Week 5 Reflection in the Classroom

My lesson on the Shel Silverstein book The Giving Tree went very well on Monday. There were things that I saw could be changed, but overall I found the reactions of the students to be very knowledgeable and receptive. I’m finding myself slowly getting use to the routine throughout the day. At first, the kids changing classes was like mass confusion: one group of kids replacing another, many were leaving to go to special classes and coming back in during lessons, and I wasn’t sure who it would be best to stay with or go with to observe. Lately, however, I’m finding that I am getting acquainted with both sets of classes and they are also getting very use to seeing me. So many who would never before ask for help are now calling me over to look at their work, to listen to them read, or just to talk to me and tell me what is going on in their day. You definitely get attached to kids fast, I can see that teaching is a rewarding career path, but can also see how it could just as easily be a heartbreaking one.
On Wednesday, the classes were beginning their unit on Dr. Seuss. I read them the book “Better Butter Side Up”, which I had never read before introducing it to the children. In a way, we discovered it together, which made it a more novel experience. It tells the story of two sets of people constantly fighting with each other and building a huge wall to separate them from each other. They each keep building bigger and better machines to fight with, until they each end up at a standoff with a single, small bomb- but who will drop it first? The students seemed to really enjoy it, but were perplexed by the ending. There were no neat “wrap-ups”, no clear answers or “happily-ever-after” moments, just a kind of “wait . . . wait and see”. I explained to them that stories do not always end the way we think they will or should, but that sometimes it is better for them to keep us thinking. These can even be the best kinds of stories. This way we can use our imaginations to think about, or predict, what happened to the people in the story. A few of them shrugged their shoulders and went back to their desk, while one boy thought a moment and nodded in agreement. He quickly moved back to his desk and continued on being a young boy, but I suspect he had grown a little just from thinking it over. One girl, as she walked by me, asked to look at the book for a while. Taking it to her desk, she said that she would figure out how it really ends and maybe write about it. With that, I decided that we would all have to wait . . . simply wait and see. The ending may in fact be the very best part.