Sunday, October 24, 2010
Chapt 4
Gallager talks about under teaching more difficult text in this chapter. I witnessed this more than anything other than the intensive testing focus in my classroom observations. This particular incidence concerned lessons on Greek and Roman history. The teacher told the kids to read the chapter and do worksheets sorting through complex vocabulary like Epicureanism, Hellenism, Socratic Method, and Hippocratic Oath on their own. I actually asked the teacher about the difficult and generally unfamiliar words, he said that he didn't actually teach these harder terms, just exposed the class to them. I thought this was rather bizarre because these words were included on the chapter vocabulary lists the kids would eventually be tested on. They had to define and be able to explain such conceptual terminology without any support or background information. Personally I could see the frustration of the students, when pronunciation was an issue let alone comprehension.
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Unfortunately I feel your host teacher's pain. It certainly doesn't make it right but I find myself teaching what I can but sometimes towards the end I find our teachers (including myself) trying to at least expose the students to certain concepts so that if they do see it again they at least had some sort of exposure. I don't think we do this with the harder stuff though and you are totally right. What use is it to "expose" someone to something if they are NEVER going to remember it anyways, especially if they cannot even comprehend it at all. Something to think about :-)
ReplyDeleteI think that chapter 4 focus too much on the wrong problem. Why are teachers doing what you host teacher did? I can for all day on my out look but the problem starts with the government and falls down from there.
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