What’s in a Face?

One of the things that I have notice about my school site are the clocks. In the classrooms, there is a clock like in all classrooms. However, the thing that stands out for me is that they are all digital. Not one of them is a standard clock with hands pointing towards the hours and minutes. While this can be a bit of a blessing when checking the time really fast during instruction, I feel that it is also a loss. To me, the clocks being digital shows a loss of the skill of telling time from a normal clock. I know as a child, this was very important for the students to be able to do, and there were many a math lesson that was based around the telling of the time with a normal clock. Now, every student has a cell phone, and I don’t think that I have seen a single one without a digital clock on it. It seems to me that it is not important anymore for students to be able to tell time by actually looking at the hands on the clock or on a watch. I am not exactly sure how to think about this, but it just irks me in some way that I cannot quite explain.

 Working with Unique Personalities

                 To say that each teenager has their own personality would be a massive understatement. However, it is interesting when you have to place those personalities in the context of the classroom. I recently had a student who had shown themselves to be a really quick learner, and is pretty interested in the content material. However, he recently started to not do any work that required him to finish it at home. This had not really been an issue in the past, so I was curious to see what was happening with him. As he explained it, he was tired of being motivated by teachers, and felt that he could do everything at his own pace. He stated that he hated people telling him what to do, and that he understood everything that he was taught. It was an interesting conversation with him, with me feeling reassured that he ‘got’ the info, but also worried about his grade slipping since he wasn’t turning in his work. We were able to come to an interesting deal – I accept late work up to a point, with some of the score being deducted for it being late. I told that student that if he gets in what he is missing, then his overall grade would not suffer so much. The entire encounter was fairly eye-opening in learning to work with different students.