The primary purpose of my rural practicum was to spend a week observing, assisting and teaching for a week in a rural Alaskan school. Aside from the unexpected delay that meant I spent an extra day in Anchorage, I can say that objective was thoroughly met. My hosting teacher, Jeff Clay, is the math teacher for grades 7-12 at St. Mary’s High School. It can sometimes be a bit awkward to show up at a stranger’s home or classroom (a similarity I think about often but will have to write about more later), but l am quite happy with how my week went in Jeff’s classroom. I got to fill a variety of different roles, including planning and teaching today’s Algebra II lesson on my own.
Allie and I spent almost all of our time during the school day in Andreafski High School, working primarily with the math and science classrooms. On our first day we attended the 7th/8th grade Yupik class to watch the kids rehearse their song and dance for the upcoming community event. Jeff has all of the math students, but with so many classes to teach and only six periods in the day (and no prep!) some periods have multiple classes at once. That’s probably the biggest difference between St. Mary’s and North Pole. In the afternoon Jeff has an Algebra I/Geometry split class and then a Pre-Algebra/Algebra I class. Erin, my math mentor at North Pole, teaches three different preps and all of them are in different periods. Jeff has to teach 7th grade math, 8th grade math, Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. That makes for a busy day and requires different planning strategies!
The class sizes are much smaller here in St. Mary’s. I was looking at a roster today, and it looked like there were between ten and eighteen students per grade. Because attendance is a bit of a “fluid” concept in bush schools, Jeff’s classes had between five and thirteen students in them, though all the seniors were gone this week on their class trip. If I had to choose between fewer students with more preps or fewer preps with more students, I think I’d pick the smaller school model. I feel like it’s much easier to understand who my students are as people and to be able to help them more effectively. It was much different to teach Algebra II to six students today instead of my usual thirty-one. I like the NPHS students I have. They’re usually kind and mostly attentive, but it’s hard to help that many people at once, and I feel like some of them slip through the comprehension cracks despite my best efforts. Today during the practice problems I was able to look at each student’s paper and offer direction to everyone that needed it. I got to actually see their calculator screens as I was teaching them how to graph functions. That’s something I rarely get to do with 31 students.
Most of the week was spent doing math wrap-up on a large school-wide place based lesson on ice fishing. It was interesting to see how Jeff took the data from the fishing trip and had the classes work with it in different ways depending on their level. Being efficient like that in my lesson planning seems like a valuable skill to have, and it’s one I hope to develop quickly as a teacher. If it would’ve worked out, I would’ve been willing to stay here in St. Mary’s longer to do a significant part of my student teaching internship. And that’s not just because we have such nice accommodations and beautiful weather here this week!
Below are photos of the school and photos of Allie and I teaching. Again, if you click on the small image, it will enlarge and show the caption.
Allie and I spent almost all of our time during the school day in Andreafski High School, working primarily with the math and science classrooms. On our first day we attended the 7th/8th grade Yupik class to watch the kids rehearse their song and dance for the upcoming community event. Jeff has all of the math students, but with so many classes to teach and only six periods in the day (and no prep!) some periods have multiple classes at once. That’s probably the biggest difference between St. Mary’s and North Pole. In the afternoon Jeff has an Algebra I/Geometry split class and then a Pre-Algebra/Algebra I class. Erin, my math mentor at North Pole, teaches three different preps and all of them are in different periods. Jeff has to teach 7th grade math, 8th grade math, Pre-Algebra, Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. That makes for a busy day and requires different planning strategies!
The class sizes are much smaller here in St. Mary’s. I was looking at a roster today, and it looked like there were between ten and eighteen students per grade. Because attendance is a bit of a “fluid” concept in bush schools, Jeff’s classes had between five and thirteen students in them, though all the seniors were gone this week on their class trip. If I had to choose between fewer students with more preps or fewer preps with more students, I think I’d pick the smaller school model. I feel like it’s much easier to understand who my students are as people and to be able to help them more effectively. It was much different to teach Algebra II to six students today instead of my usual thirty-one. I like the NPHS students I have. They’re usually kind and mostly attentive, but it’s hard to help that many people at once, and I feel like some of them slip through the comprehension cracks despite my best efforts. Today during the practice problems I was able to look at each student’s paper and offer direction to everyone that needed it. I got to actually see their calculator screens as I was teaching them how to graph functions. That’s something I rarely get to do with 31 students.
Most of the week was spent doing math wrap-up on a large school-wide place based lesson on ice fishing. It was interesting to see how Jeff took the data from the fishing trip and had the classes work with it in different ways depending on their level. Being efficient like that in my lesson planning seems like a valuable skill to have, and it’s one I hope to develop quickly as a teacher. If it would’ve worked out, I would’ve been willing to stay here in St. Mary’s longer to do a significant part of my student teaching internship. And that’s not just because we have such nice accommodations and beautiful weather here this week!
Below are photos of the school and photos of Allie and I teaching. Again, if you click on the small image, it will enlarge and show the caption.