Field Experience III

It was interesting being in a fifth and sixth grade combined classroom. The students were well aware of the grade that they were in, however, were able to interact with each other equally. The only time I ever saw any difference was sort of like gender bias when the teacher is calling on students. It was instead a grade bias. One time the students we reading a passage on a projector and one student rose her hand and said, "You are only calling on sixth graders!" to our cooperating teacher. So, not only does she deal with the gender bias, she deals with the "grade bias." I found also in some journal entries that the students are now forming attitudes and personal fables. We went on a field trip with the students to the Space Center in Pleasant Grove. On of the students accounts of his experience was this. "We went to the space center and I had already been there a few times before. I had the same job (they are assigned jobs on a space ship) as last time and it was really boring. If I would have known that John was going to be the captain of our ship I would have just blown the ship up and ruined it for everyone." It was major attitude coming from is journal entry. Our cooperating teacher was not impressed by his attitude and when we were teaching social studies she asked me to keep a good watch on time to make sure he wasn't off task talking about his horrible time. One other thing I noticed about this student is that everything "sucked" our end of unit project was a lot of fun, well all the other students were engaged with it. So I asked him to say atleast three things that sucked about it and he couldn't come up with anything. I would consider it a personal fable, because everything "sucks." I can remember being in that stage, it is just interesting to see how the negative attitude of one studetn can spread. In a lesson with our cooperating teacher he just said to the experiement "this sucks" and would refuse to help his team do their science observations with bending light. One thing for sure that I have learned about this whole experiment is that there always has to be a plan B and nothing goes according to plan. I learned a lot but one thing I learned is that nothing is more constant than change.