Clare McInerney EDUC.

353

Final Growth Statement for Education 353

Now that my 353 class is coming to an end I am now realizing how much work I have done this semester. With my experiences in my lectures and outside in the field I gained a lot of knowledge. I made 5 lesson plans that I am very proud of. This semester I became much more comfortable and familiar with the common core standards. Now I am able to come up with lesson plans with standards in mind because I know them. I used to have to come up with a concept and try and fit it to apply some standards. Its so important that your lesson plans align with the standards because students need to be excelling not regressing. One thing I walked away with was that Social Studies and Science are essential pieces of full education. In lecture we discussed the states exams main emphasis are literacy and math. Ive seen for myself out in the field that teachers are pretty much excluding science and social studies from the curriculum all together. To me this is extremely problematic and detrimental to our educational system. If our students dont have any basic understanding of science and social studies middle school will be especially difficult. This approach of teaching is addressing only a fraction of the skills students will need to progress in school. I know that in my classroom science and social students will be implemented as much as possible. We learned a lot of really fun ways to involve labs and learning experiments in the classroom. I really enjoyed writing my lesson plan on static electricity; the students had a fun interactive lab. I feel that science is so important to engage students natural curiosity. It is so important that we get students

interested and involved in science at a young age. To rob them of that foundation is an injustice to students education. I saw able to see evidence of this outside in the field as well. My classroom only did literature lessons, independent reading and math lessons. You could almost see the gabbing holes where social studies as supposed to be. The students had very little knowledge about other types of communities or cultures other than their own. With no foundation about suburbs, cities and farms the students dont really understand the world as a whole. They were very unfamiliar with any of the states and did not know the difference between a country and a continent. This affects the students in all of their subjects. They were unable to make any real connections with the literature they were reading in class because they never had other references. Imagine not having a concept of the country, our government system or basic world geography until 6th grade? Observing showed me that a full rounded education is so incredibly crucial to a childs full development. I feel like I gained a lot of experience in general by being inside the classroom. I was exposed to all the flaws and realities of the New York state school system. Part of it was really disheartening to go and watches the teacher do test prep every day. I watched bored kids fall further and further behind. It is truly a broken system and a fair amount of the student wont even pass these exams by the end of the year. Part of me wanted to give up because I felt like the system is really structural flawed. But that only made me want to become a teacher even more. I know that some of my students I observed could excel if they were in the different learning environment. This class made me positive I want to be a teacher because I realized there are a lot of kids who have potential who arent being reached.