Student Teaching

Its been a while since Ive written, everything here has just been very busy and exhausting. This past week in school I've really started to get into the teaching aspect of the trip. In the classes Ive only been observing and working with small groups because the classes don't meet regularly so it was not until this Friday that I finally met all my classes.

(Wednesday 5/4)
Because of that Ive only been trying to get to know the students and make sure they feel comfortable with me in the class. However, behind the scenes Ive been working nonstop.  Ken Hansberry (our cooperating teacher) has decided that Emily and I should plan and teach the second part of his Islam Unit. So I have been doing a lot of research and discussing how we want to teach the students about Islam in current events. Ken started off by saying that he has this amazing clip from the show West Wing that discusses terrorism and Islamic extremists, however the show is for adults and is way over 7th graders' heads. So Emily's and my job is to plan and teach the lessons building up to that clip so they will have a better chance of understanding it. A hard enough task if we were to do that in the American schools, however it becomes 10x harder when you are working with students who all have completely different knowledge, completely different cultures (so you can't even reference celebrities or shows to connect with the kids like in the US), etc. So, we decided Emily and I would take over the lesson planning and teaching for the class on May 16th- where we will teach them about religious extremists.  First we made a list of different examples we could think of, for example: the Westboro Baptist Church, Jim Jones and the suicide cult, the Muhammad Cartoon in Denmark, the Florida preacher burning the Koran, etc. Once we made a list of religious extremist examples, we had to do research to gain as much knowledge about these events as possible. Finally, we decided that we would organize our lesson into "Stations" which means the students will be split into 5 groups and each will learn about one example/ event of extremism at that station. After 12-15 minutes, they will move to the next station, until each group has done all 5 stations. Our homework was to set up these stations with activities and questions for the students. My feelings were a mixture of excitement, exhaustion, and intimidation!

May 4 is called Remembrance Day in the Netherlands for all those who died in WWII. Similar to our Memorial Day (except school and work stays open) they have ceremonies throughout Amsterdam and the country. At 8:00 pm -8:02 pm there is two minutes of silence. At the royal palace in Amsterdam, in the middle of the city, where thousands are gathered, the Queen comes out, makes a short speech, and puts out a wreath, then the entire city goes completely silent for those 2 minutes. We did not go, but the teachers said that it is always amazing- thousands and thousands of people stay completely silent, nothing moving, for those moments. I can only imagine how magical that would be to see, Im sorry I missed it!

Thursday (5/5)
Today in school we did more planning for the lesson and observed and worked with some classes. Setting up to teach the Islam unit had been extremely valuable because we are able to work so closely with Ken who is probably one of the most intelligent, well-rounded, and experienced teachers I know. He has worked all around the world (literally) and even runs a teacher-training program at Yale over the summer. He is truly amazing, and I am so fortunate to work alongside him.

Today we worked with Ken's 8th grade humanities class, which we had gone on the field trip with but had not officially met yet. The students were working on projects about the field trip to Naarden (talked about in an earlier blog) in which they had to plot the buildings that they had to find on the trip, on a map of the city- color coordinating the different uses of the buildings. They also had to include their own pictures from the trip and small paragraphs about each building's old and modern uses. They had to put all these things on a poster that they will present next week. I enjoy observing the students' work on this project because they are subtly learning geography and how to find and map different points in the town and reinforcing the history and the "gentrification" of the town, which they explored on the trip, all the while simply enjoying coloring the map and cutting out pictures. During the class we waked around helping students if they needed it, but mostly just observing. At one point we were able to take one group out of the room so they could all plot the points on their maps, so we got to work personally with that small group. Even though we are not teaching classes yet, I feel the observations are just as valuable and Im learning so much just from watching the students and the teachers.

May 5, aside from Cinco De Mayo, is Liberation Day in the Netherlands to celebrate their freedom from the Nazi's in WWII. Although not much seemed to happen officially, it is more of a day just for feeling good and celebrating and Im really glad we were able to spend the past two days here experiencing the two holidays. I have to remind myself that unlike the US, the Netherlands (and all of Europe) was at the heart of the fighting in WWII, Amsterdam had been taken over by the Nazi's and there are plenty of people still in the city that remember Nazi troops walking the streets. We simply don't have that opportunity in the US and its an amazing feeling and experience.

Friday (5/6)
Today we again observed more classes and working on the lesson's with Ken.
Im really excited because we were trying to come up with an Essential Question for our lesson (which is simply a question that you want students to be able to answer by the end of the lesson) and I gave him my idea for one and he liked it. So we are going to use the Essential Question that I came up with for our lesson! It just makes me so excited because it kind of confirms my feeling that this is what I want to be doing, and can do it. So our Essential Question for that lesson is: "How does religious extremism create misunderstandings and how is that true in Islam today?" We also came up with our final 5 stations and started to form questions for those. The stations the students will learn about are: The Muhammad Cartoon from Denmark, The Westboro Baptist Church, The Florida Preacher Burning the Koran (Terry Jones), Jim Jones and the Suicide Cult (1978), and Aum Shinrikyo (a doomsday cult responsible for an attack on Japanese subways in 1995). The students will learn about these events through different activities including reading articles, watching videos, listening to audio clips, and looking at pictures. The questions they will be answering will all be different however they all connect back to how these examples of extremism misuse or misinterpret the religion they say they represent and what can happen because of this (fighting, people being killed, etc.).

In class we worked with Ken's 7th grade class (the ones who are working on essays, which we haven't seen since last Tuesday). By this class they were supposed to have finished an organizer that mapped out their essay. Most students were in all different places so they continued to work independently while Emily and I helped students and Ken taught mini lessons on writing transitions between body paragraphs, a road map (pretty much how to write an introduction), and conclusions. Just listening to those mini lessons I gained a lot of valuable information that I plan on using in my own essays! I worked with one boy for most of the time who needed help with his thesis. His essay is comparing and contrasting Cathedrals and Mosques. He was a really sweet kid and had great ideas, so I just helped him organize and word his thoughts. I was very impressed with the work ethics of the students, although they sometimes got off task and fooled around (like every 12 year old does) they really got a lot done. This is the class we will be teaching our lesson to, so Im very excited to work more with these students.

Like every Friday, after school was happy hour in the teacher's lounge. It was a lot of fun because more teachers came and I ended up staying until 7 pm simply talking to the different teachers and school staff. We met people from all over the world and it was very interesting to hear their different stories on how they ended up at ISA. It really is a great school and staff, and everyone just seems so happy and friendly. They have definitely convinced me to look into graduate schools and later teaching abroad!