Sunday's thoughts

Hello, out there! I have been doing some thinking today about everything we have been looking at with the CREDE standards. I have been surprised at how much of the standards I do practice, but wonder about making things better. As professionals, we should always be looking for ways to better ourselves. It is a never ending job to grow and learn as teachers. I know that I need to work more on giving the students more individual projects to accomodate those students who work better that way. I know that I need to invite parents to come into my room more, too. Even though I don't have the different cultures, with the different languages, I am sure these parents would have something to give my students. I just have to find out what my parents are strong in and go from there.

As I continued to think today, I could not help but think about Standard 4 and the challenging activities. I really don't give my students a lot of feedback about there performance and the standards. I tell them how the activity ties into the standard we are covering, but when we are done with the activity, we don't go into whether or not there were successful in accomplishing the standard. We need to work on that. I, also, made comments here about student attitude and involvment in the activities. My colleagues at school have talked about how hard it is getting the students this year excited and engaged about anything. They will look right at us and tell us they don't care. How can we get anything out of them with attitudes like that? I thought today that we are just compounding the problem when we have such a negative attitude, too. If we give up, then they will, too. We cannot allow ourselves to do that. We have to stay excited, and positive, and keep challenging them. We are not helping them at all by having that attitude, too. I do have a question, though. My principal and other administrative personnel have told us that we need to be focusing on those students who are so close to passing the state tests. Those who are "on the bubble," so to speak. There are those who will pass, no matter what we do, and there are those who will fail, no matter what we do. We need to hit that group in the middle. I hate to think that that is true and I need to have that mentality going into everything I do, but when I get 6th graders who can only read on a 1st or maybe a 2nd grade level, what else can I do? This is why I can think of these students as the same as the ELL students this class talks about. The only difference is that my students know how to speak the social English and have a general understanding of the academic English. They are the same, though, because the don't have the comprehension of English, just like ELL's. I just can't imagine what it would be like to have ELL's in my classroom without a lot of support from somone who knows the language and can help with translation and culture - at least until I could get a general understanding of it.

Gee, I kind of got off there a little, but I guess that is okay. Well, I think that is about it for this evening. Those were just the thoughts going on my head today that I wanted to share. Talk to you later.