The Struggle of Keeping the Students Engaged

Today was the first day that I have been able to go to the school in a while, and I am happy to report that the three girls I have been working with are doing really well! Student K seemed very happy to see me and was much more willing to do her work and pay attention with my help. As per the norm, Student S needed no help, and Student C needed a considerable about of help. However, after I gave Student C some one-on-one attention, she grasped the concept. Today we were working on identifying dependent and independent clauses. All three of the girls are second language learners, so grammatical lessons can be a little more difficult for them, especially when they find the lesson to be boring. I have to actively keep them engaged or they lose focus. Talking about their social lives between assignments keeps them off their phones and focused on engaging with me. This helps when it is time to flip the switch back to academic conversation. The teacher uses differentiated learning to try to keep the students engaged, but sometimes I feel like that can backfire. For example, today only about half of the students were in attendance, so they fell asleep during the instructional videos and therefore were unprepared for the assignments that came afterwards. Overall though, I think the teacher is phenomenal and is incredibly invested in the success of her students. As a future educator, I think that experience that I am getting in this classroom is extremely valuable. All of the students I have worked with thus far are extremely intelligent and are capable of being extraordinary students. They just need a little but of TLC and attention to get them motivated. I would love to work in a school like this one someday.