An Anti-Climactic Breakthrough

From this weeks experience I wanted to sum things up from our observation in Skyline. I was so set on going to observe teaching in a multimedia class. I didn't even know what was included in multimedia. So despite our group being 5 (when it should have been 3) I went. We woke up super early so we could get there on time. The school was old. But unfortunately we caught the teacher on a "B" day so she wasn't teaching multimedia, she was teaching business tech. aka word processing. But I did learn some valuable things. I saw that it really takes a lot of preplanning to have learning activities and tasks ready for the class. Alicia did a mostly good job at this. I only saw one problem. When students finished their tasks, Alicia had to come by each student and check off their assignment, but it was a big time waster because lots of students finished at the same time, and we watched one particular student wait for 15 minutes for the teacher to come verify what she had done. Perhaps she could have had a list of non time-pertinent tasks which students could do while they were waiting, which maybe weren't required but which further enhanced learning. I think a big problem in education is that because teachers must in part wait for everyone to catch up, the students with greater potential and capacity to achieve faster are held back. I experienced this in 8th grade science. I went and complained to a teacher that we weren't learning enough. She actually said well I"m sorry the other kids are just dumb and can't keep up. As teachers we should look out for all levels of achievement and help cater to their needs and wants.