Day ten: April 9, 2015

9:15-10:40

14 hours and 10 minutes

       Today, James was in class but he refused on having a tutor. Mrs. Clark took him outside and talked to him and everything and he was just not having it at all. He just kept saying that he didn't feel well and he just wanted to do his work independently. This frustrated Mrs. Clark because she knows how much he actually needs a tutor to help motivate him to get his work done but she knew that if she did make him work with me he would have made my job even harder and refused to work so she let him stay in the class and just had me observe more to see how James is when he doesn't have a tutor and this was definitely interesting for me to be able to watch. Mrs. Clark was at the front the class going over some reading that the students were supposed to be doing on their own. Their assignment every day was to read ten pages from their book that they were reading as a class. When I heard this, I though for sure that everyone would be doing their assigned reading since it was only ten pages and she even gave them time in class to read as well but many of the students including James hadn't been doing their reading for weeks. In fact, James never even told me that they were supposed to be reading ten pages a day and I have been tutoring him since the beginning of the semester so he was very behind on his reading. After asking the students what page they were on in the book, Mrs. Clark decided to let the students have the rest of the class period to read so that they could catch because the students wouldn't have been able to do their assigned work without having done the reading. She told all the students to cut off their computers and focus on reading. She had to ask James and many of the other students multiple times to turn off their computers so that they could read. Finally, when she got all the students to turn off their computers some students began to read but some brought out their cell phones and were trying to hide them inside their books so they could surf the web or text their friends. Mrs. Clark was constantly walking around and had to talk to many of the students multiple times to get them back on task. Mrs. Clark was very frustrated because the students were supposed to have already read and now she was having to push back the lesson since none of the students had been reading the way that they were supposed to.

      It was very interesting to see how difficult it was to get the students to do something as simple as read ten pages a day and even then when they didn't do so it took copious amounts of effort for Mrs.Clark to be able to get them to read consistently throughout the rest of the class period. Seeing this made me realize that it doesn't matter how well a teacher can plan their lesson plan, if the students don't do their assigned work it can throw off the whole week. This also showed me how much James really did need the tutoring that he was getting simply because he needed that extra motivation so I definitely see what Mrs. Reed was talking about last week about how I was helping James more than I realized.