Internship-The Final Week!

Describe your reflections on your internship project—what went well, what would you do differently, and what stands out to you?

My project was working with a little girl, Esmeralda,* who is a first grader and is struggling with keeping up with her peers. I first learned about Esmeralda when Sarah Barnes, my mentor, suggested I work with her for my project. She told me she was a first grader who really needed help learning how to read, write, and do simple math. She is the daughter of a single mother who works hard to provide for herself and her daughters. I found myself blaming the parents for a lot of the things that I saw was wrong with her students. Now I realize that even though it is the parents fault some of the times, it is not always because they choose to not spend time with their kids. I even began to feel a little big hopeless because I wished that her mom had more spare time that she could spend helping her daughter do her homework. When I first started working with her I was surprised to see just how much she needed to learn to catch up to her classmates. The students at room 1 had been working on writing books, but her book was mostly filled with pictures. When I did my first assessment with her to see how much she knew, I was surprised to see that even though she knew the names of all of her letters, she didn't know the sounds that most of them made. My goal was to get her to at least recognize the sounds that some of the letters made. My first method of trying to get her to learn this was reading to her and getting her to recognize some of the letters in the book and telling her what sounds it made. I would also have her follow along with her finger as I read to her which was going great, until she got bored and stopped wanting to read. I realized that to get her attention I was going to need a different method of teaching. This is when I began taking my work home. I wanted to make Esmeralda want to work with me so I made a game that we could play. I ended up making a matching game out of construction paper and pictures of random things in my house. I would put a letter on one card and I would put a picture of something that started with that letter in another card. She really liked to play this game with her friends, but would get really frustrated when her friends would beat her at the game and would give up playing. It took a lot of convincing to get her to start playing again, but after a while she started getting the hang of the game and when she started winning, she wanted to play more often. What I would do differently is I would have tried to work on more games with her. Towards the end more people started to work individually with her and I had less time with her on my hands. She started doing different activities with different people and would usually tell me what she wanted to work on. Usually she would say that she wanted to play the same game and since I saw improvements I didn't bother changing my strategies. I also would have recorded her progress more. I made a chart for how much she knew in the beginning and how much she knew in the end and even though her improvements were obvious, I just wish I would have been recording more during the process of teaching her everything I did. Overall, I feel my project was a success and I got farther than I had expected to. Not only does she know most of the sounds the letters make now, but she even sounds out words now. She is beginning to keep up with her work at school now because she understand what she is working on at school. I feel this was a good project with me and I just wish I had more evidence of what we worked on.

*names have been changed.

Internship Week 3

Who benefits from the work that you do at internship? How and/or why?

The person who benefits the most from the work I do at my internship would be the little girl who I am working with to help her read. I work with many other kids at my internship and I would like to think that many of the kids I work with benefit from the work I do with them, but the person I am trying to focus on the most is the little girl who I am working on for my project. It makes me sad to think that many of these kids are behind because they don't get the help they need from their parents. They fall behind, not because they are not smart, but because some kids just don't have the same support that others have. It really makes me wish there were less students per class so that more kids could have individual attention. While many kids in the class I spend a lot of my time on are working on writing books, this little girl doesn't even know the sounds a lot of the letters in the alphabets make. She is falling far behind in math as well. I want to focus on just one thing at a time because she gets tired easily and very distracted. I hope that by the end of my internship I have helped at least this little girl has received some sort of benefit from my attendance at their school. I honestly feel like there has been much progress made because she is becoming more and more comfortable with me and is eager and wants to work with me unlike she did at the beginning of the month where I was practically begging her to read with me for ten minutes. She is really getting better at recognizing sounds and hopefully she will begin to recognize small words soon. This kind of work is what really motivates me and makes me feel good about my decision to intern with the special education students of Explorer Elementary.

What are you thankful for in your internship experience?
I am thankful for many things that I have experienced through this internship. First, I am always happy to work with kids who look at you with admiration. They like to work with me and they sometimes argue over who gets to read or write with me. I am thankful to have met these amazing kids who are all so smart and caring. They are also extremely creative and respectful. Since I have been there they have continuously proven to me that they are mature and very smart. Another thing I am thankful for is the people I have met that work there. First of all, Sarah has taught me a lot about special education and the thought of doing what she does makes me want to do everything in my power and set aside any set backs in order to achieve my goals. I am thankful for my mentor for being so kind and helpful from the very beginning and from being so honest. I enjoy spending time in her office talking about college and work. She also introduced me to a student teacher whom she has been working with and it turned out we had a lot in common. She and I have a very similar background and talking to her about college and our goals was very motivating and it really made me feel like I am not alone. I am especially thankful for the opportunity to be working with such a great mentor, co-workers, and students.

