UCSB Day 6

Today’s the first day at school!!! A great mixed of excitement and anxiousness. Woke up at 545am and had a bit of Fruit Loops and hot barley for breakfast. Got changed and readied for lesson. Peggy came and off we go to Dos Pueblos High School.
Looks cool huh!

Did not take photos of the infrastructure as I am really not sure if there are anything that I am not allowed to take. The outlook of the school looks a lot older than most of our schools. Most of their buildings are single level as compared to our multi-storeyed buildings. We went to visit the VP who later showed us around the place. While the exterior of the buildings looked run down, some rooms feature ICT such as interactive boards and most had televisions and projectors. They had some other interesting rooms as well such as a media production room where students can film programmes against a blue screen (which is green in colour) and that film will be aired on wednesday 10+ am. They do also have a swimming complex, a football field, theatre, different computer labs in which one takes apart broken computers, etc. We met numerous teachers along the way and were welcomed rather enthusiastically. Dos Pueblos is famous for their engineering department and we will get to tour the place on Wednesday. :)

As they work on a homeroom system, the teacher basically stays in the room and delivers the lesson while the students come in and out between periods. I first met my Cooperating Teacher (CT) at the photocopying room while touring the place. Based on my impression, he was one of (if not) the most nonchalant person with regards to our arrival. Usually most will smile and at least say a welcome but not this guy. When he was told that I will be popping by, his response was “whatever”. :O Gee… Strike one. After the tour, since my CT is the only one with full 6 periods (he is paid more so he says), i went to my class first. During class, it was fine. He will help me in my introduction to the class a little (which i had to repeat about four times for every lesson). As there was another person sitting in the class like i was from UCSB, I learnt quite a bit about the US system. Apparently, they are termed teacher-candidates who are required to meet certain requirements before being able to apply to be a teacher. She mentioned that she is a biology major in UCSB but she is required to serve a total of 60hours in schools before she can qualify for application to the teaching profession. As such, she is sitting in for the monday and friday class from morning till lunch with this Friday being the last day. I have came to learn also that the school offers positions such as being a teacher aid (assistant) to the Seniors of the cohort. Alright, some terms to get use to (i have yet to). Basically, elementary school takes students from Grade 1-6, middles school takes students from Grade 7-8/9 while high school takes students from Grade 9/10-12. Grade 9 are known as sophomores, Grade 11 are known as juniors while Grade 12 are known as seniors. So the Grade 12 (Secondary 4 equivalence) are allowed to take up these roles as teacher assistants to clear credits. Their job varies across teachers and based on the two that i came across, one of them marking some scripts while the other was sleeping.

My CT is a physics teacher so I sat in the physics classes. They have a variety of streams (as we will call them) for every subjects. In the case of physics, there are classes for ‘conceptual physics” which is catered for less mathematically inclined students and “physics” which basically has all of the mathematically components. I am not sure if it is the case of teacher’s expectation but it was told that the “conceptual physics” classes are generally a lot weaker and the difference is obvious when compared to the “physics” classes. The difference was apparently supposed to be so large that i can tell straight. However, I do not see that distinction that clearly. Perhaps it will be reflected in their work but i was not really able to tell from the class itself. As the teacher puts it, the students are less motivated. Indeed they may be so, I am NOT saying that my CT just let them be but I was just reflecting and cautioning myself about how we may discount students if we just think that they are just not motivated or (most damaging conception) not “motivatable”.

The students there are really a lot more vocal. In fact more so than what I have initially expected. What’s contrary to my expectations was that they are actually very considerable and respectful individuals. As much as they may be fun-loving etc, they are acknowledge the importance of upholding an environment that will allow others to learn. I think that this is very admirable. Students raise their hand and keep quiet till their called even when they may be overlooked by the teacher for a couple of times. Furthermore, students are willing to ask questions and not hold them in like Singapore students who most likely wait unless it’s a burning question (I am a Singaporean student yea).

And so the two main things that i took away today and of which i found was very worth looking into were:

• As mentioned, the education of students to respect their fellow peer and people around them. When others speak, listen. Be considerate enough to think for the people around you. There was this one case that a student put up his hand and upon acknowledge to name his problem, he mentioned that he will like to request for special arrangements as to his retest (which i will talk about later). With regard to that, my CT actually answered him and also reminded him that they could have done this out of lesson time so that they do not waste other students’ time. On an off, when students start to get rather chatty due to lack of work, they were asked to REFLECT and consider how that would have affected others in the class.
• That brings me to the next point of reflection. Before a quiz was returned, my CT actually gave out a reflection slip which guide the students to think about and consider how do they think they fared in the test, the content area covered, the hardest and the least hard questions. My CT did also provided his take on the manageability of the paper as well as how he expected the pupils to fare. In this particular test for example, he reasoned that the standard was manageable as there were a few students who are able to score full marks and a good portion who scored rather well. However, the spread of marks was great and that suggested the lack of effort in the underperforming group. I thought that such reasoning provided a logical and convincing (to me) point to inform the students to buck up. Off the class time, i feedbacked to my CT and asked if reflections were done often. As much as i thought that it was a good move, my CT brought up the point that since they were just 9th graders, they need lots of pushing are seldom reflective. Food for thought.

Another interesting point that i was thinking about was the importance of a system of standards. Each state has a set of regulation to follow in the education process. However, teachers are very much empowered to have their own style of grading and assessment. Some teachers will allow retests like my CT does. I think he doesn’t change the paper but he does collect the paper back after going through. The clause was that in order to put the name down on the retake list, the student is required to approach my CT during lunch and then go through the paper once more with him before they can have their name down. Not a bad idea but i was just thinking that students from other class would have lose out because of this retest system. I was also imagining that if this was allowed in Singapore, i will expect a large portion of students will immediately sign up for it even if they have scored close to full marks (well, i may be wrong). Then again, the average of the two tests will be taken so that will prevent some one who did not score full marks to attain full marks after retesting.

As to my CT, i got this rather cold feeling and that he is not very welcoming but well, it’s only the first day and he seemed kinda unwell too. He was also talking to the other teacher candidate about him having taken one more student previously but marked the person down as he did not think that the person was mature enough for the job yet. Sheesh… Strike two! Hope things are not as negative as i am. Gotta wake up even earlier tomorrow as we are cycling to school! Hope that I will be able to make it on time for my 8am class.