Nakkula

Chapter one of Nakkula reaffirmed my observation of an adolescent and further explained what I had written about in my reflection paper only one week ago.  For that assignment I observed my students during their morning routine. The students were ready for school, eating breakfast, taking their medication, and getting ready to come downstairs to school.  As the observer I tried not to interact with them much, because I didn’t want to interrupt the normal flow of things, but because of our familiarity the girls were interacting with me some.  What I observed during that time is a set of behaviors unlike I am used to seeing from these same students while in the classroom.  The girls were much more disrespectful, rude, and challenging during my observation.  At first I thought maybe they weren’t ‘morning people’, but as Nakkula points out on page 3, “As adolescents test limits through experimentation with their behavior and the responses it elicits, and as adults help shape and label that behavior, adolescences itself is being constructed.”  These individuals were testing limits and they were learning from the adults in the situation that their behavior was either not of concern or didn’t require redirection at that time.  Without going into too many specifics, I now realize that I was seeing adolescence happen.  These adolescents have learned that what is acceptable in one situation might be unacceptable in a different situation, based on the reactions of the adults who surround them.  As adolescents they are constantly “creating themselves and the worlds they inhabit” (pg. 5) and as adults we play in integral role in that creation.

The section on coauthors and teacher-student relationships brought back memories of my teacher research project from SED 551 in which I specifically examined the role of teacher-student relationships in the classroom.  A concept that was present both in that project and Chapter 1 of Nakkula was, “because teaching is a vocation that suffers from lack of extrinsic rewards relative to higher-paying and higher-prestige professions teachers depend on intrinsic rewards to make their work feel worthwhile (pg. 13).  This chapter furthered my understanding of the role that teacher-student relationships play in education.  I liked the thought of cowriting our narratives with our students and think it’s important to remember that they are shaping our stories as much as we are helping to shape theirs!