Dancing with Athena :: Personal Narrative Teaching Essays

leaping with Athena I shall always remember the new-kid-in-school feeling that came flooding venture from childhood on my first day of student teaching. Having been in my dower of new environments, I have learned deeply the power of a first impression. That first day I made it a speckle to look into the eyes of the young people in my classes, ignore the butterflies of trembling fluttering in my gut, and smile bravely. Most students smiled back, some curious, others confident. Some appeared quiet guarded, while a fair number wore their seventh-grade brand of defiance and abhorrence on their sleeves like a badge. Over the course of my ten weeks with them, I learned to better read those faces. Students who appeared receptive or open capability instead be thoroughly, benevolently disengaged. Some of those students who were quietly guarded at first needed only an invitation to open up. Others remained locked behind walls of resistance. This last appetite was the mos t challenging one for me to decipher into its constituent parts. Being always up for a challenge, I took it upon myself to discover my way into their bunker and go steady their need for protection. I ascertained quickly that my mentor teacher took a very traditional tact in her teaching style. The division of province in her seventh-grade classroom was very clear. She engaged in what Bridging English authors Joseph O. and Lucy F.M. Milner, depot total lecture and linear explication, while students engaged in man-to-man seat work (347-8). That is, the teacher went over the lessons from the book, then students were expected to complete their exercises quietly in class, pass them in, and go on to the next period. very little attention, in my opinion, was paid to the individual or community skill needs of children in this classroom. I observed no real probability for students to take ownership of their learning process. Each group of students responded differently to this traditional approach. The high achievers class was frustrated and bored. The inclusion class, a group which include students with specific learning disabilities mainstreamed into a general education class, mostly accepted the autocratic system and most functioned acceptably well within its expectations. The last two periods of the day were general education classes.