10th Grade English, Again!

[Chris O’Mara]

As I walked through the large, gray hallways of Northfield Public High School all I could think about was how different everything was from when and where I went to high school two years ago. Everything was so much bigger: the hallways, the campus itself, the classrooms, the class sizes, everything. I struggled to find my way to room 101D, and it quickly became clear that one thing confusing me was the fact that there are 4 (or maybe more?) wings at the school, and each wing seems to have around 20 rooms in it. When I finally found my room after 5 minutes of wandering aimlessly and eventually asking some students where I should go, I thought to myself how stressful that must be for a student coming on the first day of school in 9th grade, already nervous about everything they were going to face then having to find the right room. Mr. DuBe’s classroom is a pretty standard classroom, with about 30 seats all lined up in rows and columns facing the front of the classroom, where Mr. DuBe presents class from a podium covered with past students’ names while gesturing to a slideshow on the projector.

The rest of the classroom is pretty typical, though I quite enjoyed everything Mr. DuBe hung up in the classroom. He had some personal pieces scattered throughout the room, like a St. Olaf flag behind his desk, some cutouts of world maps from different time periods up on the walls, inspirational posters about courage and motivation, and useful posters with general lessons about figurative language, writing a well structured paragraph, and basic components of a story. Another key aspect of Mr. DuBe’s room is the mini library in the back corner of class, where students are welcome to pick up and drop back off any book they choose to read during Free Reading time. I really enjoyed the presence of the library, as students were able to peruse options at their own reading level without the “big deal” of going to the library with a book already in mind.

Mr. DuBe seems to run his class in a laid back manner while consistently reminding his students that what they are learning is incredibly important, as reading well and writing effectively are useful life skills, and that they will get out of class what they put in. He begins class by remarking something about the day and by asking students if they have any good news to share. While students don’t always participate enthusiastically, this seemed to be a great way to both get to know the students and to gradually bring them into the flow of class. The classes I’ve been observing have both been 10th Grade English, and Mr. DuBe teaches 9th and 10th grade in the same classroom. The current objective of the 10th graders is to be able to effectively comprehend and highlight a short story, and to think about conflicts, setting, figurative language, and other basic aspects of a story. The students in Mr. DuBe’s classroom are generally interested in Mr. DuBe; when I first sat down on Monday, I heard one student remark to another “I don’t really like English class but I like Mr. DuBe.” Some students are deeply interested, volunteering to answer questions and seeming very much at home in his classroom, while others are much more subdued or simply  uninterested in class.

I didn’t pick up on too much pandemic hangover, though Mr. DuBe told me during intervals and after classes that many students had missed tens of days of school last year, and that the students who missed class last year were far behind compared to students who were able to come to class consistently last year. I was unable to pick up on too many social dynamics in Mr. DuBe’s class, as most students were focused on the teacher or, at worst, keeping their disinterest to themselves. It seems that lots of students are academically behind; Mr. DuBe told me after class on Wednesday that while a few of his students could be in honors English and are doing great in his class, another portion of his students could be English levels as low as 6th grade. Students seem to do okay with the mandatory mask mandate at the school, as Mr. DuBe only has to remind one or two students at the beginning of class to wear their masks properly and the vast majority of the class wore their masks without complaint or need for reprimand.

According to Piaget, all of the students I am working with should be in the formal operational stage: self aware and able to use logic, capable of abstract thought, and using  analytical reasoning to come to conclusions. The two students I was working with, Phillip and Isaac, both were certainly in this stage of development, though it seemed they were still developing and becoming comfortable with the skills characteristic of the formal operational stage. For example, I spent some time with Isaac, who I was told “is special ed” and has some accommodations for reading out loud, going over what an external and an internal conflict are, which he seemed to grasp by themselves as concepts. Once we tried to apply our understanding of the different types of conflict, however, Isaac struggled to identify whether a conflict was internal or external. He started to understand the concepts better as we continued reading, but the ability to apply abstract concepts is still certainly in development and not yet facile. My other student, Phillip, was interestingly quite able to discern internal and external conflicts, yet his primary difficulty lay in his reading level. It took him a long time to read paragraphs, he read everything out loud, and he needed lots of encouragement to understand what was going on and to begin applying the abstract concepts we were learning about. His reading level was low in comparison to his ability to think abstractly, and once we took the time to read through some paragraphs we were able to talk about how the forest in a story we were reading functioned almost like a character, which was certainly demonstrative of his being in the formal operational stage.

All in all, I would say my observations support Piaget’s findings as a general scheme for understanding stages of development, but also point to how it does not apply to every student in the same way. It seemed my students were definitely at their correct stage of Piagetian development, but it seemed more like a combination of Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s theories as both Isaac and Phillip seemed to have zones of proximal development within the realm of formal operational thought: they weren’t excelling at implementing the thought processes of the piagetian stage, but they were getting better at it with the help of myself and Mr. DuBe.

[Chisom Oguh]

When I read about the mini-library in the back of the classroom, that made me think back to 6th grade where Mr. Dowdy had a few bookshelves in the back corner of his Language Arts class filled with books. When I was younger, I consumed books. I was reading all the time; whenever you saw me, there was a book by my side. I really appreciate Mr. DuBe for having this sort of structure in his classroom, because not only does it encourage reading, but it could become a safe space for a student who just wants to sit down and lose themselves in a book.

Speaking of 6th grade, it’s interesting just how each student could be at a different “level” inside a stage of development. I am tutoring 8th graders (in Algebra I) which would mean that, according to Piaget, they should also be at the Formal Operational stage. Yet, are they really? Algebra I has abstract concepts so the students should be able to understand them, but are they really understanding it or just going through the phases?

[Author]

Posts