RPCS Day One

As Mark would say…Holy frijoles!! Today was an experience, for sure. Some good, some repetitive, a little uncomfortable, and most of it interesting. I’m writing this opener after I’ve finished the post and realize I feel unable to capture my day, my thoughts, my impressions. Something I will definitely work on this week. This might mean I need more time to process before writing.

The teacher I observed today, and will probably continue to observe for the rest of the week, has been working at Rock Point and Rough Rock Demonstration School for 24 years.

I started to hear some of her life story today. She first attended school when she was nine, and she didn’t know how to write in Navajo and she didn’t have an English name or any English language acquisition. She said school was very difficult for her and she was teased a lot. Her parents sent her to a diverse high school off the reservation, which she is so grateful for, even though she continued to be teased.

The “Aha!” moment she related to me today was when she had to read Romeo and Juliet in high school. It was so challenging for her to comprehend the language, but she was too embarrassed to let on that she didn’t know what was going on. Her brother told her to get La Farge (she commented to me, how did my brother know this name? Maybe it was sent from God, a sign), and she went to the library and found Oliver La Farge’s Laughing Boy, which is the Navajo version of Romeo and Juliet!! She looked at them side by side and by doing this, was able to get through Romeo and Juliet.

This was how she succeeded through school – taking the material and making it her own. This, she says, is the basis of her teaching at Rock Point. She takes the material from textbooks and other resources and uses them as is, but in explanations, she uses Navajo examples.

Throughout the day, my teacher gathered for me a pile of books to look at about Navajo culture and history, Rock Point community, and stories that were written in both Navajo and English. It was great! I spent some of my time in her classroom looking at these books, and will continue to look at them this week. Some of them are her own personal books and some of them she uses in the classroom.

Here are some specific things I observed today that at first may seem or appear negative (and ashamedly so, there were times in the day when I found myself judging), but are not necessarily problems or deficiencies of teachers, students, or the community, but are certainly different than from what I’m used to. To preface these comments, it’s necessary to remember that this was the first day back from classes since winter break and students were getting new schedules, and getting reacquainted with school routine.

Students talk throughout the whole period, even when the teacher is talking. This is very different from what I’m used to! I’ve had the expectation as a student and as an observer that talking when you are not supposed to or when the teacher is talking is inappropriate and disrespectful. This seems to be a cultural tendency, because my peers experienced this same behavior.

Students casually address teacher by first name, and I often heard “What’s up, [teacher’s name?” This I liked. I didn’t find it disrespectful (in most cases).

Some students were friendly and interested in why I was there, others confused. In some periods I sat down in an empty seat and talked to the students around me. The students in the morning were much more talkative and responsive. When introducing myself, one jokingly asked “Where’s Illinois”? and after looking at some of the books about Rock Point, a couple students asked me what I had learned. Mostly students avoided talking to me and nobody asked me any other questions, but I think that’s typical of any high school class (I know that in the same position, I never asked the student teacher any questions I didn’t have to).

I spent some time in the school library looking around during my teacher’s prep periods. It’s a rather small library but has a lot of great material. There’s a whole wall dedicated to an “Indian Collection”, which has academic books, non-fiction books about land and culture, novels, and student-written work. After spending about a half hour looking around, I asked the librarian about bilingual books and she pulled some from the Indian collection. She also showed me four storage boxes of materials that the school used to use as curriculum guides, readers, and student-written publications in both Navajo and English. I was able to get through one box today, and am very excited to continue looking through them as the week goes on. A lot of the materials were written in the mid-1960s and the ‘80s.

One of the materials in the box today that was particularly interesting was a 4th-grade unit on “The Land I Live In” focusing on Navajo terrain and landscape, with a focus on having students realize that they live in a beautiful place. It was created by the Dine Department of Education and the College of Education at the University of New Mexico in the 1960s. To date the curriculum, one of the objectives for one of the beginning lessons is “To have a great time”.

My teacher taught the same lesson to all six of her classes (one junior high class, and sophomores, juniors, and seniors), and the ‘bell-ringer’ activity ended up taking the whole period in all classes, and will probably extend into tomorrow (even though there were several activities following the bell-ringer activity on the objective chart for the week). The teacher gave directions on the assignment at the beginning of class and then left the rest of the period for students to work on the assignments. The assignment was split into two parts. First, the students had to match a type of celebrity (famous race car driver, aging cowboy star, Miss America) with an appropriate product they might advertise (cars, vitamins, cereal) on a worksheet. Then, students had to create their own advertisement using a celebrity and a product (it could be one from the worksheet, or one that they create on their own) on construction paper, and write a persuasive paragraph describing their product.

It appeared to me that some students were slow to start and did not finish, and others just used the magazines that were available as examples as a way to pass the time by flipping through multiple magazines casually. I would have done things differently, mostly having to do with scaffolding the assignment, and withholding the magazines from students until they had planned their own advertisements.

This post is way too long. I’ll end with a question I will continue to try and figure out this week: are the students self-directed or are they lacking direction?