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.