Chapter 7- Hannah Schreiber

"After reading the kids' letters, though, I'd decided it was time to admit temporary defeat"
Being able to crumple up your lessons and admit that you were wrong is not an easy thing to do. This is one of the lessons that I learned during my student teaching placement. I was teaching preschool during this one particular circumstance, reading a story to my 13 4 yr olds. It was a bad story. A LONG bad story. One which I hadn't read ahead of time to make sure that it wasn't a bad long story. The kids were bored with the story, and worst of all, so was I. They were all starting to get really antsy and couldn't sit still any longer. My cooperating teacher let me trudge through the book and finish an abbreviated version of it (in which I ended up making up part of the story on my own just to make it more interesting). Later that afternoon she told me that if I ever find myself in a similar situation again, that what she normally does is either admit to the kids that the book was boring, or tell them that you'll put a bookmark in and finish it later. (generally 4 yr olds won't remember if it was something they weren't interested in and you won't actually have to finish it.) It was hard at first to admit that I made the mistake by picking such an awful book, but in the long run, it saved me a lot of misbehaving out of sheer boredom.


"The security measures they seemed to say, were a necessary evil"
I know that this is quite a stretch from security measures and what was actually happening in the book, but the term "necessary evil" made me think about other necessary evils in education today. I currently have a child in my pre-k class that really needs to be receiving services of some kind. The way that things have been going, he just can't function in a regular classroom all by himself. The center that I'm teaching at doesn't have any sort of inclusion "technology" or services to help children with legitimate behavioral disorders. Today he was observed by Roosevelt center, a school for children with special needs, in the hopes that they would provide a 1:1 aid or some other sort of services for this child (or to train current employees in ways to help this child). Unfortunately, this child's mother has a fear of her child being labeled as special needs and prepared him for the observer. In the education world, i guess that you could say that labeling children with special needs is a "necessary evil" for getting a child the services that they need to succeed in school.

My last creative connector deals with Mr. Michie and talking to Mayra about what has been bothering her. Though my scenario is not really the same, it has similar characteristics. When I was in my first student teaching placement in Kindergarten, there was one particular child that was very quiet, didn't play with the other children, seemed to have speech problems as well as fine/gross motor delays. He came to school in dirty clothes with open sores on his feet from his wet socks/shoes combination. But worst of all, he had bruises all over his little body. Its one of those scenarios where you don't really know what to say. Nor did I know what to do. I wasn't the classroom teacher so it wasn't my place to bring up suspicions about abuse/neglect. But I felt like I had a duty to this child to protect him and make sure that he was taken care of. In the end, it turned out that my cooperating teacher had the same concerns as me and had already started looking into contacting CPS to help the family. But reading that part of the book made me remember that awful feeling of not knowing how to help. I think that Mr. Michie helped Mayra to decide what she wanted for herself and not to try and work hard for anyone but herself.

Essence Extractor: Students need to be interested in their learning for THEM and not because they are trying to impress someone else (ie: a teacher or a parent)