La Presa Middle School

Today I took a break from HTH and visited La Presa Middle School in La Mesa. I am staying with the director of the camp I worked at last summer and her husband who teaches history at La Presa. I thought it would be interesting change of scenery and I wanted to watch him in action. A little background information, La Presa is a public middle school and has a terrible reputation in the district. San Diego school districts are separated into levels of school so La Presa is in a district with other middle schools and a few elementary schools. La Presa has a student population of 1,000 of whom very few are white. Parkway, another middle school in the district is predominantly white, affluent families. I find it interesting that in the same district there are such different schools. The facilities and funding are much different, but the student demographics definitely are. For 1st period, I observed Josh teach an 8th grade history class about the Bill of Rights. The class contained 41 students whom Josh managed extremely well. Josh lectured for probably 45 minutes which is a long time for 8th graders to stay focused, but they did a really good job until the end. After attending HTH, I can't help but wonder how these students will use this knowledge in their life besides getting a good grade in history. 2nd period was spent in a 6th grade math class of which the students were all girls. Crazy! I didn't even notice until a good 10 minutes of observing. I was only able to observe for a little while because their class is separated by lunch. I was able to ask the teacher a couple questions as we walked to lunch. She told me that she and her partner decided to split their team into single-sex classes so she has all girls in the morning and all boys in the afternoon. She loves it, eventhough a whole class of boys is a little tiring. After talking to Josh about this, I questioned the issue of a public school allowing and creating a single-sex classroom without parent choice. A little sketchy but it seems to be working with little resistance. After lunch and advisory, I sat in an ELL class that was learning about the characters in their new book, "The House on Mango Street." The teacher used a technique called gaping to create visual images of the characters inside the students' heads. She drew and had students draw pictures of each of the characters to help the story come to life. She explained to be that her students were CELT 3 students. CELT stands for the California English Language Test and students take it at the beginning of the year to determine their level of need. CELT level 1 and 2 are provided instruction in both English and Spanish as they learn English. The CELT 3 students can speak English, but need a little extra help making the transition in reading and writing. For the final period, I returned to Josh's room to observe a 7th grade social studies class as they did a gallery walk around the classroom reading excerpts about Chinese achievements. Josh prefers this method because it gives the students a chance to move around and gives them a break from listening to him lecture. I enjoyed the day and I am happy to have observed in a San Diego public school.