Week 2 of Solo....Oh so different

nikkicookiebaker

And so begins the trials and tribulations of student teaching.  I may be exhausted, but I will reflect here....

There is a reason I love black and white cookies so much.  They have both chocolate and vanilla.  Even though I like the vanilla part more than the chocolate, I will always eat the chocolate side first.  While eating it is not a torture.  Hello it is a cookie after all! I equate it to how you have to go through some stuff you do not like to get to the good.  To say last week was stuff you do not like is an understatement.  It is still all a blur to me.  There were behavior issues that escalated, lessons that flopped, and an all around dead energy.  With little help from my mentor teacher to mediate the problems, simply because she was MIA for the majority of the week, I was forced to figure it out. 

                Well, at the dawn of a new week and plenty of rest, I was ready to start fresh and get to my vanilla side of the cookie.  Maybe it was because solo teaching ended this week or maybe because I knew we could only go up, I felt that I had a renewed sense of energy this week.  My lessons went better than expected and my students were producing great works.  While it took us two hours, we sat in the computer lab and created incredible PowerPoint presentations on different cultures.  They were able to use their notes that they had taken, and transfer them to the computer.  Many have had little experience with typing and couldn’t find a key if it were staring them in the face.  I knew it was worth it because when we were doing math today and one student came up to me and said that is what the person I was researching ate was well worth it.  Or it was when we were doing a science worksheet and a student said “Hey, Ms. Yewdell, that’s cause and effect.”  The science sheet was incredibly boring and a time filler, but I was so happy that there was cross curricular learning going on.  I strive in my own classroom for there to be those opportunities.  While it is much easier in a self contained classroom since you are in control of it all, if I am teaching one or two subjects, I want to know what is going on in the other classroom so I can help the students create a connection. 

Week 1 of Solo Teaching

Michael 1952

And so begins the trials and tribulations of student teaching.  I may be exhausted, but I will reflect here....

In third grade, the students have a ton of energy.  That energy can be productive and destructive. Dealing with it and making choices of how to deal with it is a hard battle.  You can be really lieutenant or a drill sergeant.  I like to assess each situation and deal with it on a case by case basis.  What I need however, is a clear set of rewards and punishments.  In my future classroom, I know from my experience here that there needs to be consistency with punishment and rewards.  When reflecting with my mentor teacher, she suggested that I be more strict with the students.  For those who are talking out of line or not on task give them a punishment or have a consequence to their action.  I cannot agree more with her.  However, the problem this week while solo teaching was finding those punishments and consequences.  In my current classroom there is no real consequence except for losing 5 minutes of recess or whatever you feel that moment.  The kids could care less and their behavior does not improve.  In the short 2 weeks of solo teaching, I am not going to set up a rewards and consequence system for the kids to forget when I leave.  From this experience, I know that this is a HUGE thing I must consider when setting up my classroom norms.  The students must have a CLEAR understanding that behavior A will result in consequence A, and behavior B will result in consequence B.  When behavior A happens in September or March the consequence will be the same in September or March.  Now, I just need to figure out how to set up that system.  Hopefully, I will get a job at a school where I like how the school wide system works. 

If the shoe fits....

dherrera_96

And so begins the trials and tribulations of student teaching.  I may be exhausted, but I will reflect here....

A little late, but one from my first placement.

How do you know it is right?  You just do.  Actually you don’t, but from each experience with my practicum and student teaching, I know that this is the right decision.  When I left my job at a fashion company, did I cry like a baby as I took the cross town bus back to my apartment?  No.  Did my eyes look like water buckets (they came up with that simile not me!) today around 3:55?  Yes.  These past 7 weeks have been such a wonderful experience.  Each day I was happy to wake up and each afternoon I left the parking lot with a smile on my face.  Even days when the students are misbehaving or I feel the pressure of the TPA, it still feels right.  That towel will not be thrown in. 

                I by no means am a great teacher, but I know one day I will reach that summit.  Just like my for my students, I set high expectations with the ideas they can be met.  I know that I will one day meet them.  I have filled my tool belt with so many great resources from teaching these past few months.  The strategies will carry me through teaching.  I cannot wait to implement them in my own classroom, hopefully 5^th grade. 

