- This topic has 3 replies, 2 voices, and was last updated 3 years, 6 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
-
I went in for my first shift in the TORCH academic support classroom run by Ms. Battaglia, on Tuesday. I arrived at NHS at the start of 5th period, where I was greeted at the security desk. Like the high school where I went, there was a main entrance with four big glass doors spilling out into a common area, the doors and the common area good for accommodating big crowds of students passing through on their way in and out. Only the first door I tried, which was closest to where I had parked, was locked. I saw the sign on the rightmost door which said “visitors enter here” and guided me to the security desk, a very clever setup. The high school I attended, which was finished in 1917, had a security desk at the front, but it felt much more like an afterthought than the one at NHS. The security desk attendant was professional and I told her I was a Carleton Student and I was there to help in room D110. She unlocked the door and directed me to fill out a sticker to show I was an approved visitor, and then handed me a map with instructions to get to D11o. I felt safe and comfortable at the school with these protocols.
When I got to D110, it looked like a comfortable place to do work and get academic support. M.s Battaglia welcomed me and gave me a tour of her center, which I would say has about 3 and a half separate rooms. When I told her my major and my minor (Physics and Creative Writing), she grinned and said, “Ah Physics, so you can help with math? Excellent, a lot of our students are working on math” which appears to fit with a larger educational norm I notice in the US, which is that high school students tend to both value and struggle over math more than other subjects. At the same time, appearances can be deceiving, and M.s Battaglia may have given the same reaction had I been a Biology, or a Spanish major. In addition to her and me, there were four other non-NHS students working there, and only around 20 students, so I could tell this would be quite “teacher populated” compared to other classroom settings that NHS might offer. This made sense for an Academic support center. In the main room there were tables arranged with lots of room to walk in between, and doors to rooms for quiet work, test-taking, and self-care. I was introduced to the faculty and fellows, who were helping students with various subjects. The room adjoining next door was a separate classroom that was reserved to be a space for first-generation students, and down the hall was an ESL classroom. I was told I would generally stay in the main classroom, but students might come in from the other rooms if they wanted my help.
I went in for my first shift in the TORCH academic support classroom run by Ms. Battaglia, on Tuesday. I arrived at NHS at the start of 5th period, where I was greeted at the security desk. Like the high school where I went, there was a main entrance with four big glass doors spilling out into a common area, the doors and the common area good for accommodating big crowds of students passing through on their way in and out. Only the first door I tried, which was closest to where I had parked, was locked. I saw the sign on the rightmost door which said “visitors enter here” and guided me to the security desk, a very clever setup. The high school I attended, which was finished in 1917, had a security desk at the front, but it felt much more like an afterthought than the one at NHS. The security desk attendant was professional and I told her I was a Carleton Student and I was there to help in room D110. She unlocked the door and directed me to fill out a sticker to show I was an approved visitor, and then handed me a map with instructions to get to D11o. I felt safe and comfortable at the school with these protocols.
When I got to D110, it looked like a comfortable place to do work and get academic support. M.s Battaglia welcomed me and gave me a tour of her center, which I would say has about 3 and a half separate rooms. When I told her my major and my minor (Physics and Creative Writing), she grinned and said, “Ah Physics, so you can help with math? Excellent, a lot of our students are working on math” which appears to fit with a larger educational norm I notice in the US, which is that high school students tend to both value and struggle over math more than other subjects. At the same time, appearances can be deceiving, and M.s Battaglia may have given the same reaction had I been a Biology, or a Spanish major. In addition to her and me, there were four other non-NHS students working there, and only around 20 students, so I could tell this would be quite “teacher populated” compared to other classroom settings that NHS might offer. This made sense for an Academic support center. In the main room there were tables arranged with lots of room to walk in between, and doors to rooms for quiet work, test-taking, and self-care. I was introduced to the faculty and fellows, who were helping students with various subjects. The room adjoining next door was a separate classroom that was reserved to be a space for first-generation students, and down the hall was an ESL classroom. I was told I would generally stay in the main classroom, but students might come in from the other rooms if they wanted my help.
