Aymi Francis's blog

Belzoni, MS

Belzoni ,Mississippi Part 1

Questioning Strategies

            Since our discussion on Questioning Strategies last week, I have consciously tried to incorporate more questions into my teaching instruction in order to better assess my students’ knowledge, reasoning and attitudes. I find teaching through questions mutually beneficial for me and my students. For one, if forces students to engage with the material and use what they’ve learned to draw their own conclusions, rather than me just telling them. Furthermore, it saves me a lot of unnecessary talking and explaining.

            This summer I am teaching seventh and eight grade English, and so far I have mostly covered parts of speech. The one thing I love about teaching parts of speech is that my students already know the material!  We are constantly using nouns, adjectives, adverbs, etc. in our everyday speech and writing, so my job is to simply teach my students how to identify and classify what they already know.  Therefore, I have mostly used the “ask before telling” technique which allows students to think through language.

            For example, for my lesson on adverbs I walked across the classroom and said “Ms. Francis is walking.” I then started walking in different ways and asked the class “How is Ms. Francis walking?”  The students responded with words such as “strongly”, “quickly”, “foolishly”, etc.  I then explained that adverbs help to describe verbs, and that all of their descriptive words were adverbs because they described how I was walking. I followed this with more walking demonstrations and asked “Where am I walking?”, “When am I walking”, etc, to elicit more adverbs from the class.

            This questioning strategy was very effective and I noticed that many of my students used similar examples in their own sentence constructions. I think they better conceptualized the use of adverbs because they were the ones who generated examples for themselves, not me.  I look forward to using questioning strategies in my Spanish classroom next year where student participation and creativity will be especially important.  

Reflections from week 1

When first asked four days ago to reflect on my short time here in Mississippi I was unexpectedly short on words. Before heading down here I had spent a lot of time, probably too much time, using my limited knowledge of Mississippi and Google maps to construct some sort of mental image of the state. Unfortunately, pretty much all of what I’ve read about Mississippi cultures has been concerned with incidents of racial oppression and violence. Knowing that every area is multifaceted, I expected to come down here and experience an immediate cultural awakening and be freed from my own ignorance. It has not happened…yet.

            This is not to say that I am disappointed in any way. I arrived in Oxford exactly eight days ago from Toronto , ON via Syracuse , NY with two overly stuffed suitcases, the love and support of my family and friends back home and an eager mind. I was welcomed by a group of friendly and helpful group of MTCers who have all helped to make my transition here phenomenal. I am staying in a very cozy apartment, on a campus that is picturesque and in a town that has all the amenities for comfortable living. I’m moving on up!

That being said, I realize that my comfy lifestyle in Oxford is not representative of Mississippi at all. In my quest for enlightenment (and also something interesting to write about in my blog), I took a trip to Belzoni, the lower-income community in which I will be teaching. I have to admit that initially I had some reservations about moving to such a small rural town, but now after seeing it I can really see myself coming to love Belzoni. Google map did not serve Belzoni any justice! My trip was a great opportunity to see the school, meet the faculty and see my community first hand, rather than on a screen. I find now that I have moments of uncontrollable excitement, and seeing my potential Spanish classroom was one of them. Surprisingly, our school has a lot of resources such as computers, TVs in every classroom, cameras and other things that I did not even have in my well-funded High School.

 As awesome as my trip was however, I still feel unfulfilled. I still haven’t been shocked or awed so far. I want to be challenged, forced to reinterpret the world, and changed as a person. Bring it on Mississippi ! Nonetheless, it was foolish of me to think all of this could happen in a matter of a week. I guess that’s why they make the program two years, which still will not be enough time to see and understand Mississippi in its entirety. 

All in all, I am actually even more excited about MTC now that I am here. My biggest challenge right now is controlling my anticipation and excitement for teaching and learning. I hope that when we are called again to reflect on our experience that mine can be filled with insight, personal growth and knowledge gained from experience.