Teacher Identity

The Wire - Mr. Prezbo tries to teach fractions

Teacher Role:
From outside the classroom, Mr. Prezbo may appear to be the "leader" in the classroom as he is standing at the front of the classroom directing attention to the blackboard. However, within the classroom it's a different story. Mr. Prezbo continues to explain the problem, walking through and circling the numbers to direct students to focus, however there is plenty of chatter going on in the background. Mr. Prezbo doesn't seem to be frustrated or even agitated by it as he continues on. When a students asks for clarification on what "distribute" means Mr. Prezbo simply rephrases and says to give out. The student responds with "Well, why didn't you just say that." With no comment, Mr. Prezbo simply changes his phrasing. Throughout this whole process, Mr. Prezbo is quite calm as he responds to students directly. He does make a few facial expressions when hearing the students response to the answer but doesn't act upon it. Mr. Prezbo appears to make very little connection with the students as he continues to push forward with the lesson. Later in the clip, outside the classroom however we can see that he truly does care about his students performance and is frustrated by his findings following the quiz he gave them.

Student Role:
The students appear to be in the mode of multitasking. They are chatting with each other however can still hear the teacher talking in the background as they make random comments about it. You see a few students are paying attention however many are not giving Mr. Prezbo their full attention. The student who asked Mr. Prezbo about what distribute means I believe is a student who is engaged as he spoke up when asking for clarification on a word he didn't understand. The way he asked and put Mr. Prezbo on the spot wasn't respectful however this is a student who does want to learn.

Curriculum:
In this lesson, Mr. Prezbo is trying to teach his students fractions. He highlights the numbers that they should be paying attention to and then asks them to solve the problem to figure out if the answer is a, b, c, or d. From my observations, Mr. Prezbo appears to be speaking another language. The context of the problem isn't quite at the students level as the Calvin who went up to the board made fun of context and replaced it with his own.
Looking at Mr. Prezbo's response after the class in the teacher's lounge, Mr. Prezbo clearly sees that many of their students aren't grasping this concept, as many are far from it.