Reflection #2 - Trussville Middle School - 10/07/2014

My second day at the school was a little bit chaotic at the beginning. We arrived there and they told us that they have the 9 weeks tests today, so it would be boring for us to just watch the students doing their tests. But they found another solution for us and we were placed into other classes.
I was in Mrs Ormond's history class. I really liked the classroom, there were a lot of historical posters, timelines and maps on the walls as well as paintings and other works from students.
The lesson was very interesting, though Mrs Ormond said it would be boring for me. I couldn’t observe a lot but I liked the method a lot. The class was divided into casts on the basis of Indian casts. So there were warriors, commoners, laborers and untouchables. The warriors were allowed to do whatever they want to do, so they sat on their tables eating sweets and played with their mobile phones. The commoners had the task to build a vase with modeling clay and write a short paragraph about it. The laborers had to clean the room and afterwards doing a worksheet on Buddhism. The untouchables had to work on the Buddhism worksheet. The casts were not allowed to talk to another cast, and the untouchables were not allowed to talk at all. Each student wore a wristband which had different colors depending to which cast they belong. The warriors had red wristbands, the commoners black ones, the laborers green and the untouchables had wristbands with bells on it. The casts were also separated in the classroom. The warriors sat in the front where they could see the whole class, the commoners on their left side facing the warriors, the laborers on the right side with their view to the wall, the untouchables were behind the commoners and with their backs to everybody else in the room.
This project was only on this day and the students have to sit and behave in every class like this, not only in the history class. I really like the idea behind this method. The students can gain insight into the cast system and can get a feeling for how it feels to live in such a separated society. Though I think it would be more beneficial when they change their roles, so that every student was in every cast. So they could gain insight into all casts and see the differences better.

The second part of this day I spent at Mrs McIntosh’s English class again. But I could only observe the students doing their 9 weeks tests. They had to do an online test on the Literary Devices, Prefixes etc. and afterwards they had to write a journal about the book “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio, which they read in class.

I didn’t see a lot at this day, but it was interesting anyhow to see the method Mrs Ormond used in her class.