Emotional

If I had to describe this week in one word it would be educational. I took over full time teaching now and even though its one more class it adds a lot more work to my load. I also had to do progress reports this week. If I learned one thing from my students about life back home its that they can pretend they are too cool for school but the minute their Mom or Dad finds out they are missing work or doing poorly in a class is the minute they are scrambling to get late work in.


The biggest thing I learned this week was my students have very little prior knowledge in government. I was having my students do a scavenger hunt on the constitution and they were caught up on who goes in what branch. I figured they would at lease know congress is legislative and the president is executive but they didn’t even know that. My cooperating teacher said to assume they know nothing and now I know. I found out last week that in assuming my students have no prior knowledge I need to do more prior knowledge checks. If you remember from last week, I learned that instructions needed to be simplified for my students. This week I simplified instruction but not the assignment and got great results.

If there is one thing you learn from teaching at Eisenhower it’s that the students are very culturally diverse. I was teaching a lesson this past week about making sure when you are doing a sample of a culture that you need to make it representative. The issue my students ran into is they only know about how to represent their culture. I asked my students what a representative sample of the United States would entail and they said African Americans, Mexicans, and Caucasians. I don’t think they felt other cultures didn’t exist or shouldn’t be represented, I just don’t think that they think about representing those other cultures because they barely interact with them.

When we were talking about representative sampling another issue came up. I had said when a psychologist is studying an African American culture he can include a Caucasian in his sample because it is non representative. My students thought that was racist but when I explained that we all have our own culture, values and traditions they were excited that I recognized that. This week I will be going more into that with them when we talk about social psychology. 


As for my goals this week;

1. Prioritizing life and work to allow myself some emotional stability definitively happened but I was so exhausted by the end of the week. 
2. Starting my action research work for school happened as well, or at least I know what I'm doing and how I'm going to do my first implementation of it.  
3. I have now learned most of my students names, there are only a few now that I forget or switch up. 
4. My social life consisted of my roommate, a Friday night football game with another student teacher and a partial evening with another close friend. I think I did much better prioritizing.
5. I have learned that there will always be something to do when it comes to teaching and as long as i can keep up all has to be good. I got done grading for last week on Thursday and by Friday I had 120 tests and study guides to grade. 
6. Eating healthy consisted of eating what I had left in the fridge, which was still good seeing as I don't buy anything unhealthy anymore.
7. I will just put this out there, my relationship with God is going great but I need your prayers. 
8. Didn't get my sanity back this past week, lets hope for this week. 
9. Being the best teacher I can be this week includes collaborating and learning from who I can. 
10. Worrying about the job front is just causing more stress and I know I need to be applying places but right now my students are the ones I need to be putting my effort into. 

I believe I am getting observed this week so please wish me luck and please pray, I  need it. 


~Abby

Overwhelmed, and Emotionally Exhausted

I'm so sorry if this post seems rushed, I am running out of hours in the day to do things. 

If I tried to sum up this past week in one word, I would have to say it was exhausting. If I was able to do it in two I would say it was overwhelmingly exhausting. My students were so good this past week and I am very supported by my cooperating teacher and the other teachers in the building. I can’t imagine what I would be like to not have that kind of support while student teaching. My problem started with my lack of emotional preparation for student teaching. I failed to remember that real life would continue to take place during student teaching. So not only was this week and weekend full of lesson planning and grading but it was also full of class work for Monday, wedding planning with a close friend and friends who I rarely see these days. How does anyone keep sane during this process?

Through everything this week, I was still learning so much every day. The first major thing I learned was that I need to be writing on the board what my students should be learning for that day. Most schools in Illinois require you at least put the standard your teaching for the day on the board, but the school I am at doesn’t. I was talking to a SPED teacher and she says that it helps the students and the teacher if you can reference back to it. Besides just putting the standard on the board I should be writing the tentative schedule for the day. It helps the students prepare for what we will be doing and keeps all of us on track.

