Catching Up on My Journaling

Now that I am done with my philosophy of education paper, I can once again work on Journaling. Much has happened since my last entry, including our class discussion on Tuesday, more assigned readings, and observation at the junior high. Not too much has been happening during my observation. The students were preparing for their chapter test which is on Friday, so they spent Monday and today reviewing and finishing their study guides and maps while watching a video about the Andes Mountains, which they were studying. During this time, I looked ahead at the next unit, which focuses on Europe. I also spent some of the time memorizing the rest of the students names. This is the class that I’ve spent the least amount of time with, so there were some students that I didn’t know. I am also realizing that it’s going to be a little difficult to work with my student that I’m profiling. Her supervised study classroom changes everyday and I only observe her in class every other week. I will need to meet with her in class next week so I can figure out her schedule and find times when we can meet.

In class on Tuesday, we first discussed our philosophies of education. I was relieved to hear that other students had trouble keeping their papers to less than three pages. I had so much that I wanted to say and so many questions that I needed to answer, but there was no way to address every issue. I really hope that we have the chance to rewrite it this semester because I want to make my philosophy more concise. Also, we discussed the article we read about immigration and its affect on the educational system. I found this article very interesting because when I think about education, I don’t often think about immigrant students. I did, however, have some experience with these students in elementary school because we had a very good ESL program at my school. I have found that these students learned a lot of their English from their peers during social times such as recess. I believe that these students will add to the success to the future of America. They have many positive values that students in America don’t have, and add diversity to the classroom. I think that the issue of immigrant students is very important and should be addressed more often.