Homecoming Week!

My teaching experience this week went pretty well. If I had to sum up my teaching experience for this week in one word; I would have to say that word would be hyperactivity. I say hyperactivity because my kids were hyper this week because it was spirit week. Their homecoming was Friday and the dance was on Saturday. Both my Wednesday and Thursday classes were cut short because of late start and the pep assembly. I can get awfully irritating to lose 16 minutes of class time in one week. Especially when the kids are so hyper it’s hard to steer them in any direction.

Luckily I wasn’t the only one facing the problem of hyperactivity in the classroom. My cooperating teacher also had to face this with his AP kids and my Aide in my government period was in on the ride with me. One of the things that I did to help make this last week better was I talked to other teachers about how they handled this week. I got tons of great advice and I implemented a lot of it.

Another thing I did a lot of this week was ask advice about how to better teach a subject and how to better modify my assignments to meet the needs of all my students. We share the social studies office with the special education teachers and they are always willing to give me advice about how to teach things better or how to better modify my assignments to meet the needs of all my students. A major question I had for my supervisor, which I forgot to ask him when he supervised me this week was; “How do you get the kids to higher order thinking when you can barely get them to follow directions.” Well I asked some of the special education teachers and they were very encouraging.

One thing I haven’t talked about is all the meetings, PLP’s and information that I’ve been getting from the experts and community at my school. They have a lot of great ideas to implement in my field and they remind the teachers of things that they should be doing and make sure that they are implementing good practicing techniques. I take a lot from these meetings and really try to implement what I’m learning in my classroom. The challenge is that they aren’t always thinking about the challenges that our individual students bring to the classroom. They especially forget our students’ lack of prior knowledge especially in the subject of Social Studies. I’ve heard other teachers mention how they are supposed to skim over the early part of American History because the students are supposed to already know that, but the problem is that they don’t.

A huge thing I learned in the past couple weeks of teaching is that I need to use authentic and real world problems in my lesson. This tends to be very easy for me in Psychology because it is easy to relate things back to the kids. We are learning about what makes them do the things we do. Of course I could always get better at making sure the examples fit my students better because that is important. In government this is a little harder. My students tend to bring up the real world problems in that class and as much as their examples sometimes scare me. For example, “what happens if I commit and murder in Illinois then go over to Indiana and commit a murder what will happen then can Illinois extradite me?” I really wanted to say don’t commit murders and you will be okay but I answered her question first before adding in but it would be much easier for you if you didn’t commit any murders.

After being observed a couple times now, if feel that I get better after every observation. My supervisor always has great things for me to improve on and ideas that will make my life easier in my classroom. I am constantly working on wasting as little time as possible in my classroom but I was also reminded this week by my supervisor that I need to make sure that I have my students’ full attention before I can move on in my teaching. This means that I might have to waste some time before I can move on.

In our education class we’ve been reading from Laurel Schmidts’ Classroom Confidential he has a lot of great ideas about communicating with parents and preparing for parent teacher conferences. What really helped me is when he talks about how my students culture can really affect my communications with the parents. I’ve communicated with a couple of my students’ parents already and we have had meet the teacher night already but we have not done parent teacher conferences. Schmidt says that it is important to get to know as much about my students culture as possible and I feel that I’ve really been able to do this especially in psychology. Another thing I’ve been trying to do with my parents is be proactive. If a student is struggling or not turning in assignments I first talk to the student but if that doesn’t solve anything then I email the parents. I learned that with a lot of my parents calling home doesn’t get me a call back most times. But emailing usually gets a response in less than a week. I think Schmidt’s ideas about being proactive and positive will help me really prepare for my first parent teacher conferences.

As for my goals this week:

1.      I’ve learned almost all of my students names and only occasionally forget. I’m still working on this with government.

2.      My social life is kind of nonexistent but with an upcoming wedding and all of its festivities I’m going to have to be careful about prioritizing.

3.      Grading went fine for this week it’s just a matter of getting all the late and retests in. Oh and all the late work students are turning in but I won’t complain about that. J

4.      Eating healthy continues, I now just have to remember to eat.

5.      My relationship with God is going good. I was mad at him for most of this week but he forgives me and we get stronger. Thank you for all your prayers for my observation, it did not go as well as I would have hoped but I got a lot more out of it then I would have if it did go well.

6.      Sanity is really a fluid thing I would say, or at least I hope.

7.      Being the best teacher I can be now finally includes developing better relationships with my students. Getting to know them more than just that initial ten percent.

8.      The principal panel this week gave me some better ideas about what I need to focus on when it comes to the job hunt.

9.      One of my new goals for this week is learning how to better incorporate my aide in government because she is a certified social studies teacher.

