Another Day At The Elementary School

To start off my blog I want to say that I am very sad I only have 3 more visits to attend. This experience has been a lot of fun and very interesting. I have gotten to know the children so well over the past 6 times Ive went, and it will be sad to leave them. When i go into the classrooms they all get excited when i walk in and especially the children who I'm working with one on one. As soon as i take the children out in the hallway to practicing rhyming or making sentences I always ask them about themselves and I want to know more about them than just their name and what school they go too. This makes my experience a lot more interesting and fun if you get to know the children and they also feel more comfortable around you. In one of the prompts it talks about "no one enters a classroom without a personal history; thus no one enters a classroom completely bias." When i looked at this prompt I knew right away what i was going to say. As soon as i walked into that classroom, or any teacher that walks into the classroom always needs to know about their children they are going to be teaching. Even in college, we go around and talk about ourselves because no one wants to learn or sit in a classroom not knowing one thing about the teacher or any of the students. When i become a teacher and teach elementary school children there are going to be many challenges and advantages as I go along. In my classroom particularly at Snow White Castle Elementary School a lot of children there are shy and don't know how to express themselves. When asking a child to tell you a little about themselves most of them wont open up to you for a little while because they are just young and don't feel comfortable around you yet. But then you have some children who just want to talk to someone and will tell you everything about their lives. I wish i had enough time every week to go into the classroom and learn something about every child's life, but considering we only have 90 minutes I cant bond with the children as much as i want to. When i walked into the first grade classroom , the teacher was telling each child to be quiet and do their work while she was testing with other students. I sat down with one of the children and helped him with his spelling, while another girl across the desk was talking. I simply looked at her and told her to be quiet please because other students are working, and then she continued to give me a hand gesture and roll her eyes. Now she is only in first grade and she is already giving me "talk to the hand" gestures. I right then was a little upset and got the wrong impression of the little girl right when she did that. As a teacher, I would then talk to her one on one and ask her why she did that. That's not the right way to approach a teacher but since i am not the teacher she thought she could take advantage of me. This student was probably the nicest girl, but by doing that to me i wasn't sure what to make of her. As a teacher, there needs to be many adjustments made with some students but that's what teachers are here for. Also, by reading Lisa Delpit, The Silenced Dialogue reminded me a lot of this prompt. She talks all about different races and codes of power. This relates alot to my classroom and what I'm talking about because she talks about issues of power in classrooms. The power of teachers over students and all about the different experiences in the classroom. I also like in the article when she says "The teachers role is to maintain the full attention of the group by continuous questioning, eye contact, finger snaps, hand claps and other gestures." Which reminds me of my classroom at Snow White Castle Elementary School. When the children aren't listening the kindergarten teacher snaps her fingers and says "Okay class lets look up here now" and she really get there attention. If you are teaching middle school or high school it might not be a good idea to snap your fingers because the students wont listen to you. But as an elementary school teacher the children will listen when you snap your fingers because most of them want to learn. I only have 3 more times to attend which is sad, but by going to this elementary school it has helped me out a lot so one day we can all be the best teachers around.