A major problem in psychology is that students don’t have much prior knowledge. I learned the best prior knowledge I can play off of is the prior knowledge brought in by science and math. Luckily this week that really helped. I had my students creating their own psychological study/experiment and it helped that my students knew the scientific method already as well as a little about independent and dependent variables. I played on this prior knowledge to help me show my students how a psychologist would use these methods to do experiments/studies.

Another huge lesson I learned this week is that my students need very structured instruction. They get overwhelmed with instruction that is written out in one paragraph which goes along with a rubric. I ended up having to redo a project sheet the day before my students started working on it because I knew the first sheet was going to be too overwhelming for them. This project went off very nicely and I don’t think it would have if I hadn’t redone the assignment sheet. I gave one section at a time for my students to do, so I wouldn’t overwhelm them and played to as many learning styles as I could in the project. I allowed some students to type the project up and others to write it. If they wanted to draw pictures to better show me what they meant they were also allowed. This helped several of my students who struggle with instructions and expressing what they know.

As for my goals for this past week;

1. I did figure out a better way for my students to do vocab and a better way to assess their vocab knowledge and even though my cooperating teacher didn't like it as much he could see how it was helping. 
2. I wasn't falling as behind as I though I was last week but I am still about a day behind where I wanted to be. Timing is very much a work in progress and I'm praying it gets better.
3. I had a few students call me out on learning their names, I think i'm up to knowing about seventy-five percent of their names, which for me is pretty good. 
4. I will be honest my social life really messed with me this week, I really need to learn how to prioritize. Its just hard, i'm a social person and I want to see my friends, especially because in December I may not see them for a while. 
5. As for procrastination, well grading is done, homework for school, not as done and planning needs to take more a priority but is going okay. I would like to be more ahead with planning but I find it hard to plan too far out. Procrastination is still very much a work in progress.
6. As for eating healthy, I found a app on my phone that tracks what I eat and when I exercise. This has been about the only goal that went amazing this week.
7. My relationship with God is doing amazingly, this week has been one of those weeks where I was forced to realize just how much I needed him. 
8. Staying sane has now been gone for about two weeks, lets hope I get my sanity back soon.
9. I think this week being the best teacher i can be is just going to be, working on my self emotionally. If my students teacher is not emotionally sound they are not getting the best teacher.
10. I can't even begin to think about finding a job even though I know I need to be doing stuff. I need to sign up for some tests though. 

My two goals for next week are going to be: 

1. Prioritizing life and work to allow myself some emotional stability. 
2. Starting my action research work for school. 

Please be praying for me, I really need it.

~Abby

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. 

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

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!!!

Are You Coming Back Monday?

Wow I wont lie this week has been one heck of a week. Not only did I have two full days of meetings that all teachers have to attend but I had another day of getting to know the school, getting my Id card, my log in, my car registered, and planning stuff for the first day with our students. I also had a meeting for one of my students whose mother (putting this delicately) likes to make sure things go her way. Needless to say that meeting in itself was an eye opener.

Thursday was an amazing day, I got to meet my students and really see how the first day of school looks on the teacher side of things. The kids were rambunctious and down right crazy by eight period. I was exhausted but exhilarated at the same time. The kids really seemed to be responding well to me. After my cooperating teacher did a small getting to know me thing, he had the kids fill out note cards about themselves but didn't share them that day. We had about ten minutes of free time so I decided I would try to learn their names. I did pretty good for me. Remembering 120 names is kinda hard.

Even though I was exhausted on Thursday evening I went to my first White Sox Game!!!! It was pretty awesome I was blessed to get a free ticket from my amazing friend. The Sox lost against the Cleveland Indians but the experience was priceless. I got back around 11pm and was pretty much delirious with exhaustion, good thing I wasn't driving!

Friday proved to be a bit more challenging then Thursday. The first day mania had worn off and the kids were just pissed to be back in school now. Most of the teachers were going over their syllabi today and the kids were bored out of their skulls. My cooperating teacher went over his today and went over the students' responses to the note cards. This was my real first reality check. The kids were loud, they weren't listening or being respectful and if I heard another kid yell and call another kid stupid I was going to scream. I decided that I needed to talk about respect right away. My cooperating teacher didn't care what I did after he was done so with less then ten minutes to spare at the end of each class I talked to my students' about the importance of respect in my class and how disrespect wasn't something I would tolerate (trust me it needed to be done). I also had the kids fill out clock buddies. This will hopefully allow me to have the kids pair up quickly and effectively. Although with a test on my eighth period, i'm not so sure how well its going to work.

