The Outliers

These notes are from my first day of praxis this semester that took place this morning. This semester I am placed in a 6th grade langauge arts classroom at Spring Charter School.* This is the same classroom that I was placed in last semester for another education course, so half of the students that I worked with today were the same as the students that I worked with last semester. 

I was in classroom from 8AM-1PMand during this time the class engaged in morning meeting, a period of reading, a period of writing, and then the other class came in and repeated the reading period before I left.

Observations:

There were three different teachers that filtered in and out of the classoom. One of these teachers was the main 6th grade language arts teacher. This teacher is responsible for teaching language arts to 5th and 6th graders, using a looping system where they start with the students in 5th grade and then move up with them to 6th grade.

As a member of the rowing team here at Bryn Mawr, we're encouraged to enroll in the PE Rowing Class that an instructor, Harriet, offers at the start of the spring semester. We don't officially start our season until the second week of February (per NCAA rules), so the class is a good way to get in shape for the actual season. While many of my classmates are also my teammates, everyone else in the class is entirely new to rowing, so the first few days are spent learning the rowing stroke on the ergometer. 

These notes are from the second class on Tuesday. In this case, I can't really say I'm learning how to row in the class  - hopefully I know how pretty well after eight straight years of it - but instead I'm learning how to observe the instruction and withhold my own critiques for the other students while still leading my team as the captain. 

7:00am - Class starts

- People milling around in the multi-purpose room

- Harriet takes attendance and instructs Joanna, my co-captain, to run everyone through a 10-minute warmup while she quickly runs to her office

- Joanna tells us to do a 3-2-1 warmup, with increasing pressure. Because she's standing next to me, I correct her and say that the new students have no idea what that means, so she clarifies that it's 3 minutes at an easy pressure, then 2 minutes with more pressure, and a final minute with more. 

I've attached two sets of field notes.  One attachement is notes I took specifically for this assignment after my Zumba PE class yesterday, and the other attachment is old field notes I have saved from when I was in Special Ed and ELL.  

01/29/2013

Today, I took field notes on a field placement orientation in a class. I’ve used pseudonyms throughout. The orientation took about 30mins.