Journal Entry 1 (Oct. 4): First Fieldwork Session at LHS

Day one at my school! I am pretty nervous, body and mind soaking in stimuli from all sides. First, I have to navigate the crucial but essential hurdles of finding where to park, locating the administration office, and getting to class before 1st bell. Luckily, since I arrive around 7:20, I don't need to swim my way through a sea of humanity.

Whew, with all that successfully behind me, I introduce myself to Mr. T. He is originally from Lebanon, which explains the accent that I was having difficulty placing when I talked to him on the phone. In terms of appearance, if you know who Tony Shalhoub is, then you know what Mr. T. looks like.

Soon, the students start to filter in for homeroom. The screen is pulled down and what looks like a film begins featuring kids in superhero masks. It takes a while for me to catch on that they are delivering the day's announcements in the form of a skit. And it won't be until sometime in the afternoon that I learn from students that kids are wearing Marvel and D.C. Comics garb to celebrate school spirit.

Mr. T. teaches a heavy load of all seniors in English, which he is happy to do for the extra bit of money he gets as a stipend. Today, I will observe two honors classes, two regular-level classes, and a journalism class. There is one blank period for prep that comes right after homeroom that, along with lunch, rounds out the day. 

In the two honors classes, the students are presenting aspects of a Gary Soto's personal essay "Like Mexicans." They break into groups for five minutes to organize and divvy up tasks. Then--cue the educational technology--the screen comes down and YouTube clips and Power Point presentations go up. The groups tackle a variety of topics--syntax and diction; family background and ethnicity; point of view; social class and race. Each group gets the grading rubric Mr. T. will be using to score the presentation, broken down into two major categories of presentation (posture, eye contact, enthusiasm, pace, asking questions, evidence of collaboration, etc.) and knowledge (insights, relevant details, organization, support for arguments from text, visual creativity, etc.). The essay is part of a unit on race and class Mr. T. is teaching, and the students seem to be very engaged by the subject matter.

In the two regular-level classes, the students are instructed to write in their journals for ten minutes, reflecting on what they have learned in the first few weeks of the term, their likes and dislikes, and assessments and critiques of Mr. T.'s instruction. Mr. T. is very honest with these students, telling them they will be writing in their journals 6 to 8 times in the term, but that he will only have time to read two of these for each student, one of which may be chosen by the student. Following this, there is a discussion of Sherman Alexie's essay "Superman and Me", pulling out various literary elements the author uses, such as the various forms of irony, personification, euphemism, diction/syntax, and oxymorons. (Any time a student gave a particularly cogent answer, Mr. T. would yell out "one point," and, at the end of class, the students who "scored" handed in their point tallies to the teacher for entry in his grade book. What a great strategy!) One of these classes contains a few children with language learning difficulties and an aide is present. He didn't appear to do anything, but maybe his role will become clearer in the weeks to come?...

A word about lunch: I grabbed a slice of French bread pepperoni pizza and a grapefruit juice in the cafeteria to experience the dynamic there. It is one vast room with students noisily talking in a sustained roar of indistinct words--about what I expected. As a culinary aside, I'll only say that if there are healthy choices on the menu, I must have missed them. After scarfing down my pizza, I hang out and read on a couch in a faculty lounge.

For the last period of the day, the journalism students have to take a two-part quiz, half short-answer and have matching. Then we get up to go to a writing lab--cue the second instance of education technology. This time the students have access to cool little Acer-type notebooks on which journalism pairs cooperate on writing an article. I sit and observe, but soon am called over by a couple of students to help. It was a little difficult to read a story and on-the-spot offer suggestions, but I was happy to be called on to help.

Mr. T. announced that he would be sticking around an extra 45 minutes after school to help kids with the diction/syntax knowledge he would be testing in an upcoming test. About a half dozen students showed up and we read portions of some New York Times editorials to analyze the authors' word choices and how they structured their sentences.

By the end of the day, I was all in, though I hadn't even done much but observe. I will say that spending so much time carefully observing was not as passive and easy as it seems. I slept well at the end of day one of my practicum.