WEEK TWO, DAY ONE

This week we have 8 students in the class. They are all boys (not sure about why these first two weeks have had zero girls, but it’s an interesting note). The age range is from 10-15, and the backgrounds of the kids have an extreme range of socioeconomic statuses.

We kicked off the week in the same way, having the kids write about a boring prompt “Should schools require uniforms? Please explain and support your answer”. As expected based on last week, all eight of them didn’t enjoy the work. We had them crumple up the papers and toss them into the garbage.

The format was primarily the same as the first day of last week, so I won’t go too in depth in detail. However, we didn’t do the imitation activities this week on the first day, instead we focused more time on writing about things the kids are passionate about. In addition to our free write about anything, we had them do a word association activity that led to a short writing assignment. This week, we had a little trouble with a couple of the boys in terms of getting them excited about writing. Thoughts below.

Thoughts from the writing portion: 

• There is a complex line we have to walk, between setting learning goals and not being too overbearing. We want to have common goals that the kids can work toward as a class, but learning is extremely individual.
• The reasons why we learn are totally different and we can’t expect to standardize it, but we want to be able to get the class fired up over the same things.
• We also need to figure out effective ways to measure the kids’ success and progress. It’s hard to motivate kids to work on the pure basis of enjoying learning when they are often not interested.
• There is a disconnect between what we are passionate about and the classroom. The classroom, “learning”, and “writing” seem to be triggers for a lot of the kids and makes them not want to do the activity, even if it’s about something that they love! For example, I tell a student he can write about his favorite food, but the concept of writing is so ingrained as a negative thing that is boring, we can’t overcome that mindset.
• We are improving on giving individual feedback while still keeping the class engaged, because when you start talking to one kid the rest tend to lose interest because it’s no longer applicable to them.
• Accomplishment is one of the driving forces behind why people work because it feels great. One of the flaws in our activities has been the lack of finishing. We have been acting as if the process of writing itself is always fun, but the truth is sometimes it can be frustrating and difficult.
• Even when working with kids to really find out what they are passionate about, they don’t necessarily jump to wanting to learn about it. Having total control of your own learning is so foreign to so many of them that it sometimes is actually detrimental.
• Definitely had some kids completely buy in to the process and fully enjoyed writing about anything they wanted.

In the afternoon we moved onto our first day of public speaking. We spent a lot of time working on voice control and tone, similar to last week. Tongue twisters, coloring words, and telling short creative stories were the primary activities that we used. We rounded out the day with our topic choosing session for their presentations that they will work on throughout the week.

Thoughts on the overall day:

• Having more kids is good and bad. Clearly with only two we could do tons of individual feedback. However, with 8, we are able to integrate a lot more peer feedback and group work.
• The egg activity is a favorite for a second straight week. It’s interesting, because it actually has the most amount of instruction. However, I feel that because it seems the least like “conventional classroom activities” there is an automatic disassociation from learning and it becomes “fun”.
• The kids give great peer feedback but if we have all of them share in front of the full group it takes too much time and some of them start losing interest.
• It’s really inspiring to see some of the students completely “go for it” in the public speaking activities. When they hold nothing back and don’t try to censor their emotions, some of them have made great progress.

This blog post may seem like it has lots of criticism of ourselves, but Wilson and I both felt the first day of this week was overall an awesome experience! We are holding ourselves to high standards because of our extremely short time with the kids, and we want to make an impact in that window.