Connor
Undergraduate
English Education |
Connor
Undergraduate
English Education |
Another week here in Siena down in the books, and it was a really quick one all things considered. Sweat went well, for the most part. I only got to teach it for one day today, but we had some interesting discussions for that shortened period. We continued with the theme of intersectionality, and I showed the students some of the Crenshaw TED Talk I mentioned last week, but some students were just not having it. In the video, Crenshaw speaks about a case where a black woman wasn't hired and it cited that white women were hired for secretarial work, and black men were hired for factory work, so there was no place for her to go and as a result it was both gender and racial discrimination. And this discussion got heated very very quickly with the male student who was very firm in his stance of "there's no way to prove discrimination, she might just not have been good enough for the job". My mentor teacher came in an asked him who seemed to rule the world and he said it was men, but couldn't give reasons why. Another friend of his took the defense against almost everyone else in the classroom. There was a group of female students who got very heated with the discussion as well and it went very long. I'm normally okay with controversial discussions, and in fact thrive on it in classrooms since this is what I wanted. In my previous placement, which was a majority students of color environment, we had a lot of these kinds of discussions. However, I could relate to them more and have more experience with relating to those students than these ones. It's not to easy to bring up the study done on hiring discrimination when it comes to names that sound "black" and names that sound "white" (taken from this article https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/18/name-discrimination-jobs) without then having to give longer backstory on the significance of names and name stereotypes. Maybe it isn't as complicated as I think, and in theory could be easily put into practice, but it's such unknown territory. I can't say to my male student that he has horrible ideas and should be put down as a result, since we're not told to discourage student's opinions. However, I also can't let him think these things to say are okay without inputting my personal beliefs, which I'm learning is very difficult when it comes to teaching. How do you learn to separate yourself from your beliefs in a classroom of wildly different personalities and beliefs? How do you separate your identity from when students are hateful towards it, whether through willful or unknowing ignorance? When do I step in as a teacher to make sure students are able to articulate opinions for grades when I do not want them regurgitating those opinions, no matter how sound and well put they might be? Teaching is full of very fine lines and as a teacher, I think I need to learn more about them in the next few years and really develop my identity quickly with how the current generations and this country is turning out. On a lighter note: I went with my host lady to a dinner at her contrada, which is sort of a neighborhood with more pride attached to it in Siena. A lot of it has to do with Il Palio, which is a huge horse race in Siena twice a year in the summer. The food was wonderful (three courses minus dessert), and the aesthetic was very vintage which I could get behind! I fully intend to enjoy my Bob Dylan and Nick Cave CDs that I purchased there once I am back on home soil (in 11 days).
Some of the younger students that I see when I'm working on the library also saw me and stopped to talk in the street yesterday, which filled my heart because they were so excited! It means a lot to me. I was more than happy to dole out hi-fives to those who asked.
