Our first day in our math classroom had 17 students all working on "dream house" plans drawn to scale on graph paper, using plans projected onto a front screen. Kids are quiet and attentive. A few are sharing information with one another. It is every bodies' first day. Introductions did not go well. Kids finished about 9:40 and began to share with one another their plans. Discussed with each other what they were doing. Teacher helps a student with his plans. Students stopped at 9:45 and signed their work and a couple of them helped to pass the rulers and papers to the back. All the students carried up their papers to the front. Students collected pencils and rulers in the back.

We took a fifteen-twenty minute recess break. Kids played with hopscotch and four square outside. Kids played soccer on the lawn.

Second period, Teacher took role of the names of the new students. Had students pass out pencils and paper. Gave a math probelm. Stumped the kids. Gave them a second, easier math problem, and helped get the kids to solve the problem and broke the problem down on the board. Had a student share how she solved the problem correctly. Then he did a third problem "how many centuries are there in a million years."

Teacher then talked about homes, and architecture. Class distinguished between early style homes and modern homes, offering different examples of each. Then asked the students to name all the things needed in a home--a kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, etc. Projected examples of architectural styles on the wall. He had students pass out the scratch paper and graph paper and told the students to do their own design. Then he had them outline a perimeter of a set number of squares and had them measure the perimeter and the area. Had them draw ruler lengths of 2 and 5 inches. Then he explained scale for measuring the size. Students were getting restless at 11:10--by then one hour in class. Then the students started working on their house designs.

I went at 11:20 to the language arts class to compare notes. Students were doing comic strips. At 11:30 had students picking up their papers and crayons. With with information on different cartoonists. Charles Shulz, Nancy, Clair and Weber, Dennis the Menace and Garfield. Showed how all comic strips have a title and a meaning for the dialogue. Teacher gave a lot of examples. Showed the use of language in the context of the comic strip.

The class is really wound up by 11:45 and teacher keeps looking at her watch. Teacher gets students to relate personal experiences to the lessons of the comic strip. Class is finished.

The students are mostly Hispanic. They appear to be bright and mostly serious. The Math teacher had engaged them in an interesting project that they carried through to the end of the class. I think the students mostly had learned new things about relating quantities and measurements to the imagination of homes and their own personal experiences in their homes. Comparing the Language Arts class, the second instructor had a similar level of control and response from her students, and the focus was on the use of language and communication rather than on logic and numerical problem solving, practice and application. Both sets of projects, in math and language arts, are valuable to use in the classroom and I would seek to include similar style projects at whatever level I end up teaching. Having students assist in the management of the class and help one another and share their results are valuable tools in learning. My only observation is that, for both classes, I believe the periods got too long and perhaps it would have been better to break the classes up into three sessions per day, rather than two, giving more breaks in between.

I joined the math class at about 8:45 today, Tuesday, July 9th. All the students were still working on their floor plans. They were drawing quietly the front views of their houseplands that they had started the week before. They were introduced architectural icons to draw, building on the previous project. I had met the manager coming into the class outside and she told me to move around the classes, if possible. Since there seemed little to do at the time in the math class, I revisited the Language Arts class at about 9:00. The students were assembled into groups in order to make and share jokes from comics that had been cut out and pasted on a piece of paper. We broke into groups and we did a cycle of the best comics. We voted on the best one and that person got to go to the different groups and share their jokes. Afterward the teacher briefly discussed joke writing with the students and explained how difficult it is to write good jokes and how humor is subject to different people's interpretations.

Afterward, the teacher introduced speech bubbles for the comic strip, and how to write using parallel lines in upper case before drawing the bubble around the lettering. The class is working up to making their own original cartoons in conjuction with the arts class next door. She had students passing out pencils, paper and rulers. She recited and repeated the directions to the class clearly.

At 9:45 we went outside on recess and I spoke with the teacher and we shared notes about teaching, etc. At 10:15, I decided to go to the art class to compare notes with what I had observed in Language arts class, but too many student teachers were there, and so, thinking the Language arts teacher may be short one or two student assistants, I returned to the previous class, where we repeated the lesson earlier. First the students did anagrams and I helped a few students figure out alternative words from the letters of the words they were given. They were all short, monosyllabic words of not more than six letters. She went around as a whole class and answered all the word problems and then repeated it again for those who missed a few of them. The teacher explained to the other student assistants who were new that everyday they start off with some kind of word problem with pictures. The second class was smaller than the first, and also more unruly. The students worked with their neighbors, helping each other and sharing their answers.

