PHILOSOPHY!

How interesting to find out the mind of a teacher!

My interview with the amazing teacher I am aiding for went very well! It was in the midst of the children coloring a map of the world with greens and browns and showed one of the most important parts of teaching: keeping your mind on the task while making sure that the students are behaving behind your back. This also showed how well my teacher multitasks! Anyway, as it turns out, she is all about having structure: you put out for the children a set of high expectations and help them to reach those.

She has a very good handle on her classroom and it is impressive to see how well the kids respect her. At the same time, you can tell that they do like her and how much she teaches on a daily basis. A phrase she often uses is "You all have been making very good choices today", or the flip side being approximately "Please move your magnet into the yellow zone. I would like to see you make better choices than you have been". The magnet idea -- I don't know if your teachers do it -- is definitely cool! Each of the children have a little magnet person of themselves sitting on a whiteboard with different zones. It's a great visual aid instead of "drop a card" types of things.

Anyway, my teacher and I had a rather big conversation about teaching in general and here are some of the major points that she brought up:
*) It's important to build save learning environments in school.
*) School is a community and we should be building the connections in that way.
*) Set forth high expectations.
*) Grab the students' attention and be engaging. Use different types of questions for different children and help to scaffold on what they already know.

I also asked about other various things, such as her past. She has been a teacher for the past ten years and she has stayed with schools at the same SES level. We talked for a while about how SES effects children, and there were a few things: lower SES leads to limited social/academic schools, therefore it is necessary to push the children toward their growth; when children do not have their basic needs taken care of, it is harder for them to learn; it is harder for them to focus in general.

Another thing I asked about were morals. My teacher replied that social skills and morals are necessary to teach in school. I believe that this is a large debate and falls under the philosophy of a teacher.

Overall, I love my classroom, students, teacher, and entire situation. There is no way that I could have fallen into better hands!

One thing of controversy, as it has come up already: if a child grabs your hand to hold it, what should you do? When walking to recess, there's a little girl who always wants to hold my hand. Is this acceptable? I feel like it is, but there could be definite arguments against it. It's especially hard to tell her "no". How do you do this without hurting the child? It's the same as when I've made the mistake of going "shhh, listen to the teacher!". I realized how much it hurt one of the boys when I wouldn't listen to his story and told him to pay attention to my teacher up in the front of the classroom. Any suggestions to any of this?

My apologizes for being late.

Glad to see you all are having a good time in your classrooms :)