10.  Another goal is to get better at using real world scenarios with my students.

Emotional

If I had to describe this week in one word it would be educational. I took over full time teaching now and even though its one more class it adds a lot more work to my load. I also had to do progress reports this week. If I learned one thing from my students about life back home its that they can pretend they are too cool for school but the minute their Mom or Dad finds out they are missing work or doing poorly in a class is the minute they are scrambling to get late work in.


The biggest thing I learned this week was my students have very little prior knowledge in government. I was having my students do a scavenger hunt on the constitution and they were caught up on who goes in what branch. I figured they would at lease know congress is legislative and the president is executive but they didn’t even know that. My cooperating teacher said to assume they know nothing and now I know. I found out last week that in assuming my students have no prior knowledge I need to do more prior knowledge checks. If you remember from last week, I learned that instructions needed to be simplified for my students. This week I simplified instruction but not the assignment and got great results.

If there is one thing you learn from teaching at Eisenhower it’s that the students are very culturally diverse. I was teaching a lesson this past week about making sure when you are doing a sample of a culture that you need to make it representative. The issue my students ran into is they only know about how to represent their culture. I asked my students what a representative sample of the United States would entail and they said African Americans, Mexicans, and Caucasians. I don’t think they felt other cultures didn’t exist or shouldn’t be represented, I just don’t think that they think about representing those other cultures because they barely interact with them.

When we were talking about representative sampling another issue came up. I had said when a psychologist is studying an African American culture he can include a Caucasian in his sample because it is non representative. My students thought that was racist but when I explained that we all have our own culture, values and traditions they were excited that I recognized that. This week I will be going more into that with them when we talk about social psychology. 


As for my goals this week;

1. Prioritizing life and work to allow myself some emotional stability definitively happened but I was so exhausted by the end of the week. 
2. Starting my action research work for school happened as well, or at least I know what I'm doing and how I'm going to do my first implementation of it.  
3. I have now learned most of my students names, there are only a few now that I forget or switch up. 
4. My social life consisted of my roommate, a Friday night football game with another student teacher and a partial evening with another close friend. I think I did much better prioritizing.
5. I have learned that there will always be something to do when it comes to teaching and as long as i can keep up all has to be good. I got done grading for last week on Thursday and by Friday I had 120 tests and study guides to grade. 
6. Eating healthy consisted of eating what I had left in the fridge, which was still good seeing as I don't buy anything unhealthy anymore.
7. I will just put this out there, my relationship with God is going great but I need your prayers. 
8. Didn't get my sanity back this past week, lets hope for this week. 
9. Being the best teacher I can be this week includes collaborating and learning from who I can. 
10. Worrying about the job front is just causing more stress and I know I need to be applying places but right now my students are the ones I need to be putting my effort into. 

I believe I am getting observed this week so please wish me luck and please pray, I  need it. 


~Abby

Overwhelmed, and Emotionally Exhausted

I'm so sorry if this post seems rushed, I am running out of hours in the day to do things. 

If I tried to sum up this past week in one word, I would have to say it was exhausting. If I was able to do it in two I would say it was overwhelmingly exhausting. My students were so good this past week and I am very supported by my cooperating teacher and the other teachers in the building. I can’t imagine what I would be like to not have that kind of support while student teaching. My problem started with my lack of emotional preparation for student teaching. I failed to remember that real life would continue to take place during student teaching. So not only was this week and weekend full of lesson planning and grading but it was also full of class work for Monday, wedding planning with a close friend and friends who I rarely see these days. How does anyone keep sane during this process?

Through everything this week, I was still learning so much every day. The first major thing I learned was that I need to be writing on the board what my students should be learning for that day. Most schools in Illinois require you at least put the standard your teaching for the day on the board, but the school I am at doesn’t. I was talking to a SPED teacher and she says that it helps the students and the teacher if you can reference back to it. Besides just putting the standard on the board I should be writing the tentative schedule for the day. It helps the students prepare for what we will be doing and keeps all of us on track.

A major problem in psychology is that students don’t have much prior knowledge. I learned the best prior knowledge I can play off of is the prior knowledge brought in by science and math. Luckily this week that really helped. I had my students creating their own psychological study/experiment and it helped that my students knew the scientific method already as well as a little about independent and dependent variables. I played on this prior knowledge to help me show my students how a psychologist would use these methods to do experiments/studies.

Another huge lesson I learned this week is that my students need very structured instruction. They get overwhelmed with instruction that is written out in one paragraph which goes along with a rubric. I ended up having to redo a project sheet the day before my students started working on it because I knew the first sheet was going to be too overwhelming for them. This project went off very nicely and I don’t think it would have if I hadn’t redone the assignment sheet. I gave one section at a time for my students to do, so I wouldn’t overwhelm them and played to as many learning styles as I could in the project. I allowed some students to type the project up and others to write it. If they wanted to draw pictures to better show me what they meant they were also allowed. This helped several of my students who struggle with instructions and expressing what they know.