After that, by about 10:40 the teacher introduced them to writing joke scripts for their comics and passed out the comics. I helped a few students to interpret their comics and to try to figure out what to say on them. The teacher gave them some examples of comics. Finally, the teacher turned the students to speech bubble writing, as before, between 11:15 and 11:45. I helped students figure out different kinds of bubbles--double bubbles, hungry bubbles, frightening bubbles, love bubbles, cowboy bubbles, etc. The students were very restless by 11:45 and so the teacher had the students pick up the papers, pencils and rulers, and she restored some order and focus to the class by reading to them a couple of Charlie Brown comic strips from a book and talking about their meaning. The teacher managed thereby to effectively refocus the class and to settle them back down again. She let them out five minutes early.

I believe things went similarly with the classes as on the second day. I believe the math instructor was a bit less inviting of participation by the student assistants than the language arts instructor. I was impressed by the continuity and elaboration of the same problem sets, dream houses and comic strips, as on the first week, building on what had been previously learned, which seemed to be to myself at least an important way of teaching on previous experience to reinforce learning. I asked the Language Arts teacher if this had been planned by the different teachers before hand, and she said not, but that it must have been serendipitous. It is valuable I think to be able to visit, take notes and compare notes between the different classes in regard to the content, teaching styles and strategies, and response patterns of the different classes. It was evident to me today that the language and cultural differential for the Hispanic students existed in the language arts class especially, as a few students were unfamiliar with some of the anagram answers and were also unfamiliar with some of the content material and context of the comic strips they were working with, such as Dennis the Menace. This was as much a function of age as it was of culture, etc. But this formed the basis for learning, not an obstacle, as long as the students asked questions and were given attention to their needs. My involvement with the students of the language arts class impoved by the second period, I think.

I think, as a future teacher, if I were to do similar kinds of projects, I would do it in a bit different manner than I saw today with the teachers. I have great respect for both teachers, but they seemed reserved to some extent and perhaps a bit preoccupied with maintaining control of the students. I think I would adopt a more interactive style intended to get the students to think about alternative possibilities in their projects and to voice and communicate their ideas to the rest of the class. The classes are new, and the teachers and students are not quite familiar with one another. The students are rotating between classes and teachers, and mutual expectations and awareness have not yet been developed. I think perhaps the students are a bit young and inexperienced with this.

I came to the Language Arts classroom at about 8:30 AM today, and I was immediately engaged in cutting out papers for the final comic strips that the students will make as the final project for the course. I spent the entire period, until 11:30, cutting out the papers. Several other student assistants came and went and helped us out cutting papers. The teacher conducted class normally. I believe she had a bit of a hectic day. Paid attention to the way that she managed and disciplined students who were being loud and noisy. Several students today were being that way. The teacher at first would not say anything, just look at the student and stop what she was doing. If the student repeated his mistake, then the teacher would tell him that other people were working quietly and it is important for the class to work quietyly. From 11:30 till noon, I helped several students work on their comic strips. They were having a difficult time conceptualizing a coherent and complete storyline. They were introducing elements at the ends of the story, or else were not completing the stories in a logical manner. Some were not very humorous. One was about 9/11 and made me wonder whether this student, who was not smiling and was bowing her head, didn't want to talk about 9/11 instead of writing jokes. It strikes me that young kids may have a lot of background issues that go normally unresolved in their lives and these issues may preclude the development of a sophisticated sense of humor that being a cartoonist entails. One student made an effort to show me a cartoon story line that had clearly scatalogical humor of a boy fishing out of a toilet bowl. It is apparent to me that the students were using the comic strips and their creation as projective devices and the strips therefore were not very funny but clearly revealing about deep-seated issues in their lives. I can see using the cartoon strip in such a manner as a symbolic framing device.

It was evident to me clearly that students were using the cartoon strips in a projective manner. This is in keeping with the child-like attraction of cartoons and the use of cartoon type zoomorphic figures in the Child's Apperception Task (CAT) such as I had employed upon the Jetty in my fieldwork in Malaysia in 1994. I do not know what the implications of this are in terms of teaching and education generally, but I suspect that it is a worthwhile and critical observation to make, much as the observations made in China in relation to second language acquisition and sound pattern recognition in 1998.

