Journal

12 Pages 3100 Words

Entry # 1:
Today was my first day at Midwood High School, where I observed three European History classes. All classes were majority sophomores and a few freshmen that were ahead of the game as well as a few juniors and seniors that fell behind. To estimate each class has, give or take, thirty five students on average. By request the three classes that I observed was on a different tracking level. The first class was an honors class that was composed primarily of Asian students, some Caucasian student and a very small percentage of African American and Hispanic students: to estimate I would say approximately four. The average class that I observed seemed to be very heterogeneous mixture of every ethnicity, race, and religion. It was so equally mixed that I was unable to estimate how many students belong to each subgroup. Finally, my low level class seemed to be majority African American, some Hispanic and three students belong to what I will very uneasily call the Caucasian group.
Behavior wise my honors class could not be beat. They were eager to participate, quite down upon the request of the teacher, and seemed to truly be interested in the material that they were learning. They always appeared to be in competition with one another to give the right answer. I found it incredibly interesting how these students not only knew the material very well, but seemed to do the reading before class. They read the newspaper and watch the news to make sure that they are up to date on current events and took great pride in incorporating this knowledge to class discussion even without the teacher’s request. When the teacher spoke anything, these students immediately wrote it down: a skill I am still to this day unable to pick up. They were assigned an extremely large amount of homework every day that was due the following day. This is probably about two to three hours worth of hard work and the students did not seem to mind. By looking at ...