As for my goals for this past week;

1. I did figure out a better way for my students to do vocab and a better way to assess their vocab knowledge and even though my cooperating teacher didn't like it as much he could see how it was helping. 
2. I wasn't falling as behind as I though I was last week but I am still about a day behind where I wanted to be. Timing is very much a work in progress and I'm praying it gets better.
3. I had a few students call me out on learning their names, I think i'm up to knowing about seventy-five percent of their names, which for me is pretty good. 
4. I will be honest my social life really messed with me this week, I really need to learn how to prioritize. Its just hard, i'm a social person and I want to see my friends, especially because in December I may not see them for a while. 
5. As for procrastination, well grading is done, homework for school, not as done and planning needs to take more a priority but is going okay. I would like to be more ahead with planning but I find it hard to plan too far out. Procrastination is still very much a work in progress.
6. As for eating healthy, I found a app on my phone that tracks what I eat and when I exercise. This has been about the only goal that went amazing this week.
7. My relationship with God is doing amazingly, this week has been one of those weeks where I was forced to realize just how much I needed him. 
8. Staying sane has now been gone for about two weeks, lets hope I get my sanity back soon.
9. I think this week being the best teacher i can be is just going to be, working on my self emotionally. If my students teacher is not emotionally sound they are not getting the best teacher.
10. I can't even begin to think about finding a job even though I know I need to be doing stuff. I need to sign up for some tests though. 

My two goals for next week are going to be: 

1. Prioritizing life and work to allow myself some emotional stability. 
2. Starting my action research work for school. 

Please be praying for me, I really need it.

~Abby

Heat causes aggression... did you know?

So before I go into why I now know that heat causes aggression let me tell you this week has been a trying one. I was observed Wednesday and my students decided that they were now ready to test me to my core. So If i could sum up this week in one word it would have to be; tested.

Now to the story of how heat causes aggression. Well heat causes agitation and as I learned this week agitation in students who are being asked to do something they don't want to do leads to desks being turned over. Now thank the lord this did not happen to me but it did happen to one of the teachers, whose room I just happened to be walking past when the incident occurred. I don't think I've ever seen our security guards run so fast. According to the lovely special education teachers that we share and office with it happens a lot in their rooms. I know its kinda a lame story now but it was a huge learning experience for me.

I learned more in this week then I think I learned in an entire semester at school (no offense to my education teachers). I learned that my students need consistent reminders to stay on task and reminders for what they should do next. I learned that I need to be strict but also remember to smile. I think about three teachers, along with my supervisor told me that. I also learned that I need to learn some new ways to self motivate my students because they aren't really motivated by getting a good grade. The thing about all this learning is most of it I learned by mistakes this week. Its hard not to feel like i'm failing because i'm constantly figuring out that I need to do something differently.

This week was mostly about figuring out how i am going to run my class, what worked and what didn't. My students seemed to be more motivated to do what I was asking them to do, when I made it clear that I cared about what they did and showed the work I was putting into them. My students don't perform well if I don't create creative assignments for them. I can barely get them to read and I was called crazy for making them write in full sentences.

The only thing i did this week that really encouraged my students to do their work was make a reteaching assignment that would replace their quiz grades. Over half of my students failed their vocab quiz. I was really irritated when i was grading the quizzes because I hated how my cooperating teacher made the students do their vocab and I knew that they were going to do poorly when i was handing out the quiz. I felt i couldn't do a thing about it because my cooperating teacher told me that the vocab and the vocab quiz was one of the mandatory things i have to do. I realized as I was getting done grading that even though I will be forced to make the students do vocab, I can do it in a more creative way that allows the students to learn better.

Which leads me to my favorite part of the day today. Before I handed back the quizzes to my students I said I will allow the students who felt they did poorly on the quiz to do a make up activity instead of their quiz grades. I made assignment mandatory for the students who got C's or lower.  For the new vocab assignment instead of just writing down the definition I had the students draw a picture that represented the word, use the word in a sentence and make up their own definition for the word. I had at least one student in all of my classes say "Miss" (which is what they call me even though they know my last name) Why didn't you just have us do this in the first place. I now question this myself.

Well besides some overwhelming circumstances with lesson plans that didn't go as well as I would have liked and some rude students and obstinate students my week went by quite well. I have to have my students constantly working on something or they will get loud and out of hand. Which means they get kinda mad at me because they have no down time but down time leads to classroom management issues. The good thing about my students always having something to do is that they don't usually have homework. Which they have already expressed their appreciation for. I had one student ask in almost every class why they had to do another assignment on words they were already tested on and I replied that if they had studied a little more like my cooperating teacher and I had asked them to do every day before the test she wouldn't have had to do the assignment. I heard several students after my remark say well next time I will make sure to study because this sucks.

