Helping in the Classroms

The past few days, I have worked a lot in the various classrooms of CLA, doing whatever I could to help the teacher. The way the school is set up, the students are assigned to a crew (a homeroom or admod) and go to all classes with the crew similar to what we did in middle school. They then have a partner crew, which is right across the hall, and these two crews share teachers. So, for the four main subjects, the students have two teachers. The math teachers also teach science and the english teachers also teach social studies. So the students go to their 4 core classes a day, but only see 2 teachers. What is interesting, is that the history and english classes are very aligned, for example: when the students were learning about Ancient Egypt in social studies, they were reading myths and other stories pertaining to Egypt in english. The math and sciences are a little more distinct, working on different projects at different times. Currently, in math, the students are creating a mini society, where they have created a currency and trade policies and will begin to learn about the financial aspect of a society. In science, the students are devoting all of their time to the community garden that they are building. All science classes venture out into the courtyard where they continue the hard work of building the flower beads and compost bin. It is remarkable that the students were able to completely design and think through the process of creating a garden of their own that they will use to produce vegetables for the community.