Working One-on-One

This week, I had the opportunity to work one on one with a girl in Mrs. Paynters class. Mrs.Paynter was working with small groups in the back of the classroom on spelling while the others worked on passed back homework from the day before. Mrs. Paynter told me I was welcome to walk around and help the students out with any questions they have. A little girl called me over to help her out on her math assignment she got passed back from the day before. She was working on adding and subtracting mixed numbers, and was concerned about a problem she got marked wrong and wanted to know where she went wrong. I was really stressed out at first because it had been a LONG time since I had even attempted to add and subtract mixed numbers. I I worked through the problem the way I thought it should be done, and it turned out that I got the same wrong answer as she did. I felt really inadequate and stupid, but she was so understanding and nice about it. I turned around and asked another student to explain to me how to solve the problem and then taught it to the girl and showed her where she went wrong. Needless to say I need to brush up on my 5th grade math, but I was really great getting to work with a student one on one. I was really relieved that she was so nice to me, and it was great to see how she processed the problems and why she was having a hard time with them.

One thing I was really impressed with this week was how involved Mrs. Paynter was with her students even before the bell rang. She answered questions, asked about readings, and was personally involved with each of her students. She is very good at checking for understanding and making sure that all the students were on the same page.

My favorite thing we did in class this week was the vocab game. Last week they got in partnerships and drew a picture to represent their word, but this week they got in partnerships and had to come up with an action to represent their word and show it to the class. I was lucky enough to participate because there was an odd number of students in the class, but most of all, I was incredibly impressed at their creativity and ingenuity. I got to work one on one with another student as we came up with our action for "developed". I asked her questions to see what her understanding of the word was, and then gave her a few of my ideas. Then she came up with an idea that we both liked and it represented our word perfectly. She was so smart and creative. It was a lot of fun, and I really liked that it was different than last week. Not the same activity over and over again.

As Mrs. Paynter taught, I sat and thought about what we had been learning this Module in relation to segregation. I can't imagine what it would be like if our classrooms were like that today. I thought about Ruby Bridges and how she attended the school for an entire year and was the only student in her class. I wonder what the interactions with her and her teacher were like. Were they more in classroom interactions or one on one interactions? I would say they were like one one one interactions, and I wonder how different those interactions were for Ruby than being in a class with many other students would have been. I think about how I would act in that situation teaching just one student instead of teaching an entire group of students. My mannerisms and methods would be more specific and specialized to a certain student, than generalized to fit a group. I thought about girls that I got to work with. I not only helped them, but in return, they had taught me as well. We created a bond and a connection that is different than the interactions I had with the other students, and I felt more and more comfortable with those two students as the class period went on.

I had a lot of fun this week observing the classroom and Mrs. Paynters methods. It was also great to learn about one on one experiences with students and how much more personal those interactions are than when teaching an entire class. It was the first time I had had that type of one on one interaction in the classroom setting and I definitely look forward to having more, and most definitely improving on how to handle them.