Journal 5

Journal 5

Kenmore Middle School

Today, the MOE class visited Kenmore Middle School. The first classroom we visited was Miss Debbie Pettit’s class. Miss Pettit used the overhead projector to show a letter to the students. She read loudly and asked the questions about the letter. Ms. Pettit is an energetic teacher and knows how to use body language effectively. During the teaching process, she kept giving the students simple questions and encouraged them to answer the questions. She kept saying,”Students, we are learning and nobody is perfect.” The words impressed me a lot.

Two students got my attention. Ms. Pettit’s students come from different countries. One girl from China was quiet all the time. One boy appeared a bit slow to learn and he couldn’t keep up with his classmates. He even turned his head to look at us and seemed to need some help from us. I wished that I could have helped him immediately. However, his classmates and the teacher helped him come up with the answer. He had a bad pronunciation. I guessed that he was quite new in class to learn English.

The students in my class also come with different learning levels. Some have extra English classes in an English cram school for a long time; some simply learn English in school. The good thing is that they all learn English well in the first semester. In my observation, the beginning-level students in Kenmore Middle School didn’t seem to perform better than the students in my class because there are a lot of immigrants from different countries in the States. It is a big challenge for teachers to teach students with different levels of English proficiency.

The students in the other two classrooms were reading story books. The classes were teacher-centered. A male teacher read loudly in class and asked his students to write down their opinions about the story. After finishing writing, the students shared their opinions with their classmates. However, I felt sleepy because the teacher didn’t have much body language and even no facial expressions. The monotonous intonation made me almost fall asleep.