Week 7/8 Post

During the week, we read chapters 4 and 7 of To Teach the journey in comics.  We learned about "building a bridge" for students and how to achieve greatness as a teacher.  With the bridge metaphor, I felt that Ayers means each student needs to work together in the classroom to make a positive learning environment for everyone.  He also means the students and their parents should have a good connection with their teacher in order for the learning process and shaping of each individual student to begin.  I feel that the "bridge" starts with little to no knowledge of things and grows into higher, more complicated knowledge that will be necessary later in life.  One example of a pattern is building a person's knowledge from childhood to adulthood as in each grade level increases knowledge by building off the previous grade.  A second example is allowing the children to learn from each other and not be afraid to ask questions in order to be better prepared for the next grade.
I decided to make a lesson plan about poem styles for elementary school students in order to instill a sense of creative thinking in each child.  I would first need to explain what a poem is and read a few simple ones to the class.  I then would go into more detail and give specific examples of different kinds of poems such as a haiku or a rhyming poem.  I would also need to take into account that these students are in elementary school and they may not yet be capable of comprehending and writing deep, lengthy poems.  Therefore, I could create a guideline for them to copy off of in order to make their first poem because I would not be expecting them to correctly come up with them on their own.  Next, I would give them an easy topic and ask them to practice each style in class and show it to me so I could help them with spelling and word choice.  Lastly, I would encourage each student to read their poem to the class to get used to comfortably speaking to their peers.  I feel that this lesson would encourage them to increase their vocabulary by finding new words to rhyme with and inspire their creativity even more.
In chapter 10 of Educational Foundations, Robert DiGiulio discusses the stress of becoming a teacher and the pressure put on teachers to take care of children while helping them succeed in life and receive good test scores.  DiGiulio writes, "No standardized test for students can ever inform us of a teachers' enthusiasm, caring, or belief that students can be successful-- three factors that have an enormous effect on student achievement and self-esteem," (127).  In other words, it is more important for the teacher to have a personality and be a role model for his or her students.  To be a successful teacher, one must have successful students, "And, to achieve student success, great teachers help move their students via three paths: producing, empowering and connecting," (DiGiulio 129).  Everyone focuses so much on the academic aspect of school and who is the smartest and who will get into the best college but at the end of the day, it is more important to be a selfless, well rounded person that achieves greater things than a high standardized test score.

Canestrari, Alan S., and Bruce A. Marlowe. Educational Foundations: An Anthology of Critical Readings. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2013. Print.