The Real Deal: Internships and the Stephen King Challenge!

Well, folks, I thought I’d talk to you all since I realize it’s been quite awhile! I am now in my second semester of junior year, and things ae heating up because I’m beginning Part I of my year-long teaching internship! I will soon receive word on where I will start out my teaching internship this semester. I know it will be middle school students. Oh joy.

I’m kidding, I actually enjoy working with middle school students. They’re going through a tough time emotionally, so I try to see it as students need someone to model for them a supportive environment where they can be open with each other and communicate problems they may be facing as the teenage years get under way. Hey, we’ve all been in middle school, and we’ve all hated it. It’s a learning experience.

Also, my second blog, “In My Unprofessional Opinion” is under way to have more posts, hopefully soon. If you want a good laugh, you should check it out!

In other news, I’ve decided to create and embark on what I call the Stephen King Challenge. Basically, I’m challenging myself to read every Stephen King book ever written, keeping up with new ones, before I turn 30. Why Stephen King? There’s a reason why he’s called the King. From his early works to his works of today, I’ve always been very interested in his work. Horror writing is not my thing, but the way he tells a story is different from any other author I’ve read.

My Reaction to Sandy Hook

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut was a truly horrible tragedy. As someone going into education, many have asked me what I would do in such a situation. In my opinion, the true hero among all the madness was Victoria Soto, the young teacher who died when she took a bullet for her students.

There’s an unwritten rule for teachers that when something as serious as a shooting happens in school, a teacher is supposed to protect their students at all costs. Ms. Soto held this rule to her heart as she hid her class and stood up to the shooter. Speaking of the shooter, Adam Lanza, I think it’s unfair that people aren’t acknowledging him as dead. He may have committed a monstrous crime, but he’s still dead as a result of the crime. If you look up a list of all the people who died in the shooting, his name is not there. It has been mentioned by multiple news sources that Lanza had Asperger’s syndrome, and his mother was about to commit him to a care home. A possible motive for the killings was that Adam felt his mother loved her students and the school more than she loved him, which was why she was committing him.

I hope people haven’t started associating Asperger’s syndrome with violent behavior as a result of this incident. Asperger’s is merely a form of autism, in which at times can exhibit somewhat strange and irrational behavior, but not violence. Schools all over the country held meetings to inform students of what would probably happen if such a tragedy was to occur in their building, which is what should happen as we all recover from this tragedy.

The students at Sandy Hook returned to school this morning.The school was moved to a different building for the time being, and they probably have grief counselors on hand while the students and staff recuperate.

Update: Jan 15th- While keeping up with the news on HuffPost, I heard that the school district where Victoria Soto went to high school is planning to name a new elementary school they’re building in the district after her. This is an amazing and well-deserved honor for Ms. Soto’s heroism. Fabulous news. Construction on what will be The Victoria Soto School is said to begin this summer.

The Truth About Prison

In my last post, I talked about how I tutored in a prison this past semester. I only talked about it briefly, but now that it’s all over, I can really elaborate on what I saw in prison. As volunteers, we only saw so much, and learned more about what we didn’t see from talking to the inmates. This post is not going to be happy, so read at your own risk.

The first thing people need to know about prison is that it’s a really screwed up system, especially in America.  Prison has evolved from what it was originally supposed to be into something awful. Prisons were created to rehabilitate criminals so they can safely reenter society. What they have become are people warehouses, holding criminals for years and years and if they are released, they’re even more messed up because they’ve been locked away and abused for so long. In fact, the United States has the highest amount of inmates in the world. Why? Because we give the longest, harshest sentences. In the old days, murderers would get two years in prison, tops. Now, we have multiple life sentences. Even thieves can get up to twenty-five years in prison. That is ridiculous, and it means there is a serious problem with America’s view of social justice.

Next, people need to know what happens to inmates. Imagine the worst thing you ever did in your entire life, and you are judged for it for the rest of your life in a place where you aren’t trusted and have no rights. Imagine living in a cell infested with mice or roaches, with asbestos and unsanitary conditions. You’re stripped of privacy, decency, and humanity. Imagine not being able to see your family, your parents, your children, your friends, except maybe once a week for about an hour. This is how they live. They are searched constantly, belittled, humiliated, and neglected. Have they committed horrible crimes? Maybe. But does that really justify treating them like trash? Inmates are still people, just like everyone else, and they deserve to be treated like people. What’s that golden rule we are all taught in grade school? Treat others the way you would want to be treated. Even if someone is incarcerated, they deserve the same respect, because it’s decent.

I want you to think about the Princeton Prison Experiment. It was a psychological experiment that brought volunteers to be inmates and guards in a makeshift prison to study human power and authority. The study had to be terminated early because the “guards” got too out of control with abusing the “inmates.” Even though it was not real, the people who were “guards” became so obsessed with abusing “inmates” and treating them horribly. This really happens. One inmate told me about getting strip searched for no reason and her cell torn to pieces. She said some powerful words to me, about how she had to let them do what they wanted because she has to play the part of the “dumb white girl.” She also told me about the harsh treatment of another inmate we worked with from the other inmates. She explained that the more successful you are before incarceration, the more other inmates will hate you. For some inmates, they are living in Hell because of the guards and their peers.

I’m going to stop there because I know this isn’t a happy post. If you have questions, please comment and ask about any of what I mentioned, because I really do want to spread the awareness of what really happens.