I know this experience will stay with me.  How could it now?  The students were so great.  They made my job so easy.  Yes, there were days where they could not exactly settle down from the excitement.  Yes, there were lessons that met blank stares.  Yes, there was subject matter I had no interest in teaching.  Set that aside, I loved every moment of it.  It all felt right, so right.  I am so grateful to have figured this out, or I would be sitting at my dead end job looking out on the Hudson adding a zebra tag to a boring crew-neck sweater. 

Must see

Roots Before Branches

photosteve101

And so begins the trials and tribulations of student teaching.  I may be exhausted, but I will reflect here....

Ok I am tired.  Writing lesson plans and being creative was like pulling teeth (simile!).  Writing that simile was easier than coming up with a lesson plan to teach both metaphors and similes.  Maybe it is because TPA teaching is over, maybe it is because we are almost done at my current placement, or maybe I used up all my creative energy is why my lessons this week don’t feel good.  However, I digress before I even start. 

                This week, I had a bit of a revelation with my teaching style and values.  I see the merits of asking higher lever questions.  Whys and Hows come out of my mouth more than I repeat directions.  However, that is a close race, closer than November’s polls.  While teaching a lesson this week, what I thought was a simple question was met with blank stares.  The kind of stares that can burn a hole in you.  The kind of stare where you ask yourself was I teaching a different class yesterday.  The answer is no.  I stumped them because I did not warm my students up.  I honestly do not remember the question I asked but it was asked too soon.  On Bloom’s taxonomy remembering is the base.  It is what supports all other types of learning.  We cannot analyze or apply unless we start by remembering.  However, the way I was asking my students questions I had skipped straight into the race and forgot to stretch and warm up.  So there I was fumbling with a torn ACL and no one to help me.  Then I rewound and realized that brisk 5 minute walk or a question to access prior knowledge would prevent that Bill Bruckner moment.  No it was not that embarrassing, more like missing a pop fly.  While I spit out metaphor after metaphor, my thesis this week is that to be able to start asking those higher level questions I value so much I need to start with remembering questions.  They are so important.  It gives all students a chance to access the information.  By accessing the remembering stage I can prime my students to use those higher level questions to enter their zone of proximal development.  Then when we move onto those “tougher” questions my students will first be clued into what we are actually discussing and then they can fire synapses to create new connections and make meaning.  Just like training for my 5K, I need to walk before jogging.  With my future classroom, we need to remember before we can analyze.  If we cannot remember how do we honestly know what we are discussing?

This is the lesson that never ends, it goes on and on my friends, some people started teaching it not knowing what to do.....

Salvador Dali's

The Persistence of Memory

And so begins the trials and tribulations of student teaching.  I may be exhausted, but I will reflect here....

Minus the fact I felt guilty having to be in school during Rosh Hashanah and not dipping apples in honey, this week went rather well.  My TPA lessons went almost according to plan.  They were by no means perfect, but I am not perfect.  There were valuable lessons this week, such as the value of a lesson that starts and ends during a continuous duration. 

                Due to the scattered broken schedule I have to deal with I often feel that my lessons stretch over days.  I actually don’t feel that I know that.  This week I had two lessons that should have taken 30-45 minutes, but it took days.  It was either a combination of over planning or yet another assembly to interrupt my class.  Its life, but I have to learn how to make a disjointed lesson seem seamless.  It is even harder when you do not like the lesson you have planned.  I understand I am not required to jump through hoops and pull out bunnies from hats, but when I write a good lesson I feel more prepared and confident when teaching it.  When something is good, it’s GOOD.  However, these said lessons felt like they sank faster than the Titanic.  The kids were taught the information; I just feel like I was not on my best game which made it hard for students to make meaningful gains and really grasp the material.  Some material built on prior knowledge, but it still required higher level thinking skills.  This has been a struggle.  I will say the bright side of having a lesson drag on for days (literal, not figurative)  is that I was able to try and fix what I thought was a horrible lesson into something moderately meaningful.  We can’t win them all.  I am surely not throwing in the towel ;-) but I use this as a learning opportunity how to make my future teaching practice tighter and stronger.