march fourth

Today, in Mr. Cohen's first class, a student didn't understand what "logging your reading" meant. She wrote a record of the amount of pages she'd read, and the time she'd done it in! It's funny, the kind of clashing there is between what the students have been taught up to this point, and what they are expected to do. A lot of the elementary and middle school cirriculum is about organization, rules, and having forms and folders. It's funny because, before they've entered Mr. Cohen's class, they are used to having one assignment, completing it the exact predictable way, and then getting the next assignment. This catches a student off guard when, they are handed several assignments, all due by the end of the month, and for the first time in a long time, they are asked to think.

The seventh graders are a difficult breed of people, especially since this is their first year of being exposed to this.

I stayed at Mr. Cohen's second hour, wrote a little bit, and helped a teacher organize some of her papers.

Third class, I visited Ms. Ohle's class. She's teaching a lesson about connotation. She's really getting really good at keeping them in tune, especially when you have to teach a lesson about connotation. She began the lesson with giving them names of different kinds of 1950's, 60's, 70's cars and asking them to name what they thought of. After sharing, they looked at pictures of those cars. She talked about what the names had implied, which is a great way to keep them in tune about word choice.