Agnon Field Visit

Going to Agnon was very interesting for me. Driving up to the school, I was very surprised from the outside of the building. It was very stone-like and did not look like a normal school. I was first placed in a first-grade classroom that was teaching a spelling activity. The classroom was very small and the class only consisted of ten children. Each child was expected to categorize words into familiar categories based on how they sounded or their meaning. Many kids had a difficulty with this. After, they were working on the concept of subtraction. The teacher had them pull out their math books and place their pencil in the book as they looked up at the board. She had the higher-level children go out in the hallway and work with the other co-teacher. She then tried to describe the concept of subtraction with coins. She first had the kids try to answer a question in which Sam had eight coins and Mia had six. She asked the students how much more did Sam have than Mia. Many of the kids had a really difficult time trying to figure this out. She told Justina and I that it would take several months if not a year for her students to grasp the concept of subtraction.
After we went to a 2nd grade english classroom. The teacher was very nice and outgoing. The kids were expected to complete a grammar packet that consisted of pronouns and other grammar mistakes that the teacher had found that they were having difficulty with in the past week. Many of the kids were very silly and enjoyed coming up to the teacher, Brooke. After they were done they were asked to take out a book and read or give their folder to the teacher so she could clean it out for break. As Brooke had talked to Justina and I, she told us that she use to teach 8th grade in California and Florida but her husband had got a job at the Cleveland Clinic causing them to move. Despite the great change, she says she loves her job. You could see the way she smiled when she talked and spoke to her kids. She had a playful personality that would joke around with the kids when they had asked her questions. She had told us that you have to get use to them asking you a question about something that you have already said four times. I thoughroughly enjoyed being in her class and could tell that they had a class in which discipline was a major priority but having fun was as well very important.