This tutoring experience has shaped my teaching identity in numerous ways. First of all, I didn’t expect to enjoy this experience as much as I did. The reason for this was that I’m planning on going into secondary education and I didn’t know how tutoring elementary school age children would help me. To be honest, as much as I enjoy teaching the younger kids, it has enforced the fact that I want to teach high school. My only reason for this is that younger kids have a lot of energy especially when there are 25 of them in one classroom. This experience has also taught me how to deal with certain situations especially when it comes to dealing with a child who won’t listen. I had this problem with one of the children in my kindergarten group. He just had no interest in what we were doing and was continuously saying how he would hate the games we were doing. I have had problems with this child for a couple weeks and I finally found a way to reach this child. When he was being distracting to the other kids I would ask him to stop and focus on what we were doing. This often didn’t work but I found that when I would ask him how his parents would feel if they knew he was misbehaving, he seemed to respond better. Also when I would ask him individually what the first sound in a word was for example, he would respond better and participate more. I have also found a kind of teaching style that the kids seem to like. I picked this up from the teacher in my first grade classroom. The way she speaks to the children is in more of an informal way and the kids seem to really respect her because they can relate to her more. I found the more that I did this with my first grade group of boys; they seemed to respect me more and just enjoy the reading games. I especially loved working with my group of first grade boys because they were respectful, they liked the games we would play and they would just get along really well with each other. They were friendly and were always excited about different things they wanted to tell me. I was also impressed with how smart they were, they seemed to know most of the sight words, they could separate the phonemes of most words correctly, and they could usually form intelligent sentences with their sight words. I think the most important thing I learned from these kids was, kindergartners and first graders, was that they’re all just kids. They don’t care what the color of each other’s skin is, what languages they speak, or what kind of socioeconomic background they come from. They’re all just kids who love to run around on the playground together, who’re all talking about the new kids movie coming out, and what they’re hoping to get for Christmas. I think adults could learn a lot about the innocence of these children.
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Alysha!
ReplyDeleteFrom the sounds of it, your experience was a lot like mine...I loved my time spent at my school with the kids, and would gladly do it again, but it has also enforced my belief that I should teach high school. I don't know if I could deal with these kids every day, as rewarding as this experience has been.
The way you write about these kids, I can tell that you are going to be a great teacher, no matter what age group you end up with. It's because you care. What I think we all have to remember, like you mentioned here, is that these kids have an innocence and a view on life that we, as adults, teachers, and students ourselves, can learn a lot from. The world through a child's eyes is free of hatred, race, status. I think most people can learn a lot from these kids, and I think most of us that have gone through our tutoring hours have actually learned a lot.
Tina
I agree with you, I would not want to be an elementary school teacher. It's less that I don't have the patience, and more than there are more options with older students. I can't exactly make a first grader fall in love with Shakespeare, but I could do that to a high school student! Regardless, there was a lot to be gained from this experience.
ReplyDeleteWhat I love the most about children is that same innocence you described. Children at that age are so willing to have an open mind, and they don't have any deep-rooted bias towards the world yet. They're free of an agenda, they just want to go outside and play in the grass. They're perfect candidates to be taught about tolerance through innovative lesson plans, and those lessons, if they stuck, would probably end up lasting them a lifetime. Although they would be too young for extreme lessons, Boler would argue that they could still have the issue approached, and those videos we watched give great examples as to how.