Life After DS 106

Since I’ve gotten questions about how Practicum and the Education Department work, I think I’ll use this post to answer those questions.

First, you have to apply to be in the first Education class, which is just an intro class that’s meant to teach you the concepts and theories of teaching. All the elementary and secondary students are lumped together in one class so it’s also the point in which some people decide that they want to switch one way or the other.

If you decide you want to stay in the program, you take more education classes the next semester. After you finish these next classes, you have to apply for Formal Admission. The hardest part about that is actually filling out the application, which really isn’t that hard. Once you get formally accepted, then you’re in for life.

During this time of taking classes, you have to do Practicum. Some classes don’t have practicum, most of the ones that do require 20 hours of practicum, while 1 has 30 hours. This requirement is from the State, and you can’t pass the class if you don’t get all (or pretty darn close to) of the hours required for that class.

A little math:

If you take 2+ education classes with practicum requirements, you have to do the practicum for both classes.

20 hrs + 20 hrs = 40 hours.

Which has been my life for the past 2 semesters. But I successfully avoided taking the 30 hour class with another class that requires practicum.

If you have 2 practicum requirements, you only get placed in one classroom. Which leads me to the question of how we get placed.

The wonderful computer geniuses here at UMW created a program where all the education students can put in their schedule, number of practicum hours needed, past placements, and a nice note to Dr. McCall if they so feel the desire.

Dr. McCall then looks at all the schedules and requirements and places everyone in a practicum and with a driver if they need one. This is the 2 or 3 weeks in the semester when it is not acceptable to go to Dr. McCall and distract her from making placements. (I think this is how people get bad placements ) Just kidding though, Dr. McCall is great for doing all this and we would never learn how to teach without her placing us in practicum.

Usually, she tries to make sure everyone has experience with every grade. Some classes require you to be in certain grades, like this semester I have to be in prek-2 (or3) and next semester I will have to be in one of the upper grades because of a sequence of classes I’m taking. She also puts you in the subject area of the class you are taking. If you are taking the science class, it’s best if you’re in a practicum class while they are teaching science.

In practicum, you are required to do a certain number, or type of lessons. For the science class you have to teach a science lesson.

In the Spring semester of your senior year, you apply for the graduate program and a specialization – science, math, special education, literacy, technology, social studies. If you get accepted, you get to come back another year. During this year, you do a lot of things that I don’t really want to think about right now. Sorry.

Preschool love. It’s crazy. In practicum on Tuesday, I walked in and this boy, we’ll call him lady’s man, had his arm around one girl and another girl was leaning on him. I heard there names many times that day in a questioning, disappointed teacher tone. At recess, one of the girls, we’ll call her boy-crazy, chased the lady’s man all around the playground yelling his name and giggling the whole time. It took all I had in me to not burst out laughing. We’ll see how long this “relationship” lasts tomorrow when I go back.

When I got there on Tuesday, it was quiet. By quiet I don’t really mean quiet, but I mean the closest you can get to quiet with a group of 4 year olds when they are not directly being read to or taught something. They were all sitting around the carpet reading their books they had just gotten from the library. Books in their eyes are treasured things, at least I think that until they throw them at each other. Most of them don’t have access to books at home so teaching them even the simplest things such as how to hold the book and where the title is are as important, if not more important than teaching them to actually read. This being said, when one boy, in a very matter of fact tone, told the girl sitting beside him that she has to read the title first I was shocked. He was reading a version of Humpty Dumpty, I’m not sure which one, and he actually read the title. At first I felt naive that I was surprised by this fact until the teachers in the classroom were also very surprised and took no delay in writing it in the notes of achievements that the students make.

This leads me to the complete bipolar-ness of an elementary classroom. This behavior quickly turned into hitting each other, running down the hallway, jumping down the stairs, and putting straws in bananas. For a short, but wonderful, 15 minutes while I was reading them a book about the life of a pumpkin from the perspective of a pumpkin they were quiet. Then it all ended again. Until they went out and got on the bus it was pretty chaotic. Really, right before they got on the bus, the main trouble maker of the class came running down the hall to where the rest of the class was in line, failed to stop in time, and knocked 3 other kids over in the middle of the hallway.

