Integrating disciplines

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Students need to learn how to integrate subjects in their minds. Students need to make the connection between math and science to be able to succeed in chemistry. Rather than seeing math and science as two distinctly separate periods and subjects, utilizing the new and background knowledge across subjects will help them not only succeed during the school year but also remember what they learned.

I personally know that I remember new information better when I make multiple types of connections to other new things I am learning as well as things I already know. Students need to be able to make connections like these in order to tap into the full capacity of their learning and memory capabilities. However, students may or may not be able to learn to do this on their own.

Teachers need to learn how to teach the students through integration of subjects, or at least teaching students about the links between subjects. How powerful would it be to have an art teacher talk to an English class about William Holman Hunt’s painting of "The Lady of Shalott" or other similar paintings while they are reading Lord Tennyson’s ballad? How many more connections could be added by a history teacher? Understanding of the poem could be much deeper and memory of the connections would be much stronger.

What I am trying to say is that teachers should be teaching in a more collaborative and integrated way in order to teach students to make the connections between the subjects. When I was in my middle school placement for student teaching, I saw teachers teaching in exactly the same way they have always taught middle school, completely separate from other subjects. Sure they met as teams, but that was only by subject. Math with math, social studies with social studies. The thing that bothered me most about this way of teaching was the school had been built to facilitate collaboration between subjects.

There were four classrooms and a shared space that made up a pod, and each classroom in a pod was a different subject. Furthermore, most of the students had most of their classes in one pod; a student who had math in pod B usually also had history, language arts, and science in pod B. So why weren’t these teachers collaborating and trying to link their curriculums to find places where they could teach the student to utilize multiple disciplines at once? Yes, it takes a lot of time, but isn’t a school supposed to be about creating success for the students? I think if schools would open their eyes to how beneficial integration of subjects is, there would be more time allocated to collaboration between subjects as professional development.

Autobiographical Poem

As I was reading chapter 2 of William Ayers To Teach, I came upon the examples of autobiographical poems on page 40. The format for these poems is as follows:

First Name
       Three words that describe you
       Something you love
       Something you hate
       Something you fear
       Something you wish for
Last Name

I found the two examples of the kids' to be quite profound and revealing. They also created quite a bit of room for conversation between Ayers and the students which wouldn't have been available otherwise. Ayers wouldn't have learned or this "raper man" that one student was afraid of, and he began to see this student in a whole new light after their conversation turned to his brother being on trial for murder. While the student's main teacher had wanted to get rid of him because "His mind [was] wandering and he [didn't] want to work," Ayers stumbled onto the root of the problem through this simple exercise.

It bothered me that Ayers didn't talk about the other boy's poem though. The other example creatively used the three words in the first body line to read "flunky but funny" creating a sentence rather than a list of adjectives. It also had the line "I hate being whipped." What? What did that mean? Ayers didn't say anything about this child or whether he asked this child about his statement. I would be very surprised if Ayers had not asked about it, but he didn't even touch on it in his description of this exercise. I wanted to know more and find out what this child's experience with whipping was. Did he actually get whipped by someone, or was it a figure of speech for losing badly? I may never know.

However, this conundrum did not stop me from thinking about my own autobiographical poem. Maybe it will start a conversation, and maybe it wont. It will, however, enable me to reflect upon myself in a different way and provide insight for me to continue my journey to becoming a teacher. And also provide me with an example to use with my class when I use it in the future. ;)

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       Awesome Ambitious Reliable
       I love creating beautiful things
       I hate close minded people
       I am afraid of spiders
       I wish for more time
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