The Past Semester

Overall, I really enjoyed my field placement classroom and I am looking forward to going back to work with the kids next semester. I feel that I learned a lot from the teacher and from the students. Working with the struggling students gave me experience in this area, including how to deal with behavior problems along with helping them understand the material being taught. I also helped the students develop their ideas and thoughts into completing problems and different writing assignments. Seeing the range of students in this second grade classroom really showed me how different a classroom can be. There will be students who understand everything and then there will be students who struggle with almost every assignment. The teacher showed me many different ways to teach the kids and just watching him was a great experience in itself.
The one disappointment that I got from the field was that I did not see much technology used with the students. However, it's a Lansing school, and they do not have the funding necessary to afford multiple types of technology. Also, I was hoping to work with some students who are more severely disabled. I wanted to see how they fit into their classroom, as well as how they worked in the special education classroom. I did work with students who were in the special education program at the school, and working with them was very helpful in my understanding of how to help and teach these students.