September 18-22, 2006 Observation

September 18, 2006

Before class today my mentor and I talked about my lesson plan for next week. She made some suggestions on the times that I picked out as well as altering an activity. She said that pairing up the students and having them come up with counter arguments for their partner’s topic would not work well because the students would not want to hurt each other feelings. While I understand where she is coming from, and I will follow her advice I thought that maybe we should push students beyond their comfort zone since in the ‘real’ world hurting someone’s feelings will not matter.

In class the students did a second peer review which looked at different types of sentences. My mentor taught sentence structures on Independent and Dependent clauses and had students do some examples on the grammar website. I know the importance of teaching the different structures, but I did not see this as the most effective way. Some of the students were just clicking answers without even reading the questions on the quiz. 

September 20, 2006

The students began brainstorming on topics for their second paper. The students looked at the assignment online and started some different in-class discussion on what an argumentative paper is and what kinds of topics would work. My mentor said that the students had to use one online source and it could be any kind of online source. I was a little surprised since some online sources are not really academic. Afterwards she went back to review sentence structure with the clauses, as well as compound, complex and simple sentences. The students then tried to underline, bold or italicize the different types of sentences in their paragraphs from brainstorming. The students were having difficulty understanding the different types of sentences and many of the students did not care at all.

September 22, 2006

I learned how to troubleshoot and work the Elmo in the classroom. It was a good lesson to learn, something practical I needed to know. The rest of the class was focused to picking a topic for their papers and learning about how to write persuasively. My mentor talked about logos, pathos, and ethos, which the students seemed to understand but was unsure of how to apply them. I would have liked to see her teach more with Aristotle, rather than just a general overview. The students started working on their thesis sentences for the end of the class. I really like how the students have an in-class document where they can write everything that they do in class. The students have to answer all of these different questions the teacher poses and has all of their ideas available to them while they are working on this project. Not only is it helpful to the students while they are working on their paper, but the students are constantly writing while they are in class and can see their progress over the weeks.