On Explaining Tragedy

In other words, a second grade teacher's guide to explaining 9/11.   

This morning when I walked into class, my teacher said, "the math lesson is ready, right?  And you're ready to explain 9/11 to the children?"  Uh, what?


I'm student teaching on the west coast, but I grew up in Southwestern Ohio (should "southwestern" be capitalized?).  On the morning of the attack on the twin towers and pentagon, I was in my seventh grade history class when the principal asked teachers to turn on the televisions over the intercom.  I didn't really understand what was happening, but I was pretty nervous when people started spreading the possibility of random attacks on towns throughout the U.S.  You know, the corn fields of Morrow are an obvious target...  Anyway, I started to really understand when I went to Papaw's house and tried watching TRL, but instead found only 9/11 coverage/tributes.  

I have heard from my friend that grew up in California that 9/11 wasn't as scary for him because of location and awareness.  A lot of his classmates weren't in the loop immediately about 9/11 because they hadn't watched the news before leaving for school.  In his experience, Northern Californians were a little nervous that San Francisco was a potential target.

Given my different experience with 9/11 (considering my teacher was an adult at the time of the attack), I really didn't think I would be an appropriate candidate for explaining 9/11.  Did I mention she didn't want me to really talk about the terrorist attack/death aspect of the events?  Don't get me wrong, as a teacher, no matter my background I should be able to represent an unbiased view of historical events, but having no time to research appropriate presentation methods along with NO IDEA HOW TO SPEAK ABOUT TRAGEDY to students who are seven or eight year olds...  I just think that this would have been a great "modeling" opportunity for my lead teacher.

So what did I do?  I illegally hopped on the computer and researched "9/11 for kids."  The best link that I found was a link to watch the Nickelodeon video "What Happened? The Story of September 11, 2001" which I watched a little bit of.  I have to say it's pretty good, so you should check it out.  Unfortunately, a twenty minute video is unacceptable for a brief discussion (there was no extra time allotted for this discussion, thank you) so I wrote down a few tidbits by watching the beginning and end.  I started out by asking students if they knew what day it was ("Tuesday!").  I then explained that it was 9/11 (a.k.a. Patriot Day, if you haven't heard) and asked if they knew what 9/11 was ("it's when the war started and the soldiers went away to fight!").  Eventually, I explained the Twin Towers, terrorists, and the memorial.  Then I explained that it is important to remember events like this because we want to come together as a community to protect each other.  We "remembered" 9/11 by singing Grand Old Flag, Star Spangled Banner, Yankee Doodle Boy, This Land is Your Land, and God Bless America.  We didn't really have much of a discussion, now that I think back on this morning, it was more like an "info session."  Even though some students do not eat breakfast before school, at least they had a large helping of American patriotism to start their day!

Next time, I'll definitely take care to come up with more of a discussion and structure some in-depth understanding- I'm sure there is at least ONE picture book out there explaining 9/11... (September 11, 2001: Then and Now, A Place of Remembrance: Official Book of the National September 11 Memorial... Sorry they're all informational, I can't find any "cheap" picture books)

I havae a ErasRe in my malpfe. Srooy"!

Today marks the beginning of my fourth week in my general education placement!  This is the week before "mid-point" since there 10 weeks in each placement (special education and general) and there are a lot of assignments that I'm working on.  I have to put up 2 bulletin boards, create a substitute binder, write about three classroom procedures/routines.  There is probably more that I'm forgetting, but oh well!  Maybe next time!  In the last week I recently picked up Math along with Shared Reading and Read-Alouds.

Math is not so bad, but I haven't quite mastered think-alouds to my lead teacher's liking.  She usually interrupts my lesson (before I've even moved on!) and will provide more examples.   Sometimes this is annoying, but honestly I've thought about it and I'm just being grumpy- obviously she knows what the kids need and I'm learning!  We teach math out of a Houghton Mifflan book- chapter by chapter (we also teach reading/phonics with Houghton Mifflan...).  The kids seem to get it, mostly.  There are of course, some obvious strugglers, but they receive extra help from aides and the teacher.

Shared Reading is this daily activity where the kids sit on the carpet and learn a song, poem, or read a big book.  They come with pre-made lessons that create goals like learning how to question the author, making inferences, and using pictures or headings to interpret the text.  It's not bad and the kids like the songs.  We usually do read-alouds first thing in the morning, so they're either really interested, or, really NOT!  

For Read-alouds, we have to select books from a list of "mentor texts" which are boring and terrible books pre-selected by some "expert" in the district because they model certain styles or genres of writing (example: personal narrative, descriptive writing, etc.).  So far the worst book that I've read was My Mother Has a Dancing Heart by Libba Moore Gray....LAME!!!!  Sorry, it could be the best children's book ever, but in my opinion it was the most terrible book I had ever read ("it has rhythm," my lead teacher said).  They really like authors like Donald Crews, Cynthia Rylant, and others are frequent flyers of this "mentor text" thing.  If I can't be interested, how could the kids possibly love this stuff- FYI they hated that book, too. 

*In case you were wondering, the title of this entry was determined by a letter a student wrote to their mother after my lead teacher caught him chewing a pencil eraser.  Gross!  

**Another gross thing:  another kid can almost move his front tooth a full 360 degrees!  It creeped me out!!!

Word Vomit!

If you're a student teacher, you understand!  Nothing personal towards anyone I work with, just a whole lot of junk I need to get out of my system because of how hectic and fast-paced everything is.