Free Write: Fears of Teaching

I got into the teaching program at Southern Connecticut State University in March of 2013. I started taking teaching classes in the fall of the same year. So far being taught how to teach has been interesting but I still feel like I have a shadow hanging over me. Professors are positive and sure that the skills that they are teaching us will work and we will be efficient, outstanding educators. This is what I doubt. What if literacy circles don't work with my class? Will reader's workshop help my students to be successful? From the reading that I have read by teachers that have been using these skills for years say that these techniques work. But at the same time I have read about classes that had to be adapted to fit a classroom that could not have learned anything from the traditional class set. There are so many variables with classrooms that can change the way we need to teach. A literacy centers class may work with a suburban class of seventeen. On the other hand it would not work with an urban class of twenty-five. One of the articles that we read talked about how the teacher need to adapt literature circles because her students could not stay on task. This is what I'm afraid of. It is hard to get jobs in small towns with small classrooms and supportive parents. Many teaching graduates get whatever job they can get even in urban areas. I know that Southern has one of the best teaching programs in the state but I'm still not sure of myself. Hopefully as I finish the program I will become more sure of myself. Despite all these thoughts and all of my doubts I will adapt for my students and become successful in the end.

Writing about writing

My first memory of writing starts with kindergarten. The teacher of my class was teaching us how to spell simple words such as the, like, also. I was having fun but I wanted to spell bigger words. I asked my teacher how to spell other words. A few other students had the same thing in mind. My teacher sat the three of us at a separate circular table and wrote out the word "house" on a small white board. We were given the small lined white boards that the other kids had but we had a slightly harder task. I was able to write out a big word not just letters and small words. I now knew had to spell house. I might not know how to pronounce each letter but I knew what it looked like.
Through out elementary school the more I read the better I got at writing. Reading taught me more vocabulary than any of my teacher's spelling tests. To this day people tells me that I use big words or stop and ask me: "What does that word mean?" This might deter some people from using their vocabulary but I have pride for mine. Reading was the key thing that propelled my writing from kindergarten and first grade into the upper elementary levels.
In third grade we had a contest. Who ever read the most "Amelia Bedilia" books and wrote the best essay about the books and how the series went along won a prize. I read all the books in the classroom and also bought the books that my teacher didn't have. I wrote a long paper describing the ins and outs of Amelia's life. All of my work paid off. To this day I don't remember what the prize was but I do remember how the reading and writing felt. By wining I felt like a better student.
The older I got the more I wrote. I kept a journal through out my educations in to my high school years. It was very theriputic and I enjoyed getting all of my emotions out.
Now that I'm in the "real world" I barely have time to write because I'm working, going to school, and studying. I would love to have the time to write is a journal again buy right now it's not in the works. Maybe in my writing future will be a possible book. I've tossed the thought around in the past so I guess I'll have to wait and see what will happen.

Review of My Experience with "The Maze Runner"

The book that I read for reading workshops and mini lessons was The Maze Runner. This book is about a boy who is suffering from amnesia. He has totally forgotten his previous life and is thrown into a "camp" with other teenage boys. Every boy has a job and he wants to do something called maze running (or also known as runners). I do not know how the book ends about there are many things about this book that stuck in my mind that I will present now.
My Book Review: This book is just plain weird. I'm sure if I read the whole book I would understand half of what is going on but in the beginning of the book there are many strange plot lines going on. There are so many questions and nothing is explained. I read half the book and NONE of the questions that I had were fully answers or in the very least understood. The more I read the stranger it got. I will probably find everything I need to understand and answer my question but if I were a student I could see how frustrating the book would be and how they might want to give up.
I choose to do predictions in the book for my mini lesson. Finding a children's book that this skill could be found in was easy, but then I realized that I needed to apply this skill in The Maze Runner. My experience with this book was 50/50. In my lesson I had my "students" read the first chapter and we made predictions together because it would have been so hard for the student if I had just let them come to their conclusions by themselves. So many new things are being introduced to the reader that they don't understand. They are presented with a main character that doesn't even know himself. They are also put into a setting that is foreign. As I said before students might not get into the book like a teacher would want. There are so many variables that it is hard to get into.
One good thing about this book is that you can predict away as much as your heart desires. So many things are going on that you can pretty much guess anything and it might be correct. At the same time it might be a great book if you are looking for something with less structure. For upper-aged elementary students it would be useful in teaching students about predicting and visualization. Because there are so many open ends in the book students have a lot of leeway in making their predictions. Visualization is good as well because this whole new world, for the main character, is described in full.
This book might go either way as far as teaching is concerned but overall I would not recommend it to any grade below sixth. It is just too strange and in a weird way it reminds me of Louis Lawry's The Giver. It was a good book in the end but the reader has to wait a while before they can understand why and how things are going on.

Colaborative Learning Supporting Literacy

This topic seems like a catch 22. There are so many aspects outside the classroom that influence it.  Students comprehend in so many ways that one technique may work in one area and not in another. The first article says that students comprehend better when summarizing, clarifying, questioning, and predicting are involved. The next says that when they try literacy circles the are unsuccessful. It all depends on the situation. Maybe using the first technique in the more urban school system would work better than the circles that the students were supposed to be working in. who knows maybe the children in the first school would learn better with literacy circles. The reason why the circles are not working is not because the technique doesn't work but because there are factors outside of their control. The children are not learning because of their economic status and the culture they were brought up in. I had literacy circles in my elementary school and my other students and I learned a lot. We talked about books, themes, and other related topics. Of course I grew up in a small suburban town with only seventeen kids in each class. They might have gone in a different direction if it was in an urban school with thirty kids to the class of mixed races. Teachers have to be taught how to handle every situation. The way a student in the inner city learns is different from how a child in a rich suburb learns. Yes it does support literacy but it needs to be applied in a way that is tentative and careful.