Lesson 8 Reflection

Blogging offers several opportunities for me to help my students in my classroom. For one, navigating the blog is simple, easy, and gives me a way to help students from my own and their own homes. Because blog entries are dated and organized so clearly, students will have no problem finding a particular resource to reinforce skills they need for homework or projects.

Students can also reply to blog entries with comments, forwarding any concerns or questions without encroaching on my time or space away from school. I can respond to students' needs as they come up.

Additionally, I can direct students toward other resources to help them, either for extra practice or remediation through videos online, worksheets, articles, and so forth. I have many students who are always asking me for more articles, stories, and poems to read; using a blog enables me to provide new materials to all students, while saving paper, streamlining the communication process as it is all available in one place.

Lesson 7 Reflection

I've recently felt like teenagers were dealt a pretty rough hand in that they are just beginning to feel some of the strongest emotions and impulses and do not have the means to control or regulate them. They do not have the experience, or the biological equipment necessary to refine their raw emotions into well-thought out decisions. As a teacher, it is my responsibility to help them understand that their actions have consequences so that they are prepared for the less forgiving consequences that greet their decisions beyond their adolescence. I, obviously, need to get them acquainted with these realities. So where I may hold my students to adult consequences, I also need to take the time to explain or illustrate to them the reasons for my response. In helping them see the logic, the reasoning behind the consequences, they will hopefully better internalize them as they mature into adulthood.

Lesson 6 Reflection

I often play music in class while students work. But after considering the Mozart Effect, and its possible benefits, I may consider playing music at the beginning of class, rather than during active work-time. According to the study's findings, students who listened to Mozart performed better on certain tasks at the beginning of the testing period. It might be useful to prime my students at the beginning of each class with music to put them in a positive mood, elevate their spirits before they hit the grind for the day. I'll try to avoid music which draws strong emotional reactions as they can distract students from the tasks at hand; Mozart may not be the best choice, as they despise classical music, or anything made before November of this year. This kind of reaction is not the desired effect that the study has in mind.

Lesson 5 Reflection

Many of my students are English Language Learners, which means they did not grow up hearing English spoken in their homes; they did not grow up reading in English; they did not grow up writing in English. Having now learned about the importance of human contact and learning a native language, the true stature of the challenges that lie ahead of many of my ELLs in that their brains are not conditioned to recognizing the sounds and patterns that English offers. they are more than unfamiliar with their second language, and have to compete with the patterns adopted since birth. This doesn't put them at a disadvantage, but it certainly makes learning a new language more of a challenge. As a teacher, knowing what they are up against, the condition of the brain as it weens its way through native language acquisition, makes me appreciate their effort to learn English all the more, and motivates me to have more patience and devote more care to their writing as the year goes on.

Lesson 4 Reflection

Simply put, being a relational teacher means that a teacher can connect with their students. There are many ways to establish such connections with students. One strategy I employ at the beginning of the year is a manifesto activity in which my students write personal statements about something they firmly believe in. This helps show them that I am interested in who they are as students and it also reveals a lot about my students, such as their interests and passions. I also interview my students one-on-one, asking them basic "getting to know you" questions. It's a relaxed setting, and once again, shows students that I have a genuine interest in who they are as people, not just as students in my classroom. I also try to make class lessons and assignments that are aligned with my students' interests.

Lesson 3 Reflection

After watching the videos on Attention, Emotions and Learning, describe how this information impacts you as a teacher.

I know that when my students walk into my classroom, they aren't checking their baggage at the door. Problems at home, with their friends, parents, others around them affect how they listen and learn; they affect what they're willing to listen to and learn; they affect who they are willing to listen to and learn from. I had never thought about how that baggage isn't just a figment of memory, but is deeply engrained in their chemical makeup, and isn't as simple as directing their focus on happy thoughts. Students living in high stress environments, whether due to abuse or neglect or a combination of both, have sustained neurological damage as a result, and cope with that every day, and in turn, transfer that responsibility to their teacher, me. Most of my students face this, which means that as their teacher, I have to be sensitive to their behaviors. I now know that their misbehavior may not be fully under their control, but instead might be residual of traumatic experience sustained long ago or more presently. I may be the one person in their life who listens to them and speaks to them in a way that acknowledges their dignity, which can transform how they behave in and out of my classroom.

Lesson 2` Reflection

After watching the videos on Vision and Hearing, describe how this information impacts you as a teacher.

Though I have mentioned this already in the participation assignments for this lesson, learning about the ear has stimulated a few considerations in regard to how I articulate myself and how I articulate material sonically in my classroom. Hearing makes up a fifth of our perception; sound wields great power in shaping how we perceive information, both foreign and familiar. As a teacher, I can take advantage of my students' sensitivity to sound by incorporating a range of sonic textures in my lectures. Rather than maintaining a single mode of speech or sonic input, I can include music, recordings, oral histories, all kinds of sonic input to stimulate student engagement with particular subjects.

I have actually already done this without really thinking about it. My classes are in the middle of reading Nightjohn by Gary Paulsen; it's a novel told in the perspective of a slave living on a plantation leading up to the Civil War. Paulsen writes in a sort of dialectic narrative, reminiscent of slave narratives of the 1800s. I thought it might be useful for my students to actually hear what this kind of speech sounded like. So I played a couple of interviews with former slaves from the Smithsonian's collection from the 1930s and 40s, had my students try to transcribe what they heard. Upon hearing the records, they perked up; they were fascinated and intrigued, ready to learn.