Sami Singleton Blog Post 2- Routman (2003), Ch. 4: Teach with a Sense of Urgency

I have always had the mindset that I need to teach with a sense of urgency. I think this is because my students are already far behind their peers. I have a short time to work with them and there is twice the amount of work I want to achieve with them. I want to be able to close that gap between them and their peers, but I only have a very short amount of time to do that. This makes every minute I have with them very important.

The book mentions that some students go to a pull out program that only help with phonics and skill and drill activities. We are lucky that our resource pull out program incorporates stories and vocabulary words to help our struggling students with language and not just phonics. The book also mentions several things that I am already doing in my classroom. I only have the students for 50 minutes but I make sure to ask every child several interactive questions about the stories we read. I make sure to not only ask detail questions because it is very important for students to think beyond those types of questions. I want my students to really think about what we read and to build off of those ideas or concepts we learned.

As I said earlier every minute in my 50 minute class is very important. The book mentioned that some poverty stricken schools do not hold high expectations for their students. I am proud to say that Arcadia does not operate that way. We hold very high expectations for our students and our students enjoy that. In my classroom my students love to learn new things and are very proud when they have mastered a skill we have been working on. It is very important to keep high expectations and to teach to your greatest ability.