Upon entering Mrs. T's classroom, I immediately saw a list of rules hanging up on her wall. These rules were implemented throughout the school and were the same in every classroom. This, Mrs. T said, was so that the students knew what to expect in every class. They were created as a collaboration among all of the staff and the principal. Sure enough, when I visited the high school teacher across the school, she had the exact same list posted in her class.
I was able to observe a kindergarten and a fourth grade class. To get the students' attention (she said she does this for all grade levels) Mrs. T will turn the lights off and on again quickly. They know that they are to stop talking, stop working and listen. Mrs. T also wears a microphone around her neck that is connected to an auditory system in the room so that the students can hear her better with the speakers.
When I asked Mrs. T why she wanted to be a teacher, she said that originally when she was in college, Stout as a matter of fact, she was an apparel design major. She had grown up on a farm and had been making her own clothes for some time, and would buy pattern samples and alter them. She then switched her major to interior design and soon after realized that wasn't what she wanted to do as a career. Mrs. T said that teaching art seemed like the best choice. She had always liked drawing and painting when she was growing up and knew that's what she wanted to do. When she was in college, art education students were required to take two levels of all of the studio classes, and there was less of an emphasis on education classes. She's been teaching elementary art for 22 years and knew right away when she started teaching thats what she wanted to do.
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