Ellie Timmermann

19 March 2014
Field Experience Reflection

I observed Mrs. Kamides 9
th
and 10
th
grade English classes at Annandale High
School. I basically watched two full school days of classes, as well as observed additional
parts of a teachers typical work-day such as meetings and planning periods. Throughout
my observation, I got to see how a high school in Fairfax County is run as well as what
goes into teaching for lower level high school English courses.
One of the first things I noticed was how the room was arranged and decorated.
The students sat in groups at large desks, probably due to the group work that is done in
class. The classroom also had a Smartboard at the front of the room, which, according to
Mrs. Kamide, is in every classroom because the county requires it. She uses the
Smartboard mainly for projection purposes from the computer or the document camera.
She told me that she did not like having the smartboard, and did not like using it, but had
to because the school required it. She informed me a student had broken the document
camera the other day, so she wasnt able to project assignments on the board like she
normally did. On the sides of the board were agendas for both of her classes with the
SOL standards that were going to be covered that day.
The room was decorated with a lot of posters having to do with English, mainly
quotes and rules pertaining to grammar. However, what caught my eye were two bulletin
boards that were on The Odyssey and Julius Caesar, texts that her classes were studying
at the time. One was a poster that listed different things about Julius Caesar, and the other
showed student works having to do with The Odyssey. I liked that she involved her
students with the decorating of these boards so they could be meaningful to them.
The ninth grade classes are co-taught by Mrs. Kamide and Mrs. Perkins, a
Learning Disabilities specialist who worked in the school. This is because there are
several students in the class who have IEPs, and therefore need extra attention. However,
Mrs. Kamide basically served as the main teacher of the class, giving instruction and
doing most of the grading. She said to me that when they first started co-teaching, they
had a good-cop, bad-cop dynamic, but over time, Mrs. Kamide had to do most of the
classroom management because Mrs. Perkins did very little in terms of teaching or
managing. I noticed in the second ninth grade class, a lot of students were coming to her
asking to get extensions and so forth, with one flat out saying that she would have given
them a better grade than Mrs. Kamide.
At the time I was observing, her ninth grade classes were doing class registration
for next year with the guidance counselor, so a good chunk of the class time was spent
there. I should also mention that at the time I observed, there had been several snow days
that resulted in Mrs. Kamides classes falling behind schedule, as well as forcing me to
reschedule an observation day.
Once the ninth graders were done with registering, they finished up with group
presentations they were doing as part of their unit on The Odyssey. One of the things I
thought worked was that the students who werent presenting had to annotate the quote
being presented and turn it in, thus giving them incentive to pay attention to the
presentations.
In her 10
th
grade classes, they were working on research papers on world leaders,
and were supposed to discuss how the leader they chose was similar to Julius Caesar. I
thought this was a good way to make the themes present in Caesar relevant to the present
day. It also tied in with the SOL requirement that pertained to research papers. However,
the students were so far behind that instead of actually writing out the paper, they were
just required to turn in an outline with a works cited. Not only that, but they were
required to have a specific format, and Mrs. Kamide was going so far as to have their
thesis statements be fill in the blank ( __________ was a modern day Julius Caesar
because ____________).
When I was telling my advisor about my observation, she remarked how
Annandale was a very diverse school, and she was absolutely correct. All the classes I
observed had a diverse group of students in race, religion, socio-economic status, and so
on. A majority of the students were Hispanic, African-American, or from the Middle
East, though there were also a good number of kids who were white. There were also
several female students that wore hijab. The most major way this applied to Mrs.
Kamides classes were in the 10
th
graders research papers. According to her, many of the
students decided to write about Assads regime because it was the most relevant to them.
In addition, the high school had a separate program and coordinators for ESOL students.
I also was able to sit in on a collaborative meeting between the teachers of the
English department after classes ended. This meeting showed how the different teachers
taught similar curriculum and assignments, so that way all of their students are on the
same page. An example I saw was an assignment on To Kill a Mockingbird that two
teachers were designing together. I also sat in on two homeroom sessions, called Atom
Time. During these sessions, students had the opportunity to go to their teachers to make
up assignments, turn in additional work, and so on. There was also a career fair that was
going on that students had the opportunity to go to.
There were a lot of surprising things that I was not expecting during my
observation, but looking back, really should not have been surprising. One was the way
extra credit was used. For one of the assignments, Mrs. Kamide was offering 25 points
for students who did extra credit for the assignment. She also offered extra credit to
students that went to a festival that was sponsored by the school. It wasnt long before I
discovered why she offered a lot of this extra credit: a good majority of her students do
not turn in their assignments, and many do not even show up to class. As a result, many
of them were either failing or barely passing.
The other major element I noticed during my observation was the classroom
management that Mrs. Kamide used. Both the 9
th
and 10
th
grade classes were spending
the class mainly working on the projects that were due, while also going to her desk to
have her check their work. Instead of working though, a lot of the students were either
using the laptops to go on Facebook, or chatting. Granted, it is possible that there were
some that were talking while doing their work, as two girls sitting near me were doing,
but thats not always the case. Mrs. Kamide occasionally would tell the class that they
were supposed to be working instead of socializing, but they would then go back to doing
just that. She later told me that her classes always do this, but that it was beyond her
control. I later read in a chapter about classroom management that the teacher must never
sit at her or his desk while students are working, because they should always be
monitoring the students. I thought of her classes when I was reading that section.
I remember on the second day of observation, a student in her homeroom had
asked me if anything crazy happened in Mrs. Kamides class yet. She had asked
because she had heard stories from her brother, who was in one of her classes. That
indicated to me that a lot of what I was observing was fairly typical of her class. The
closest that it came to being crazy was a discipline incident with a student. Apparently,
this student had bumped into Mrs. Kamides docu-camera, causing it to fall and break. In
addition, Mrs. Kamide was already having problems with him due to his grades and his
overall behavior, mainly socializing when he wasnt supposed to be. So it was a few
minutes after the bell rang, and the door is shut. I, and some of the other students see him
run up to the door, and he knocked. When Mrs. Kamide opened the door, he tried talking
to her to explain being late. However, she yelled at him that he needed a pass and was
inconveniencing her life. The entire class was dead silent for a few minutes, with a few
students expressing shock at this. To me, it seemed like a culmination of her frustrations
with her students and the system in general, and she ended up taking it out on a student,
something that I hope to never do.
So, what was my ultimate takeaway from all of this? It certainly has not dissuaded
me from teaching high school. The students seemed very social, chatty, and were also at
times funny. I liked interacting with them and I find that to be a better situation than
classes that are dead silent all the time. I definitely think that you need a lot of patience
and a calm nature for this job, as I saw can easily be taxing for a lot of people. I would
probably manage my class differently than Mrs. Kamide, though I did like how she was
implementing the curriculum and reading into creative assignments. So I found some
enjoyment and learned a lot from this experience.