Week Seven

 I did my edTPA this week. It was weird. I took over completely in my purple days classroom and surprisingly, the students responded pretty well. Even though it was a writing unit, they worked well with me. I formatted the whole thing using “I do, we do, you do” and I think it was really helpful for them. Not only did my mentor say she was surprised by how responsive the students were, I also had some students turn in really impressive quick writes. It was nice to feel like I was actually teaching and not just filling in for my mentor. 

Conversely, I feel like the grant we’re working on for my group is just kind of filling in boxes. We started out working on a grant for counselors, but not only could we not find an actual grant to apply for, we also didn’t really know what it was for. The problem we assessed was the high turnover rate for counselors, but we didn’t know how money would fix that aside from higher salaries, but no grants could really do that. So we thought about making a cooldown room, but realized we’d need a monitor for the room and a bunch of supplies we didn’t have. So, I suggested we target the low math proficiency rate with a tutoring program. Muncie Community Schools had just gotten a grant for that, though. We decided to make a dedicated math room with a smart board and updated supplies so that students would have access to resources and not just what the grant they already had funded — which was just the cost of the tutoring for families. 

In talking to students and teachers, it seems that nobody cares enough about the room to even really want it. When talking to my mentor teachers, one said students in the school don’t even get scared by zeroes. He said students are unmotivated on the whole in the school and nothing can really fix it. The other mentor teacher told me a very similar story. Students who aren’t going to work and are below proficiency don’t respond to resources. She also told me about how even if kids are failing the class the whole year, if they pass the final, they pass the class. She said she’s had to pass students who never did a thing. While I think that that system overall is very harmful to education, I think that’s a huge contributor to the lack of motivation. Students don’t care enough to work and don’t have to in order to pass, so they sit on their thumbs and watch movies in class. 

I don’t know what my group can do because money can’t change the culture. As much as I’ve watched students grow, the amount of students who don’t care and are content to fail is staggering. It’s bleak but it’s real.