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I love your use of the word, penultimate!
Your observations about rebellion in the classroom are really interesting. I, too, would have thought about Colin Kaepernick and the political symbolism of disobeying mandatory expressions of patriotism in the classroom or workplace. Your picture of the American Flag juxtaposed against the widely accepted Lab Classroom feels interesting to me as a science major. I assume that schools in Canada, Argentina, Japan, and Senegal also have a Lab Classroom only with different flags flying, but this could surely be an artifact of my American education, I don’t know what science is like in other countries.
I agree with your sentiment that English classes should help students find their voice. This is a great way for that to happen. We shouldn’t get lost in the materials we traditionally use to teach, because then we risk teaching our students to imitate what they have already seen in school rather than make new ideas. A voice doesn’t have to come out in a book report, actions speak louder than words.
These are really valuable observations, I think they point out some of the toxic parts of competition in the classroom; students stressing over not knowing the answer and shutting down, the mentality of “oh you all knew that and I didn’t? That’s okay because we shouldn’t even know that as Americans, so I’m still the best!” and my least favorite, hating Canada! Ever since I started playing Rec Soccer in first grade, I have always been staunchly non-competitive, and I felt like this gave me a disadvantage in Kahoots. I often had other things on my mind and didn’t mind coming in the middle of the class, but I did not enjoy the attitudes of my classmates when they beat me. I think competition can bring out the worst in people, and in the educational setting people are willing to say “it’s for school” and use that to excuse whatever nasty behavior they display.
Worksheets seem like a really good way to plan out a lesson, it sounds like Ms. Hebs has a really consistent lesson plan which will help students come into class each day knowing what will be expected of them and be able to do it. It seems really conducive to promoting her students’ motivation, although I can remember my middle school algebra experience feeling really rigorous. Your observation that the second class is more energetic and struggles less than the first class resonates a lot with me, I think that a lot of the efficacy of teaching depends on how much folks are willing to learn and participate. Even a sound lesson plan isn’t guaranteed to reach all students equally, there is a vygotskyan explanation for the second class doing better, perhaps there are more MKOs in the second hour than in the first because of random chance, and these are contributing to the success of the lessons.
It’s cool that you found an example of negative reinforcement! I think the skill of observing a class is very different from observing, say, a chemical reaction and I am increasingly impressed by my classmates finding meaningful applications of the theories we are learning about in their tutoring experiences. I’m not saying those applications aren’t out there, but I think observing something requires observing all of its facets and it can be hard to sift out the diamonds from the dirt.
Your insights on the influence of behaviorism on our everyday lives are super interesting! It’s always helpful to take a step back from what we are talking about in class and see how things affect human behavior outside of the educational setting. It provides a refreshing viewpoint, and I’d love to read more of it!
LOL this all reminds me of the Drake and Josh episode where Drake and Josh are actors in a burglary reenactment, and everyone is so amazed by Drake’s one line
I connect with your observations at the beginning, throughout school I always found it MUCH harder to connect with female teachers than to connect with male teachers. The first time I had a male English teacher was 12th grade. Prior to that I never considered myself an English student, but now I’m a creative writing minor! I think students need role models more than anyone can express, and it’s naive to assume that the same person can serve as a role model for male and female students. In this way, it’s a good thing high school and middle school students go from class to class, teacher to teacher, because it gives them exposure to a whole range of potential role models! There was an English teacher at my high school that was very close with my sister really from class and extracurriculars, but when I had her in ninth and eleventh grades I felt like I was such a disappointment to her and we didn’t connect at all. But I got along really well with my biology teacher and continued to come to him after I was no longer in his class.
The history of atomic theory stuff is so cool! And I really like Mr. Wiebe’s analogy that you give, you’re correct that it really demystifies the subject, I think it even hints towards Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.
I think your observations highlight a really significant gender imbalance! Highlighting some of the skills that girls as a class of students tend to exhibit is really important to understanding students and teaching all students the best we can. Growing up, I think I missed this. I was taught that feminism meant striving for gender equality at every step, which I misinterpreted that allyship should mean ignoring any differences between the genders. In high school, I thought that in order to be supportive of feminism I should not only not assume things about people in general but also very much disregard observations. I think this had a detrimental effect on my feminist thinking, because I assumed that everyone shared my attitude and I didn’t appreciate the diversity of thought. I’m really glad that the girls in Mr. Dube’s class are so focused on putting in more than the bare minimum, and that you’re able to have a positive impact with the boys.
Your identification of two different types of students, those who interact with groups and those who are more solitary is really interesting! I wonder if the two groups have overlap in other classes, like maybe about half of the class has a group that they like in the class and the other half is made up of people that don’t fit in as much. As compared with other theories we have learned about, it is certainly difficult to look for cues of psychosocial development in the students we are observing so I can sympathize over the woes of incomplete data here. I bet it will be way harder to track moral development in the classroom.
It is funny to hear your observation of an eighth grade teacher’s positive reinforcement ritual, in your situation I too would have found it surprising that students were into it. Eighth graders are always trying to be cooler than one another, and surely extra attention doesn’t help them with that. When I was in middle school, I felt like part of being cool was being able to answer questions without positive reinforcement, Yeah I could answer that, no big deal type responses. But Mrs Talbot sounds really wholesome and I am glad the students are responding nicely to that. Although the issue of motivating students who feel inferior is an important one, and I would hope that Mrs. Talbot is doing things to address that, even if it is when you are not there t see it. Your observations of testing also resonate with me, I would love to learn more about the effect of that, although I hope that they do not make students feel sad and demotivated.
I loved reading your story about learning from a great MKO and then becoming a great MKO at the kennel! (~~The student becomes the teacher~~) It sounds like you had a really Vygotskyian experience that turned out to be really positive in the end. I think learning on a job is a really good place for learning to preceded development; when you were new to the kennel you absorbed the knowledge like a sponge, and as you got older you took your MKO status to heart and become more of a teacher up to whom your coworkers could look. I can think of related experiences at jobs I have had. From your writing, I can tell you had a lot of patience for this task and were thoughtful in your understanding of the people you were teaching. Your statement that people were on their phones, but this was more of a symptom of feeling hopeless than a part of the problem was really profound. I think it takes a lot of humility to see your coworkers are on their phones, and consider that maybe they are having trouble due to inadequate preparation and not just slacking off. When I was a camp counselor, I felt grumpy that I was struggling so much to make the experience for my campers a good one while the other counselors were slacking off. But after reading this, I think I was just being judgy, and maybe the other counselors could have used some advice.
It sounds like working in an English class is tough! I always get really nervous when students ask me things I don’t know the answer to, and I can’t imagine my vocabulary is any better than a seventh-grader’s.
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.
I’m blown away by the ways in which the students at Prairie Creek are experiencing the unstructured, outdoors-focused aspects to their school that you observed. Everyone knows “kids are so imaginative” but I, as an adult, always forget how active imagination can lead to thoughtful and complex, if not convoluted, feats of art and engineering when nurtured carefully. Probably because I’m not imaginative enough. These herons haven’t even reached middle school yet, but they seem to have gained an intuition for building and keeping a fort, diplomatically working towards protecting everyone’s creations, engaging in democracy, and the real estate market. It sounds like there are some real benefits to this type of learning for students in the concrete operational stage, as you identify. The ways in which they apply the skills they are learning are immediately useful and are relevant to the things that are happening around them; they are concrete. Macroeconomics classes which ask questions involving even the most basic of hypothetical economies would engage 0% of the skills these kids should be developing, but here they are effectively learning about economics. You better let me see the mushroom stick you are working on!
