Prioritizing

My teaching experience in the past week has been comforting. I’m finally beginning to see how much I’ve learned and that I can be a great teacher, I just need to continue to work hard. Before this week I was worried I wasn’t good enough. I was worried that by trying to become a teacher I would just harm my future students. I was watching all these other amazing teachers and just praying I could be like them and was mad at myself for not being that good. This week it finally set in that If I work hard and always put my students best interest first then I will eventually become an amazing teacher. I had a classroom full of students tell me I was already a good teacher without any prompting so it’s starting to really dawn on me. I was right in following God’s path for me; teaching is what I was meant to do.

The first thing I want to address today is my students’ lack of prior knowledge in both my subjects. In psychology I expected a good lacking in my students prior knowledge but I did expect there to be a lot of prior knowledge for my students in Government. I can’t believe that after all the classes my students are required to take before Government that they wouldn’t know more than they actually do. Another area of concern I have is that my students have a lot of misconceptions about both my topics. All my students know about Psychology is what they see on TV and for Government they barely know more than that. I’ve found that not only am I trying to connect the lesson with what they see on TV or in real life but I have to correct the misconceptions they have learned from TV.

This week I taught a lesson in Government that used a lot of different ways to teach my students key ideas. I did this with a child’s story book and a graphic novel on the constitution. But I also had my students come up with examples from their experiences. In this lesson I was teaching the reasons for Government that are found in the Constitution. This was an important issue for my students to understand because many of them don’t really see a need for government. They consider any kind of law or law enforcement bad. I wanted them to really understand without government our lives would be chaos. In this lesson I read the children’s book to my students. I didn’t know exactly how they would respond to it because; I was reading a children’s book to them. They loved it and I think it is because the book used simple words and my students could understand it because they didn’t have to read it themselves. For a lot of my students English is their second language. The graphic novel chapter still had a lot of words in it but it had pictures to help my students understand what was going on.

In psychology I try different ways to incorporate real world experiences into the material and for this class it feels much easier. Now that I’m moving on to the brain and biology behind psychology its going to be harder to connect it to my students in the real world but easier to connect it to what my students are and have learned in science. For this chapter I’m constantly checking to see what my students already know and if they know something already I ask them and relate it back to their science classes.

As for my goals this week

1.      I am still working on learning my government kids names.

2.      My social life is kind important right now seeing as my friend is getting married in two weeks so all those pre-wedding activities are really picking up. I just have to make sure school is really still coming first. My students are too important to not come first. It’s all about prioritizing.

3.      Eating healthy flew out the window with pre-wedding activities but I’m working on it.

4.      My relationship with God is stronger than ever because there is no way I would get through this experience without his support constantly.

5.      Sanity (crossing fingers) is returning, even though life is staying busy.

6.      Being the best teacher I can be is not only developing better relationships with my students but also making sure they are respecting me as well.

7.      For the job hunt to begin I need to figure out where I want to go in life. But I’m working towards passing all my tests and fixing my resume.

8.      Communicating more effectively in front of my students is going well. It was suggested in a workshop I went to last week that I should be real with my students and so I’m trying that. It seems to be working well.

9.      Being consistent is a challenge for me right now because I want to find the best practices that work with my students. I am going to continue to work on this for the upcoming week.

10.  Another goal I want to work on is being better prepared to answer my student’s questions about the curriculum. My students are very interested in what they are learning but there are several questions they asked this week that I didn’t know the answer too. I want to try to learn to prepare for those questions. 

I'm being observed this week again so please pray that goes well, 

Abby