Most of the activities my students worked on this week were activities they could do in partners. They really like to work in partners, they don't like working in groups bigger then three and they are okay occasionally working by themselves. Today in my 6th period my students were not listening and paying attention. So I stopped talking until they were quiet and said "you know, I was going to let you work in pairs on this activity but I don't think that is going to work anymore." They realized they lost a privileged and the whole class changed their ways. I thought it was a miracle.

This week one thing I really focused on was that I have a lot of students who need visual, kinestetic assignments. My eighth period has a few students who have some moderate learning disabilities. I have an aid who is actually a qualified teacher in that class with me and she has really given me some good ideas for things that I can do for the students who have some learning disabilities.

1. As for my goal of making enriching activities that apply to several different learners I succeeded in doing that only to find out that these types of activities take a lot longer then I anticipated. 
2. I did learn my students' names better this week but i'm not sure I'm at half yet so I will keep working on that for next week. 
3. I balanced my social life with work life very delicately and it seemed to work out pretty well for me this week, with the exception of Wednesday because I stayed up way later then I should have. 
4. Procrastination is still very much a work in progress and to be honest I failed again at getting things done in advance. Good thing I have my students and parents to keep me accountable. 
5. I ate pretty healthy this week but like I said earlier this week, I'm all out of healthy food and must go grocery shopping. Oh yeah and I have to start taking vitamins because my students are already getting sick and it seems like the sick ones are the ones that always need my help. 
6. My students are actually helping me stay accountable with God, or at least they were this week. I was forced to remember to stop and pray for them, myself and my cooperating teacher. If I don't things don't tend to go as well. Oh and i went to the involvement fair and found a church I might be interested in going to.
7. Sticking to honestly, I did go a bit crazy this week and in several different areas of my life but I came back to reality and stayed optimistically happy. 
8. Being the best teacher I can be will now include learning as much as i can possibly cram into my head from my coworkers, cooperating teacher, supervisor, and professor. I know i'm going to need help and they are all behind me to help so i'm going to use them. 
9. On the note of finding a job, i'm still trying to figure out this whole student teaching thing. 

My two goals for next week are going to be: 

1. Figure out a better way for my students to do vocab and a better way to assess their vocab knowledge. 
2. Get better on my timing with lesson plans because as of right now I'm falling further and further behind where I wanted to be. (Don't worry, i'm cutting things that aren't as important to catch up)

Thank you to all of you who are praying and supporting me, I can definitively feel it, especially in stressful situations. 

~Abby

P.S. Sorry this is so long, there's just so much to tell you. 

What I'm really made of

Yesturday and today were days that were meant to break me. First of all Wednesday I was supervised and it was so hectic and I was so overwhelmed I wanted to scream. At one point during my supervision I had seven adults in the room along with 32 students. If you cant imagine what that is like, imagine being packed into a train car with 40 people and being in charge of making sure everything goes smoothly for a one hour trip. I really found out what I was made of during that period and I think I was the most stressed out during that point then I have been since the night before my AP psych test.

My supervisor said I did really well but man I was at my breaking point by the end of third period. He said that there are a lot of things I need to be working on and gave me some great tips and pointers. He also reassured me that I was where I needed to be at, at this point in student teaching.

Well luckily I get two periods off before I have to teach again and its wonderful. It allows me to take a break and do something that isn't working with students. Don't get me wrong I love my students but I do need my breaks too. I starting to really miss the boys I used to nanny for. They may have been hyper and sometimes naughty but at least I knew what to do with them. Each day I'm being presented with new challenges that just throw me through more loops. There's no way I could learn how to deal with all the different situations that are constantly flying at me as a student.

Today was rough in the morning but got better towards the afternoon. I feel so bad for my first class because that is the class that all the kinks in my lesson plan have to get worked out. Today they merciless, they were loud, they didn't listen, they were rude and I had to have my cooperating teacher help me with two of the girls that were close to pushing me over the edge. All I could do was breath. every time something else happened I just stopped and breathed for a moment or two. They were really challenging me and I made it through. I learned so much today about what I'm really made of.

All I can say is I hope tomorrow goes better for second period. I almost cried today and its way to soon to be crying about school. I know it will probably happen but its way to soon.

Anyways I found out that I am going to be taking government next Friday. I'm really nervous about teaching government, and I don't know why. It might be because the class is rowdy, or because there is so much going on in the government curriculum. So please pray for me and I appreciate all the love and support I'm getting.

Thanks for reading my impromptu update,
~Abby