Wednesday, October 11, 2006

RE: Observation

Today Ms. H's classes met in the computer lab to type up the english papers they've been working on for weeks. They were all supposed to have written a Beginning, middle, end worksheet, a writing analyzer writeup, at least one rough draft, and a final draft. I was absolutely amazed at how many students in the class did not have one or more of these four components. Most parts of this assignment were done in class instead of for homework, so there isn't even a very good excuse for not having everything finished.

Something that also surprised me was the lack of typing skills among the students. Granted they are still young, but by their age I was already relatively proficient in keyboarding skills. Of course, something I always took for granted in school was our keyboarding program. I began learning how to type around first or second grade, and we had a keyboarding unit in our computer class every year through 8th grade. There was also a keyboarding class available in my high school as an elective credit. Most of the students today were hunt and peck typers, so Ms. H asked me to help several students from each class by sitting down and typing their papers for them. As I was going along with the first student I realized that I was changing things as I went along almost automatically. I did not realize at first that my hands were just typing the correct spellings and correcting grammar errors as well. Force of habit I suppose.....but I decided that it would be more beneficial to the students to see what their errors were when they went back to do spelling and grammar checks, so I decided not to fix the errors and had to consciously remind myself to put in all the errors from their drafts.

Today I met my focal student, Lisa (name has been changed for her protection). The setup of class today was not very conducive to talking to her very much, but I explained to her briefly that I was planning on working with her throughout the rest of the semester, and that I needed to get to know her better. I think she will be good to work with because she seems to be a hard worker who is pretty quiet during class. Hopefully when we're back in the regular classroom I'll get a chance to observer her more closely, and I may even go observe her tomorrow when I do not have class.

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