Colleen’s Blog

Last week I started my first week of student teaching. I am in a 6th grade Language Arts classes and I have already come to realize that the classroom is much different that I expected it to be. Right off the bat, I noticed that classroom management is the number one issue that my mentor teacher deals with every day. Given the opportunity to to so, 6th graders will talk and act up and go crazy every day.

Later in the week, I was reading about a first year teacher who was trying to be funny and well-loved by his students and all the while having a very difficult time with classroom management. I suppose that one of my greatest fears when it comes to teaching is that I will worry so much about being well-loved among students that I won’t have control over my class. Janet Alsup and Jonathan Bush talk about this tension in their book “But Will It Work with Real Students?” They recommend finding a “happy medium between the natural tendency to want to run a ‘fun’ and a need to create a means where mutual respect becomes natural,” (146). They also suggest having an opening activity and having a set of rules and standards developed by the students that will keep students accountable in an academic atmosphere. I can see myself using both of these exercises in my own classroom next year, but I am looking for more suggestions to use. Any suggestions?

Dare I even pose the question? Although, something I read in Deborah Appleman’s book “Critical Encounters” made me think about this very question. She said:

“…some have been left to wonder whether the subject of English as we have known it is dead and shouldn’t rename our enterprise something like cultural studies.”

So, this quote got me thinking: what is it that I want my students to accomplish? It is a love for great literature or is it the ability to think critically? I am not saying that those two objectives are mutually exclusive, but this quote got me thinking about how I fee about incorporating other cultural mediums into the classroom. Is what we teach our students as important as how we teach them? Does it matter if my kids are reading William Shakespeare or Dr. Suess as long as they are thinking critically about the material?

I believe that the skills that we teach our students are far more important than the texts they read, but I fear that there are scholars out there who question if English is dead. I know that we live in the generation of the reality t.v. show and the text message, but isn’t there a way to still make literature relevant to our cultural studies?! Has anyone else encountered this dilemma before?