STCBlogPosts

  Today, I (we) will be talking about a potential increase in defeatism in students. Admittedly, there is not much research done on this topic, particularly as it relates to students in secondary education, or grades 6 through 12. Personally, I think more research needs to be done about this topic as it relates to current events. And by that I mean in a post COVID-19 world. Of course, since it’s only been almost three years since COVID started and less than a year since it’s really ended, there is even less research about this topic. Honestly, there’s not really any research about it at all. For the purposes of this podcast, I’ll be referring to levels of hopelessness in students as well as defeatism, with references to depression and anxiety, because there is more research done within these topics, and the implications of studies on hopelessness, depression, and anxiety could very well be linked to defeatism. So, before I jump in, I’d like to ask… What is defeatism? Defeatism is d...

  I taught the same lesson to the other class this week; the one that Dr. Spanke was sitting in on. He had a lot of notes but I think I’m doing well, overall. The main critique he had of me (and something I know I do often that I need to work on) is that I advance through lessons rather fast. My lesson last week was supposed to go for 45 minutes and I only went for 35. Added some things to the lesson for this week in hopes that I would have more things for students to do and learn so I could shoot for 45 minutes and it still ended up being only 35. I think this happened because I had already taught the lesson so I breezed through it and students may have lost out. I added elements to this lesson such as more definitions and a different approach to analysis, some helpful Shakespeare vocabulary they might encounter often while working through Hamlet, a potential practice assessment students can do while reading, and quotes we use in the modern day that students might not have known h...

  Defeatist Attitudes in Students in a Post-COVID World What do you know about the problem? It doesn’t matter if a student is truly “defeated” or not, it’s the mindset that ruins their chances Defeatism is the mentality that, no matter how much things progress, they will never actually get better This is a learned response Increases in anxiety and depression (relating to financial and social health) can lead to a more defeatist mentality Not much is said in research about defeatism and high school students Much is said about hopelessness in secondary education You can’t discuss hopelessness/defeatism without taking external factors into account All the results I’ve found for why students feel defeated/hopeless do not seem satisfactory https://m.aliran.com/web-specials/2015-web-specials/aggrandisement-and-defeatism-in-politics-and-education https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1068744 https://web.p.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=baac3c6a-6c21-4999-b928-6d05bafe41e4%4...

I taught my first official lesson on Friday. I started with what my mentor teacher deemed as the more difficult class, simply because they don’t engage as much as the other class. It went amazingly well! Students were actually engaged and I am far less stressed now after the lesson is over than I was going into it. Students are about to be reading Hamlet. Most, if not all, students have experience reading Shakespeare, but I still did a lesson about reading Shakespeare and understanding Old/Middle English (much of Shakespeare is written in an odd transition period between the two). I gave them a brief history and incorporated a lot of things that they might understand from the modern day that hadn’t necessarily changed for other languages. For example, English is, in part, Germanic, and we used to have words spelt with a ‘v’ instead of a ‘u’ and vice versa (the letters were almost interchangeable). I discussed how something similar happens in German where words with a ‘w’ are pronounced...