Journal #2-Domain #2 and #5 -Teaching and Students / Teaching and the Profession

What is the student body diversity and how is cultural diversity recognized in the school?

There is not much student body diversity at Emerson Middle School. The school is located in a middle to upper middle class neighborhood and I would say about 90% of the students are white.

Polish is the largest culture group at Emerson. There is a class called TPI that is offered for “English as a Second Language” learners. One girl, Peppy, in Ms. Sorensen’s class is in TPI. She is Bulgarian. In TPI she learns basics of English words, grammar, and sentence structure. Even though she is in TPI she is still in the regular English class as well. Peppy told me that “without TPI school would be very different” and that she probably wouldn’t like school at all. Even though English is her second language, her favorite class is English because “I love reading and thinking of stories and writing paragraphs. It’s a lot of fun.”


How are children involved in the classroom; how do they relate to one another?

In the classroom children are involved in various ways. They are asked to pass out papers or collect homework. Also, before group reading sometimes one student from each table would go up and get the chapter book, Freak the Mighty, for his/her table. Furthermore, students sometimes take the recycling bin to the main recycling bin of the school. Many students like taking out the recycling. There are always a couple kids every time I’m there asking Ms. Sorensen if they can take out the recycling.


How are the needs of students with exceptionalities met in the classroom and at the school?

Emerson is very accommodating to students with special needs. Emerson has special education resource rooms for each grade level and a self-contained special education classroom. The resources rooms are used for students with a variety of needs. Some students have specific learning disability, speech-language impairment, deaf-blindness, emotional disability, or traumatic brain injury.

Ms. Hess is in charge of the self-contained special education classroom which is called STRIVE. She explained to me some differences between a resource room and the Strive program. It originally started as a resource room; however, the students needed more of a self-contained classroom to benefit their needs. The students that are placed in Strive are low incidence. They can have Down syndrome, Fetal Alcohol, mental health impairment, or various other disabilities. They try to pre-teach the children. Meaning the purpose of the Strive program is to try to teach them what they will need to know need to know before they can teach them required information. This includes working on educating the children in social and life skills before supplying them with information regarding educational skills. The program is direct instruction teaching, but they also incorporating supplemental teaching as well.


How do teachers and other school personnel work together?

Teachers work in teams of four and it is called their “core.” Emerson is made up of grades 6-8. In 7th grade students are assigned to a core (that has four teachers: one English, one Math, one History, and one Science teacher). They keep those same four teachers for two years—all through 7th and all through 8th grade. The core teachers work very closely with one another. They often have lunch together as well as meetings. However, all the cores work together, too. Two of the cores are even having a competition with one another for which core can raise more money for Haiti. All the core teachers of 6th meet together to make sure they all on track and doing similar activities and all the 7th/8th grade teachers meet for the same reason. Also, there are meetings for individual subjects. Meaning, all English teachers will meet one day and all math teachers will meet another day. Emerson functions really well because all the teachers are very helpful and very welcoming to one another.


How are families and other community members involved in the school?

Families and other community members are involved in the school in numerous ways. Just the other week, Emerson had open house which was open to the parents. The parents and students were able to come in one night talk with the teachers, look at the students work, and play activities in the gym. There are also parent teacher conferences where the parents come to school and meet individually with the teachers. Furthermore, there are parent organizations call PTO and parents are also used as chaperones for the school’s socials. Also, Emerson has a basketball team called the Emerson Eagles. They play other schools in games and Emerson’s main rivals are the Lincoln Lions. Community members often come to watch the games.


How does the teacher keep track of student progress?

Students have binders that are divided into vocabulary, quizzes and tests, grammar, rough draft, final draft, writing handouts (vivid verbs, more on transitions, words for feelings, ways to say said), reading logs, miscellaneous). Also the students have composition notebooks which have vocabulary in them and journal entries. These are two big portions of the course that keeps track of their progress.

Furthermore, Ms. Sorensen likes the old fashioned paper grade book. She says she feels more comfortable using this because she “doesn’t trust technology” and if something happens to the file she won’t lose all of her student’s grades. In her grade book she has dividers for homework, reading logs, quizzes, tests, and projects. If there is a circle that means the homework hasn’t been turned in, if there is a check then that means the homework was turned in, if there is a red check that means the student turned the homework in late. Also, the are students who are in resource (which is the school’s program for students with learning disabilities) are highlighted in yellow.

Emerson also requires the teachers to use PowerTeacher Gradebook. It is an online program (similar to Microsoft Excel) that the teachers post the grades in so parents and students can view the grades from at home. I think it is an awesome program. The teachers can post comments on each individual grade. Ms. Sorensen said she post comments on grades that are low or failing to explain to the parent and student that that grade received a low grade because it was turned in late or wasn’t completed.


What extra duty tasks does the teacher perform? (meetings, bus duty, etc.)

Every Wednesday after school Ms. Sorensen has to go to meetings. The meetings switch between Emerson Middle School and Lincoln Middle School.
Other teachers are chaperones for the school socials, on lunch duty, or run clubs such as yearbook. Furthermore, other teachers are in charge of the band or orchestra, coach sports teams, intramurals, or cheerleading. Bus duty is an extra activity that the teacher gets paid extra.



Since I started observing at Emerson I have learned a few things about Teaching and the Student as well as Teaching and the Profession. First of all, in regards to Teaching and the Student, it is necessary that students need to feel like they belong in school. Without this sense of belonging students will not succeed. Maniates, author of Teach our children well: Essential strategies for the urban classroom, believes this can be accomplished by cultivating “respect for differences as well as similarities.” In the classroom I’m observing at, Ms. Sorensen has incorporated this idea through a journal assignment. In class we are reading the book, Freak the Mighty. One of the main characters in the book, Kevin, is born with Morquio Syndrome. So my teacher posed the question “Would it be better if only ‘perfect’ children were allowed to be born? Explain why or why not in complete, well thought out paragraphs.” She explained that they must choose one side and that there is no right or wrong answer. The students had very well thought out answers and even though another student may have disagreed with what someone said everyone in the class respected one another’s answers. Furthermore, from observing I learned about Teaching and the Profession and that teaching is not a simple, standard, or tedious job. A teacher has to be flexible and accommodating and vary his/her lesson plans for each class and sometimes for each student. In chapter 5 of Teach our children well: Essential strategies for the urban classroom, Maniates discusses how to “Make Learning Explicit.” She writes about how teachers “speaking to the whole class explicitly about skills or strategies they want them to learn, or sitting beside students and pointing out problems a coach or coworker would. These teachers show students how what they are learning will further the purposes of their lives. Students respond well to be treated with respect, to not being patronized, and to not having the learning process or curriculum made mysterious to them” (64). Ms. Sorensen makes sure that when she is teaching her students she is teaching them things that will be beneficial for years to come. Her goal for her students is that when they are done with her English class her students will be able to walk away with a better understanding and a better knowledge of the English language.