Keeping busy cutting out the papers for the teacher preoccupied most of my time and interfered with making critical observations or interacting with the rest of the class. Cutting and folding papers is a normal part of a teacher's workaday load, and so is to be expected.

Came to language arts at 9:00 AM. The class has been engaged in their final version of their comic strips. We (the teacher and myself) discussed the problem of how the children organized or had difficulty organizing their comic strips and storylines, and we reached a common agreement about underlying issues relating to projection. It appears as if the children are at a transitional stage in doing their comics. The cartoons are better developed and the storyline is better worked out on a number of them. There is still an issue of separating their own subjective semantic context and framework from the issue of their involvement in the story in an objective way.

Went to recess at about 9:45 and talked with a couple of fellow students there.

Second period, we worked with what the teacher called the "problem" group--a couple of boys especially appear to be hyperactive, and this disturbs others in the class. We cut out the black backgrounds for the final comic strip. Students worked on word problems. Students were then given their assignment doing their final drafts at about 10:40.

At 11:00 the kids were working on their comic strips. Some were finished and oethers were not focused on the topic. it is evident that the cartoon strips were very projective in their elicitation of response from the students. There appear to be a lot of basic issues that students are dealing with in the background of their lives that frame their interreation and construction of new experience, and in this case, the production of new cartoon forms.

I think the teacher may have labeled this class and has in a sense given up on trying to control them as a group. She has sat at her desk the entire period almost, only getting up twice to help other students. One boy especially is being chronically "naughty" and hyperactive--he appears to be serving as a model for other kids to imitate. He went to the bathroom with his "buddy" and on the way out dimmed the lights. On the way back, he shut the door behind him and held it shut so the other boy couldn't get back into the classroom. Finally he let go. The other student teacher, Elizabeth, afterwards came to me and said she had to make him her special project otherwise he wouldn't have gotten anything done on his comic strip. The teacher remained at the desk the entire time and remained somewhat aloof from all this activity. She made the students come to her to seek her attention at her desk.

It is clearly evident to me now in watching the different students story-lines unfold that the cartoons served as thematic apperception tasks for the projective elicitation of unconscious and contextual content that is normally otherwise repressed. It is my conclusion that issues relating to family relations and to disturbing issues in the world, like 9/11 and terrorism, must be worked out in order for the students to move to a more creative and productive level of involvement in activities like cartoon making.

The teacher stopped the class at 11:50. She had students put everything away. She asked for three volunteers, and surprisingly, the two naughtiest boys persisted in keeping their hands up to volunteer and were chosen to help the teacher. I thought that they were really seeking some kind of positive attention, albeit in negative ways. I left the class five minutes early in order to visit the bookstore to buy some blue books for our Thursday exam.

The projection on the cartoon strips witnessed the week before was again clearly evident this time around. It was common enough in occurrence between the two sets of classes that a significant conclusion can be drawn if we assume a high level of cultural sharing and consonance, which I suspect to be the case in these classrooms more than 90% hispanic in composition. Two cartoons by two different people dealt with Osama bin Lama. One the week before dealt with 9/11. One last week dealt with the issue of human feces in a toilet. The same boy told me this week he liked this previous comic strip better than the new one he had done, which I told him I preferred his second one. It dealt with a person's shadow. Another boy did a comic book type character called "The shadow" that kidnaps a boy and gets into fisticuffs with a rescuer. A couple of boys did themes that demonstrated some degree of conflict or violence in the home. One girl did a theme dealing with stealing in the classroom. Another girl dealt with a theme of trespassing over an area that is restricted by a sign. Both boys who were the most hyperactive and the least attentive to the task assigned to them appeared to deal with subjects that involved some measure of violence or aggression. One clearly depicted a stern and demanding father. The other deal with a boy being knocked out in a fight using the same "May day" pun he had used in the comic strip the first day I worked with him.

I observed today as well that students were somewhat self-organized into subgroups in the class, and some students were abnormally quiet and marginal to the main activity areas, while other students were abnormally intrusive of other students through their inordinate and not always well-intentioned behavior. Students appeared to be constantly testing one another's and the teacher's and classroom's limits, as well as their own, and they always seemed to be fishing for appropriate reciprocal feedback from the other students and teacher.

