The first day of my practicum, was by no means what I was expecting at all, which was a great thing! My practicum is taking place at South High School in which I will be in a Freshmen English class. The two classes that I am observing are pretty normal to what you would expect in a freshmen English class, but the second class of the day is somewhat different from the first class, even though they are both freshmen English classes the second class has a large number of IEP students so there is a ESE teacher also in the class room. I met with my teacher about 20 minutes prior to the start of class to go over the lesson plan for the day and if I had any questions for her, which was extremely nice of her to do. Of course I had plenty of questions as did she so twenty minutes went by pretty fast. I learned that there is no attendance policy, students can miss multiple days as long as it is excused by their parents, I also learned that any student can take an honors class; because they have no standards or requirements.
The lesson for the day was sentence structure, identifying the subject and verb in the sentence, identify the complement and the direct object. The teacher informed me in the beginning of class that her students simply did not know these steps/components/ rules in English so she had to stray off course to teach and try and get her students to understand and know this material before moving on. I was pretty shocked that this was what was being taught in class and that 95% of her students did not know these basic steps in grammar.
Close to the end of the class she allowed the students to start their homework, so that if they needed any help or had any questions she would be able to help them, during this time she allowed me to walk about the room and help students. She gave me strict instructions to not give the students the answers, but to try and help them work it out. This proved to be a difficult task because the students were expecting me to give them answers which I did not but they were getting frustrated with me, I did not let it get to me I just tried another approach to the question and hoped it would help them understand or figure out the correct answer on their own.
The class room itself is a smart class room, the teacher uses a smart board and there are multiple computers in the class room too. Because my practicum is on Monday and on this past Monday there was no school due to presidents day I arranged with my teacher an alternative time to come into the class room, so I will be at South tomorrow at seven, which is exciting because the school is on block schedule will be joining them for their literature part of English, which is something I am looking forward to and I will hopefully be able to look at some of their writing. Over all I enjoyed my first experience at South and I am looking forward to what this experience is going to bring me, I know I will be learning a lot!