Incarceration

I’m sure the title of this post grabbed your attention. First of all, I’m not incarcerated. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been quite busy with starting my junior year of school. But, what I have been doing is volunteering as a student tutor in a prison. This started as a result of a program my college does where a few of our professors teach classes in two different prisons, the Maryland Correctional Institute of Jessup and the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women.

Once a week, I go into the women’s prison for two and a half hours during their study hall, where the inmates are in a library and I look over school work for them  and make corrections. As you might think, it is scary to go into a moderate security prison. We aren’t allowed to ask the inmates why they’re incarcerated, but you can’t help but think you could be helping people who could have been convicted of something heinous.

But the funny thing is, once you get past the twenty-foot electrified razor wire fences, you meet the friendliest people ever. I’m not joking, I felt so comfortable with the women and forgot where I was for most of the time. As I read their writing (because, of course, I’m a writing tutor) I learned about their families, their children (of the 40 women taking classes, 35 have children), their hopes, dreams. It was heartbreaking to read about what they could have been, if it wasn’t for the one worst thing they ever did that landed them in prison. One woman showed me a pocket sized photo of her children she keeps with her ID tag. Another showed me the tattoo of her favorite Bible reading that wraps around her entire arm in a tight coil.

Perhaps I will make another post about the common misconceptions of prison, because I don’t want this post to be much longer. But hear me out, imagine if a loved one you have was locked up and you could only see them once a week, and can’t bring them anything. That’s what these women face.

Reese’s Classes

As I said much earlier, my teaching role model is different from the Crazy Writer from Hell. Now I will feature the person who triggered my epiphany of teaching. She was my junior year chemistry teacher from three years ago, Ms. Reese. Like me, she was very petite and soft spoken, a quality that tends to hurt teachers, especially young ones like her, as she was only twenty-six years old and in her third year of teaching. Many students in my class walked all over her and attempted to take advantage of her because of her size and soft voice. But she was a fabulous teacher! I’m a person who can’t retain any information that involves numbers, which is a prominent part of chemistry. I got an A in Ms. Reese’s class, just one percent lower then A+, and higher than I would have ever dreamed for a math related class. Ms. Reese managed to pound numbers into my head.

Now that I’m an education student, I’ve learned much of the philosophy behind why Ms. Reese was such a good teacher. She was able to compose herself in times of trouble, which is why she never bent when my classmates would attempt to take advantage of her. But she has also taught me some things to do in classroom management that I should do, that she didn’t. Classroom management, unfortunately, is one of the hardest parts of teaching, because you can’t learn  how to manage a classroom full of teenagers in a college class. You need to experience it firsthand and go to the books, or do anything to get the class’s attention. Obviously, teachers aren’t allowed to physically force students to do anything, nor can they use physical discipline, so they do have to get creative with how they manage their students.

One teaching strategy she would use that I really benefitted from was building on prior knowledge. It’s a valuable teaching tool that many teachers today tend to neglect. In Africa, I always asked my students what they knew about a subject before I decided where I would start my lesson.

There are some students that teachers call “reluctant learners,” and we’ve probably all seen them. They have no motivation, no interest, and no care. They don’t always listen, and when they do, they’re uncooperative. They can also be the goofballs in the class that attempt to distract everyone else. No teacher wants to say they have bad students, but reluctant learners make it somewhat true. We had a few reluctant learners in my chemistry class, and that’s when I knew Ms. Reese was trying to hit the books on discipline, but most of the time the kids just didn’t listen to her. When this happens, teachers need to be able to break persona, or do something unlike them. It startles the students and makes the teacher appear unpredictable to them, and therefore, in control.

People You Meet in a Community College

As you probably know by now, I go to a four year school in Maryland. I’m taking a class this summer at a community college near my town, and I have to say, it’s a whole other world in the world of people who live at home during the college academic year. So, I thought I’d make a list and provide a description of the kinds of people I’ve seen at a community college. 

1. The Smarties– These are the people who have the intellectual capability to go to a four year institution, but choose to save some money by going to community college and planning from there. There is one sub-category of Smarties, called the Indecisives, which are the kids who are very smart, but don’t know what they want to do with themselves, so they just go to community college to stay busy and try to figure things out. 

2. The Workers– These are the people who work full time either during the day or at night and find some time to get some education in their schedule. These kids tend top be much more stressed because they have so much to do. However, Workers are at a sort of advantage because they don’t have time to procrastinate. 

3. The Adults– Either they’re retired and bored, or trying to start over, these are the parents who go back to school. Strange to think it, but you could have a class with someone old enough to be your mother. 

4. The Lowlives– These are the people who literally do not have the intellectual capability to get into a four year school. They come to class high, and leave without opening their notebooks. They ride the public bus back home and sit and watch TV the rest of the day. If they do their homework, it’s nowhere near correct. Whether it’s lack of motivation or a learning disability that is overlooked, these kids can’t get through academic life on their own. 

5. The Gangstas– Kind of in the same category as the Lowlives, but it’s made up of African Americans and other minority races. Don’t get me wrong I’m not racist at all, but there’s a trend in the classes and capabilities the African Americans have. Most of them are a combination of Lowlife and Worker, so we put them in their own category, Gangsta. 

There you have it, the people you meet in community colleges. Happy studies!

South Africa Dance Video

Hey guys, I’m embedding a video my friend made of our time in South Africa. Check it out and see the joy of teaching and being in such an amazing country! Here’s the link!

Please comment and say what you think or if you have any questions about what’s going on in the video.

The kid dancing to headphones at the end was my host family’s son. My friend found it recorded on her iPhone and knew she had to include it in the video!