Frustrated and Optimistic

Frustrated that is my one word that could summarize this entire week. I was frustrated with my government students my 3^rd period students and myself. I thought hey I’m finally getting the hang of this but no I’m still struggling. I was getting observed this week and a lesson that went fine in my 2^nd period went horribly awry in my 3^rd period which happened to be the period I was being observed in. My supervisor was awesome and gave me some helpful comments about reflecting and trying to figure out what was different and what I could change. I still felt horrible about the observation. I just wanted to prove that I had improved as much as I felt I’d improved. In the past couple weeks. Well I started to breath after my observation and tried to relax and when my 6^th period walked in I forced myself to be happy they were there. They are perceptive students and I love that period anyway. So about two minutes into the period I was happy they were there and they had me smiling again faster than I could have done.

I was still feeling pretty negative about student teaching so the next day I made a list of positive things about myself and student teaching. I also had my facebook friends help me. It really did help and I stayed positive rather then sink further into a depressive mood. So on the note of staying positive I will tell you my strengths before I tell you my weaknesses in this past week.

Well my strengths when it comes to the rules of English, grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization and syntax are limited. On the positive side because I have struggled so much on this subject I’m very good at teaching different learning strategies to my diverse learners. As a result of my struggles in this area I can empathize with my students. I am also open and honest with them about this area in which I struggle and they can see that everyone struggles at something. As a result of my struggles in this area I make sure that I’m not always making my students do written work and I’m giving my students diverse teaching activities that a meet the diverse learners in my classroom.

A positive that I do have is I’m pretty good at expressing ideas orally. I’m good at coming up with explanations my students can learn from and that apply to my students. I practice what I’m going to say in my classes and work on my examples ahead of time so I can express ideas clearly. Another positive about me as a teacher in the classroom is I do listen well to my students. When my students ask questions or answer a question one thing I do is restate or summarize what they have asked me to help my other students understand. This also tells the student that I’ve heard them correctly and that their questions or contribution was a good one. This also helps because a lot of my students have a problem with understanding English or speaking English clearly. I have a lot of English as a second language students and when I restate the question or even repeat directions I’m giving it allows my students time to fully understand what is being said.

It’s important for me to be a good model when it comes to effective reading, writing, speaking and listening. My college supervisor and I have talked about the writing aspect in my classroom because this is a huge struggle for me. I am a terrible speller and it shows even though I don’t want it too. It’s important that I’m making sure that if I make a mistake I let my class know I’ve realized this mistake. If I forget how to spell something it’s okay to ask if someone knows. As for the other effective communication skills I can show this by reading to my students more and continuing to be a good speaker and listener.

When it comes to my classroom I learned by reading Schmidt that students may have trouble getting that first sentence or even word on paper. They may have so much to say but don’t really know how to write it on paper. Having my students talk about what they want to write down might be better than having them write the information down and then talking about it. I also learned from reading Schmidt that I don’t have to be a great writer to enjoy the writing process as a teacher. I can improve my skills as a writer in the classroom while I’m improving my students writing skills. I’ve seen just by teaching my students to break down words to decipher the meaning I am also improving my vocabulary and writing skills. I also learned from my reading this week that I need to be using more primary documents in all of my classes. Students are naturally curious and from my experience with past lessons the students like those lessons better. Another thing I found myself interested in doing and what I have been doing with my students is recreating the past. I could do this more with psychology and the experiments down in psychology and government has already done a lot of recreating. We recreated our need for federalism, and our need for a constitution. I am thinking of ideas to recreate our need for the two branches in congress for the upcoming week.

As for my goals this week

1. I’ve got almost all my government kids names out of necessity. There are only a few I forget.
2. My social life revolves around school and the wedding. I’m so excited for next weekend but it put a lot of stress on getting work down this weekend.
3. Eating healthy returns but not with a vengeance. I need to work on eating better. I’m going to get sick if I don’t.
4. My relationship with God continues to grow because I’m constantly reminded of my reliance on him during this trying time in my life. I’ve recently set up bible verses to come to my phone every morning and Its really helping set my sights on God every day.
5. Sanity this next coming week is going to focus on making me stay positive.
6. Job hunt… I need to get those letters of recommendation forms out to my professors. Oh and study for my two tests in November.
7. I worked on being consistent and I am finding what best practices work with which classes.
8. I’ve found that it’s really hard to predict what questions my students are going to ask and getting back to them with a more complete answer is better and easier.  
9. I’m adding a new permanent goal into this list of goals. That is to stay positive and to stay the person I know I am.
10. Another goal is to get better at writing in front of my students, but also show my students how I’m working on becoming a better writer.

