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.