Reflections of the First Week of Student Teaching

Oh, how fucked we are!

On Monday I started my first week of student teaching. I'm not exactly thrilled with this, because I'm not exactly thrilled with the idea that some stranger will be coming in and critiquing me every week, but I'll deal.

Let me give a little background first. The school I'm student teaching at is in North Central Austin. It is a low Socioeconomic Status (SES) school (like every other high school in Austin). The school is about 75% hispanic, 20% african american, and 5% white. I will be teaching Algebra every afternoon from noon until 4pm. On Monday I show up at noon, which is when the students all head to lunch. I was standing outside my mentor teachers portable (I hate portables, but I'll talk about that later) just about to go in when the two teachers from the portables across the way come out of their rooms. The female teacher gives the male teachers two thumbs up and says, "no knives today!" What a first impression.

I meet my mentor teach a few minutes later. My first impression of him is that he has no fingertips. Please read that again. The man is missing all ten of the tips of his fingers, they're gone from the last knuckle. There is nothing wrong with that, but its just a rather odd thing to see. I'm not one of those people that will blurt out, "so what happened to your hands" so I still do not know. Anyway, his name is Mr. B, and hes a very nice guy. He really likes his job. He drives about an hour to and from work because he would rather work kids that need it rather than the "rich" kids in the school district near his home.

As I said Mr. B is a nice guy. He also has a high school algebra teacher with a degree in Social Work. Go ahead and reread that if you please. The highest this guy ever got in math was 1st semester calculus. Again, I'd like to point out hes a nice guy and I like him, but it really pisses me off that I have to go through 35+ semester hours of upper division math, and go through this student teaching accreditation in order to become a high school teacher, and some people just have to have a degree... IN ANYTHING. And people wonder why our kids are doing so poorly.

Well, on to the kids. They're not a bad bunch. I am in class with 4th, 5th and 6th period (Mr. B has a prep period 7th period). I will be teaching 5th and 6th period. Mr. B informs me that these are his best and worst classes. I see right off that there are going to be one or two kids that will be a pain in my ass in the 5th period, but the best thing is that most of these kids are freshmen and sophmores, so that means I am bigger than all of them (although a couple of them have as much facial hair as i do). They have their bad days (Wednesday) and their good days (Thursday), but all in all not a bad bunch.

Mr. B's teaching style is probably familiar to the 2 people that bother to read this article. He gives the students a warm up each day. He then introduces them to the topic of the day (this week it was linear equations) and shows them how to do the day's task by solving some examples. He then assigns homework and lets the students get cracking.

This is pretty much the antithisis of how they taught us to teach at the University, and also how we will be judged by our observers. The university would rather have us use the Moore Method of teaching. Now because I realize neither one of you will bother to go to the link, the Moore Method teachs the kids to think and learn, rather than shoves knowledge down their throats. The theory is that math teachers were always the kids in class that "got it" and the stuff made sense just by looking at it. 99.9% of students aren't like that. The Moore Method lets the students develop their own understanding of concept. In essance, they learn the topic in a way that makes sense to them, rather than try to understand a way that makes sense to their teacher.

Now I know alot of people will say that this is a bunch of shit, and that its too impractical (not that any of them will bother reading this), but I would have to disagree. I've been to classes where that Moore Method is in place every day, and the students, not only can pass tests, but they actually understand what it is they are doing. I will go into the difference in a later article.

Some other things that have bothered me, and make me feel ashamed of our education system:

All three of the classes I have observed this week have about 20-25 students (small classes for Austin Independent School District), but there has never been more than 13 students show up in any period on any day. Of the 13 or so that do show up, I have never seen more than 5 turn in their homework on a given day. Today (Friday) I administered a test to the students (my mentor teacher was out), and I would say that maybe 3 of the 30-35 students in all of the classes got above 50% on the tests. I would also say that 10 or so did not answer a single question on the test. The students were allowed to use notes and use calculators on the test.

And that, my friends, is why we are fucked...

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Well Pidgey, we may be shafted in the short run, but I'm hoping that some teachers (hopefully like you seem to be) can recognize the problems, have plans to to try to address them, and eventually change the culture in our classrooms that has created this travesty. Good luck amigo!

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