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

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

Information and Communication

If I had to describe this past week in one word it would be informative. This week not only did I get to know my students better but I also went to my first teachers’ in-service conference. At this conference teachers from the three district high schools presented on how they do best practices as teachers. I went to two and learned a lot about the Socratic method and motivating students. I also learned a lot about the different cultures in my classroom. My students learned a lot this past week as well, but if there is one thing my psychology students will take from our Friday class, its that Miss. Doesn’t like snakes.

I learned this week that communication with my students isn’t just verbal and it isn’t just in the classroom. Saying hi to my students in the hall way and using their names makes them feel like they aren’t just one in the crowd of students in a classroom. Another way I communicate with my students is to thank them by name for staying on task in my classroom. I’ve started to do this because it was suggested as one of the ways to get the students not working motivated to work. This along with marking their paper with a highlighter pen has been working extremely well in my government class. When I mark on my students paper with a highlighter pen it indicates to me that they were working with the time I gave to them when that paper gets handed in. That mark will go towards a participation grade. This new system I implemented about a two weeks ago has really been helping getting my students’ motivated to use their time wisely.

Now, I use non-verbal communication as much as I use verbal. This is especially true when my students need to stop talking and switch their focus back to me. The most effective way I have found to get my students to stop their own conversations and focus on me is to stop talking, sometimes turn off the lights, and wait until they refocus on me. Many of my students will do the quieting down for me and as my cooperating teacher says. The louder I get the louder my classroom gets and eventually I’m going to end up losing my voice and I will continue to have the problem. So I started simply just standing and waiting. It works pretty good. Another way I have been nonverbally communicating with my students is a smile when they walk in or as I’m circulating the classroom. I also go and simply stand next to my talkers or interrupters. They hate it but they get the message loud and clear.

My students in both my government and psychology classes have gotten many different opportunities to communicate with me and each other; verbally, non- verbally and written. Their notebooks are the main source for this communication. Most everything they share with me and the class they write in those notebooks. Once they write their answer to a question of the day or a question I ask them during class; I have several students share their answers with the class. Often times I have my students share with a partner as well. Both psychology and government have now had experience writing information down that they themselves have gone out and found. They have also experienced presenting that information to the class. They don’t like it much but they just need to practice.

One thing I do a lot as a teacher is listen. When I ask a question I am listening to how my students are relating the information to their lives. I also am listening and assessing how well my students understood a concept. I do a lot of listening when my students are in groups. Often times I’ve found myself solving little conflict issues my students have run into. The main way I’ve been listening this week is students who are talking to me before or after class about issues in their lives. I have been making it a point to talk to the students who are not themselves or are not participating the way they should and see what’s going on in their lives. This past week two of my students were gone for more than one day. They were both in the hospital. Effectively communicating with them involved being sympathetic but also gaining from them the best way to help them succeed now that they were back in my classroom. I also learned that my students are more accountable if they know I’m going to ask them how they are if their head is down or if they miss class. They don’t really like to lie to my face so I get much better behavior just by making sure I’m communicating with my students.

So far the last huge way I’ve been communicating with my students is feedback on handed in assignments and questions answered in class. The work I give my students to do is work that I can give them a lot of feedback on. Their assignments usually have red ink on it no matter if its excellent quality or poor quality. When they answer questions in class I pull out the parts of their answer that were right and I work with the students on finding all the right parts to that answer.

As for my goals this week:

1.      I know for sure I have my students names in psychology but now I really need to work on Government. 

2.      I have determined that my social life really isn't important in this phase of life, right now I need to focus on school and getting through this experience. I'm sure my friends will understand. 

3.      Grading took up most of my Friday and it takes up a lot of my time during the week but hey I got through 95 journals on Friday before I left school so I didn't have to tote them home and back. The only problem was I was at school Friday till 8pm. :( 

4.      Eating healthy flew out the window this past week but hey today is a fresh start. 

5.      My relationship with God is going well, I can see him working in my students lives and I'm glad he loves them as much as he loves me. 

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

7.      Being the best teacher I can be, continues to include developing better relationships with my students, but also includes getting better at using best practices. 

8.      Job hunt, where to even begin, where do I even want to teach?

9.      Incorporating my aide is harder then I thought it would be because she is not as motivated to be incorporated as I thought she would be. 

10.  I did very well at using real world scenarios in each class. My students will not forget the bystander affect, or the main elements to attitude for a long time. :)

11. My new goal for this week is to communicate more effectively with my students when I am in front of the classroom. 

12. My second goal is one I learned about at the teacher fair for our in-service day. That is I want to be real with my students. This includes staying consistent and being open with them about who I am and what I expect from them. 

I think that is it for now, 

~Abby

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.

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