Week 10! We did it!!!

I'm starting to feel like I have less and less to write about. As the school year winds down, so do the activities in the classroom. But, here it goes!

Highlight: Reading! Literally. On Thursday of last week I spent 45 of the 55 minute period reading to the juniors from The True Confessions of a Part-Time Indian. This fit into the end of their unit exploring Alexie's different perspective of settling in the West. The reason I spent most of the period reading is that is the best way to get the students attention. Never has the junior class been quieter or more attentive than when I read to them. They were putty in my hands. It's true: no one ever gets sick of getting read to. This was a great experience for me and the students loved it as well. We got about a quarter into the book before I had to stop and they were responding very well to it. I hope some of them will search out the book on their own and finish it.

Something that made me think differently about teaching was a short conversation I had with the long-term sub I have been working with this quarter. She has had a career before getting her masters in teaching. After this long term sub position is finished, she isn't sure she wants a full time teaching job. I personally love teaching. Yes it has been difficult at times and students can be a pain, but I KNOW this is what I want to be doing. It just feels right. So it was interesting to see a different perspective where I don't think her heart is fully in it. It makes me question her decision to become a teacher in the first place.

An approach I plan to use in the future is reading to the class. I will have these juniors again next year as seniors during my student teaching. I am glad that I learned this about them now. While it may extend the time needed in class for reading, at least this way I will know they have read it because I read it to them! When we do Beowulf next year I plan to do most of the reading in class as well as incorporate a graphic novel version of the book. This should hopefully be enough to keep all the students up to speed and engaged in the book.

A perplexing situation I had this week is dealing with one student in particular. He is hard to handle to say the least. I am hoping over the summer he will mature a bit more, but in the case that he doesn't I need to think of way to get him to be less disruptive of the class. He's big and he is loud. I have tried talking to him one on one a few times this year, but that usually doesn't even last to the end of the period. The teacher I am working with will often just send him out of the classroom, but honestly, that seems like what he wants. So, I may try talking to him again at the beginning of the year to try and set him up to be better in the classroom. I am hoping that creating a personal connection and trying to work with him on this issue will help the situation.

Week 9: Corndogs and Hormones

Week Nine! Here it is! Woo hoo! The final countdown! The last stretch! So close to done I can almost taste it! Or... maybe that's just the spaghetti I am currently eating. Either way, this quarter as has been madness (both good and bad) and this is my second to the last post for the quarter. And, needless to say, I am ready for a break! Anyway. This week was again pretty light on class time as Friday there was no school. But I do have a few lessons from Thursday to discuss and I had my observed lesson on Tuesday which I will also talk about. Also, kind of at a cross roads with that I need to do for my placement next year...

Thursday was a bit of a fiasco to be honest... It was a half day for the students, so after lunch there was an assembly and then after that students had a free day in the school to just hang out, play games, watch movies, or go chill out on the football field. This was all fine. I was looking forward to getting to get to know some of my students better. But, the problem was an epic miscommunication had happened with my observer. While I thought he was talking about Thursday the 30th, he was talking about this Thursday. So he showed up right before the assembly was supposed to start. Which was fantastic. If it had been any other normal day, we would have made it work. I could thrown together my lesson pretty quickly. But being as there would be no students in the classroom, it was kind of impossible. And while we got it all figured out, that was probably the most stressful few minutes of my life.

Tuesday was a completely different story! I was teaching and getting observed as planned! And, as far as I'm concerned, it went great. Especially for the maturity level of the material and the fact that they have one week of school left. They were more wild than they usually are, but it was kind of challenging and kind of fun also. I think it was a good experience, especially in front of a supervisor to see how I managed the class. While it was far from perfect, I am still just a student! So, I feel I did pretty well considering the circumstances.

Also, there is a possibility that I may need to change my placement next year, but that will hopefully be resolved soon. My cooperating teacher has two sections of AP English Composition and is concerned about me doing my student teaching in those classes. But I think we may be able to work out a co-teaching situation for those two classes and I will take on her Juniors and Seniors on my own. So, should be interesting!

I learned that I need to be on top of things myself this week. I can't rely on others and I need to make sure to clarity, in all situations, rather than just assume we are always on the same page. And a teaching technique that I need to learn to apply is a few re-directing skills. And hopefully they will become more apparent and clear to students as I teach more.

WEEEEEEEEEK 8!

Unfortunately, due to strep throat, I only in the classroom for one day this week... And all they were doing was working on packets and watching Canterbury Tales videos. So I will try to make this as interesting as humanly possible, but not promises.

