Three down, two to go. Two more weeks left of Institute, and finally today, I am getting a sense of urgency, as well as a sense of hopelessness and helplessness. Truthfully, after a week of positive encouragements and confidence-building, I felt I've made my students and myself believe that they have mastered all the objectives, learned all that they can, and would be able to score 100% on their midterm exam. Seeing the averages now, I realize there is still much to do, and I question, have all that I have done in the past two weeks been merely futile attempts at this thing called education? While 90% of the students actually improved, they weren't where I thought they would be, where I was confident that they would be. Such smart students who have aspirations to go on and become engineers, nurses, x-ray technicians, history teachers, dancers and choreographers. Faced with this conundrum, I question myself what it is I'm doing wrong and how I can make things work better.
Few moments I've had in the past week:
- Students are finally opening up and not being afraid to ask questions about the content and even outside the content. I am so impressed by this culture that I feel somehow they have created it on their own. At the same time, I am getting ahead of myself and thinking since they are asking the right questions, they must be getting the objective right? Not quite perhaps.
- Yesterday when I was teaching heterogeneous and homogeneous mixtures, I anticipated what was going to happen. In fact, I anticipated it a long time ago, and was having a hard time debating whether I should incorporate a lesson on diversity explicit into my lesson plan, adding a slide about discrimination into the powerpoint presentation or not. If I do, I thought perhaps my students would know that I've been trying to guess what I've been thinking, and this would also mean I have to take time out of my valuable lesson time in order to preach a message. On the other hand, I could simply talk on the spot if they act immaturely, hoping I would not have to go that far if they are mature. They are 9th graders... needless to say, as soon as I said "homogeneous mixtures", one student giggles and blurts out "homo", others around him began to giggle as well. All the way up until that point, we have been progressing through the lesson very well, talking about pizza and laughing together. I knew I was getting on a comfortable level with the students, but I needed to know my line. As soon as I heard what I anticipated, I immediately stopped the class, "Whoa, hold on, we need to have a conversation." I asked the students who laughed, "Why do you think it's funny? Please explain why it's funny." They knew I was being serious and quickly ended their laughing. I brought up the fact that no matter what a person is identified by, what they were doing was discrimination. While I'm not trying to ask them adopt my opinion, I wanted to know what is discrimination and what is intolerance. Moving on with the lesson, no one laughed again whenever the word "homogeneous" came up.
- Same lesson, at the end of the class, everyone went to the posting to look at their grades. Cariyell stays behind, "Miss, I want to talk to you." "What's up?" "Am I doing well in this classroom?" "What do you think?" "Yeah...?" "You have one of the highest grades in this class, you should be so proud of yourself!" She stood there for 10 seconds in a smiling state - it was a moment, I hugged her and told her that I was very proud of her.
- Yesterday morning, I get several hands up when I asked whether anyone thought the homework was difficult. "Can you go over the homework? I didn't get it." I was exhilarated that THEY asked ME, that I went ahead and showed them the problem.
- This morning, Rene asks me right before the exam what happens with N and O when they bond, what kind of covalent bond do they form. It was a question I couldn't even answer simply, because I couldn't even remember whether it was NO or NO2 that had a resonance structure, so I had to give a BS answer. Perhaps this weekend I can find an answer for him.
- Today after our midterm, we sat around in a circle and read together an article on Ellen Ochoa, the first Hispanic female astronaut in space, meant both as a motivational piece but also as a literacy piece. While my read-aloud wasn't as effective, and they weren't taking notes as they were supposed to mainly because I forgot, I stopped at each paragraph to ask some questions about the paragraph so they can relate to it better. But Joel was so excited today that he constantly raised his hands to make a comment, to the point I asked him several times to keep his valuable comments a bit while other students receive a chance to participate. Jeannette pointed out at the end of the class that his attitude is disrupting her willingness to participate, which is frustrating because finally one student is coming around, another is being pushed out of the picture.
- After lunch, I sat down with Danny to go over the homework that he didn't do correctly. While we talked, he asked, "Miss, how long did it take you to learn all this stuff [periodict table]?" "Like you, I went through high school and then college, a long time. ... Danny, you want to go to college right?" "Yeah..." "You will be an amazing engineer." I don't know what triggered it, instead of walking him, he sat in the cafeteria during his free hour of last period to do homework and extra credit. I was almost moved by his increasing confidence and seriousness for hard work. The positive phone calls definitely helped especially when he said his parents are a big influence for him.
I'm beginning to enjoy this job called teaching. While there are the ups and downs, everyday, the one thing that's always constant in my mind is my students.
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