The One Where We All Laminated

Today was our fourth day in KIPP! A decent portion of us spent our days laminating sheets for math centers for the second graders. While many of us found this relaxing, others were more inclined to explore other tasks such as math tutoring and reading to some of the kids. Prior to this, I (Lekha), along with Sara, helped Ms. Nowell with administrative work which involved preparing for the much anticipated Family Night later that day. After joining with lamination, we decided to join Ms. Tillery with her math class, a class we had been in for the past two days. I worked with the same student I had been working on, and was comfortable enough to jokingly reprimand her when her attention seemed to stray, and tried to prepare her for the upcoming exam on Friday. When this class ended, Sara and I decided to go into classrooms asking teachers if they needed any help. We caught Ms. Torrence in her room, and asked her if we would be able to teach a math lesson the next day, since the classes were only 28 minutes. With Ms. Torrence, Shoham, and Sara, we all came together to construct a short lesson involving a game to practice adding and subtracting positive and negative fractions and decimals. We took the rest of the day to make a PowerPoint, beginning with an animation to represent adding decimals using a word problem involving a relay race.

At Family Night, a few of us were able to sit in on a few classrooms and were able to be "make-shift parents" for a few children whose parents were running a little late. I (Breannah) was one of these people and seeing the smile on these children's faces as they realized that we cared enough to join them for their Family Night activities, even just for a few minutes was very rewarding. Those of us who were not helping during Family Night helped the Bio teacher in the high school make posters for his classroom.

We had a huge fried rice dinner tonight with Ms. Hine and her dog as special guests! Ms. Hine brought us super delicious cookies, which we all appreciated very much. Her dog was much more interested in exploring the house as she has not spent much time in the house. We however we just happy and excited to see her dog no matter how little she was interested in us.

For reflection, we took a slightly different route than our previous ones. Instead of speaking about our own experiences, we based our discussion on a video of a panel discussion by the American Enterprise Institute. We were able to learn the background information about charter school networks and the specific issues regarding rural schools. I (Lekha) have some background with charter schools and public school systems, so I was able to expand on my already established knowledge of these types of systemic issues. I was intrigued by the point one of the panelists noted about regarding these issues of rural education as systemic issues rather than deficit issues. Rather than blaming students and families for the inequities they were facing, it was necessary to instead understand and try to eradicate the unfair systems in place, most importantly unique to rural communities (much different but often lumped together with issues urban communities face), to allow students to be provided the necessary resources to academically succeed.