What happens when students don't get it?

When I was observing this week my supervisor wanted to me to teach a 10 minute lesson, but I ended up teaching a lesson for the whole period. I taught my class about punctuation. I first asked them what types of punctuation marks are there and when do you use them as a Do Now. They answered and knew a majority of them. Then we went over a paragraph and i asked them to punctuate it together as a class. The class simply did not get it. I tried explaining to them the best that I can. I gave an example for each punctuation mark and they still did not understand why a comma was used as in the way it was used.
As a teacher how would you go about trying to get your class to understand grammar without spoon feeding it to them?
I put them in pairs too, but it simply did not work. I am student observing in a difficult district, but still I want them to understand this for future jobs and everything.

"How Do You Like Those Apples"

Susie and her family decided to go apple picking one October afternoon. Every year she goes with her family to pick apples so they can bake apple pies and fruit pies for the fall season. It was always incredibly fun for Susie because she got to spend quality time with her sister and brother, Jessie and Tommy, who are both over ten years younger than her. They live in South Hampton, New York where there are a lot of farm stands. Tommy and Jessie usually sell the pies they make right in the front of their house.

            Susie is twenty years old, has brown curly hair and wears glasses. She attends college hundreds of miles away from New York, but it doesn’t stop her from going home and enjoying this tradition. However, lately she has been feeling stressed with her school work and job that she rarely has any spare time for herself. Overwhelmed with adult obligations, she forgot what it is like to be young. In school all she does is attend class and work at the Diner as a hostess right off campus. Working almost every night, she never has time to go out with her friends or come home to New York. She does not even have the time to make new friends or have a relationship with a guy.

            As they were apple picking, Jessie decides to run away from the family.

Susie exclaimed, “Jessie, don’t run too far. We can’t see you!”

Susie’s mom explains. “Susie, why don’t you play with your sister? You’re never home anymore and she misses you desperately.”

Susie answers back, “What do you want me to do? I am not running after her like a little kid.”

Susie’s mom begs, “Come one Susie. I cannot see her from here.”

Susie asks, “Wow really, what about Tommy?”

Susie’s mom says, “Tommy’s bonding with your father.”

Susie screams, “Ugh fine! Why do I even visit you guys if all I do is baby-sit? Jessie, where are you? It is not funny anymore!”

Jessie yells, “I am over here. Come find me sissy!”

Susie runs after Jessie and doesn’t notice a huge pile of apples on the grass. She trips over the bunch of apples and falls back, hitting her head on the ground.

Susie barely opens her eyes and yawns, feeling as if she has been sleeping for fifteen years. She gazes at the sight in front of her and gasps. She covers her eyes with her hands and thinks she is going crazy. When she uncovers her eyes she is not in the same place anymore. She doesn’t feel the warmth of the sun pressing upon her or the itchy grass underneath her body. She doesn’t see the gigantic apple trees and she doesn’t hear her sister yelling back at her. She realizes she is in her dorm room at school, but she knows before she fell she was chasing after her sister while apple picking.

            Susie questions herself. She paces from the foot of her twin bed to a door decorated with huge Greek letters and a collage of pictures of Susie and her friends at bars, formals, at the beach, drinking, and with boys. Susie seems puzzled at the fact that she is in all these pictures, but does not remember taking them. She notices the mirror hanging from her closet door and looks in it.

            Susie exclaims to herself, “What the heck! I have blonde hair and it is straight. How can I see right now without me glasses? Look at these red stiletto shoes I am wearing with this dress from Express. I would like to know when I bought these sexy things. Maybe I should leave my room.”

            Susie hears people yelling and laughing outside her dorm room. Through all the chatter, she can make out a girl saying, “Party at the house tonight! 66 Will Avenue.” She cautiously walks to the door and trips twice on her new glamorous heels. As she places her hand on the doorknob she takes a deep breath. Not knowing that her life will never be the same again once she opens that door, she steps outside into the hallway.

While observing last week, I noticed that so many teachers do not know how to deal with classroom management. I observed for a different teacher because my teacher was absent and it was a completely different experience. The students did not remain in seats and just walked around the classroom as if it was a free period or lunch. I also noticed that the teacher sat with one group of students and did not even get up to see what the other students were doing until 20 minutes passed and the period was half over. The students took forever to start the assignment and it was a very quick writing assignment. They had to write about a memory in their life to include in their memoir. I think as a teacher you need to make sure your students are constantly on task because once you let them go off course for a minute their going to take advantage and continue to act out. The only time students should be allowed to walk around or go off task is when a teacher specifically says that for the last 10 minutes of class you can catch up on anything for the class or read. Other than that, there really shouldn't be too much time for them to go off task. The teacher must show that she is involved too. She must be there for all the students not just a select few.

For future teachers:

How would you react if your class was acting out and going off task?
What is your classroom management strategy to get them back on task?

revised content lens essay

Dinamarie Tsoukalas

            According to Duff Brenna, “All literature shows us the power of emotion; it is emotion, not reason that motivates characters in literature.” In other words Brenna is saying that characters are affected by their feelings, which could be anything from happiness, fear, love, or anger. He is also saying that characters are not affected by their rationales or explanations. This is shown to be true in Night written by Elie Wiesel, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Setting and imagery are used in these two novels to depict the main characters’ emotions. These characters are also emotionally affected by the common themes in the novels: inequality and injustice.

