It has been really cool to see how the kids are very obviously cognitively different than high school kids and even the elementary school kids that I have helped with, and how Ms. Noltie has included that in her lessons. The kids are showing a lot of new signs that they are entering the Formal Operational Stage (Piaget’s Theory). I have really noticed Noltie pushing them to exercise those concepts, two in particular. One idea that she does really good at enforcing is small pieces of abstract thought. For instance for their narrative writing piece they did a few weeks ago, they were asked to look at a series of pictures, pick one, and write a narrative about what the figurative meaning of that picture was. Another thing, and this being one of the greatest things, she enforces is the kids ability to reason, determine evidence, and make a conclusion. She has done several activities where the kids discuss their opinions over certain topics such as cloning (House of Scorpion) or politics and must give reasoning behind why they chose this opinion and/or reached this conclusion. These kids are really beginning to think critically about things and connect pieces of evidence into a strong conclusion that they can back up.
However, though the kids are beginning to show these skills, I was extremely surprised to find that they were not at all at the high school level most of my peers are at. For a minute there I kind of though to myself, when did I learn all of these writing and comprehension skills? To be honest, I don’t really remember learning much in high school or spending much time on these skills, and so I figure it has to do with my development since middle school, which is a crazy change to me. As a said above, the kids were responsible for writing a five paragraph narrative about a picture. The few days I was there while they were working on it, many of them asked me to read them or give them tips on what they were missing in their writing. When I read I was just surprised at how basic the language was, how vague most of the descriptions were, and how little comprehension they had about grammar and sometimes spelling. Not that these kids weren’t smart, but they just were at a very different developmental stage than I thought, which was kind of a rude awakening for me. There were quite a few things I wanted to point out in their essays or ask them to make parts more descriptive, but I wasn’t sure if that was too much for them or really I just didn’t quite know how to help them. That is something I definitely want to learn more about it how their development changes in those few years of high school, because it certainly was bigger than I thought.
Something I found so strange though was how they seemed more cognitively immature in their essays than they do when you talk to them. Though they may say a few things that are a bit less mature than a high schooler, talking to most of them is a lot like talking to someone who goes to Rock Bridge and socially, they act the same sort of way as a high schooler, yet their brains work so different still. They treat each other like high schoolers, they treat Noltie the same as high schoolers treat their teacher, and they have so many of the same habits. I just thought it was really crazy how they learned so different from people at Rock Bridge, but they still acted a lot like us. With that in mind, you can tell that their are many similarities and also differences between them (all of the middle school kids) as well. There are some that still make the stupid jokes about farting and all that stuff I got from the first graders, and there are others who are so respectful and think those jokes are stupid. Even with the essays, there were a couple kids who displayed beautiful language and description, and then there were several who forgot to put capitals and periods in their sentences, so their stories became one page long sentence. They are all developing at highly different rates and I find that so interesting, in learning and in social activity.
Overall, middle school is a really cool age to see what kids are thinking and how different all of those thoughts are. They are all so different and developing cognitively at such different rates. It’s also really interesting to see how Ms. Noltie uses creative freedom and reasoning to help form all of their development stages into one lesson form. That is one thing I hope to be able to do in my classroom, and I really enjoy how much she exercises the kids to be creative, think figuratively, and reason through many of the things they are learning in class. I am finding that it’s so important that this happens in the classroom, because not everyone can get their own lesson plan, and so you need to harness those skills on common ground, which Noltie has done an admirable job of, and so do most teachers in the district.
Teaching Portfolio 