Sorry

My worst sorry moment probably comes from my first two weeks in student teaching. To give a little back ground on this moment I had a student who was non-compliant and very accusatory. He did not want to do his work and when I confronted him about it countless times he stated that he did not believe that I liked him very much. My reaction to his statement startled me and him as well and made my cooperating teacher laugh. I came to realize later that what I had stated was not bad or even that hurtful, but my quick reaction, sarcasim, and dry sense of humor made the situation a little uncomfortable for my student. Thinking back on my reaction I believe that it has been the best motivation for him and one of my best learning experiences as a student teacher because now he does his work and is one of my best student. So without further ado here is what I said.
I remember closing my eyes for about 2 seconds and then looking my student dead in the face and wondering what was about to bypass my brain and come straight from my lips. I looked my student in the eye and without pause stated that no I did not like him when he did not do his work therefore he must be under the logical understanding that I did not like him since he was intelligent enough to understand that intellectuals do not tolerate laziness. I know that the bulk of what I said went over his head and that only my tone and demeanor were the problem, but I still felt upset with myself. The student stopped staring at me, turned around in his seat and proceeded to do his work. He later came and apologized to me for upsetting me and I began to feel worse because not only had I shown emotion to my students but I had also shown that I could be rattled by there actions and words. Since this moment I have had no real problems with my students, and my cooperating teacher laughed at me and said that it was a good lesson. Still I wish that I could have that moment back cause I think that now with a little experience I could have handled things differently.

raleigh brooks sumner

classroom management

The three tips that I chose for this blog are time mangement, ESOL managment, and interruption management. The reason that I chose these three forms of classroom management is because these are the three things that affect my teaching the most. I have the most problems with interruption because they seem to be non stop and not coming from my students necessarily. Yes I know I've stated that I have had kids arrested out of my classroom, but the day to day interruptions that affect my classroom are from administration and other teachers. The second biggest problem in my classroom is the constant removal and then readmittance of my ESOL students that is getting them behind when they don't need to be or wouldn't be if allowed to stay in the class.
The first thing that I plan on doing is changing up my time management. I plan to be more effective in getting through my instruction and using every available moment to get across some type of relavent information. My biggest problem is not keeping myself on topic and allowing myself to stray onto a linked but not standard important topic. I plan to keep myself on task by focusing on the information that is relavent for the subject matter and its standard components at the time.
My next problem was interruptions for my ESOL students. The ESOL specialists and guidance counselors continuously pull them out of class to give them a test or ask them a question, not realizing that it puts them farther and farther behind in my class. Since we have to send all of their work to the ESOL specialists for them to work on it during their 4th block study hall, I am afraid and have been confirmed by their grades that they are not getting the proper social studies instruction and that is putting them farther and farther behind as well. I have attempted to talk to administration and the guidance counselors but the situation continues as it always has. I don't know what I'm going to do.
Lastly is my interruption management. Teachers and administrators are constantly interrupting my class to ask me a question or take a student out in the hall and ask them a question that has no pertinence to my class or any school situation. These questions are as ludacris as how the students plan on playing in the up coming basketball game. I have already taken steps to show and voice my displeasure with having my class constantly interrupted and have even gone to the principal and other members of the administration about it. I have also told my students that they are responsible for all work missed if they have to be pulled out of my class, but if a teacher pulls them out for a bogus reason they must tell me what the reason is and then I will help them with the make up work.

National Social Studies Groups

The national social studies group that I chose to view for this blog is the PBS teachers organization. This group is sponsored by PBS Media system and is designed to aid all teachers, not just social studies, and give them video feeds, information, and tools to use in their classrooms. In the social studies section you will find films, audio, video clips, primary resources, political cartoons, and tons of other sources that can be used to instruct students. This group offers membership to teachers for free, as well as offering the information that is present for free. Anyone can join this organization and I found it to be a wonderful source of information for my student teaching experience. I found relevant video and audio as well as some very interesting and stimulating political cartoons. I have already joined this professional group and would definitely recommend it to any other teacher no matter which subject matter they teach.