I do not know the full implications of these observations or my conclusions based upon them. I would say that they warrant further inquiry and are in line with methods developed in relation to symbolic framing research that I conducted previously. I think that these projective responses may both interfere with further learning and development, and also at the same time may be used, as in the case of cartoon strip tasks, to elicit subconscous themata and to facilitate learning in the appropriate manner and context. I would be interested in establishing a correlation between a phenomenon referred to as field-dependency and what would be labeled hyperactivity in the classroom by certain students who have difficulty focusing and staying attuned to a single set of tasks, as I suspect such a correlation could be significantly established. I would like to do human figure drawings and analysis and kinetic family drawings with these students to compare to their work on the cartoon strips, and also to selectively do an experimental and controlled sample with the CAT apperception cards. The kind of assignment like the cartoon task that involves both drawing and language tends, I believe, to be particularly interesting in eliciting thematic type response patterns. Language I believe mediates experience upon a number of levels, and the drawing elicits "right brain" kind of response that language or other kinds of cognitive tasks do not necessarily elicit. Combining the two allows us to get a good sense basic cultural dynamics at the familial level and aspects of basic socialization processes that may either interfere or enhance a child's educational experience. Evidence of this research can be found at the following webpages:

http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/EthnoculturalModelsFrames.htm

and at:

http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/TyingItUpFrames.htm

I believe that the teacher last week was uncomfortable with the results of the student's responses to the cartoon task as she was not expecting this kind or level of difficulty with the task. I believe she wanted to give a good presentation to the parents for the final day, and wanted spit and polish on the cartoon strips that most of the students, frankly, were not interested in giving. Speaking with the teacher today, there was some agreement and discussion of the basic issue, and she appeared to be a little more accommodating of the student's needs and interests in their subjective interpretation of the assignment. In observing the same pattern of response today, I have little doubt as to its implications and significance. We may speak of undifferentiated eidectic response of 10-year-old children and an over-extension of reference from personal subjective experience to external world contexts. I believe a critical insight is that the children had not yet developed the communication skills, nor the other logical apparatus necessary to be able to abstractly or concretely contextualize the cartoon strips in a manner that would result in an objective interpretation beyond their own immediate expreriences. It is as if one were expecting a person from a traditional oral tribe that expressed itself in terms of pictographs to be able to render a fully literate representation of itself purely by means of an alphabetic script. I believe also that students were learning new skills in doing this via the project, and some of the students even developed very interesting and genuinely funny cartoon strips. I would characterize this 10-year-old group as transitional still, and would expect a more objective kind of story-writing response a year or two later in their developmental trajectory.

The other issue I think played in the dynamics of the classroom activity as I observed this is in the labeling and social construction process when it comes to categorizing students, their performance or personality based upon the observation of a few behavioral responses, etc. Teachers must often operate with such labels, and their ramifications, whether they want to do it or not. At some point, the teacher may have found labeling her last class as "difficult" provided her with a suitable and manageable framework for dealing with this group by "not dealing" with them. Being their last week together, she dismissed the project and gave up on trying to manage a few of the more recalcitrant students.

If we create a category "gifted and talented" because their is a state mandate and an incentive for funding in doing so, and we lump a lot of students for a variety of reasons into such a category, regardless of objective measures on standardized achievement tests, etc., then we run the risk of conflating individual differences and possibly ignoring a wide plethora of issues that may enter into a student's life--unresolved family issues and conflicts, hyperactivity, the need for a certain kind of attention. Furthermore, we may run the risk of creating false expectations of behavior of otherwise healthy and normal students that they should perform consistently upon a level that is beyond their own developmental trajectory or stage in their life. We end up hot-housing a mixed group of bright and above-average students with the naive faith that this may in the long run make a difference in the net outcomes of their development as adults. In the long run, I must ask if such labels and their social consequences might not do in the long run more harm than good, if the reasons for their realization today are rooted in political realities and mandates, and not in the true needs of the students themselves.

It strikes me that in public education, few people are thinking critically through or behind all the labeling and constructive processes that are occurring and that structure education in so many different ways. I have learned through my observations of the class that the teachers are good and experienced, but not infallible or without their very human idiosyncracies. I have learned that the students are on average bright and good, but also not without their limitations and foibles. I have learned that teaching and learning are group processes that demand a number of different reciprocities upon a number of levels. It is very important for the teacher to feel good about what it is she or he is doing, how and why, so that overcontrol of the students does not become an overriding and interferring issue in education.

At the same time, I've learned that students are carrying into the classroom all kinds of baggage from their world and homes that they must sort through and learn to manage before they can get themselves fully hooked into the learning game, or doing what the teacher's all expect of them in a proficient and rewarding manner.