Internship Week 2

How has or do you see your internship changing the way you consider that paths your future will take?
A while ago I read a book that I felt I connected with on many different levels. In the last chapter, the main character says something that stuck with me. I had thought this way for many years, I just could never find the right words for it. In this book by Ellen Hopkins, Pattyn, the main character, is feeling confused and has feels as if she had nothing left to live for. "I am sitting on the hard cement railing of a freeway overpass. Legs dangling, I watch the unrelenting motion of normal people in daily transit. Mind-boggling, how so many separate lives travel in such a remarkable unison. Soul searching, I know that I will never squeeze into such a common mold." I always felt like I didn't belong. Every day I would wake up to see my dad wake up to go to work. He would do the same thing every single day, and had been doing the same thing for many years. On the weekends, he would say that he was tired and didn't feel the need to do anything else than just sit around and watch TV. I saw many people living the same day over and over again, and I couldn't help but wonder, "isn't life to short to live the same day twice?" I promised myself I would never fall into this trap that these people call life. I had forgotten about this philosophy of mine until I started my internship. I thought that maybe it was important to find a reliable job and live on a steady income, and I was determine to dedicating my life to special education. Though it is something I still know I want to do in my future, I just don't think it's what I want to do for a living. I sometimes fear that my reasoning immature and I will wake up one day and regret my decisions, but this internship has taught me that only a few lucky people end up doing what they love for a living, and I haven't found what it is I love yet, so I need to keep looking. Before these past two weeks I had a plan. I was going to follow a certain path that was reliable and safe. Today, I don't know what the future has in store for me, but I am excited to find out.

What is the biggest challenge face at your internship?
One thing I learned while working at Explorer Elementary that I did not expect to learn was that as badly as one may want it, we cannot always help everybody as much as we'd like. I noticed that some kids are very behind and their capacities are not as advanced as others. It really makes me want to blame the parents that the kids don't know their alphabet when the rest of the class already knows how to read and write. It is important to always keep in mind that life is not fair. I would quickly judge the parents for their child's progress in school, but after talking to some teachers, I learned that some kids that are behind are that way because their parents are unable to help them out with their school work at home. There are single moms who have to work many hours a day breaking their backs to care for their children. They leave their children at school in programs that allow them to stay late giving the parents more time to work, and when they finally pick up their children and home, the exhaustion is just too much. It makes me angry that there are many different cases that keep the children from moving forward along with the rest of the kids and that some of them who are not exercising their brains and will always find it hard to move forward. I get really stressed out and wish that I could dedicate more time to each of the kids who need me the most, but the I would be neglecting the ones who I believe don't need me as much and that would be unfair to them. I understand why the teachers seem so relieved when they receive help from volunteer workers and teachers aides. I had forgotten how much I really learned when I was in elementary. It is where it all began. I will never again underestimate the job of an elementary teacher.

First Week of Internship

What are you most surprised by during your first week of internship and why? I never would have believed that within the first couple of hours in my internship, I would have had a complete change of heart when it came to my future career choices. For almost a year I had felt very passionately for special education and I did not believe that I would ever change my mind about what it is I was going to be doing with my life. I had it all figured out, until I spent a day in a classroom. I do not remember much about my life when I was in the first grade, and I now know why. My brain must have been completely turned off due to boredom. Though this may sound unprofessional and maybe even a bit childish, I strongly believe that though I love special education and feel the need to help children who need special attention out, it is just not what I want to do for the rest of my life. I cannot handle a group of children yelling and all calling for my attention at a time. I had no idea I would learn this in a day. What I was most afraid of before coming into this internship was realizing that special education is not what I want to do, because that would mean that I would have to start over and begin, once again, to evaluate myself and finally find what it is I need to be spending my life on. This happened, and now I am terrified. Though it has only been two days, my mind is restless and everything the adults have told me for years and years is becoming more and more meaningless to me. I just know that I will only live once and I want to live happy. I don't want to look back when I am thirty and wish I had taken a different path. I wake up hoping I will get into a small car accident or that my house will catch fire simply so that I do not have to attend my internship. It scares me to think that maybe this is not for me. I do not want to start from scratch, but during this first week of internship, I have learned that elementary school just isn't for me.
What goods and/or services does your company provide to the community and how do they consider their role in the community, responsibilities to society? Though my experience with Explorer Elementary hasn't been the greatest time of my life, so far, it gives a lot to the community. It is a charter school that is filled with loving teachers and a large number of dedicated high school students and parents who are willing to donate their time to helping out the teachers who need someone to take the time to help out an individual student who they feel need extra attention. Teachers like Ms. Barnes, my mentor, and the special education teacher, get up every morning and get ready to head to their jobs where they are treated with respect and kindness due to the love, patience, and time that they dedicate to the children that they teach every day. The respect the teachers at this school have for each other is obvious, for they are all very caring and give these kids something that they are very lucky to receive in such a loving way, an education. They all take their jobs seriously and their role in the community is not only important to them, it is important to everyone in this country, for these kids are the future, and their education is very important. They have a huge responsibility with these children and society is counting on them to help these children learn how to make decisions and make them want to learn more to make a better future for the earth we all live in. Thus far, it has been a nurturing experience and though I am not exactly ecstatic about everything I do at this workplace, working with the children is the highlight of my everyday.