Urban Seminar, Day 1

Before I wax eloquent about day one, let me talk about yesterday! We arrived at Central High School, which is right next to La Salle. The high school is HUGE! It's so much bigger than PBU. I was traumatized as we moved into our La Salle rooms later. I am always thankful I go to PBU and not a huge public school with communal bathrooms, dorms with lots of floors, graffiti, smoking, etc. I don't think I could ever go to any other school other than a small Bible college. Wow. But anyway, we arrived and had to make several trips from the parking lot across the street over into the dorms and up 3 flights of stairs. The dorm complex has a little thing where you swipe to get past the metal gate thing... I don't know what it's called... like at the MRT and LRT. Yeah. Anyway.

So today I got up bright and early at 5:45, got in the shower and discovered we had no hot water. That was a cold shower! But it woke me up (not that I wasn't already wide awake in the first place). We left for the school at 7:30 because we thought we had to be there at 8. Turns out the teachers don't show up until 8:10 or later so we'll be leaving later next time.

I was expecting very different things when I went to the school. I had done some after school tutoring stuff in Kensington for my ministry my second semester of my freshman year. The kids there were rough, very badly behaved, and very troubled. This classroom was rather well-behaved! In fact, it was better behaved than any classroom I have been in in the States! Unfortunately, it was excessively boring. They did a lot of tests today (catching up on stuff they missed because of PSSA's and benchmarks testing) in the morning and then in the afternoon they just did review sheets on their own for math. I felt like there was never much of a lesson and that they really learned little. For language arts, the teacher wrote the vocabulary on the board along with the definitions and told them to memorize them so we can use them in the story. Wouldn't it make so much more sense if they learned the vocabulary in context?! At least the kids were really quiet which meant I didn't get a headache. ;)

Speaking of the kids, they're SO CUTE! I have 4th grade and I'm taller than all of them. Whew! When we went to pick them up at their line-up, they immediately started talking to me. One girl said "Hi! I like your skirt." Another said "Are you Cambodian?" The little Cambodian girl was my biggest fan, apparently. She even wrote me a welcome letter. There were no white kids in my class, which was also unusual for me. I'm used to having at least several! The one kid I thought was white was actually Guatemalan. He's really cute too. I helped him with his math. (Amazing) All the kids call me Miss Becky but my cooperating teacher is convinced my name is Betty. Hahaha.

During lunch, I graded papers. They were doing worksheets on reading comprehension. Wow. I was shocked. I thought reading comprehension was poor in the Philippines... it is just as bad in this class! Although it appears that they are learning it in their lessons (they have enough worksheets on it and stuff) somehow they're not learning effectively because they really didn't get it. There were 20 questions and most of them had 9-14 correct. Some of the questions were just bad anyway. They were multiple choice. One section was on paintings by a Mexican-American artist. She painted pictures of her rather huge family. The multiple choice question was something along the lines of "The viewer will realize this about her paintings" and the option that many kids picked was "Her family is too big" (which was true -- it was a huge family) but the correct one had to do with the closeness of their family. But since it said "viewer" it was really so much more of an opinion question. Bad question. Bad question. :) It made me want to attack my IDP again with fervor. Hahaha.

After lunch they had a period of Silent Sustained Reading. They kids just picked books and read to themselves. One girl raised her hand and when I went over to her she said "Can you read this to me?" Hahaha. I said "Uh, no. This is silent reading!" She kind of smiled and said "Ok...." Haha. Cute kids. I think they tried to win points by complimenting me. Sneaky kids. I got multiple "You're so pretty" and "I like your outfit" and then they wanted me to basically tell them the answer in math. Hahahaha. Tricksey hobbitses.

During math, they worked on all these problems that were supposedly review. There was a pre-algebra section dealing with fractions. The kids had no clue what they were doing! Dr. Mac's voice kept coming into my head: "Never teach the concept before the skill!" I was apalled! They were allowed to use calculators for things they didn't need to use calculators for! Most of them were just punching fractions into their calculator until they got the answer. I asked a couple kids "What is a fraction?" One of them pointed to the number. I said "Ok that's how it's represented but what does it mean?!" Wow... so I started drawing boxes and shading things in. It was cool to see "lightbulbs" go off in some of their heads as I described why we needed common denominators and what numbers were really representing. THANKFULLY the fractions were easy! Whew! If they had gotten into multiplication and division I would have been totally lost.

We all left at 3:10 and then had another general meeting at 4 and a debriefing thing with PBU at 5:15 and another large group debriefing meeting at 7. It was interesting to hear how different everyone's experiences were.

I am excited about these two weeks. I have had a feeling that urban teaching might be something I'd like to do and these next few weeks might confirm that. Haha. At least.. as an alternative to Iraq. :)