Presence in Fieldwork

Post for 10/13

Today was a great day. After the long drive, I arrived at what I will call Midland High School at 7:30 AM. No students had arrived yet and only a few teachers had arrived yet. I waited for my contact, Mr. J, to arrive in the office and introduced myself to the secretary and Mr. J when he arrived. Mr. J did not talk to myself or the other assignees very much (read: at all) and gave us a half-hearted offer of help if we needed it. I sincerely hope I will not have to get him involved in anything in the future.

After brief meetings with some other administrative workers, councilors and librarians, the other assignees and myself were introduced to the Vice Principal of Academics, Ms. V. She was very welcoming and seemed genuinely excited to have us at MHS despite her disappointment that none of us were Special Ed certified, English teachers or both (as they had apparently hoped for). It was in this meeting that I got the sense that MHS is a school with a plan. While perennially one of the lowest ranked schools in the state, MHS is quickly making great progress in testing and in numbers of students accepted to college. Not only are they achieving in the classroom but they have a brand new building, have instated a hard and fast uniform code and are trying to change the culture of the school in a dramatic fashion from “having the toughest students to having the hardest working and best students [around].” Later in the day, MHS was compared by another school employee as being “an unfinished jigsaw puzzle with the edges already in place.”

After this meeting, I was introduced to my cooperating teacher, Mr. Draper. Within a few minutes I was very comfortable in his class, his teaching and with him personally. Mr. Draper teaches US History II, US History II Honors and AP US History. He is very animated, outgoing and while the majority of his students seem to genuinely like him, there is definitely a group of students that cannot seem to stand him since he requires them to work and is a self-described “notoriously hard grader.” I liked him right away and felt like this was a good fit for my Fieldwork assignment.

Throughout the day, he introduced me to all of his classes at the beginning of the period and got me involved right away by assigning me to groups of students and helping them with their Panama Canal geography project for the day. In addition, during breaks he would offer me lesson ideas, organizational tips, thoughts on classroom management and had me help him develop test questions for the unit on American Imperialism. The day was extremely productive and very comforting in the sense that I had my first experience in an urban school and it went fairly well.

In keeping with our theme of Presence, Mr. Draper is an individual who always seems to be Present with his students. He is aware of what's going on in his classroom at all times, cuts bad situations off before they can develop and knows his students very well on an individual level. For example, in one of his smaller classes, he went extremely off-topic to explain the timeline of events after the US's so-called 'Age of Imperialism' to show its importance to the US to a student who didn't understand why the US would want control of a lousy canal in the first place. “Larry is very much an auditory learner,” Draper later told me. “He needs to hear the content to process it and doesn't have a great grasp of the timeline of events. His questions end up helping the class and it always helps him to give them more context.” In addition, Mr. Draper has a very playful manner in class and his students complain about it but clearly enjoyed his class. At least they did today.

Mr. Draper's manner in class has clearly been refined over years of practice so I suspect I would not have the ability to step into a class and do the same thing effortlessly. Of course, effort over time is what makes something seem so effortless. However, today was good mental preparation for how to deal with a classroom atmosphere and especially one that can apparently become hostile very quickly. As I was told by Ms. V at the start of the day, “MHS students punish bad teaching, quickly and unapologetically.” She quickly added, “but as much as they punish bad teaching, they reward good teaching just as much.”

Mr. Draper strikes me as an experienced, thoughtful teacher and I think I have a lot to learn from him about running a tough classroom and not only being a person who cares about other people but a teacher with Presence.