Please pray for a more calm and stress free week for me,

Abby

Here is my art project to remind me to be optimistic. Thank you Jodie for reminding me that I need to be optimistic

I Went Back Monday!!!

Wow last week and the weekend have been quite busy. I epically failed at keeping up with my social life this week. I basically went to school, went to student teacher orientation and came home. The good news of the week is that my roommate is here!!! She drove all the way from California and got here in three days. It was nice having her finally here because I got to decorate. So we now have furniture and the walls are no longer barren.

As far as student teaching goes, i've been hard at work lesson planning. I started today on my first lesson which went okay. I wont pretend it went perfectly. My first class barely finished the assignment before class ended and a few even had to take the assignment home. My second class got finished with five minutes to spare (so we played a vocab game), and my last psychology class finished with twenty minutes to spare. I ask how in the world am I supposed to plan for that. It helped that after my first class I knew what questions I was going to get and addressed them before the questions were asked but wow.

I was told I was crazy today and no it wasn't because I was acting crazy. It was because I told my students they would have to write in full sentences. After being told I was crazy, I told them that they are going to have to write in complete sentences for the rest of their lives. They didn't seem to believe me and when I addressed the issue with my cooperating teacher he seemed to think it wasn't an issue worth fighting with the students over. Again I ask; Are you kidding me? I was looking at my schools report card and only 40 percent of my students pass the english portion of the state test. This means that my 60 percent of my students are not at the reading and writing level they should be at. So when my cooperating teacher made it seem like this was an issue not worth fighting for I have to disagree.

On a lighter note my students are really opening up with me and I'm really getting to see all the different personalities in my classroom. I have to say i'm loving it. I end everyday excited for the next day. I am excited to lesson plan because I know I am actually going to be able to teach it. I know I wont always end each day with this feeling but I'm being reasured everyday that this is what I am meant to do. At this point in my experience I feel like I'm the luckiest person in the world to be finally doing what I am meant to do.

So for those of you interested in my anecdote its going to be less rambling and more structured thanks to my education class that goes along with my student teaching. Don't worry it will still be me, I just have to include somethings that I normally include anyways. For instance I have to tell you my goals for the next week. Here they are:

1. One of my goals Is to teach well planned lesson plans that have many enriching activities built into them that apply to several types of learners.
2. My second goal is to get to know my students names better. By the end of the week I hope to know half their names.

I've already been working on goals so those will just be added to my list. For those of you who are interested I find that I have four main type of learners in my class. Students who learn better when they hear instructions, students who learn better by doing hands on activities, students who learn better repeating instructions or talking through steps and students who learn better by seeing me do what they are supposed to do.

According to my check list:

1. The balencing seriously went onto the other extreme from last week. The only people I saw this week were the people in my education class and my roommate.So I will keep trying with the balencing act.
2. I really failed at the procrastination thing this week. I waited till Sunday to do all my work and I feel that it really came out in my homework. I care more about my lesson plans so that suffered far less then my homework. Again, I will keep trying!!! Maybe some accountability will help.
3. Eating healthier is going really well, I ran out of most of my healthy food over the weekend and was too lazy to go shopping for more. I have a feeling if I don't, eating healthy might suffer.  
4. I need to be held more accountable for my relationship with God. Especially when it comes to going to church. I just haven't found a church I like. Any suggestions?
5. I didn't go crazy this past week even though student teaching orientation almost did me in.
6. Being the best teacher I can be now includes being patient and being assertive (mainly not letting students walk all over me).
7. On the note of finding a job, its going to take a lot more work then I thought it would. :( But I did get my resume and a cover letter done. :) Now time to go out and get those letters of recommendations.

I think that is it for now. No picture this time. Sorry!!!
Thank you for reading and please continue to pray,
~Abby

Oh yeah I forgot to mention my first observation is this Wednesday. Wish me luck!!!