Outreach Blog 5

Outreach Blog 5

            My fifth engagement was the same as the others, a four hour session on the twenty-first of October from eight in the morning to noon.  The location was again Mrs. Fyke’s classroom at Dexter High School.  The participants were the students in her three freshman English classes and a class of sophomore English students.

            I’d like to go over how the actual engagement with the classroom went as far as my interaction with the students.  I’m not counting the first time I took over a class because that was a failure.  There are students who will participate and there are students who won’t.  When I opened up a question to the classroom no one was jumping out of their seat to answer the question but some could be warmed up to an active engagement.  It seemed as though it was always the same students even if it was Mrs. Fyke or myself in front of the classroom.  Those students needed hardly any coaxing to get their input and invite them into a deeper conversation about the text we were examining.  Other students it was like pulling teeth.  They gave simple concise answers that filled the bare minimum for an engagement or didn’t seem to know what was going on.  I thought this was interesting because I got the feeling that the kids who gave half hearted answers weren’t necessarily dumb or uninterested but that it might just be high school insecurity.  They didn’t want to look too excited about English or didn’t want to seem as though they were giving a dumb answer or a dumb question.  If I could do it over again I would have liked to have found a way to draw these students in without giving them the feeling that I was pulling teeth.