Blog Post 1- Berliner

For this first blog post, I will reflect on my experience with Ms. Ramos at the Tropical Elementary School.  To start off, I’ve never seen a school set up like this one before.  Ms. Ramos is the math and science teacher for all grades 1-5.  Where I’m from, in an elementary classroom setting, you have one teacher the whole day for all subjects.  When I first observed her classroom, to teach all different ages throughout the day was mind-blowing to me. 

When I first met Ms. Ramos, she had a very shy and sweet disposition.  But after spending a couple of hours observing her, her quiet disposition warped into a mean and stern persona.  I was shocked to see how she dealt with stress.  A student repeatedly was asking her a question while she was writing an email and instead of saying something like, “wait one second,” she stood up and in front of all the students, started screaming at this student.  I was in astonished.  I felt so bad for the student because if I were the teacher, I would have gone a completely different route.  I would’ve definitely been sweeter and more patient.  By calling this young girl out for repeatedly asking a question, the rest of the class was from then on afraid to ask Ms. Ramos a question.  The children’s faces were terrified.  This definitely made the students do their math exercises in silence and made them get their work done faster, but the rest of the hour; they were petrified to ask any question.  If Ms. Ramos answered in a more welcoming tone, the students wouldn’t have been so afraid of her.  She also would have more than one grade level in her class at time, which confused me.  At one point, the majority of the class was in the fifth grade, but there was a side table with 4 1^st graders doing different work.  I was very confused about that too.  She would work with the first graders at the table while the fifth graders worked on this packet that was going to be due three days later.  

Her room was also very clustered.  Since she teaches grades 1-5 in math, she has to have her classroom appeal to all five-grade levels.  On the white board she has agendas for each grade for what they must accomplish each week, but it gets messy and confusing with all of the grades. 

She gives each grade a packet full of math problems for their level and makes a certain amount due at the end of the week.  This gave the kids a goal to accomplish by the end of every week, but not every student worked on the packet efficiently.  Since she wouldn’t check up on them every so often, the kids would mess around and not get so much work done.  At one point, Ms. Ramos came over to the 1^st graders to go over a problem in the packet and she lifted a random student’s packet and he hadn’t done one problem in the whole packet, which was due a day later.  She called him out for it and set up a meeting to have with his parents and himself to discuss this problem.  I thought that these goals were easily attainable but she didn’t give them enough attention for the students to want to achieve them and get them done.