Teaching Context
High school placementMy student teaching placement in a public Philadelphia high school spanned August 2013-April 2014. I was placed predominately in a 10th grade classroom with Ms. Ricci and for one period a day in a 12th grade classroom with Mr. Ford, both veteran English teachers in this school.
The school in question is a 1:1 laptop school that was designed to be an innovative, project-based, 21st century learning model to be replicated by other schools in the district. It was once designated special admit but is now an open-admission school that has doubled in size in the last year with the closing of a number of public high schools in the area. Students come from all over the city to attend this school, many traveling quite far each day. Approximately half of the student body were sent to my school this fall from one of the closed high schools. The staff and faculty had high hopes for a smooth integration but little was done to ease these communities together. Over the year, a rift thus became visible between the students who were new to the school and those who attended the school the previous year. Over the year, I heard many students say that they did not speak to or socialize with students from the "other school." |
I have no way of knowing whether the events that I am about to narrate are effects or causes.
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Along with this influx of students came further challenges to the already struggling school that included a revolving door administration and a new student body unhappy with their school placement and untrained in the technology. School pride was invoked as the cause of many fights throughout the year as well as disciplinary issues such as refusal to follow directions, class cutting, and uniform violations, as students claimed they did not think the new school's rules should apply to them. This was exacerbated by inconsistent enforcement of school polices and disciplinary repercussions. In an ethnography assignment for the Teacher Education Program (TEP) class "School and Society," I described my first reaction to my placement school as a striking contrast between vision and reality. I further attempted to articulate this disconnect in the following passage:
…A place where exciting things are happening, where students, in some ways, are engaged in authentic and diverse experiences with people that value them and are working to help them achieve their potential. This is the kind of school I wanted to be a part of when I was growing up. Yet I can also see ways in which we are not doing justice to these students: ways in which they are being pandered to, cheated, experimented on, marketed to, or overlooked. Not through any master plan or ill will on the part of the faculty and staff, but through external pressures, funding problems, and the deterioration or mutation of once progressive, well-meaning ideas or systems. (Kates & Symonds, 2013)
This was written prior to my in service placement. Seven months of teaching have now passed and this still rings true to my experience, though perhaps I now have a more finely tuned understanding of these issues. To start, the year began with overloaded classrooms (around 40 students to a class) and no computers for almost the first two months of school. All students, but especially those from the shuttered school, consistently expressed frustration at the large class sizes and subsequent lack of individual attention (many of the new students had previously been enrolled in classes as small as four students per teacher). As the year went on, though, I also saw many of examples of individual support of students by dedicated teachers, large-scale student engagement in a range of classrooms, projects, and activities, and students from both schools helping and supporting each other both academically and socially. There is thus no way for me to paint an accurate picture of the school environment here so briefly, but the next section aims to provide some snapshots of my experiences that shaped the teaching and learning that occurred in my English classrooms.