Monday, November 30, 2009
An interesting student
During one of my observations the students were given the task to label the different parts of a plant (flower, stem, leaf, and roots). Most of the students in the class were able to complete the task by themselves. One student, however, had much difficulty with the task. What was interesting to me though was that his difficulty was not caused because of a lack of knowledge, but simply a lack of interest. The student just sat in his chair for a little while looking around the room. Eventually the student changed his piece of paper into a telescope and started looking through it at his different classmates. Once the teacher noticed this she quickly moved him to a table away from his fellow classmates. I watched as she flattened out his "telescope," the paper still showed no sign of work. After the teacher walked away the student quickly stated the four parts of the plant out loud, but then he started to label them wrong. The student also got up from his chair and started copying other students work. Eventually he came back to his spot and erased everything he had written. I believe that this child was perfectly capable of doing this task correctly, I think he was just bored and didn't feel like doing it.
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Meg this is so interesting because I think it is something that can happen a lot in the classroom. There are so many times when students have to learn things that do not interest them and I think that is why teachers work so hard to present them and teach them in interesting ways so that the student could be involved. I think in situations like this the best thing to do is to present it to that individual child in a completely different way that might interest them. For example, the teacher could have demonstrated a real plant to point out the parts to the student, or tie it into somehting that the child might be interested in. I do know however, that this is a great challenege for teachers as sometimes we have to teach things that are not very interesting to the students so I think the key is to present them in a way that can interest the student to get them involved.
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