Thursday, April 23, 2015

Day 9 at Classic City High School: 4/15/2015

This day was a really good day for me.  I showed up to Classic City, waited for Mrs. Smith, then got my student right away.  At first I was nervous working with this student because Mrs. Smith had talked about her with me telling me that she doesn't like to do her work, but then as I started to work with her it all went away.

We needed to work on *Becca's annotation log.  She was very behind in her reading and even farther behind in filling out her annotation log.  When Mrs. Smith told me that she was using the annotation log more as a vocabulary log I knew that Becca did not understand how to annotate.  I remember being told to annotate, but was never really taught how to.  When Becca and I got to the media center and I explained that we would be working on her log she was not excited about it at all.  She told me that she didn't know what to do.  I did my best trying to explain to her what to do, but I could tell it was going in one ear and coming out the other.  I decided that working with her and helping her find passages would be more beneficial.  Becca's last log was on page 36 but she had read to page 76 so I told her that we had to go back and find passages from past pages and get caught up to where she left off.  I think this was a good thing for her since she had already read the pages and looking over them again with a more critical eye is easier than reading and trying to find critical passages.

I was the one who would point out different passages and then have her analyze them.  One passage I picked out was because the author utilized anaphora.  I knew that she did not know what anaphora was, but I thought it was a simple rhetorical term that she could find on her own easily.  I pointed it out and told her what her meant and then moved on.  As we continued the assignment I would ask her if she has any questions on what was said.  At one point she wondered how the sheriff knew a gun was not shot by smelling the barrel.  I told her that asking the question and then looking it up was a perfect annotation.  She wrote the passage, asked the question, and then googled it to find out the answer.  By the end of the class she was still not able to pick out passages, but she was able to think critically about passages that were given to her.  I felt that that was an important step in learning to find the critical passages herself.

At the end of class I talked to Mrs. Smith about Becca and how she worked very well with me.  Mrs. Smith told me that she is a great worker one-on-one but in the class she has problems focusing because of friends.

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