My Fourth Day

On Wednesday, February 15th, I had a change in placement. After Anna and I arrived in Ms. Johns's class, she informed us another teacher, Mr. Jones, needed one of us in an 11th grade class. At first, I did not want to leave, since I had gotten more familiar with the students and Ms. Johns, but I decided I wanted to experience a different grade level.

In Mr. Jones's class, there were a lot more students, and they were older. I was kind of nervous, but Mr. Jones was super nice and outgoing. He set me up with a student, Lexie. In his class, students mainly work on assignments on their own on class laptops. Lexie was finishing an assignment where she had to write a summary of a short story. Mr. Jones had a step-by-step process that had to be filled out. Mainly, they had to state important parts of the story and explain them.

This assignment was a struggle for me. I had a clear idea of what I thought the answers should be, but Lexie did not always do what I thought was right, but I did not know how to lead her in the direction I thought she should go without outright telling her what I thought. I think it's important for teachers to not just tell a student the right answer when they're wrong. They should help lead them to the right answer. I wasn't sure how to do that with Lexie. Furthermore, maybe I wasn't right in the first place. Picking out important parts of a story is a matter of opinion. While I would've chosen different moments than Lexie, her reasoning for her choices made sense, and who was I to tell her she was wrong? Because of my age and inexperience, I still have a hard time feeling like an authority on a subject. I know no teacher knows everything, but I still lack a lot of confidence. That's something I'm really going to work on during my next visits. I need to be more confident and authoritative.