Wow. Mondays are tough! I am going to be observing her classroom this week so that I can know how all of the procedures and such go before I start doing some lessons next week (on heredity.) Observing today was not that hard, but I can tell my teacher has been teaching for a while. Even while she was saying she was so scatterbrained, her classroom ran smoothly. The children knew where they were supposed to be and when they were supposed to be there. They always knew what they should be working on, and they knew what they should have turned in already. I was so impressed by everyone! When you give the students those high expectations, they will exceed them!
There are two students who have had some trouble staying focused in the past. Their additional teacher came in at the end of the day. "Wow! You are such a good teacher! Those two were both doing their work!" And I think part of it is because she expects them to do their work. I will need to remember this for when I am teaching, have high expectations (that are also realistic) and the students will reach them.
There is so much paper work to do! Whether that be grading papers, cutting papers out, gluing papers, laminating papers, or just filing papers. There is always paper! Which is a great thing for a classroom. Thankfully all of the students in my classroom have their own computer so we are able to do quite a bit of learning with those. But there is a healthy balance between paper and computer work.
At the end of the day, I could tell those kids were ready to go home. An hour before school got out, at least 5 reminders were needed to tell them to stay on task. These kids work so well in the morning, but I think they should have some unstructured breaks in addition to their afternoon recess.
Speaking of recess. I have been thinking about Finland. For every hour of instruction time they have 15 minutes of unstructured recess for their students. (Or something similar to that, so I have heard) Yet their children are doing so well in school and their test scores (Which cannot show everything a child knows) are very high. They also don't start formally teaching their students to read until they reach the age of 7. How can those students keep up with our guys? Or rather how can our guys keep up with them? We are struggling to fit so much into a set amount of time, and each year we just have to put more into it. Our students need to learn one more thing, when we didn't have time to teaching the original 27 things.I read this article about the education system in Finland compared to Canada, and found it very interesting. It doesn't talk about recess but about how students and teachers are valued. My favorite quote from it was "I always say you can't take one element out and transfer it to your own country. Education is the result of culture, history, and the society of a nation." What does that say about our nation?
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