Final Reflection-Letter to me from me about me and for me

Dear Mr. Thompson…well, Michael…you haven’t earned your honorific yet,

You are probably wondering who I am.  The answer is simply that I am you.  We (that's me and you) just celebrated our 10-year-reunion and you are well on your way to getting a Dual Major in both English and Secondary Education.  Believe it or not, you are going to be a teacher.

At some point in the future, you are going to finally decide what you want to do with your life.  Believe it or not (and you probably will not actually believe it), you are going to decide to follow in the steps of the might Green Ink Nazi and become an English teacher.

Once you make the decision, you are definitely going to have your doubts, but continue on and hold strong as you continue on your path.  You are going to feel like you have waited too long to return for your education, but this experience will also help you to succeed in this new venue.

Getting a job in the district through the Cooperative Education program is going to feel like it is getting nowhere, but you will get on at a school that will show that you have made the right choice.  The students are going to do what they can to challenge you, but this is just their way.  Co-op is going to be one of the best experiences you will have and will prove to be an extremely valuable experience as you get started on your career.  You will work with some amazing teachers and their knowledge will help you find your own way as a teacher.  This will give you a great chance to learn different perspectives about the profession and to apply what you can to a classroom setting (or at least what is realistically applicable, since some of it just isn't quite practical).

You will be studious and will do your best, but there are definitely times when you should study more diligently and should be more thorough with your reading, especially in your literature classes.  You are going to cut it close in certain classes, and some of your better professors are going to push your writing to its limits, and it is going to be worth it in the end.  Remember to always be reflective and challenge yourself, even when some of the less-challenging professors will not be doing the pushing for you.

Don’t freak out about your inexperience with some of the classic literary works: you are not the only one who has not read every single work in the canon.  Be aware and learn all you can from the texts which you do end up touching upon throughout your educational career.

Instead of trying to keep to yourself like I know you are going to your first year at WSU, branch out and get to know the people who are also in your classes.  You are going to meet some really clever and interesting people who you will want to keep in touch with for a long time.  You don’t need to hide in the front row of class and be a mute.  Your policy of keeping school and personal life separate is going to make that first year in your new school lonely.  The school is only going to feel like an airport terminal because you aren't getting to know the people you sit next to throughout your classes (especially that horrible poetry class that almost turns you off of poetry).  Surround yourself with these friends you make and you will get through the stress.

Overall, I would suggest you go through your program as you normally would choose to.  Inquire about the dual major and acquire as much knowledge as you can from your courses.  You do not have to have a favorite author, but learn as much as you can about the ones that you delve into with your different professors.

Finally, and probably most importantly, do what you can to enjoy the process.  You will be the first in your family, both immediate and extended, to earn a college degree.  Your 4-year degree is going to take about five years, but it’s well worth the ride.

Sincerely,

The you that is me, and all you hopefully will be,

Mr. T

Official Blog Post #3--Writing our first essay, woohoo

I really am not sure what to write about today.  I am so glad to have the KPTP behind me now and while I am anxious about how I have done, I am just going to put it behind me and move on, placing more focus on working on some of the details that I need to focus on in my classroom.

Something we started on today in my classroom was a writing assignment where I am going to ask students to provide a definition for freedom.  This is a slight twist on what is required for the pacing guide, which expected students to do a persuasive speech “declaring which freedom(s) are essential”.  Instead of going with the speech idea, I am instead turning it into a four paragraph essay (which I will also have them read out loud, even if it’s in small groups or to a partner).

One of the things that I’m dreading about this writing assignment (and that they are too) is the fact that the longest thing these students have been required to write so far this year in our class is a well-developed paragraph, which they had been provided a template and sentence starters with, so they are all showing a lot of resistance to the idea of writing an essay, although I am doing what I can to make it as structured as possible.  I want to prepare them with at least one more-extensive writing assignment before they move into high school.

Even though I personally do not take well to most pre-writing strategies, we started with a concept map yesterday about freedom and how it can be seen in the protagonists of the texts we have read as a class and also in their own lives.  This was something I used to help develop students’ background knowledge and get them thinking about the topic, which has been the main theme of this entire unit.  Certain students even showed me that they had taken a whole lot more out of the units than I had realized, especially when one of my “challenging” students spent a portion of class explaining themes of a text to a student who had missed the entire week we had gone over it.

So, my big challenge now is going to be keeping students interested in a 4-paragraph writing assignment when the most they’ve written is one.  I plan on breaking up the writing assignment with fun, smaller activities from time to time.  Yesterday, I started out with a writing assignment another student teaching candidate (Mr. Thimesch) had suggested, which was to have students write “the most bogus excuse you can that you do not have your homework today.”  Even though a few students really enjoyed it and even took it home to add more to it, many of them simply provided me with one or two sentences of clichés, no matter how much I prodded.  My CT has warned me that a longer writing project was going to be a challenge with them, but this has made me realize just how much of a challenge it is going to be, because this was even a “fun” assignment.

