The key idea that I took from the part of the lecture (and my reading) on Confucius was that good individuals made for good society.  He emphasized things like “know yourself” and “love others” and “pursue the highest good.” Not, learn science to get a good job! Which, of course is also important, but the more abstract things that Confucius believed in make for a more civil society (in my opinion).

The key idea that I took from the part of the lecture on Lao tzu, and having read the Tao Te Ching, is that learning is organic and happens at the appropriate moment.  I think that this is a little harder to wrap my head around.  I guess I’m more of a Confucian – I need some rules and codes.  It’s a little scary to think about how this would work in my middle school… His ideas on learning remind me of Waldorf schools.  The idea (for example) that students will read when their ready, not on a schedule has its pluses and minuses.  As I’ve said in previous posts, I’m not in favor of pushing kids into algebra before they’re ready – BUT, we should have reasonable benchmarks so that we can assist students who are having difficulties.

The key idea that I took from the part of the lecture on Gandhi is the emphasis of the student as a part of society.  This fits in with last week’s “Paideia” idea, which I really liked.  This is also important as we’re a very multicultural society.  We have to take into account, and honor students’ home language, culture and experiences since these things frame how students interact with the world.

The lecture taught me/helped me remember the large goals of education in general: academic knowledge, citizenship, self-realization, career/job preparation.  It also reinforced what I knew about different modes of instruction and the different roles that stakeholders can play in education.  I know that sometimes it’s easy for me to fall into the teacher as provider of knowledge and student as absorber of knowledge role, especially when I am overwhelmed (which is often).  But I need to remember that my ultimate goal is to have students as active learners, and for me to be a guide.

This week I also learned that the idea of students as active learners is at least a century old.  Whitehead’s “Aims of Education” paper from 1916 was full of great ideas that are still relevant today.  As I stated in my discussion post I was especially inspired by this quote: “Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilization of knowledge.” Sometimes I really struggle with some of the content that I am required to teach – why exactly do students need to know this specific fact?  Maybe the problem is that I’m not really asking the students to DO anything with their knowledge.

And this week I also learned that different people have different reasons for wanting to teach (which, I guess is pretty obvious).  This was evident from all of the discussion posts that I read – they varied from “everyone in my family is a teacher” to “I am driven to work with early elementary students” (not direct quotes).  The readings from “Educational Foundations” also reinforced this.  I loved Frank McCourt’s essay – I often find that students LOVE to hear personal stories from me, and I think that some time spent showing students that I’m a person is worth missing instructional time.  It pays off in better relationships with my students.  A lot of my classmates seemed inspired by “The Green Monongahela”, but for some reason it didn’t really do much for me.  But I guess we all respond to different things.  The excerpt from “Death at an Early Age” was very disturbing to me.  It made me wish that I had a time machine to go back to help Stephen.  If Kozol was trying to make people angry and spur action, hopefully he succeeded.

Another instance where direct instruction  can be helpful in when dealing with recent immigrants or ELL students.  For these students, the various teaching models can be more confusing when they don’t have all the language or they are hesitant to participate in group activities.  Cultural views on interactions in class may affect their participation.  A friend of mine teaching math at a high refugee and ELL school was having trouble with newer immigrants trying to teach the constructivist math methods.  She got a hold of some older textbooks and tried teaching in the old “drill and kill” method of teach and practice.  The newer students had an easier time with that method.  She could then try scattering different types of lessons in every once in a while to try to get those students used to different styles of learning.

The most realistic approach to the intelligences is varying the type of lesson each day to try to touch on different learning styles throughout the year.  It may not be as good as individual attention for each student but with the limitations teachers have it is better than nothing.

As a science teacher cooperative learning is essentially required in many cases.  Few schools have the resources to supply each student with lab supplies.  It is up to the teacher to come up with some creative ways in which the groups can accomplish their tasks.  during my student teaching, my mentor and I used group work quite a bit.   We modified some of the lessons to be more group oriented and constructivist.   One such lesson that I remember well is a lesson on the moons apparent motion.  Each group had a task card in which they had to answer two questions.  As a group they were tasked with coming up with a way to model which way the moon spun clockwise or counter clockwise.   In addition the groups had to come up with a way to prove through modeling whether or not the moon spins knowing that on Earth we always see the same side of the moon.  In order for each group to complete the activity they had to model their answer and explain it to Ms. Anex or I.  This activity was great for student constructed knowledge.  Many students came in to the lesson with preconceptions.  Some students made up their minds as soon as they read the questions.  It was fun to hear some of the students when they saw that their initial thoughts were wrong.

I think cooperative learning can also be a bit of a double edged sword.  Not all students like working with others.  Not all students work well with others.  Some students who are prone to slacking off will continue to slack off even in the group leaving the rest of the group to make up their portion of the activity.  Other students who may not do so well individually may be brought up by the input of other students. Each student can bring a new perspective to a problem and maybe as a group solve a given problem.

Cooperative activities are good practice for working together.  I as a teacher need to be vigilant and monitor the groups for participation and appropriate behavior.

When I think about all the tools I’ve learned about over the past year, they sometimes blur together.  Advance organizers, graphic organizers, non-linguistic representations,  and others are all tools which can be mixed and matched to fit your needs.  A non-linguistic representation can serve as an advance organizer.  A graphic organizer can serve as either an advance organizer or a non-linguistic representation.  I think we are sometimes lead to believe each of these is an individual tool each separate.

