Usually multiple times a day, Mrs. Rose’s students spend time on the reading rug. This is an area where they not only read but work on learning various vocabulary words, and where they are given their work assignments for the day. Mrs. Rose is an incredibly enthusiastic and dramatic reader, she really does a great job of capturing her students attention. One the students were working on “karate chopping” vocab words. This is an activity where they are asked to draw lines and circles on top of the word where it should be chopped into two words. Victor was working on one of these problems one day. Mrs Rose handed the white board to Victor and asked him to “karate chop”. He did not get the answer right and after a few laughs from the students on the back of the rug, he became discouraged and no longer wanted to try. That is until his classmate Marco told him “you can do it, I believe in you”. Upon hearing this Victor took the whiteboard and got the answer right. Mrs. Rose heavily applauded Marcos for his kindness towards Victor and awarded him a plastic coin which the school uses to reward the students. She then mentioned to the class that what Marco did was very kind and that they should always be supportive of each other and not laugh. This shows that Mrs. Rose encourages positive social interaction and support learning within her classroom. Even though she may not be able to fully understand some of the Spanish terms or phrases her students occasionally uses, she accepts them open arms and encourages them.
Theorist John Dewey emphasizes the importance of education being a social function. Every student is different from one another. No student is exactly like the next. Therefore, Dewey believes that from these differences we learn from one another in the social atmosphere that is the classroom. Marco and Victor socialized together in a positive way that brought forth positive results. While Mrs. Rose usually does not allow talking on the rug while she speaks, she openly accepted Marco’s remark toward Victor and was very pleased.
That was very nice of Marco to help Victor out. Teachers should be applauding of that because a lot of students won't stand up for others like that today. Mrs. Rose did the right thing of giving Marco the coin because it shows that when you do something nice for your fellow classmates you can be rewarded in such a way. I bet Victor felt really good after that. Even so Marco probably felt like he should help out more people by telling them how he believes in them. I had a student do something similar in math. One child couldn't figure out the time on the clock and everyone kept laughing at him and Gabriel stood up and told the other student he could do it just think a little bit harder!
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