Will- CO 3

 

The day of my final classroom observation I woke up with a summer cold and could barely get out bed. My whole body ached but I some how managed to make it to the Eppes building. I walked into the classroom I thought I was supposed to be sitting in on and immediately saw my conversation partner, Hamad. The rest of the students were still coming into the class when the teacher introduced herself and I realized that I was kind of in the completely wrong class. I apologized for my disturbance, wished Hamad a good day and quickly bolted down the stairs to find the lass I was supposed to be in. I made it with a minute to spare and as I entered the teacher was conversing with several students. One student in particular seemed to be having trouble reading (I was sitting in on a reading class apparently) and the teacher was explaining the pitfalls of translating a thought into Arabic and then retranslating it back into English; the student was fairly adamant about not doing that, to the point that they began to argue about it. The student insisted it was just too hard to learn English and the teacher kept insisting that he try harder, explaining the merits of actually learning rather than awkwardly translating a sentence every time it is presented to you. The teacher realized that the argument wasn’t really going anywhere, apologized to the student for becoming argumentative and then proceeded to start the lesson by having two students come up and report on a word from their individual vocabulary logs. Each student passed out a copy of an email they sent to Mr. Schiefelbein, consisting of their topic (I wasn’t explained the context of the topics), and two vocabulary words. The students wrote their words up on the board and explained the meanings with the rest of their class, fielding questions at the end of their presentation. The teacher followed the presentations by discussing information pertaining to their impending final. After he explained everything, he asked the students to pull out their copies of Frindle, a book they were collectively reading. As the teacher walked around the room making sure the students had their book, he kept saying some expression from a gangster movie (I forgot the name, as I was more focused on my own discomfort) to which the students would reply with, “fuggit abooudtit,” in a faux-mobster accent. Their collective reading, Frindle, seemed to be a lower level reading story regarding he purpose of certain names of things. The protagonist doesn’t quite grasp the concept of proper names and opts to rename common objects like a pen, as a “frindle.” Overall I felt that this class gave me more insight into a reading class, specifically the difficulties that may arise when trying to convince students the necessity of learning English versus translating to and from English. It was a nice glimpse of how a middle level English reading class should operate in terms of both positive and negative student reactions.