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.