This class seems to work best when they are watching or listening to something while doing another activity like a worksheet. While that is not a style of teaching I am really fond of, it clearly works better for some groups rather than others. It is also the only time they seem to quiet down.

But! While visiting the drama classroom, I was able to help out the drama teacher a little bit. I recored a voice over for her spring production and also recorded a new welcome message to play before performances for her. They were still using the same one I made when I did my play senior year 4 years ago! So, it was kinda fun to be able to update it and keep my presence in the department alive. I'm hoping to help out while I am student teaching as well, since I will be there all the time anyway.

Oh, what I forgot to post about last week! There is a very good chance that I will be able to student teach in the journalism class at Freeman! During my time I would be overseeing two issues of the paper (February and March). So, that is pretty exciting. I have been sitting in on this class occasionally this spring to get a feel for it. Its pretty laid back, but they do have hard deadlines that they are required to meet. It seems like it would be a pretty easy class to teach as the student editors have a lot of the power, but it does become more reliant on the teacher as the publication date closes in with final checks on articles and, the most time consuming, reviewing and editing the layout of paper to ensure it will all print properly and look clean.

A struggle this week was my sickness. I fell behind in a lot of things. I was supposed to teach two lessons that I couldn't be present for. It was pretty terrible.

Weekly Blog Post 7!! Woooooo hooooooooooooooo!

This week I had another amazing opportunity that I pounced on when I was offered it! The journalism class was going on a field trip to KHQ and to The Spokesman Review. Not only did I get to learn a lot about both types of journalism needed for these different mediums, I also had my first opportunity to be a chaperone for a field trip. AND, it opened up an opportunity for me next year during my student teaching at Freeman, which is all really exciting.

So the highlight of my week was obviously the field trip. At The Spokesman we got a tour of the old part of the building, that is still all original from the early 1900's, we walked through the writers offices, and sat in on an afternoon editors meeting where they figured out the main articles they are working on for the following days paper. They also took us to the top of the building where there was an outdoor patio for employees to take breaks or write at if they chose. It was all pretty cool.

KHQ was also very interesting to see journalism from a different point of view. They are telling stories too, but with words and images rather than writing. We noted immediately that both the paper and news go about gathering stories much the same way, just their output method is obviously different.

Something I learned this week in the classroom is that as the school year gets closer to ending, the students get more troublesome. And I have heard this said many times before, and also been the student in these situations, but I have been seeing it first time from a different perspective. Even students who are normally fine are starting to check out. And honestly, at times it seems like the teachers are in the same boat. Watching movies and just generally becoming a little more lax as the year comes to a close.

I hope to be able to keep students attention a little better. Though I'm not sure how I would really do that, besides try and be a fun and dynamic teacher. Hopefully this is a skill I will learn with time if I continue to strive for it.

Weekly Blog Post 6

This week I had the opportunity to do something that I really enjoyed and that I think was super beneficial for my teaching carrer: I basically had an entire class all to myself for an entire period! My cooperating teacher went home sick for the day so I was left to my own devices with the class. And while all that was planned was a simple Jeopardy game to review for a test, it was great being the actual leader in the classroom. Everything seems to feel extremely fake and simulated... probably because it is. But this experience felt real for the first time. The person assigned to watch the class after she left came in and out intermittently during the period while I conducted the class. It flet great and I think it seemed to go pretty well. They were listening to me and responding when asked.

This is the first time that I have been really left alone with the students and it definitely made a difference. It was interesting to see how quickly their full attention turned to me, rather than to my cooperating teacher through me. Anyway, it was just a good experience for me that I am extremely grateful for this quarter.

This week I also spent some time in the other english classroom. Always interesting to see the differences in classroom arrangement and teaching style. And with that, again, I find myself seeing teachers respond to students in two extremes: either over reacting about something I would perceive as a small problem or not reacting at all to something that I would see as larger problem. After discussing this with my cooperating teacher, I do believe a lot of it has to do with being with the students every day versus me only being here two or three times a week. It's still odd to see.

I also watched one of these teachers argue with a student again, which always makes me cringe. It doesn't seem affective to me. And it almost seems like students keep doing it to get a rise out of the teacher. I just keep thinking, "Do not engage!"

Something I learned about teaching this week is that giving students respect will illicit respect in return. I even had a short conversation with a student about this. He had mentioned that he was going to be good for the period when I asked him how he was going to do today (he's generally a really loud student). He said not to worry about anything because he respected me more than he respected the cooperating teacher. While I told him he needed to respect her simply because she is the teacher, it still seemed like a compliment. He said he could tell that I respected students, so it was easy to respect me back. Interesting to think about.

