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. 

Try and follow the leader

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

Following directions.  Most people seem to not want to do that.  Is it because they do not want to or is it because the directions are not clear?  I am going to have to go with the later.  Just like directions from Ikea, I felt that during the week my lessons were lacking a bit of clarity in a certain area.  While lesson planning and thinking I spend extensive time scripting and thinking of what I actually would love to say and how to communicate an activity to my students.  To me it sounds crystal clear.  Then I start teaching. 

While the lesson seems to be unraveling in front of my face, I know the lesson is actually hitting a speed bump.  When explaining the directions of the various activities to my students I am often met with blank stares that scream “WHAT LANGUAGE IS SHE SPEAKING TO ME!” While recognizing this, I mentally try to take a step back and breathe.  I know something went wrong.  Often times, I will try and call on the one student who may just get my train of thought and have them revoice it to the class.  I catch myself using adult words (I will not stop however, but challenge my students to figure out the definition) and then having to clarify what they mean.  So I recognize that students will need clarifying, but even after a student tells the class in their language they seem to be lost.  Could the students not be listening?  Yes, but I know that one of my weaknesses that I must focus on in coming weeks is my clarity of directions.  I do not mind having to repeat myself 4 times, but when every student has a clue what is going on there is an issue with what should be a simple task.  As the week progressed students had a better grasp of what was being asked of them, which makes me believe there have been slight improvements.  There are also some practices I need to keep students accountable with following directions, and it is not a check in their behavior folder.  Patience is a virtue….I will get it, soon!

Truth

A Small Bite into Decoding

Last week, I gave what I consider an awful presentation on decoding.  Why was it awful you may ask?  Well after a week from hell where my computer self combusted I basically left the burden up to my partner to complete the assignment.  So maybe because only my feet were wet and not all the way up to my neck, or the fact I really could not grasp what decoding was and how it looked for students.  Or it was awful because I made a huge fool of myself in front of the class because of my inability to personally decode.  In the kitchen of screw ups, there was a dash of both ingredients.  So now I know that decoding is breaking up words into its various sounds.  I never really got to experience students decoding in my last practicum because it was a 6th grade placement.  My students then were all at a level of high fluency.  I spent the majority of my time with them working on comprehension.
This semester I am tutoring a struggling reader who I know will give me plenty of opportunities to help her decode.  At least I think so, I am still administering tests to have a better grasp on her abilities.  But I digress from the reason why I came out of hiding to write this post.  Today, while working on a math lesson in my new practicum placement my student was reading a word problem aloud.  He was having trouble with the word macaroni.  Without even thinking (well I lie again, I saw my decoding opportunity and pounced) I stuck my finger over "aroni" and had my student break apart the syllables.  He was able to get mac, then we moved onto "ar" and so on.  He pushed the syllables together and there it was "macaroni."  I thought about pointing to the pic of mac and cheese in the textbook, but knew that by using decoding the student would have a more concrete understanding of the words and use that strategy next time he comes to a stop in his reading.  It was not explicit that I was teaching reading, I am just happy I was able to start mastering a method I was previously so uncomfortable with.