Classroom Ethnnography, part the sixth

Ms. Beale is the authority in her classes. She is the leader. Students are rarely actively off task, and rarely actively resist her instruction. Students do resist her authority passivly, by not working on the assigned work, or by working on other homework in class, but she either does not care to correct these students or does not notice. A few students show cooperative behavior by doing exactly what Ms. Beale instructs all of the time, such as taking out planners when Ms. Beale goes over the schedule for the next couple days, or taking notes on other students presentations. Most students resist these habits, and Ms. Beale does not ever demand compliance or try to correct these behaviors.

During free time, students socialize. This is universal among all of Ms. Beale's classes.

All of the students in her 4th hour class participate in group activites and discussion in at least groups of two, although some groups are more on-task then others. The students seem to be sitting near people they can relate to, if not friends, and so there is little discomfort during discussions.

During class on Monday, the students were working on a collage about In the Time of the Butterflies. Some students congregated by the large bins of magazines that Ms. Beale had set up, some worked at their desks. Two students went back and forth, giggling and teasing each other by pulling pages out of the magazine and using them as masks. A group of male students talked about the car magazine they had found. It was the most active I had ever seen the class. However, as soon as Ms. Beale spoke, everybody was immediatley silent, until she stopped.

It is hard to assign roles such as "disruptive" or "disappearing" to these students. Nobody ever disrupts Ms. Beale when she is talking, and there is little student-to-teacher or student-to-class interaction, so it would be fair to say that the entire class disappears when Ms. Beale talks, and is present again when they work. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend class when there was a graded discussion, so missed a day that required large group interaction, something that has been lacking in the days I visited.