Weekly Blog Post: Week 5

The highlight of my past week was getting to go around to a few different classrooms and observe them instead of my cooperating teachers classroom. She was doing mostly quizzes and videos last Friday so I took it as an opportunity to look into some teaching and classroom management styles of other teachers. 

I had my first interactions with a freshman and sophomore English class. The freshman sent most of the time doing individual seat work with a little instruction at the beginning of the period on a new concept.  This is clearly a routine that they are used to by this time of the year as it was mostly quite and productive (or at least seemed that way) for the period. While the classroom routine is likely the largest factor in the management of this class, students sitting in their seats the entire period does not fall in line with a method of teaching I plan to use. Seat work can be beneficial  and I believe the concepts they were trying to learn are well suited to that, but asking a freshman to sit for an entire hour with little to no interaction is comparable to torture. 

The sophomore class was a lot more interesting and engaging. Students were working on a final project for The Odyssey in which they had to create a board game that included trivia elements about the story and followed Odysseus' travels though the story. The students started their planning phases and some started creating elements of their game by the end of the period. I had the opportunity to walk around to every group and discuss with them the layout and design of their game boards and how they planned on incorporating the trivia elements. It was a good experience in seeing how the students worked together. The groups maintained their working for most of the period, though a few groups started to get distracted and linger near the end. Two groups combined and were clearly just conversing about nothing related to the project. While it went on a for a little while, the teacher eventually brought it to their attention that she was aware they were not working. Her tactics were not quite what I would have done to disband the group, but she did effectively do so. 

The major issue that I keep seeing as a recurring problem (especially when it comes to the seniors) is keeping them engaged this late in the year. With the seniors, I almost feel as if it is a lost cause. They only have one month of high school left in their lives. At this point, they have calculated how low their grades and go and still pass. I struggle with letting them get away with that. But... I'm at a loss for what to do. As most of the teachers I see are just accepting this as a fact of life. 

I have said it before and I will say it again: group work! Not where other students are necessarily dependent upon others for their grades, but so there is interaction between students in the classroom. Sitting quietly, alone, and in a desk is something I want to try and avoid as often as possible. 

There is one student in particular that just does not like class. He always complains. Even when we watched a video. I don't know what to do about it, but I'm thinking about just asking him what he would like to do. And possibly trying to get a lesson going around that. Just so that he might open up more and realize that I am listening and trying to help. 

Classroom Management: Cell Phones and Students

The article I read was about the presence of cell phones in the classroom. And, while it points out many things that I would have generally assumed already (by being in the classroom and currently being a student myself), it also pointed out a few interesting ideas that I hadn't thought of before.

First was the disconnect between school rules and individual classroom rules. As can be imagined, each classroom interprets the school wide rules differently. And in some cases, individual classrooms do not follow the school rules at all. Most teachers and students find the school rules to be too strict. In this certain school, teachers are supposed to take students phones when they see them and take them to the office. All of the teachers in the study reported having a problem with that policy and not enforcing it to that extent. Out of the three teachers they spoke to, only one teacher took it so far as to take the phones from the students. In his classroom, if he sees a cell phone, it is taken away until the end of the period, no questions asked. The other two teachers were more lenient  to where they rarely took phones, but asked that phone use was kept to a minimum and only used during work time and especially not when students were supposed to be paying attention to each other or the teacher. The second two teachers had apprehension when it came to taking students phones, their reasoning being that it is something they (or, more likely, their parents) are paying for.

When teachers adapt their own rules to the school rules, this can be confusing for students. It also seems to undermine the authority of the administration overall on the issue. Though, if it's something that most teachers do not feel comfortable with, maybe the rules are worth reconsidering?

Second, students appear to adopt their own rules about using cellphones in the classroom. Most students tend to apply the same rules of etiquette when speaking to a person face to face to their texting habits in the classroom. They noted that if you were talking to someone and having a conversation, you wouldn't pull out your phone and ignore them to start texting. The same seems to go for in the classroom. Most students agreed that it was rude to text while a teacher was lecturing or speaking directly to them. And, beyond that, they also mentioned that when they are texting, its typically not anything terribly important and is not overly distracting from the task at hand. They say it would be similar to passing a note in class or even just a quick comment here and there, which happens in classrooms all the time. So, to some degree, students also have a system of rules for themselves that they abide by when using cell phones in the classroom.

I lean towards the more lenient attitude when it comes to cell phones. If someone is presenting or lecturing, it is important to be respectful. But, as long as it does not become a major distraction, I wouldn't see myself taking a cell phone from a student.