And yet...

Obviously I haven't posted in a while. That would be because my student teaching experience ended fabulously with a pizza party and graduation. Following that I moved home to the County where there are no jobs. Last year and this year I have been working in an elementary school and a one-on-one. Last year was second grade and this year is kindergarten. For someone who prefers seniors over freshman this is a bit of self torture really. However, it is in the school district that I ultimately wanted to work in so hopefully being there will give me a leg up to a secondary position. So...when I manage to get a real job I'll be posting again.

Ugh...

Last week was pretty terrible towards the end. On top of all the typical work and issues, I could not get one of my classes to pay attention and I totally misread a situation in a different class and made things worse. My 3AB class after being taught something twice, still could not answer the review questions with a couple of exceptions. I could not make them understand that they needed to pay attention because they were going to be tested on this later, so I decided to make the test more real and give them an unannounced quiz, knowing that they should have the chance to remediate by school policy. Of course to qualify for remediation, they need to have shown that they made and effort and participated in preparation. I was going to let everyone remediate as long as they tried to do well on the quiz. However, several people wrote one word besides their name on the quiz and handed it in, so they will take a zero with no chance to make it up. I can't wait to see how they take that news today. I think it did achieve the desired effect of making them snap to attention though, we'll see. In my 6B class of juniors they were choosing their years for a project and I was choosing people off the list randomly. One student got upset because someone chose his year and he got all dramatic. As I saw it, he got a lot of laughs for his performance and this inspired him to continue. It seemed entirely harmless and just good natured teasing. However, after class the girl complained about the situation, rather than speaking up while it was happening. Apparently I also missed a student videoing during class and taking pictures, not surprising in a large class. Mr. Hodge helped me deal with this particular situation by talking to the student because he was able to use previous knowledge of the student's life to help him. By the end of the day Friday I was about done in general. Then I was overly busy all weekend just to get ready for Monday.

Fun

This week has been interesting. I basically have all the classes starting Monday, but I am not doing the planning for period 2 until Wednesday or Friday depending on how long it takes for them to finish their current projects. I am already working with them though, and I really like them. Plus it's a world studies class, but I get to teach the Salem Witch trials and the Revolutionary War here and in France. I'm pretty excited about that one. I have also found, this week, that the classes that are considered "lower level" are the classes that are most engaged and interested in learning and putting in the effort (with exceptions of course). My highest level classes are full of kids who think they are entitled to an A without and work required and get very upset when they don't get it. Period 4 is becoming my favorite even though they all have behavioral issues. Them and psychology, but that is as much the content as the personalities in the class.

Growing Up

This week I have learned that I really hate snow days. For now it is annoying but managable, but if we have another it is going to get harder to get my unit done with all three classes before I leave and I don't want to leave it up to Mr. Hamilton to finish. He's not a terrible teacher, we just have very different styles and ideas. I did manage to get some extra work done on the snow day though so I can see that it still has benefits. It was just funny how I was upset when i got the text telling me school was closed when just last semester I was begging for a snow day. It's interesting what views change when you switch sides of the desk. Though I did learn when I did lunch duty that I'm still pretty close to high school in some ways. Some kids were building a tower or their pizza boxes which I thought was pretty cool but Mr. Hamilton told them to knock it off. I thought, at first, that I wasn't grown up enough yet to teach high school. Then I realized that it really wasn't a big deal and maybe Mr. Hamilton was too grown up.

Pre-Vacation

This week has been great. I've been teaching regularly three classes now. I've gotten through a large-ish project with three classes and then an in class writing piece today with period 8. I didn't want to assign something over break because it is too long a time for a small assignment, or at least I think so. I also keep managing to throw in as much English type things as possible. I'm actually really impressed with what I got today. The assignment, after covering the rest of the war, was to write a journal entry (or several) from the perspective of a person who was at either Vicksburg or Petersburg in any capacity. I asked if they had ever done on demand writing and none of them had even heard the phrase before. So I did a five minute explanation of on demand writing and explained what I wanted. I also gave them a few suggestions like taking ten minutes to plan, think, outline before starting to write. I gave them plenty of time too, knowing it would likely be a challenge for some of them. Some finished in about twenty minutes, some went to the end of class. I looked through a few and I think they really nailed it. They had an assembly this morning so the schedule was off and it's the Friday before vacation, the last period of the day. Knowing this, I started class by promising that if they pay attention and cooperate they wouldn't have any homework over break and we would play a game when they got back. I was planning on do that anyway, but bribery rocks!

Good and Bad

This week has been better. We had the workshop day on Wednesday and it was interesting seeing that. We broke into departments to discuss the Maine Learning Results and what the goals for each grade level should be in relation to them. The Social Studies department consists of Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Simonea, and Mr. Henry and since they all have one of us as a student teacher they would have had double the input. However, they pretty much just chatted and said they were already meeting the standards. Then we went to the middle school to listen to the DEA about street drugs in Jay. Then Thursday I taught my first lesson in period 8 on Gettysburg and the Gettysburg Address. It went pretty badly actually, but in the ways I was expecting. I speak faster when I'm nervous and adding that to the fact that it was pulling teeth to get one word out of any student, the lesson was done much faster than I had planned. I tried to get them to do a current event, but it didn't really work. Today (Friday) I taught the same lesson to period 3 and it went fantastically. I was more relaxed, I have more of a connection with the kids in that class already, they were willing to speak at least a little so it wasn't just me talking the whole time. I did make one major change from yesterday in how I had them discuss the Address. Yesterday I did it whole class thinking I would walk them through it since it isn't an English class but none of them would talk even when called on. Today it was a bigger group to begin with and I had them break into their groups for the projects and discuss it in smaller groups. The groups that finished faster I told to start thinking about the presentation so they would be ahead for next class and I spent more time with the group that was not staying on task and having more trouble with the wording. It went much better than period 8 and a couple even called me by name, which is wonderful since being called "hey!" gets annoying after a bit. Anyway, the point of the week is that it's getting much better and I'm finally teaching. Unfortunately, the group you will be seeing is the period 8 group, but I'm thinking that on Monday I may get them to loosen up a bit, at least I'm going to try.

Patience

So what do you do as a student teacher when you are ready to teach but your mentor is still holding your hand and trying to ease you into it? Most people start teaching after a few days, I'm on day 8 and I may not teach anything until day 12. Besides being bored, I'm not learning much from observing, except students' names. I'm grateful for the support because I would not have been able to just be thrown into it, but some sort of work with the students would be nice now. I think I am just going to start jumping in where I see opportunity. It's not that I am not doing anything. I planned an activity to go with a movie and I've helped with research and other planning, but I'm waiting for Mr. H. to catch up where he told me to start and it is taking a great deal longer than planned. By my observations this is for two reasons: 1) poor planning and 2) not great classroom management. He thinks up what he is going to do just before he does it most times which is a privilege of being a veteran teacher, but it doesn't really work for him. The activity I planned was for a movie they were watching that day, so it's a good thing I came up with something. He also gives breaks without time limits and just waits for people to wander back in. He doesn't seem to expect much from most of his students and he gets exactly what he expects. He is a good coach, but coaching is not all there is to teaching. He also uses the same strategies and assignments repeatedly. I understand the need for routine, but this is pushing the limits for kids who are already bored to begin with. If you are going to lecture or read from the book, at least use a PowerPoint for visual stimulation or some sort of movement. (At least that's my theory.) Oh well, I'll take over a couple classes soon and we'll see how they respond to a different method that still gets the point across.