First week of Practicum at Headstart =  overwhelming, hilarious, and messy

In all the classrooms at Headstart there are 2 teachers, 1 main teacher and 1 assistant teacher…one is intimidating enough for me. It turns out that having 2 teachers is extremely beneficial for my purposes in Practicum. When I need to talk to the main teacher about having to do a lesson or interview her (which I will have to do in a couple weeks) there is another teacher who can be in charge of the classroom while we are talking. Also, 18 four-year-olds are just a tad overwhelming. When those 18 four-year-olds come from families with incomes below the poverty line, it’s even more overwhelming. (As an aside, in order to enroll in the Headstart program a family must have an income below the poverty line. I’ll have more information on that once I actually do some real research for my Sociology paper.)

The room is also very colorful. I don’t mean the colors of the rainbow, but colors of race, ethnicity, background, and personality. Many new teachers say that they are “colorblind” and don’t treat their students differently based on race, ethnicity, or culture. As Dr. Wright as told my Classroom Management class multiple times, “It’s impossible to be colorblind.” Also, being colorblind would be doing these students a disservice. If teachers never accounted for the differences in students, these students would not be in an environment conducive to learning. If students are not comfortable in their classroom environment, they will not be motivated to learn. In the classroom that I am in and all around the Headstart building, there are labels on important things in English and in Spanish to accommodate the large number of Spanish speaking students in the school. Headstart is also all about feeding families. Not necessarily with food, but with the resources to keep healthy. They set up appointments with doctors and dentists, counsel the families in the way to receive welfare and tell them job opportunities and give them opportunities to be substitutes in the school. They also provide counseling services for the parents and the students. The goal is to get parents involved early on in their child’s education with the hope that they will then continue to be involved throughout the rest of their education.

The first day I was there I ate lunch with them in the classroom. (They always eat lunch in the classroom to give the kids an opportunity to have a “family meal.”) I ate some of the questionable chili and peaches and salad. After I was finished, the boy I was sitting next to elbowed my tray and peach juice spilled all over my pants and my hand. Good thing I wore my pants that I bought when I got a job at KFC this summer. Then the next day that I was there I was in charge of the table where the kids were painting fire trucks. Red paint. Luckily it didn’t get on me, but it got all over the table and the floor.

At the beginning of Friday, after the students got off the buses, one boy had a conversation with me about how he didn’t think that I was in his class. After I told him that I was, he said that he didn’t believe me. Then at the end of the day he came up to me and said, “I really didn’t think you was in my class, but you are.”

While they were sitting on the rug on Friday, I overheard the funniest thing I’ve heard in the whole 2 days I’ve been there. One boy leaned over behind the boy he was sitting next to and got the attention of one of the girls in the class who was playing with her hair. He the proceeded to say, “I like your hair today.” She was very polite and said thank you, then he went on to say, “Do you like mine?”

Needless to say, I can’t wait to go back tomorrow.

Extra note: This is not about practicum, but it is about another 4-year-old. Monday, I was babysitting a 19 month old and a 4 year old. While the 19  month old was taking a nap the 4 year old wanted to play with my hair. I couldn’t tell what she was doing so I said, “Are you gonna make me look funny?” Her response? “No, I’m makin’ you look hot!” My response? “What?!” She then says, “But I don’t know what that means, so don’t tell me.”

I was talking to Sadie about what I was going to do my project/theme by blog around for the rest of the semester, and I think I finally figured it out.

I am in the Elementary Education program so each semester I am required (but really, allowed) to go into local schools and do Practicum. Basically, each education class has a required number of hours you must spend in the classroom in order to get credit for that class. Some classes don’t require any, but most require 20 with one requiring 30.

My assigned practicum this semester is in Head Start (aka 3 and 4 year olds). I’m also writing a paper for my Intro to Social Welfare class in which I will be writing a term paper about Head Start. Crazy.

Basically, Sadie said something along the lines of “People know that ya’ll have to do practicum, but they don’t really know what it is or what it involves.”

So I’m going to tell you, whether you like it or not. I’m also going to probably tell you all the things I learn about how Head Start works. My idea of it now consists of “preschool for underprivileged kids.”

There will probably also be funny, ridiculous things the kids say or do sprinkled throughout the rest of the semester.

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This is what my dining room table regularly looks like. With my stuff and my roommates’ stuff, it gets a little crazy.

Note: in this picture most of the stuff is mine…

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Fountain in downtown Fredericksburg

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