Review of Curriculum Unit from 428

The first comment that I decided to disect was that I needed to work on dropping alot of the lectures that I planned to give and introduce more activities and handouts. I have realized during my student teaching that I definitely relied too heavily upon my lecture skills when planning lessons or unit plans coming through the program. I also have realized that some lecture is absolutely necessary to explain events and their importance on history and the historical cycles that the world goes through. I also understand now that some lecture is necessary to meet all of the requirements for the state standards. I tried a long lecture in my student teaching once this semester and althought it went over well, I noticed that some of my students became detached from the material that I was presenting and upon the next test they were unable to understand why they could not remember the information although they knew it had been presented to them. I learned quickly that 15-20 minute lectures are fine as long as you have an activity to solidify the information that was presented to them.
The second comment that I decided I wanted to respond to was that I needed to be more clear in my preparation and instructions for my lessons. In my student teaching I have had a few instances where I inadmissably got confused myself about my own instructions and also got my students confused about the instructions. I have always had a problem taking my ideas and putting them down on paper so that others besides myself can understand them. The solution that I have come up with is having my cooperating teacher and other teachers within the school I am working in to view my work and see how it strikes them. If they can understand it easily I know that my students will be able too. If they have an issue with the directions then I know I must rewrite my instuctions and give it another try. I have also begun to explicitly explain my instructions before each assignment no matter whether or not the students have read the instructions. I tell them to listen to me explain the written directions and if they have any questions to ask me directly at that time. This process seems to work very well and I believe that I have come to solve this solution in my student teaching.
The third and final comment that I decided to discuss here is that I need to use more technology in my lessons. First off I would like to state that I do use technology in my classroom, alot more than I use too. Secondly I hope that I am improving in my use of technology in my classroom and in my application of technology in my classroom. I have begun to use more powerpoint, photostory, and webquest than I use too. I have begun to incorporate these technologies into assignments, activities, and projects that I assign to my students. I think that it is prudent that I get better at using technology in my classroom simply for the advancement of my students for when they reach college or any other higher education level and need to rely on these skills to help them succeed. I do not believe that the teacher can be replaced in the classroom or the teacher's knowledge but as a teacher it is my responsibility to morph and change as an instructor and to alter my lesson plans and technology to best benefit my students and their future.

My Vision Statement vs What I Believe

In my last blog I listed what I truly believe in and that is success. I stated that I believe that success and failure are both wonderful things that modivate different human beings in different ways. I stated that I believe that a person with a disability can succeed no matter how many times we see that same person fail at the things we find to be simple to do. I stated that I have seen two disabled children succeed in moments where they were presumed to almost certainly fail. Upon reading back on the statement for the first blog, I realized that these moments of success that I have seen will live on in my memory forever. I believe that they will be an absolute driving force in the future of my life that helps remind me of who I am, where I come from, and what I have over come compared to the struggles of others who have experienced far worst lives than I have. I also believe that I will be more susceptible to understanding how and why kids succeed and don't succeed in life, let alone in the classroom. This idea that I will be more able to understand how kids succeed and fail brought me back around to thinking about what I stated that I have as my philosophy of education. I started re-reading my philosophy of education again and realized that even though I wrote these two statements months apart, I factor my experiences with success and failures into each view point that I have.
My philosophy of education stated that I believe in the ability of each child to learn and that all learning in each school system should be progress based and failure lenient. What I simply man by this is that each child has the ability to learn and a particular way to learn and it is the responsibility of the teacher to figure out how that child learns and incorporate teaching strategies and modes of instruction to reach that child. Secondly I do not believe that failure exists if you learn from a mistake. I believe that if a student fails a first test and then does better on the second but does not necessarily pass the test, he or she has improved or succeeded and should be rewarded for this. By rewarding progress and success we encourage students to continue to learn. I also stated that I believe in the use of multiple and technologically based instruction with a lean towards giving students the tools they need to move forward into the next phase of their lives no matter what that may be. So how can I impliment this in my current class? Here is how.
I plan on giving my students multiple modes of instruction. I have already assessed the different ways my students learn, and plan on implementing instructional strategies that lean on the modes of learning that my students possess. I also grade on an improvement scale where determined on how well they improve from assessment to assessment determines on whether they are above the passing line or below it. I also lean towards linked instruction which means I link each piece of infromation with the lesson that came before and the lesson that will come afterwards and when we review a particular unit, we pull all of what we have learned together to get a clear and comprehensive picture of the unit and its essential questions. This is how I implement my I Believe statement and my Philosophy of Education into my classroom

I Believe In Success.

