Field Journal 2.1

Rachel Lorenzo

09/24/11

LAE 4530.001

Tara Payor & Nina Graham

Field Journal 2.1

Arriving in Sickles, I felt the pressure of simply walking in a new environment. I didn't know where anything was (not even visitor parking). Thankfully I reached the main office and my host teacher's classroom with guidance from a few students and a staff member. Upon arriving to my host teacher's class I immediately noticed that there was no teacher present. So of course I stood there looking around several times in the hope that she would appear out of thin air as long as I kept on looking. To my relief she arrived after a few seconds.

For the first period I was there (English IV Honors) that I was there I simply sat and took notes which I will summarize here. The class had a quiz to complete at the beginning. The curious thing was that the quiz was about film camera editing terms. Later Ms. Rich, my host teacher told me that they have to learn this as a Springboard requirement. She was frustrated with it because not only have they already gone over the exact same material in their sophomore English class, the material hardly pertains to English at all. Ms. Rich went on to say that Springboard doesn't challenge the students and bores them because they continuously complete charts, graphs, fill-in-the-blanks, etc. After their quiz the students watched the beginning of a film in which they had to identify cut scenes, camera zooms, closeups, pans, and other camera techniques that they had just defined in their quiz.

This worried me because as a student at USF I heard that Springboard would be a god-send for us as new teachers because there wouldn't be as much pressure on coming up with lesson plans. But the reality sounds much worse. I would rather labor over lesson plans or come up with something as we go along that may not be well-prepared but can at least be developed over time than be shackled to a program like Springboard that does not even pertain to the subject that is supposed to be taught.

Even the students groaned when they had to pull out their Springboard books and cheered when the teacher told them they would not be using it for a long time because she was going to step in with her own lesson plans while they discussed the books she assigned.

After asking her, Ms. Rich also told me that Springboard does not have students read books but rather short passages of a multitude of texts. We both agreed that it was best to have students read few but whole texts rather than just clippings of a lot of texts. I feel as though Springboard's goal is to expose students to a lot of texts that they will later read in whole but I know that is simply not going to happen, especially not if Springboard makes the lesson activities so tedious, repetitive, and boring. When I told Ms. Rich what I was told, that Springboard will likely be done away with because FCAT scores are dropping (something she had not heard of), she told me that it's probably not Springboard alone that's dropping FCAT scores, but it's certainly not helping. 

I was glad to find that I could easily speak to my host teacher as we discussed what was expected of me in the practicum, what being a teacher is like, and a bit about herself. I have kept in touch with my host teacher since and it looks like we will be meeting every Friday until everything is accomplished. I feel more secure in my expectations as I've already set up to shadow and interview her this coming Friday.