Erin+Jackman


 * A bit about me...

The Path toward Teaching** Over the past few years I have explored the teaching world and have enjoyed it immensely. Although I have always enjoyed working with children, this was a huge change from my business background that I started out in as an undergraduate and an even larger change from my work at a free range chicken farm. To date I have taught math and literacy at an elementary school, and taught dance at a private high school. I currently work at Colchester Middle School and was the Planning Room Coordinator and Teen Center Director. My year with the Teen Center had a rocky beginning, but by November I was having a blast doing projects and playing games with the kids. By the end of the year I was working track meets, running the ever enjoyable Saturday School, writing about our school for the local paper and much more. I hope to find a home at Colchester as a teacher but as for now I can't wait to go back!!

I am deathly afraid of fish
 * Random Fact

My Life off School Grounds??** I spend a great deal of time with my family at our home on Lake Champlain. My father's family consists of over 55 members who rotate through our camp in Vergennes, VT. I have many little cousins who I teach to waterski and bike. Some days I even get to waterski and on really special occasions I tube. I feel like a kid again when I spend time with family so it's one of my favorite things to do. My mother's family is equally as large and they visit the camp as well, which makes the property both insanely hectic yet irresistibly entertaining. Here are just a few pictures that capture a bit of me.



After realizing that working all day in the classroom can be exhausting I picked up some new hobbies and interests. I have done more gardening, practiced yoga some, read some great books, and taken a class in Reiki which is a practice that promotes healing though life forces. I began my exploration of this after I took a simple Chakra test online and had conversations with a friend about her professional work in the area. I found it highly interesting and different than what I was used to. I am attaching the link to the Chakra test in case you are curious too. I am not sure if this is the best one out there, but it is pretty popular.
 * Other Interests

Project ideas generated over lunch!

- Ron Edmunds 'Successful schools' Make the planning room a microcosm of a successful school**
 * Parent support
 * Admin support
 * Clear mission

- Kids and a Moodle page Goals: - Eliminate peer to peer contact- lessen emotions - Increase time with support team- feeling of safety - Return control and generate a tangible solution - De-escalate emotion in order to successfully process event - Ascertain the root problem - Have students track their own progress -Share coping strategies- cognitive therapy (Kelly shared)- change of mind - PR becomes space to relieve amygdala and calm adrenaline- quiet space instead of increasing anxiety- can't learn if worked up or angry
 * Calendar to schedule meetings- control- importance of having a voice
 * Discussion board with the teachers- eliminate some fear about talking behind back
 * Parent Access page- communication
 * Success page- what does a successful peer do? other prior knowledge- maybe they don't know
 * Processing page - with prompts-
 * Have pictures of emotions to select how they are feeling
 * Make avatar to express emotions on Moodle- make voices
 * voice thread? program online

Other thoughts.../Connections

Kids know you are typing about them Brain wants to be safe and happy Wanting survival means wanting control Effects of extreme emotion on learning

Relate this to my own learning through this class Dunn and Dunn- soft vs hard environments

[|Chakra Test]

Please bring in the PBE info for me!

Article Response

Although we need each part of our brain working in its own way, our frontal cortex is of utmost importance. This part of the brain is where our short term, working memory takes place. This type of memory is important for planning for future events, assembling ideas, rearranges parts of information to make an internal experience, understanding and producing language, reading, problem solving, and hold facts. After items are arranged and reordered in our working memory they are transfered to long term memory. If this part of our brain is damaged or not working properly language can be skewed and vital tasks can not be completed as they should be. Unfortunately, it has been found that poverty, which many children live in, has a negative impact on working memory.

Evans and Schamberg suggest that the longer the exposure to physiological stressors in poverty the more damage is done to the frontal cortex. This in turn would decrease short term working memory. They found that it was not necessarily the time of exposure to poverty, but the length of time the child was classified as living in poverty. They found a negative correlation between exposure to stressors due to poverty and the measured achievement at young adulthood. They point out that chronic stress will eventually have a negative impact on working memory, which can be due to environment of impoverished children.

As a teacher we know that it is important not to overload the working memory. If a student gets too much information at once they are unable to distinguish which parts are important and which are not. We understand this for a fully functioning brain and are able to talor lessons, but if working memory is negatively affected in young adults by age 13 or 17 then it is possible that we are overloading without meaning to or being aware of it. For a young adult who lived in poverty and has been negatively affected by physiological stressors this means that they may not be able to process the information we give them or even the same amount of information that similar classmates can.

Another impact of less working memory is that problem solving, reasoning and forming new ideas may be more difficult. A student who spent a great deal of childhood in poverty may not easily respond to the prompts we provide other students because their ability to take in all of our input and form something new is a complicated task that requires our working memory.

Homework Teaching practices and big ideas