C4T #2

Caren Carrillo
Caren Carrillo is a history teacher who tries to incorporate technology into her teachings. She maintains a blog, which she keeps pretty up-to-date, with educational posts and things that happen in classrooms.

Post #1
The post that I read was titled,"A Little Seasonal Classroom Humor". Caren found a chain of emails between a teacher and the teacher's students' parents regarding the Day of the Dead celebration that her and her students were going to participate in at school. She would send out an email about what they were going to do for the celebration and then a parent (or parents) would email her back complaining about it or saying that it went against their beliefs or something. These emails continued to go back and forth for a while until Mrs. Carrillo sent one last email saying that she will be unemployed as of the upcoming Monday, and that the Day of the Dead celebration will always be a remembrance to her.

This was a funny, but kind of embarrassing story. I mean, I felt a little ashamed for the teacher. In my comment, I said that times have changed, and teachers can't get away with as much as they use to could when it comes to teaching some things. I think that the teacher should have never decided to participate in this day knowing that her students have different beliefs. Reading this post definitely opened my eyes to the fact that I am really going to have to think about the activities I want to do with my students before I actually go along with them and inform their parents.

Post #2
In this post, Awkward Classroom Silence, Mrs. Carrillo discussed how she use to be so afraid of classroom silence with her students. She thought that maybe she wasn't explaining the material well enough so her students didn't know how to answer. Then, someone gave her some advise: "do not be afraid of silence." Most of the time when students are silent, they are just afraid to speak in fear of answering the question wrong. She said that students wait like they are sitting on the sidelines for someone else to answer.

This post helped me a lot because even though I am not a teacher yet,  I know that I will have to battle the "awkward silence" in my classroom. Many students already feel uncomfortable in a math class, but I want to ensure them that we want some wrong answers in order to help those who will never speak up. Chances are that another student will have the same question as the student who was brave enough to break the silence.