Week 5

For my internship at Sunset Heights, there was no school Monday and Tuesday of this week, so the younger students were well-rested and ready to learn on Wednesday when they returned.

Unfortunately, this didn't last through Thursday and Friday.

In the first grade writing class, the students began to discuss topics--how to come up with a topic and recognize one in context. The kids seemed to enjoy talking about dogs. In fact, dogs were the only topic they were able to focus on. Dogs and puppies. After multiple behavioral issues, the teachers Mrs. B and Ms. R had to reassign seats three separate times.

Finally, on Friday, the students were given an open-ended prompt: write about your favorite toy. The teachers did not help them with their writing at all, and the kids were given half an hour to draw a picture and write a few sentences about their toy. They struggled with this quite a bit. One girl claimed she didn't know how to spell and wrote random letters with no spacing in between. Another student ignored the prompt and simply wrote: "I like to go in my backyard." One boy turned his paper in after the full thirty minutes with only the words teddy bear written down (and misspelled). The students made their dissatisfaction with the assignment clear; the room sounded like Mrs. B was pulling teeth.

However, I also began my research with high school students this week, and they were much more eager to cooperate. I interviewed students from BASIS Peoria about their personal high school experience, the value of their education, and how they perceived BASIS culture. Surprisingly, very few had negative reviews on the school itself, but almost everyone I interviewed expressed a desire to better manage their time and be more social. The overall vibe from the BASIS students: nerdy, but confident in their nerdiness.

Weeks 3 & 4

The past few weeks have certainly been interesting with the sugar rushes on Valentine's Day and excitement after field trips. Recently, I have noticed more behavioral issues. We had one girl decide to cut her hair in the middle of the first grade writing class. After this, another student refused to leave the corner of the room, shaking in fear, because "if she could cut her own hair, that means she could cut mine too!" The other two teachers I work with have had to deal with language from another first grader, and struggled with a writing student who writes every day yet claims she can't read.

In my older class, the students can be unruly, but they at least recognize when they push their teacher too far. One of them wrote me a poem about his feelings, and the sixth graders became very interested in high school events I've been to--e.g., prom. One of the most striking things I've noticed in the older class is their growing conception of what is "cool" and what is not--this is extremely different from the sixth graders at BASIS Peoria. At Sunset Heights, the students cannot try too hard academically without being a nerd, there is a certain style in between fancy and lazy (joggers are extremely popular) that all of the "cool" kids seem to have.

In general, the older students seem to want to learn more and try harder to catch up with their peers while the first graders don't seem to care or fully grasp how much they are falling behind in their writing. Even so, almost all of the first grade students have made noticeably improvements in the few weeks I've been working with them, and if they can overcome their frequent behavioral issues, I think that by the end of the school year they will be able to write fluently, with limited vocabulary and sentence structure, on their own.