BACKGROUND OF TEACHING

            Honestly, I was not sure what to expect as I walked into Morrisville Middle School in February.  However, what I found there surpassed even my greatest expectations and had a profound effect on what kind of teacher I will become in the future.  Although Morrisville is geographically located less than five miles from Trenton, New Jersey, the surroundings of Morrisville Middle are very much suburban.  The school is surrounded by tree-lined streets and quaint, quiet neighborhoods.  This creates a small community atmosphere for the school, and lends to the comfortable and supportive vibe given off by Morrisville’s administrators, faculty and staff.

            The school itself is comprised of both Morrisville Middle School and Morrisville High School.  In the building, there is a sixth grade wing, a middle school wing and a high school wing.  Although the school serves grades six through twelve, the student body itself is relatively small.  There is an average of about 60 students per grade, with just under 500 students enrolled in all grades.  The students travel together from class to class in a block scheduling system, with about 90 minutes per class period.  Each grade level has one teacher for each of the core subjects of math, science, English, and social studies, and the teachers in the arts and other subjects serve the entire school.  All of the teachers I came in contact with, were dedicated, caring professionals whose first priority was always their students.  Many teachers make themselves available from 7 AM until 5 PM each day, when the school day itself only runs from 8:02 AM until 2:30 PM.  Also, since the school is so small, teachers know a majority of the students in the school by name, and stay involved in their lives from the time they enter their classroom until the time they graduate, and sometimes beyond.

            The environment that is provided by Morrisville Middle School is often in sharp contrast to the household environment that the students encounter when they leave school each day.  Being so close to Trenton, the residents of Morrisville are often economically disadvantaged.  In fact, 41 percent of Morrisville’s students are on a free or reduced price lunch program.  Adding to their struggles outside of the classroom is the fact that many students face family disruptions.  In my experience, a large percentage of my students lived with family members other than their parents.  Some live with aunts and uncles; others lived with grandparents.  Still others were forced to be the caretaker for their younger siblings as their parents worked multiple jobs to support the family.

            However, despite the adversity these young adults have faced, they are still highly dedicated to their schoolwork, their extra-curricular activities, and any other venture they undertake.  This is especially evident in the recent Pennsylvania System of Schools Assessment results for the seventh grade in mathematics.  In 2006, only 46 percent of the students in seventh grade tested as proficient or advanced in mathematics.  In only one year’s time, that number has increased to 75 percent scoring proficient or advanced.  This is such a monumental increase and is evident by the comparison with the state averages on the same test: in the state of Pennsylvania in the year 2007, 67 percent of students scored proficient or advanced on the mathematics portion of the PSSA.  It is important to consider that these students are in transition from Piaget’s concrete operational stage of development to his formal operational stage and as such, this form of mathematical improvement is quite remarkable.  Students in transition between these two stages are just beginning to think abstractly: a key skill in higher mathematics.  However, even with its students showing such improvement, the Morrisville Borough School District is still receiving threats from the state of closing down the high school.  Although there is a very real possibility of this occurring, I am sure that the dedicated professionals of the district and of the school are doing everything they can to keep the school open for its students to continue their education.

According to Urie Bronfenbrenner and his works on The Ecology of Human Development, each of the unique communities that a student is a part of has a great affect on who they will become and how successful they will be in school.  Each microsystem, such as the student’s family, classroom, or peer group, interacts with the other microsystems to form the mesosystem.  In the child’s exosystem are factors such as the mass media and the larger community which indirectly influence the development of the child.  In the macrosystem are the cultural values and conditions that guide who the student will become based on a socio-cultural context.  Finally, the student is affected by the chronosystem, which tracks the ways in which the other systems change over time.  As Bronfenbrenner showed, it is important as teachers to become informed on the systems in which each of your students is interacting in order to study the effect it will have on their development and on their schoolwork.

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