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.