Reflection Journal (410)

03/22/10

Starting the fourth week of study.

Monday appointment with Hudson School. Will be teaching Excel to 6 th grade.

3/22

Meeting with Hudson School. Everyone at the school is so busy I really have to carve out my own niche here. Meeting with my mentor. My syllabus will be ready for next Monday.

3/23

Studying birth and raising children affects on environment. A lot of personal stuff here as I was a single parent in a foreign country (Australia) whilst my children were young; one at three years and the other was six months old. What affect would my environment (living in the front of a tofu factory in Adelaide) have had on them. Also flying to New York to see my family when they were one and three and a half year old. I flew by myself.

The first child – his mother and I did not know he was on his way – we had met in Sydney and we were in the States when the 'event' would have happened. We drove across the States; New York to San Francisco, the first month of pregnancy drinking huge amounts of alcohol

everyday and smoking cigarettes and smoking pot.

3/24

Worked on Grade 6 Lesson Plan: Using a Spreadsheet to fat content from a fast food restaurant. After meeting with the person who will be my mentor I am not sure how much imput I will have from him. He does not answer my phone calls or my emails.

4/07 Preparation for first class observation tomorrow. I will be in a 4 th grade class. Gathering together the papers I need for my mentor. Will give him:

choose one of four tasks

which theorist will I be influenced by? Piaget or Vygotsky?

4/08

4 th Grade class.

In the morning the 4 th grade class went to chapel then to music class. I attended chapel with them.

Having worked in various schools this is my first one with any spiritual participants. Briefly looking at other schools (not counting universalities) I have worked at:

• Albany, New York; two singled sex academies – private schools. There was some emphasis on service to the community but with no spiritual gatherings it felt empty. I am not a very spiritual or religious person but there was something empty about the culture of the schools. There was a lacking cohesiveness.
• NYC – A private school, the only one at the time which was a school for profit. There was a strong service element and link with other countries. For example there were trips to Peru, Africa, India and China to do work projects such as putting in wells or building a school. The school was run as a business and because of this there were low salaries, and for some reason not a community spirit within the school. The teachers were often disgruntled claiming everything was about profit and not really the students. There was no specific spiritual focus but there were rules. This is an IB school, and the curriculum was based on IB standards.
• NYC – a public charter school. There was definitely no spirituality at this school. And maybe this was part of the problems within the school. It was a daily battleground with police at the school several times a week in the upper-grades ( 6- 8 ) and seemingly very little teaching going on. I was the technology integrator and my role was working with teachers. My main concern was keeping track of things. For example, more than 20 new Macs went missing in the first few months, 7 out of 10 still cameras and four out of five video cameras. Nothing could be unattended. On the first day of school, an administrator was giving a talk on the year ahead, he left his new Power Mac, still connected, walked out of the room and came back to find his computer gone. There was no centering or any social responsibility being taught. Spirituality of any sort would have helped in this school.
• St. Luke's School is an Episcopal school. There is not a lot of focus on this except for the time the students go to chapel, usually two or three times a week. The students partake in the service, singing songs, do their prayer lists (which usually consist of various dead pets they they give blessings to or a celebrity gets prayed for). Somehow this one event in the student's life I think gives some grounding to their lives or at least in their school day life. Teachers rarely participate in the service nor sing. I doubt that any are Episcopal, the principal is a Unitarian and few would consider themselves Christian. Because it is an 'inclusive' school there seems to be an almost total avoidance within the school of anything Christian. Actually within the school, connected to the church, there are no Christian symbols or images but there are Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and etc. work throughout the school. What stands out with the chapel prayer list is that students think of others. In class students give their list to the teacher verbally during class, before chapel. By asking them to say something they care about they are going beyond their immediate selves. On today’s list there were the pandas in China, The Amazon, Iceland (this is the week of the volcano that halted world flights to Europe), runners in the Boston Marathon, And for the list of whose souls should be prayed for there was: Kates grandpa, Febbie Prince – she hung herself from being bullied on the Internet (this gave rise to a discussion on bullying), Gerty – a garden snake, Lizzy – another snake, Red the fish and several other pets.

Saying all this about spirituality my first day at St. Luke's School followed Easter break and Passover. Our 4 th grade teacher being Jewish was able to enlighten the students about Passover. They had begun work on posters before the Spring Break (Easter Holidays) regarding Passover.

Our teacher, Elon, has a very organized classrooms.

20 April, Tuesday.

Kids do not fail a grade they are “counseled out” in other words go to another school. This puts pressure on students to not only behave but also to work hard. There are a certain amount of scholarships for those who can not pay $30,000 per year. They receive a yearly scholarship based on their grades and social interactions. All students, even those paying full fees have to perform to the school’s accepted levels. Students applying for entrance spend a day at the school and are observed for interaction and behaviour by teachers as part of the process of entrance. Before pre-school, children are observed for social abilities such as sharing as part of the entrance exam. There is a waiting list for entrance.

