Field Experience Reflection

    My observational site was Acero-Garcia High School located on the south side of the city. During my time there, I was able to observe is regular World Studies class as well as his AP US American History class. Although we were only required 10 hours, I went consistently for a week to really see the most of the lesson unfold. On the first day, I asked Mr. P about his functions and how he sets the standards for his classes during the beginning of the school year. He explained to me that there is no set curriculum or schedule he has to abide to, essentially his department chair has given teachers free range of their classrooms. Although I feel like I would require more structure, I thought it was amazing that he was allowed to teacher whatever and however he liked. 

    A disciplinary practice pertaining to history I witnessed was analyzing credible sources. The students were born emerged in the digital era, therefore most of their research consists of google searches. While this isn't entirely incorrect, students should be wary when researching on search engines because just about anything can come up. Mr. P warned students to not use blogs, or wikipedia because uncredited people can write incorrect information on those websites. He told students that for this particular project, he would only accept sources from websites that ended in ".edu", ".gov" and ".org", unless he reviewed the websites for them before the project submission.

   In addition to that, Mr. P also explained biases to the students. Just because they have the crediatals stated above (.edu, .org, .gov), their information might be skewed to their beliefs. Due to this, he told the students to not just trust one source, they should continuous fact check their sources for credibility. This strategy is something historians have to do one a day to day basis when they are writing for research purposes.   
   
    Lastly, it was evident that Mr. P set the norm to allow some type of leniency for students to meet deadlines. He said he did not penalize students that contacted him before hand for an extension for up to 3 days after the deadline. He informed me that he accepted late work under this circumstance because he understands the community in which he teaches. Most students have part time jobs after school or siblings that are responsible for, therefore he did not want to harshly penalize any students if they were still turning in assignments and communicating their situation with him.