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.

Lesson 1 Reflection

After watching the videos on brain architecture, plasticity, and understanding the impact of the environment on a child, how does this information impact you as a teacher?

Even though my students have surpassed the initial and most influential periods of brain development, their brains have fully yet to come into their own; they still have a lot of growing to do. The information that they confront on a daily basis, both in and out of my classroom, will impact the future shape of their brains, and thus their minds. Even if they don't remember who Jefferson Davis was, or the interpretations of all of the Constitutional Amendments, if I deliver the lesson in a memorable way, it will influence the way they think and feel in the future, even if only slightly. 

In learning about elasticity, I find that I must take greater caution in planning my lessons so that they are suitable to their maturity, but also help further their development. Content must be appropriate, not too intense or adult, but it should definitely push what they had previously thought or what they hadn't thought about a particular subject. Content should stimulate, though not necessarily shock, which is easy to do in talking about history; most of the lessons that history yields are shadowy. But if too obscure, it may skew students' perceptions in unintended ways.