Hello all!!!
I hope that your semester is still going well and that your
KPTP submission went smoothly.
For my reflection, I am asking for your advice on some
matters I’m having trouble handling.
1. In my freshman class I have one girl who keeps picking on
the boy sitting next to her. She keeps telling him he’s dumb and stupid. He’s
recently started referring to himself as dumb/stupid and when I assigned them
an assignment to discuss their split identities (home vs school) (sports vs
friends) etc, he put that one of his traits was that he was dumb on it.
Here’s what I’ve tried:
I know that they are in AVID together and my CT is in the
process of visiting with their AVID teacher.
I’ve revisited the social contract, with the whole class,
they made at the beginning of the
semester , reminding them that they said that they would be respectful.
I’ve asked her to change her behavior towards him and she
simply rolls her eyes and is back to the same thing again.
2. In the same freshman class, I have a student who insists
on talking over me and cussing frequently. At some points he refuses to work
and disrupts the rest of the class.
Here’s what I’ve tried:
Asking him to change his behavior.
Revisiting social contract with whole class.
Asked to conference privately with him. He refused.
Wrote him up and sent him to the office.
Any advice you have on these two matters would be greatly
appreciated!!!!!
Now for something not so troubling. I recently went to PLC Literacy meeting where we discussed
bringing common core into the classroom and we used a book I highly recommend
to everyone called “The Core Six”. It offers great tips and activities for
integrating Common Core into your classroom.
Our discussion today was about vocabulary. The leader of the
PLC meeting asked us to recall the methods we used to integrate vocabulary into
our classroom. I then realized that I haven’t been using any methods to
integrate vocabulary. The book has a method and order for integrating
vocabulary and I wasn’t using any of them! When I was done being disappointed
in myself, I realized that while I am introducing new vocabulary into my unit,
I’m not focusing on it or making it known to my students that this is the
vocabulary we’re focusing on for this unit! She then provided us with a paper
to focus on our unit and what vocabulary words we were using and what methods
we might integrate now or in the future. While I realized that there were parts
of my unit that I need to re-evaluate before I teach The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian again, it showed me
that not everything will be perfect and that’s okay! It also showed me that the
great thing about our jobs is that we can learn from our mistakes and improve
on them constantly.