My name is Raleigh Sumner and I believe in success. This simple statement has caused me both short moments of tremendous happiness and content, as well as long periods of bottomless frustration and anger. I believe in success because I have succeeded and have seen others succeed. I believe in success because I am a success story, the kind of story that hollywood portrays and writers type long paragraphs of inspiration about. I do not state these things as a point of bragging but rather as a simple admonishment of the truth of my life and the times that I have lived. I suppose the illustration of what I believe is necessary to give credit to my claim of believing in success.
I was born unto this earth like the other 10% of humanity, with a disorder that if it were not for the advances of modern science and medicine would have been dibilitating and an eternal blockage to any type of success I hoped to find. I was born with bilateral club feet, a bone and muscle disorder that contorts the feet and causes them to grow at an extremely odd angle to the true positioning of the legs. 60 years before my birth this disability would have been incurable. Thanks to the doctors at Shriner's Hospital I was able to recieve surgery that corrected my feet to the point that they looked normal and were functional despite massive amounts of pain. Despite all of the sappy feel good stuff that I could add about my disability I will only go far enough to say that it has been the worst and best experience of my life and remains so until this day. I am 25 and I have more pain on most days than some cancer patients have, but I have never faltered in my belief that I was given this disability for one reason and that is to use it to see the good and success in others. Having state my credentials to believe in success by illustrating my own disability and subsequent mastery of it, I would like to illustrate a couple examples of the success I have seen achieved and failed at.
The first example I would like to illustrate is that of two young children I witnessed upon one of my last medical visits to Shriner's Hospital. One was a small girl, about 4 years old who was missing both legs and the other a young boy around 13 missing his arm from the elbow down. I was sitting in the lobby of the hospital awaiting my name to be called to see a specialist and found myself starring off into my own world, dreaming of college and sports and fame as any young 18 year old man would. I was shaken from this day dream by a small girl playing with some toys on the floor. I moved my head so that I could see around a set of waiting chairs to see exactly what she was doing and the first thing that caught my attention was that she had no legs. Having lived with my own disability and feeling very thankful at that moment for my own seemingly whole appearance, I cursed myself for seeing her disability first. As I was shaking away this thought I noticed that she was playing with a volleyball on the floor, using it as a tool to try and push herself into a standing position. I watched in horror and awe as this small child attempted time and time again without success to stand like her parents could. I even heard her comment on why she couldn't stand and her parents could. I do not remember the words spoken as I found tears streaming from my face at this point, realizing that she was failing at probably the only wish she had ever had and would ever have, to be normal. As I began to raise my 300 pound frame from the chair I was sitting in to help her, my name was called to see the specialist and I found myself walking away instead of helping, consumed by her lack of success and my own failure at being a helpful hand.
As I walked away and entered the lobby where patients are taken to a private room, I noticed this one armed young man holding a basketball and joking with the doctors and nurses at the children's activity desk and as I sat down at another station to further await my seemingly endlessly busy doctor, I over heard this young man make a statement that I found miraculous. This young man bet one of the doctors that he could hit 5 three point shots in a row on the basketball court just behind the children's activity desk. As all the windows where we sat were glass and over looked this little gym, I prayed that the doctor would accept the challenge so that I could see this miracle performed. The doctor did and to my amazement this young man with one arm proceeded to hit 3 out of the 5 three pointers he had promised. As I watched I wanted to jump from my seat and cheer for him as if I was watcing the NBA finals. I was called away as he shook the doctor's hand and remember being speechless and ecstatic that someone like me could do something no one thought possible.
That was my first glimpse at the success of someone other than myself that I remember instantly recognizing as true success, a success that is earned, not one fabricated by test scores, athletic success, or educational prowess. This was success of the rarest kind, success that is earned through the highest pretenses of insurmountable failure. This was success that came from desire and determination that had foregone luck and become possible only by the push of having that which you have been told is unattainable not because of ability, but because of an act of fate. Here was a young man who had overcome fate and succeeded in the face of genetics, doctors, and religion. Here was a young man who had succeeded with his own, TRUE, body.
I met with my doctors, recieved my medical consent and release to play semi-pro football and proceeded with my mother and father back down the halls that I had entered into playing the hurry up and wait game of seeing doctors who are not paid for the wonderful services that they render. I came through two large metalic magnetic doors and proceeded to the receptionists desk to schedule another appointment and much needed physical therapy before football season started. As I stood at the desk waiting for my appointments to be catalogued and printed, I looked back towards the waiting room I had first sat in, day dreaming of my successes that I hoped would come in the future and I saw that same little girl once again. Instantly my mind swam back to her failure of standing from earlier in the morning and I found myself watching her intently as she was still trying to stand. As I watched she rolled the volleyball under her and pushed up with her arms bending her legless waist to compensate her balance. I remember my eyes sparkled in tears as she finally made the balancing act work and stood up on the two stumpy appendages she would have called legs in another life or body. There in the middle of a hospital surrounded by the dispair of parents and children alike, I wept. I wept for her failure and for her success. I wept for her fight, strength, struggle, and happiness. I, all six foot one and 300 pounds of the man I thought I was wept, simply because I could. I succeeded in sharing someone else succes, and I was taught by that someone else that failure is success simply because it pushes us to try.

I BELIEVE IN SUCCESS.

Raleigh Brooks Sumner