Evaluating is for Everyone!

October 3, 2013

If you think about it; even as a baby people start evaluating stuff. As a baby, I evaluate how my parents worked. K-12, I was evaluating school. Finally, as an aspiring teacher, I am evaluating how teachers run their classroom. This week's lesson was dedicated to learning how to evaluate sentences in Language Arts class. The students learned what clauses, nouns, verbs, etc. are. This then lead them to dissect each sentence; this helped show them what it takes to make a sentence.

To help make the dissection of evaluating interesting to the kids, the teacher set up some different techniques. The first technique was a competition of boys verse girls; they had the projectors project a sentence onto the white board and dissected a sentence. The second technique is writing in what they call a "writer's notebook", this book gives them the pencil to paper feel; they write their analysis, discussion, etc. in the book. The third technique was experiments. The first experiment was analyzing the difference in chips and wrote three sentences on their criteria and how they analyzed. The second experiment will be comparing a movie, commercial, or video game to another, they will write two paragraphs on this experiment. The third experiment will be researching more in depth on the lesson that is being taught in their social studies class and evaluating, they will write three paragraphs on this experiment.

Ants in the Pants

Have you ever had those days that you just cannot stay still or on track with one thing; you constantly have to keep moving every second of the day? Today was definitely one of those days for this class. I cannot blame them--sitting through a 90 minute class period, learning how to dissect a sentence and evaluating potato chips before being able to eat them. One thing I love about this teacher--she understands that the kids have "ants in their pants" and cannot stay focused. She gives them a variety of different activities in different techniques to keep them involved and entertained.

Are you a Trouble Maker or Twaddle Tale?

The middle school age is the "in between age" of being a kid and being an adult. In middle school, the kids are transitioning from one thing to the other. There are some kids that are still in the kid stage and some that are maturing. While sitting on my chair, listening to the teachers lesson  a kid raised his hand to tell the teacher that another one of the students was on his tablet instead of listening. To be honest, I kind of giggled a little. I have been in the setting for so long of if you do not listen and mess around instead of listening to the teacher, it is your own fault and your bad grade. Another incident I witnessed was a group struggling to focus and work together, the teacher came over and before she could say anything the whole group had a triangle of pointing fingers on who started the issue.

I believe watching teachers deal with such issues in a classroom is more educational to an inspiring teacher to learn how to handle situations then to read it from the book. I have been more invested and am able to remember the incidents and how the teacher dealt with the struggles then reading it in my education books for college.