Connor
Undergraduate
English Education |
Connor
Undergraduate
English Education |
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.
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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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