I was told that the purpose of the Academic support center was for tutors to get to know and form bonds with the students personally in order to help them academically. During 5th period, there were two students sitting at the round table, and I got to meet them and learn about their interests. A boy told me about his hope to become a firefighter and showed me the website fentonfire.com which sells lots of different types of service vehicles. I was blown away to learn about this! The rescue trucks were far less expensive than I expected them to be, maybe because they are being sold to firefighters for the purpose of helping the social good and the manufacturers do not expect a large profit margin. The boy was very knowledgeable about the types of vehicles he hopes to buy and had a clear plan to get a CDL and become eligible to drive one, and then use it at his job fighting fires. During 6th period, I was lucky enough to get to help three tenth-grade students with geometry, one of my favorite subjects in high school. Looking at their worksheets, I could see a clear line of reasoning that I would use to solve the problems and from a few questions I could see that the problem was that they didn’t know what the vertical and supplementary angle theorems were, or how to apply them to solve problems. I drew examples of supplementary and vertical angles and worked towards a definition of each with the students to try and give them an intuition for how to use them. During 7th period, students were mostly done with work, so I joined a group that was sitting in the back corner and we talked about the Bubonic Plague. I could see the importance of the feeling of community in the classroom, and was happy that everyone was so welcoming. I tried to show my respect for everyone by learning as many names as I could and addressing people informally by their names. I tried to spend my time helping them with their schoolwork whenever I could, but if not then I built relationships by trying to talk to them about other things. Not everyone was receptive to either, some students were generally polite but uninterested in my tutoring or getting to know me, but I enjoyed the chances to teach people about geometry and writing, and to learn about the Bubonic Plague, dissecting toys, and owning a firetruck.
-
-
I love hearing about the ways you’ve found ways to integrate yourself into the Northfield High School community. It’s great to hear that the Academic Support Center deliberately fosters relationships between students and tutors. Your conversations about firetrucks and the Bubonic plague remind me of our discussion of the implications of Piaget in the classroom, namely the importance of letting students’ interests guide their learning and “the having of wonderful ideas.” I notice that you make a distinction between “helping them with their schoolwork” and building “relationships by trying to talk to them about other things,” but I wonder if there’s more overlap between these two activities than first meets the eye. And how exciting that a student also taught you something about firetrucks!
-
Pt 2
I could certainly see a bit of pandemic fatigue in the Academic Support Center. Across the board, students were respectful of each other’s personal space and seemed to be pretty diligent about wearing masks. It looked like the culture at NHS was generally health-positive, if not teeming with midwestern courtesy. Most students wore masks over their noses and mouths the entire time I could see them, only some needed to be reminded to keep them on. When they were reminded, it was always by the teachers who spoke to them with dignity, and the students always listened. I think this is a product of the environment which they have worked together to foster. I wonder what the center was like before the pandemic, perhaps the pandemic and the need for people to constantly consider the health of the group has made people more respectful of each other, and has made teachers and students get along more cohesively.
Working in a high school, I work with students who are solidly in the Formal Operational Stage of development. I could see evidence of this, from reading a student’s college essay with him, I could see that he was reasoning with hypotheticals of how his mom must have felt raising him in the US as a single parent who did not speak English. Interestingly, I think my specialties of math and physics draw on skills developed in the concrete operational stage, and therefore might be more accessible to younger students the way they are taught than we think. A student I helped with a physics lab needed to process the data her group collected and come up with a mathematical model for a falling object, but this requires reasoning about something that happened in front of her and that she could repeat. Aside from the prior knowledge of algebra which would be needed to guess the model she came up with and which no fifth-grader in America is up to, I wonder how far fifth-graders would get in this lab. The students working on math problems needed to draw out the angles that they were working with and reason that the straight line with two angles drawn into it contains 180 degrees. This makes me want to try teaching physics to a fifth grader. To quote Albert Einstein, “There exists a passion for comprehension, just as there exists a passion for music. That passion exists in children, but gets lost in most people later on. Without this passion there would be neither mathematics nor natural science.” To me, this resonates with Piaget’s descriptions of the concrete operational stage developments, and the keen ability to understand what is in front of you.
-
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.