            Elie Wiesel used setting to bring out the depressed state that the entire Jewish race is in during the novel. One setting that depicted how emotions affected Elie is when he was on the train to the concentration camps. Wiesel depicted these trains as horrific and disgusting. Fear for death and what will happen next caused Elie to remain strong and protect his ill father from other people on the train. The next setting was Auschwitz where Wiesel uses imagery to show how unsettled Elie was; he looks back and sees thousands of people marching behind and along dead bodies after dead bodies. Elie continues to march, not because he understood why this was being done to him and other Jews, but because he was angry at the injustice he suffered. Elie even started to deny his faith, something that he believed in so dearly, because he was distraught at the fact that his family and friends were taken from him.

            Harper Lee chose the setting of Maycomb, a racist town in the 1930’s, to depict the emotion of not only Atticus, but of the whole town of Maycomb. Atticus defended a black man because he was driven by his emotional belief that everyone should have the same privilege of receiving a fair trial no matter what skin color. He was not rationalizing the outcomes of his decision because after he accepted the position his town looked down upon him and his family; since he was very emotional about keeping justice he overcomes the discrimination. Lee also used imagery with Boo Radley’s house. He depicted his house as a “haunted mansion” and a horrible place to even go near. The town didn’t go near his house because the town was emotionally afraid of difference. They were unhappy with change which led them to be judgmental and neglect anyone that showed a slight difference, unlike Atticus.

            Both novels shared the same themes, which are the existence of inequality and injustice. It is this existence of inequality that forced Atticus to be a lawyer for Tom Robinson and Elie to continue fighting to survive in the concentration camps. Both of them were faced with discrimination because of their beliefs, but they remained strong and exceeded everything that was put in front of them. Social discrimination, religious discrimination, and even a father’s death didn’t stop both of these characters to stand up for what was right.

            The two novels, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Night by Elie Wiesel both prove the quote by Duff Brenna. Both novels showed that emotion is what drives a character to perform the actions he or she makes. The main emotion that was prevalent throughout the two novels was fear of the unknown.  The two novels also showed how not only are individual choices affected by emotion, but society and political choices are affected by emotion too. 

Dinamarie Tsoukalas

                According to Duff Brenna, “All literature shows us the power of emotion; it is emotion, not reason that motivates characters in literature”. In other words Brenna is saying that characters are affected by their feelings, which could be anything from happiness, fear, love, or anger. He is also saying that characters are not affected by their rationales or explanations. This is shown to be true in Night written by Elie Wiesel, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Setting and imagery are used in these two novels to depict the main characters’ emotions.

                Elie Wiesel uses setting to bring out the depressed state that all if the Jewish race is in during the novel. The novel starts in Sighet, where many Jewish are living during the 1940’s. Then the setting is moved to the trains that the Jewish were taken to concentration camps. Wiesel depicts these trains as horrific and disgusting because there is no room, people yelling at each other for tiny rations of food, and it reeks of death. The next setting is the actual concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where Elie describes the marches the Nazis made them run. He uses imagery to show how unsettling this scene is. Elie looks back and sees thousands of people marching behind and then after an hour he marches along the side of dead bodies after dead bodies. Throughout these two scenes Elie stayed strong not because he understood why this was being done to his father and himself, but because he wanted to survive. He ran in fear of what was going to be done to him.  The last setting was in Buchewald, where the Jews were freed, but Elie was never emotionally free. He described himself in the mirror as, “a corpse gazing back at me”. He was never going to be the same because his emotions were altered from discrimination and from being treated like a slave.

                Harper Lee uses setting to depict the emotion of not only Atticus, but of the whole town of Maycomb. The novel is based in a southern town in the early 1930’s where there was a lot of racism. Atticus defends a black man, Tom Robinson, because he was driven by his emotional belief that everyone should have the same privilege of receiving a fair trial no matter what skin color. After he accepts the position his town looks down upon him and his family, but since he is very emotional about keeping justice he overcomes the discrimination and teaches his kids to do the same. Lee also uses imagery with Boo Radley’s house who is another black man. He depicts his house as a “haunted mansion” and a horrible place to even go near. The town didn’t go near his house because the town was emotionally afraid of difference. They were unhappy with change which led them to be judgmental and neglect anyone that showed a slight difference.

                Both novels share the same themes, which are the existence of inequality and injustice. It is this existence of inequality that forced Atticus to be a lawyer for Tom Robinson and Elie to continue fighting to survive in the concentration camps. Both of them were faced with discrimination because of their beliefs, but they remained strong and exceeded everything that was put in front of them. Social discrimination, religious discrimination, and even a father’s death didn’t stop both of these characters to stand up for what is right.

                The two novels, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and Night by Elie Wiesel both prove the quote by Duff Brenna. Both novels show that emotion is what drives a character to perform the actions he or she makes. The main emotion that was prevalent throughout the two novels was fear of the unknown.  The two novels also show how not only are individual choices affected by emotion, but society and political choices are affected by emotion too.