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This week saw me getting to teach just a bit on Wednesday, which is all I can report, but it was still pretty illuminating! As I've said the previous post, I am starting the Lynn Nottage play Sweat, which is a fairly modern play that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Synopsis: It’s the year 2000 in Reading, Pennsylvania and a group of friends go to work at the steel mill and then decompress at the bar like they’ve been doing for over 20 years. But, unbeknownst to them, their lives are about to be uprooted. Their steel mill, Olstead’s, is making some changes and the blood, sweat and tears, not to mention the generations of loyalty these workers have shown, don’t seem to amount to much. These middle class, unionized, steelworkers have made plans to save money, go on vacations and then retire with a nice, healthy pension, but when rumors start flying that the company is considering layoffs, and flyers are hung to recruit non-union Latino workers for less money, the war between community and capitalism begins, and tensions start destroying not only jobs, but also relationships. This poignant play takes a look at the de-industrial revolution through the lens of a history play, but also delves into the issues of today: the economy, immigration, race-relations in America, and politics. Lynn Nottage’s Sweat gives us characters filled with the good and the bad and asks us to reflect on our own views and the views of others. Nottage never tells us who’s right or who’s wrong, but always shows us who’s human. I had a period to get to speak about it, but as you can probably see there are a lot of parts to it that are very complex and interesting. Teaching about The Rust Belt was not so difficult, as Google Images had a lot of very good images and was able to help and show what the town was and what the students should visualize in the play. Some other things, such as trade unions, striking and what being a "scab" meant were not as easy to explain to the students. I think it's going to be an interesting time to teach the students. I also am teaching the play under the topic of intersectionality. The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. It is an analytical framework for understanding how a person's various social and political identities combine to create different modes of discrimination and privilege. Intersectionality identifies multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage.(gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability etc), and how these can be both empowering and oppressing to people. I have taught my last bunch of students in Tapestry High School about this topic, which seemed to go well, but these students didn't totally get to understand. I plan to show them a video of Crenshaw explaining this in a TED Talk to them on Wednesday, which I recommend for anyone interested in the topic. I sadly only get to see them this Wednesday, which is fine, but I don't know how much I will be able to get done with them. We shall see what we can do, hopefully. In other news, culturally I went quite wild with learning new things. Last Tuesday here, it was Liberation Day, which marks the end of fascist/Nazi rule in Italy. As a result, there were plenty of parades and celebrations, so Grant, Marita and I went to what we thought would be a parade in one of the main piazzas, but it turned out to be a parade for the Italian Communist Party and we ended up right in the middle of it unknowingly. I ended up buying a newspaper just to say that I had. Yesterday on Sunday, the three of us students got invited by Grant's mentor teacher Rosie to go to the sea, which was unfortunately very rainy, but we ended up swimming in the sea and having a great time despite the fact that it did not stop raining from the time we arrived to the time we left. But I still went swimming, and the water was so nice despite being freezing. We had the whole beach to ourselves and stayed up totally late into the night singing and talking. So nice.
At the Siena school, I primarily work with Grade 12 and Grade 13 students in English. The Grade 13 students, however, spent this week doing their oral exams, where they have to speak into a microphone about their presentation which includes
The Grade 12 students were doing their own mock versions of these exams in preparation for doing them next year. Their timeline is very weird since they are doing catch up with not having had a real English teacher until recently, but they are getting them done quickly and pretty efficiently. Once they finish entirely by Monday, I will start teaching them the Lynn Nottage play Sweat, so I am really looking forward to it! I have a planning document and questions that I really want the students to think about and be able to discuss with me. It's especially interesting when looking at the context of the play and it being a very wholly American play, which I think I might have commented on in a previous post. But I know that generally Europeans claim (and there is some merit to their claims) that they do not see race and it is instead presented differently into more of a regional segregation and discrimination than a colorist discrimination (ie Eastern Europeans being associated with thieves and crime bosses, Southern Europeans being considered loud and uncultured), so these won't exactly be easy discussions and it will probably take a while to explain the true divides in America that the play shows. I'll be sure to keep notes on it and any questions/concerns that come up, but I think it will be an interesting experience and I can't wait to get started finally. I also was lucky enough to observe a History class and help the Grade 12 students in there for a period, and sat in on a Grade 7 English class where they were doing Greek Mythology. One thing I noticed with my History class was that the students and teacher were totally using ChatGPT for their papers and would often just put questions into the AI and it would give paragraphs of answers, which I'll be honest gives me very mixed feelings. The school is very open with AI use and unlike the previous school I student taught in, as well as many American schools in general, it is not seen as plagiarizing