On a brighter note; the teachers at my school are amazing. I don't know how many came up to me and asked me how I was doing, how the first day was going and how they could help. I felt so welcomed and felt like they accepted me as one of their own. The funnier side of this is that all day today teachers have been jokingly asking me if I'm going to be back Monday morning. I reassure them that I will be and they just laugh as they walk away. I'm not quite sure how to feel about this yet.

I have lots to do this weekend, including my own homework and lesson planning.

According to my check list:

1. I might have the opposite problem then I worried about when it comes to being social. I have to work on a good balance of socializing and working this semester. 
2. Procrastinating is still an issue, but I'm working on it. 
3. Eating healthier was going pretty well until the baseball game but I am back on track (hopefully!).
4. My relationship with God is an ongoing process
5. Not going crazy is going to be harder then I thought
6. Being the best teacher I can be is now going to include working on my patience. 
7. On the note of finding a job, i'm thinking about applying to teach for America but i'm not sure. 

I'm hoping to know 30 percent of my students names by the end of next week and I'm hoping to improve my classroom management which I'm going to add to my checklist. 

I think that's it for my first week student teaching,

Please pray for me; I'm going to need it

~Abby

P.S. Friday's are casual days. This was me today, how did I do for casual?

Preliminaries

As I tried to sleep last night I worried over what this first day of meetings would be like and what meeting all of the other teachers would be like. It had been a long day and I just wanted to turn my mind off. I was a student teacher from a small town, who went to a small christian college. I had just spent the summer working sixty hours a week barely making minimum wage, just to spend most of the money I made on car repairs. I spent all of Sunday moving into my apartment and grocery shopping.

Things I worried about while trying to sleep:
Would my students like me?
Was all of this worth it?
Was I even going to be able to find a job when I finished?
Were my lesson plans going to be good enough?
Where was I going to get furniture for my apartment?
How was I going to get the furniture to my apartment?
How am I going to pay my student loans if I cant find a job?
Was the water coming out of my facet going to make me sick?
Was my friend who is now my new roommate going to like living with me?
Will she still be my friend when we are done living with each other?
Was I forgetting to do anything?
Was my alarm really going to go off in the morning?

I probably worried about more things but the ones listed were the major issues I was worrying about. I prayed that God would let everything go smoothly and help me fall asleep. He was definitively listening and he was merciful to my prayer because I fell asleep quickly after my prayer and everything the next day went perfectly.

The next day started early for me because I couldn't sleep any longer. My neck and back hurt from moving all day and I was too jittery to hardly eat. It was just meetings for today at school. I got to meet all the teachers in my district along with other faculty. I was relieved to see that everyone was so nice and accepting. I meet more people then I remember and learned more in one day then I did in an entire semester of an education class. I learned to my intense relief that the school I was at really did care about the students as individuals and not just the test scores they produce. My cooperating teacher still seems pleasant which is nice because i was dreading having a horrible cooperating teacher.

After a long drawn out two in a half hour meeting about the changes initiated last year and about the new changes that are going to be initiated this year. We meet with the social studies department for our district after that. This is where I learned a ton. After all of that I was done by one and left to my own devices. Instead of continuing to unpack I'm off to visit with friends I haven't seen for a while. I will leave you with my goals for the next semester and after.

My goals: In no particular order
1. be the best teacher I can be
2. Don't go crazy
3. Maintain a healthy social life (which for me, means don't be a hermit)
4. Better my relationship with God
5. Do not procrastinate
6. Find a Job
7. Eat healthier

That's it for now I will let you know how things go later.
~Abby

P.S. I should probably tell you what I'm teaching and my general location.
I am teaching three sections of Psychology and one section of government and My general location is the southern suburbs of Chicago.

P.P.S. I love dressing professionally