Backing Up

There are two things in my notes, that I have failed to blog about. As follows:

September 30th
I observed Laura Scruggs. She was the first person at Briggs I found I really liked (she is the one who complemented my hair!). She teaches 7th grade Social Studies and Language Arts, she is the teacher we worked with for our time line, and is Melissa's cooperating teacher. She is ex-military, and Denis, our VP insisted that all of us make a point of ovserving her.

Apparantly I observed her on a good day, the students were more well behaved then usual. The group in her morning class are particularly challanging. I hear there are several IEP kids, as well as other behavior issues. The afternoon group for her is the 'Algebra class', and so there is a smaller percentage of high flying kids in her morning class as well.

The day I observed they were presenting interviews they had done with a student and were imitating that student in an effort to get the class to guess who they had interviewed. The biggest thing I notcied at first is how different this class was then my own. Part of it is that perhaps this class is just more difficult in general, there is the 7th grade Algebra class during this time period, so none of the 'high fliers' are in the class at all. On the other hand, I have heard from many people that seventh grade is the hardest, and that they are the meanest.

The activity that they were doing was presenting an interview that they had done of another student. They spoke as if they were the interviewee, and then the rest of the class had to guess who it was. In addition to the verbal information, many students also did a physical imitation of their persion. The class thought the whole thing was pretty funny and were fully of snickers and giggles. They laughed at the reason that people recieved the name that they did, and at the hobbies people put down and in general were not respectful. Mrs. Scruggs was frequently having to remind them; "Attention to the front, please".
It seems like the seventh graders are a lot more self conscious then the sixth graders. They are more nervous about presenting, and seem more afraid that what they do won't be ok. Less of a willingness to try.

When things started to get out of hand, and the kids couldn't focus at all, Mrs. Scruggs told them to stop, and take a break, but not leave the room. I thought this was a good idea. It gives kids the opportunity to stretch their legs and get some f the antseyness out without spreading the kids out and loosing track of them. When the break was over, she ws easily able to countdown from ten, and the students went back to their seats. During the break I noticed that the class immediatly split into the girls and boys sides of the room.

Later on during the interview process Mrs. Scruggs interrupted the class and very pointedly said "Some of you are being rude". This seems like the sort of tactic I would try and employ, although I'm not convinced that it was an effective one...

Soon after that they changed activities. Mrs. Scruggs had them pull out their spirals. She had a set up for the spirals that I hadn't seen before. They had a table of contents, and had numbered their pages, so there was a limited amount of space for each entry. But, they also knew exactly where to look in order to find their notes on a certain subject.

Today they were doing an activity called 'Hit the Bridge'. Using bridge words, or conjunctions. She had the acronym (fons BAY) to stand for the words, the capitals being the most commonly used. The then spent some time writting compund sentances and using examples of all of the different conjunctions.

In the middle of the explanation her overhead projector broke. She very smoothly moved to using the white board instead.

In order to integrate this lesson with the social studies she had been doing she had them use topics from the timeline that they had been making.

The lesson was effective and efficient, if not perhaps the most enojoyable for the students. And she maintained control of her classroom at all times.