or false work to use AI to generate art or help with some of your essay, as it shows creativity and a willingness to look into the future of education and embrace it rather than make it go away or pretend it does not exist. It makes me a little scared, but I have had many talks with people in and outside the school system about the benefits and drawbacks of ChatGPT, and while I do not think I would ever allow its use in my classroom purely from a moral standpoint, I do think monitoring it is going to be essential for this generation of teachers going into the field, and how it will really impact our jobs and how we teach and as well as how we structure and format assignments to give them a human element no AI could (for now) replicate. I'm looking into this week with excitement and high hopes, and the future with some worry and many thoughts. Hello! I have been absent the past few weeks not because I wanted to be, but because I had no other way to update on my blog and situation. For starters: I went around Europe for ten days! The International School I'm placed at has a longer spring break, so we had a short week from April 3rd to the 5th, and then break from the 6th to the 17th, when everyone had to be back in school. Kate and I were mainly working with getting the students in a good place for their oral exams, which will be recorded and graded this week, and then leaving them with that. I left Siena on the 6th and stayed overnight in Florence, and on Good Friday I flew into Paris. It was more than a bit terrifying a few times, and I was so so worried I would lose my luggage and get lost in a country with a language I don't speak at all, And, to be honest, I had a stereotype from pervious experiences with French people that they were very rude and unaccommodating, but many people I met were actually friendly and willing to help out with ordering food or getting around. I stayed for a few night and I have to say, I saw so much. My first stop in Paris was to go to Versailles, where I saw the palace. I can speak from firsthand experience: it's bigger than you would think it is. I saw entire rooms that could fit my house, and then some, and they were just bedrooms! The garden also went on forever, and I was exhausted by the end of it. But going back into Paris, I also saw the Eiffel Tower and of course the very famous Notre Dame cathedral. The church was still closed, but they had spots you could sit around and gaze at it. I did a lot of walking around that next day and got to see a bit of Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge windmill. There are many other pictures of Versailles and in catacombs, but I do not have that much space and this is already running long, so I will move on to London. I arrived on Easter Sunday and almost was run over by a car, as I forgot that the streets were different and backwards here for a moment. Since it was Easter Sunday and everything was closing early (or things that weren't, I didn't want to make the people working on Easter have to work harder), I skipped out of London and took a very long bus ride to Oxford, which was a very nice little town. I mainly went there for a gravesite of a very certain author I'm a fan of, but walking around the cemetery and looking at the sites and the tended graves felt very surreal and personal. It was a nice place to relax after going non-stop for three days beforehand. My day was pretty much done after that and getting back, but I did have a restful night and got up early to go walking around on Easter Monday. It was really raining so I took that as the time to walk and go for inside activities and touring. The Sherlock Holmes museum was packed, it had four different floors all set up for how it would look in the 19th century, such as Sherlock Holmes' bedroom, or his study. Finally I was able to see Les Misérables on West End, which is really the apex of musical theater for many; I feel it's a pilgrimage you have to make. And seeing as it is one of my favorite musicals of all time, it was very worth it. The whole production was amazing, and as someone who has only seeing the 2012 movie, it was completely different from what I expected. I was also able to actually meet some of the cast and get signatures! The staging was incredible and there was a lot of work with projectors, which I've noticed is becoming more of a thing in theater and it worked really well. (Although I did get asked for identification because I looked too young to be at Les Misérables, which I'm sure would be more flattering when I'm older, but I was all dressed up and I promise I am 22!) The final leg of the trip was Ireland. I spent a night in Dublin and got absolutely drenched from the rain, so I did not get to walk around much, but I did have my first experience with pod living in a hostel (pod living being you have a cubby you crawl into and are in a box for your bed). The next day was cold but only windy so I went on a wonderful walking tour by a man called Lorcan Collins who educated the group on the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the civil war that came afterwards, as well as some history of Ireland-Dublin trying to liberate itself. The most intense sight had to be the bank/post office where the original uprising was centered in and around, and you could still see the bullet holes from where shots were fired on both sides. It was a nice city and I do wish I had more time there, but Cork was absolutely stunning. I saw Blarney Castle on my second day there and was so worried I'd be rained out, and I was just in awe the whole time. I think it's hard to say I've seen that much green in one place, and like Versailles it just kept going on. I'll just say that it was a very needed time away, and it was terrifying to be going around Europe as a single traveler. And I felt more than a little out of place and I knew that no matter how well I tried to disguise that I wasn't a tourist, it very well came while I opened my mouth. Not all of the trip was positive: There were scammers all over in France who pestered me for money, and I almost lost my phone and ticket back to Siena on Saturday; my phone also died. But it was an experience I don't think I will totally forget and I'm looking forward to my chance to go back.