I tried to use a form of advance organizer a few times during my internship.  One was during the introduction of a unit of rocks.  I started by trying to think up all the ways in which rocks could be used or have meaning to humans and found pictures of them.  I then started the class asking the students if they thought about all the rocks they pass everyday and how rocks might be used or important in the lives of humans.  We discussed each idea as it came up and I pulled up a picture if I had thought about it.  If the students hadn’t thought about it,  during the discussion I brought rocks as significant places or objects, such as Uluru in Austrailia.  I finished the lesson telling about the stone statues of Easter Island and how the statues are believed to have been a factor in the fall of the civilization there.  This story seemed to catch their attention and we had some good discussion about the story.  I thought this lesson went well and even though it may have been a little more abstract than it should have been I think the students learned some fun facts and may have peaked their interest in rocks a little more.

Something I, and I am sure others, have thought about in regards to science is how long must a student retain something for a lesson to be successful?  Say a students of mine does very well in the lessons and on the test.  If they can’t do as well on a similar test a year later was my lesson less successful.  If they can’ t remember 5 year later have I failed?  I took french in high school and I did well in the class.  I can’t really speak any french now and if I were given a test from my french class I am sure I would do poorly.  So was my high school teacher not very good?  I bring this up in light of the Private Universe video.  I suspect most of the students hadn’t thought about the phases of the moon since middle or high school.  Why should they?  Will not knowing the phases of the moon or seasons keep the economists or the doctors from being successful?  What if Bill Gates or Donald Trump, or Barak Obama couldn’t answer the questions?  For the college graduates were their middle or high school teachers that taught them phases of the moon poor teachers because they couldn’t remember 5, 8, or 10 years later?  I don’t really know that this is going anywhere, these are just a couple of things I thought of when I thought about concept attainment after watching the Private universe video.

As for the philosophies of curriculum and instruction, I pretty much agree with the chapter summary.  No one of these philosophies is perfect on it’s own and I doubt there are any teachers that adhere to strictly one philosophy.  A good teacher uses what they believe works from whatever philosophy they can.  just like students take different classes to be well rounded, teachers use different methods to produce well rounded students.  A student that only takes history all through school may be really good at history but they probably won’t be very well rounded as a learner.  Likewise, a teacher that just stands in front of  a class and lectures is not going to reach all the students and won’t create very well rounded students.  As a future teacher I hope to be able to use a variety of methods in my classroom to creat a learning environment all students can be successful in.

I myself have had ups and downs through the internship.  I have gotten to experience what it feels like to give a lesson that just clicks and many of the students get it.  When exploring the interior of the Earth, the lesson involved the use of online simulations for students to see and think about followed by students acting out the properties of earthquake waves.  The students then were able to connect what they saw in their modeling to what they saw on the simulation video.  That lesson in particular is one that I recall hearing quite a few “oh’s” as what they saw clicked.  On the flip side there were times that my lessons just didn’t have the punch I would like.  I realize that 1^st year teachers don’t come in with a whole years worth of amazing lessons.  It takes years of trial and error to start to build your arsenal.  I still felt bad on the day where the main focus was a lecture/power point presentation with notes.  I tried to make them as entertaining as possible, and some students enjoy those lessons, but they tend to invite restlessness and loss of attention as the lesson goes on.  There were a couple of lessons that I just didn’t prepare enough for.  Timing and pacing are two skills that I need practice with.  There have been lessons I thought would only last 20 minutes that have taken whole periods, and there have been lessons that I thought would take the entire period that were over in half the time, leaving me scrambling for things to do.  I know I need to work on my planning.  It is always good to have too much planned and not get to it rather than too little planned and be left twiddling your thumbs for the last 15 minutes of class (not that the students mind).

In addition to my time in the classroom with the students I participated in professional development activities with the science department.  I collaborated with the other 8^th grade science teachers to come up with some common formative assessments for various units.  These meetings were good in that they were a chance for me to get to see how the other teachers taught some of the lessons.  If the students of one of the other teachers did well on the common assessment while mine struggled a little, it was to my benefit to see how that teacher conducted the lessons and how I can change mine to better help the students.

The SPU portion of the internship was a challenging one for me.  I had been out of school for 12 years before going back.  Needless to say my study habits were nonexistent.  Some of the classes were beneficial.  I feel like the classroom management class was helpful in that he gave us actual classroom examples and his take on those situations.   The teaching methods classes were OK.  We did some lesson planning and also a mini lesson.  I think it would have been more beneficial to have had more practice planning and teaching of mini lessons followed by critiques and ideas from the class.  I thought the feedback I got from the one mini lesson was helpful, but I didn’t get to turn around and try to apply it to another lesson.  The technology class was a broad overview of some of the technologies available free online.  The big project was to create a blog about one or more of the technologies for other teachers.  I feel like we would have been better served practicing creating a site for students to be used in a classroom.  I could see how some of the applications could be used in the classroom.  One tool called “etherpad” seemed like it had lots of potential for use in group projects in the classroom.

In the end the internship has been an interesting and fun experience.  Lots of people say that you are born to teach and you hear the calling to teach.  I was convinced by my girlfriend to give it a try.  Without that I doubt I would ever have thought about teaching.  I am glad I did decide to give it a try.  Will I be a good teacher? We’ll see.  I can see the potential in myself.  If I can keep my motivation up during the hard times I think I will be able to do it.  I am still nervous about the prospect of having my own classroom and being completely responsible for my students.  I think the year long internship will help me in my first year teaching.  Many new teachers have only had 2 or 3 months in the classroom.  Everyone says the first year is the hardest and if I can make it through it only gets better with time.  I have some time this summer to find a job and prepare myself to set out on my own.