather in person, it might be worth considering what lessons could be technologically backpedaled. Perhaps the students could still use the iPads for their research, but make the country profile by hand. That could also allow artistically-minded students to be creative with how they present the information.

Both the freshman and the senior classes that I am in would be considered Formal Operational by Piaget. While the seniors should be firmly in that stage, the assignment they were doing did not allow them to think abstractly. There may have been aspects of the country profile that I did not see, but from what I saw, the students were engaging in concrete operations. They would be presented with a question (like listing the major exports of Peru), go to the website that had been identified to them as having reliable information, look for the section that listed major exports, and write them down. While it would certainly require formal operations for the students to understand what an export is and how the particular products their country was exporting could help them fit into the global economy, the assignment itself did not allow them to use that knowledge. The assignment that the freshmen were given did have some opportunities for abstraction. Though they were guided along, they had to choose quotes to support their theme and give examples of how the author created tension. This was clearly a new skill for many of them, and it made sense that Mrs. McKay had a step-by-step organizer to help them do it. I think it is less likely that some students were struggling because of the abstract nature of the work and more because it was simply a jump in difficulty from their previous English classes. The freshman did not seem unengaged or bored working on the assignment, which helps to indicate that it was challenging them, and was hopefully rewarding for those who succeeded in turning in completed paragraphs.