This week was getting situated at the International School of Siena and getting to meet my mentor teachers and the school community itself. The school holds kids from Pre-K to Grade 13 (18-19 year olds), with relatively small classes. I'm primarily working with Grade 12 and 13 at the moment, and those graduating classes are about 14 and 8 students, respectively.
(As a sidenote; my graduating class in Orchard Park was almost 400. I don't think 400 students could fit in the whole school at one time). My mentor teacher, Kate Van Forst, has a background in English education , having worked many years in New Hampshire and then around Italy in Florence and Rome. So it's nice to have some sort of commonality, as she's done the International Baccalaureate Program before. From the International Baccalaureate Organization website: An IB education aims to transform students and schools as they learn, through dynamic cycles of inquiry, action and reflection. Teachers enable and support students as they develop the approaches to learning they need – for both academic and personal success. Education in International Baccalaureate® (IB) World Schools:
She also teaches a class called the Theory of Knowledge, which is a philosophically based class on who we receive and retain knowledge; the students are doing a unit on ethics and morals in this class. I don't quite know what I'm teaching yet, but I'm excited on that front. They also have me part time with the Social Studies students when I'm not with Kate, so I go to work with the Grade 12 students in that! The students were doing small class presentations on different aspects of the Weimar Republic, so I got to help one student with getting the information since she was on her own. Fingers crossed I get more opportunities like that! Every day so far has been very exhausting (8:30a to 4p school days), but I'm sure with getting my tolerance up for the days, the fatigue will eventually settle and it'll be over before I can notice. Not many pictures this week, but I have gotten to enjoy Italian Cola, so I would share that if anything (I think they like to make assumptions with me being an American because they always give me ice and a lemon. I'm not complaining, but still). I also got to see Young Frankenstein in totally Italian, which was not weird, but definitely not what I was expecting. At least slapstick knows no language barrier. As someone who's only ever seen Italy through other media, it sort of felt not real to be in the country for the first day or so. The plane ride seemed to take forever, but touching ground in Florence finally made it worth it! Grant, Marita and I had a great time in those first few days walking around and getting situated in the city. We found out a lot about each other and got to experience so much; David and Il Duomo are still huge in my mind, I truly was not expecting that. And the food has been so good, I've been eager to try everything and make good spots in my mind of where to go next.
On Wednesday we arrived in Siena and I was quickly whisked away to my host lady, a lovely woman named Gianna. There has been a bit of a language barrier, but I'm grateful because it really helps me learn Italian quickly to be able to communicate with her. On that first night, I met her family, and we were all able to get to know each other in some instances once we got settled (and pulled out Google Translate a few times!). They were all very nice and interested in America, explaining the difference between New York City and New York State was very fun. Thursday and Saturday have been more exploring of the city, which is very helpful. Thursday was a guided tour, and seeing the history of Siena and just how much is condensed into it is helpful. The Piazza del Campo is huge, and I only wish I were here to see that horse race in person and see how packed it can truly get. On Friday I went with Grant, Marita and Dr. Renzoni to the school and we saw how to get situated in and met some of the students and teachers. I did not get to meet my English mentor teacher, but I did find out I would be helping to shadow the social studies teacher as well, which is fabulous as history is one of my favorite subjects, so I immediately went into it. I'm excited to see how they handle Inquiry-Based curriculum here, as the school seems very modern and open. I had some experience with it in my first placement at Tapestry Charter High School, so I'm a bit prepared, but to see it in full force is going to be wonderful. I can't wait to get into the classroom and start helping out as soon as possible! Tomorrow will be a wonderful first day, I am very sure of it. Some pictures I took while in Florence and in Siena. The views are show-stopping. |
AuthorHello! My name is Connor and I am thrilled to be on this journey of teaching. I'm from Buffalo, born and raised, and am starting this experience as an English Education major. Looking forward to meeting my students and seeing all that Siena has to offer for the next few months! Archives
May 2023
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