Currently the reading book for 4 th grade is ‘Number the Stars’ by Lois Lowry a story of a ten-year old Jewish girl in Copenhagen during the period the Nazis occupied Denmark. What I found different with this school than other schools is that the students love reading. It is one of their favorite activities, and it is a treat to be given quiet reading time in class. In other schools the students would rather spend time on computers and this is something that stands out in this school. One student recently was reported not doing their homework and the parents said they were always reading books in the evening. This is a credit to St. Luke’s School education when reading is more fun than watching television or playing computer games.

21 April Wednesday

As 4 th grade is studying Eastern religions and Buddhism in particular we had a field trip to The Tibet Centre. We took the # 1 train one stop to 14 th and walked the last couple of blocks. As I have taken a lot of school trips on subways for various field trips, though never 4 th grade, I was interested in behaviour and interest at the centre from the children.

Walking to the subway and taking the train the students were much better behaved than other schools, especially last year when I worked at a public school and the children were so unruly.

At the Tibetan Centre we had a guide who explained what the centre was about and showed us and discussed the Buddhist artifacts. They knew how the Buddha had become the Buddha already and the life story of the 14 th Dalai Lama, who will be at the centre in a few weeks. They were very interested in all that was explained and asked a lot of questions about the statues and about Buddhism in general.

Learning about enlightenment and ethics and morals at this age is a good grounding. This fits in well with Piaget's Theory of Moral Development; the autonomous morality, or the morality of cooperation at around ten year old, which are the age of our 4 th grade students. (Berk, 2009 p. 492)

4/26

I lost the past week's reflective journal due to my computer crashing. I back everything up but after working two 12 hour plus days on assignments last weekend then teaching Monday and Tuesday all day I got behind and lo and behold now I am really behind.

I had written about Excel in 6 th grade and applying chapter 7 – cognitive development as much as possible. I am going through my own crisis or something as it is reading all this. My PhD was in communication and the Internet. Not child development. My crisis is that I was a single parent from when one child was six months old and the other three years old. We had little money and lived on a farm and then other homes – we had 10 homes in 10 years. I read all this material and place my children at the different ages for cognitive development. We took a trip from Adelaide to New York when they were one and a half and fours old, just me and them – to visit my family. We went again a few years later and the last time we took a trip around the world they were nine and eleven. I was thinking they were older, they seemed older for what I have been reading. We had a terrible life. One spent his fifteenth year locked up for murder but got out after a year as the person he was with was the one actually did it and confessed. My son was just doing the 'protecting his mate' thing. What a shit year. My youngest said at age seven he would play for the New York Yankees when he grew up – he did get signed by the LA Dodgers at age 17 and played a couple of years pro ball until he committed suicide soon after turning 20 because his girl friend who was in Sydney and he was with the Dodgers in Florida broke up with him. He flew to Sydney and went off his 15 th story hotel balcony. It is difficult reading this – I did it wrong but being on my own in a foreign country was difficult. The South Australian Family Court gave me custody but as their mother lived in Adelaide I was not allowed to move back to the States with them. So what does a single parent in Australia do? I did 14 years of university. And it has been good because I have taught at university in New York for several years, and I have taught K – 12 for more than five years and now I am doing prac teaching at two different schools and next semester in Adelaide I will be doing a prac teaching. Then if I pass this bloody thing – at age 63 – I will try to get a teaching job somewhere in the world again.

Collaborative event. I will begin to write this out. This is my first time being a part, all day, of a classroom. As the technology integrator at the past school, the computer teacher in two previous schools, and the Chair of Computing, and Director of Technology for two years all in private schools I have never been the one who did all the classes. I am use to students coming to my computer room. I lucked out and have a great 4 th grade mentor teacher who has really taken this project on. He tells me everything he is doing and why. I am doing two units with him. My third unit I am doing at another school and this did not work out so well. The school was just too busy for me, so I have been teaching 6 th grade computing three days a week and I am doing this for a ten-week block. I feel a bit ripped off as I have done this at two schools before but I need to do it for this course and have a 'mentor' observing and filling out my forms. My 'mentor' the IT person, young enough to be my soon if not grandson sort of observers. His only comment has been that I was going a bit fast. OK – I am all for doing it better, and I have slowed down – though the kids were with me all along. I can not imagine what he will write on the form for me.

Reference

Berk, Laura, E. (2009)

Blog updated January 26, 2012    K - 12 technology (updated January 22, 2012). Travel Site (2011) updated January 25, 2012. Videos/Blogs on Youtube, Twitter, Wordpress, Photo albums. Updated 15 Second Street, Round Lake, New York and photos from parent's 1943 wedding as well as Leigh's page. Farmville page updated Thursday, March 17, 2011 5:58 PM. neuage.org updated Wednesday, May 25, 2011 10:31 PM     neuage.us updated Wednesday, June 1, 2011 7:21 PM.    Resume updated January 27, 2012     

Technology Coordinator and Computer Teacher at Dalian American International School, 2 Dianchi Road, Golden Pebble Beach, Dealian Development Area 116650 P.R. China        

Blog updated / Integrating Technology Blog January 24, 2012 .  also: terrell.neuage.us and/or neuage.wordpress.co

Today working on picture poem links starting around "better" (January 28, 2012). Picture poems are the digital format of work I did as a street artist in New Orleans in the 1970s, as well as New York City, Honolulu, San Francisco and Adelaide South Australia. Follow @neuage