Thursday, October 05, 2006

Harvest Moon

Go outside, check out the moon, and bask in the awesomeness that is your ability to see perfectly clear in the dark. For the next week or so the moon will be the biggest and most beautiful it's been in some time, all because of the Harvest Moon.

Today in my observation I had the amazing and sad encounter of teaching a 6th grader how to spell the word "largest."

6th grade and he doesn't know how to spell. What's worse is that he doesn't know how to read. He was just copying down the shapes of the letters on the board. He knew "A" was the first letter of the alphabet, but what's the use of knowing that if you can't do anything with it?

When I was in 5th grade my reading level was so low I'm embarassed to say. My parents, frustrated because they couldn't connect the dots themselves, sent me to the Sylvan Learning Center. The progress was amazing and I am so thankful my parents made the right choice to send me to a specialist. I always laughed at the thought of a "reading specialist," but because of Sylvan I'm the fastest reader in my family.

After today and for the rest of the semester I'm going to dedicate my observations to figuring out how to make School Tracking work in a way that's beneficial to all tracks, not just the upper tracks. The class I'm in now, with the lowest and highest students mixed together, isn't working. The higher-level students are bored and the lower-level students aren't getting the attention they need.

It's just so frustrating to see. I've always been told "tracking is bad" and it is because those in the lower tracks are not given the same opportunity, encouragement, and care that the higher-level students are. There has got to be a way to make it so those in the lower track are treated the same as those in the higher. It's hard though, when there's learning disabilities, physical limitations, and behavioral problems to take into account. But most behavioral problems stem from lack of care and lack of education.

Bleh. How can you be in 6th grade and not know how to read? And how are there students in higher grades also unable to read or write a paragraph?

This seriously makes me want to be a Reading Specialist. Everyone should know how to read. Everyone.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home

web statistics