My CT has given me some forewarning that this is going to be the most challenging thing I’ve done with them so far, and really approves of the structure I intend to use for the different stages of the essay (that horrible, scary word that leaves students quaking) such as using graphic designers for my CwC and my other class with lower-level students.  Overall though, I feel like this is something that the students just need to get used to; in middle school, I can take them by the hand and help them through an assignment, but in high school they are going to be thrown to the sharks, so to speak.

Another detail I want to add is that I am trying to develop more of a writing community with my students in the classroom. I tried to give them a lot of low pressure, low point value writing opportunities but a lot of them have been turned off of writing by previous experiences, even telling me that fun and writing can not go together 

Student Teaching Official Blog Post #2

     So, I ended up starting my unit for my KPTP just last week.  These last few days have been real eye-openers in many ways, and a few (today especially) have really worn me down.  It has been a great experience though and I would not trade my placement school for any other.  I have been working as hard as I can to balance my lessons between the expectations of the mandated pacing guide, CCR, and simply trying to make sure that I am meeting my student’s needs.

     My Cooperating Teacher has a great classroom management structure and I hope that I can emulate hers when I have my own classroom, but I am still finding it really hard to figure out where I stand as a student teacher.  At times, I feel like I have just been left taking care of another person’s children and anything I do feels like it’s not the right thing.  At others, I think I am going in the right direction with implementing classroom management because they are all working diligently and I start to feel more comfortable (and then the next day we go back to square one and I end up feeling like screaming).  I know I just need to be consistent and understand that each day is going to be different, (especially with how hectic the schedule has been lately), but it really irks me when things do not go the way I plan them.

      I guess my biggest issue is finding the right balance with how many activities I plan throughout the day.  For the first week of my unit, I ended up planning so much for the first day of my lesson that it could have stretched over all three days (easily).  However, today I made the decision in my first hour to cut an activity instead of starting on it in the last few minutes just to continue work tomorrow, and this over planning has just really been “throwing off my groove.”  I believed beforehand, and my CT has repeated the mantra of “it’s better to over plan than to under plan.”  I know I need to just get over my problem with things not going my way, but it’s challenging, especially when I feel like I have planned fully.  I cannot find any suggestions on how to avoid over planning, but there’re a lot of ideas and tips for lesson planning on here:  http://www.knea.org/home/544.htm  .  I feel much better knowing that I was already following most of the tips already, so maybe I am just overstressing about everything (which is new to me in its own way).

Student Teaching Official Post One

My class has recently started work on reading and discussing Maya Angelou’s “High School Graduation,” which seems like it is a great story to inform students on the context and issues that students had to deal with during times of segregation.  I actually really enjoyed the story and have always had a great deal of respect for Maya Angelou for what she has done and the name she has made for herself.  She just seems like an amazing lady who has given so much of herself to helping others, despite not reading much of her work.  However, I digress.

I found that while I am more than happy to provide students with as much context as I can for a work such as this, I realized (and this surprised me) that I am in fact slightly uncomfortable with discussing segregation and “colored” schools.  I have no issues with reading a text from a time period and using the vocabulary that is necessary because I feel like texts are products of their times, but I realize I wonder if I focus too much (or not enough) on making sure that what I am saying may not be taken as offensive by one student or another.

I guess when it comes down to it, I just feel a bit uncomfortable as the “privileged majority” attempting to pose questions about other ethnicities to students who are actually affected by this, and I wonder if this is something I merely need to get over or if there is a better way to handle this subject.  I legitimately would appreciate input on the best way to handle discussing cultural issues involving ethnicity, religion, gender, etc. where I am “on the other side”.

This also had me thinking about ways to avoid potential bias in classrooms, because even though I feel like I am respectful of diversity, I am the privileged majority, whether I feel like that or not.  Unconscious biases might be causing me to treat certain students differently.  I try not to take my students’ differences for granted, but it is impossible to do with how much diversity there is, especially in our school district.  One thing I looked at for tips is:  http://www.stemequitypipeline.org/_documents/TrainingModules/_R1a_%20Classroom%20Tips%20for%20Non.pdf  .  I feel like I unconsciously attempt to do most of this anyway, based on my own experiences, but I will attempt to make a conscious effort to continue considering actions like this for sake of respecting my students’ diversity.

Genre Reflection #2

Torn-up Tomes

Lending my books starts to give me worry,

This char’table choice could make me sorry,

I love the ideal thought of sharing wealth;

Yet unforeseen grabbers may harm my health.

Already lost one: Because my younger

Sister ate it.  Well, at least her hunger

Is sated; Yet… continue on this I’ve

Debated; I still want my books alive.

Should I provide students one more chance

To—in fantastic, new locales—prance,

To—new people and novel places—meet,

While only thinking, sitting, on his (or her) seat?

Of course I should give a chance to these scamps,

But perhaps wait ‘til I’ve bought some ink stamps.

Official Blog Post 3 (Actually on time this time!)

I have really been enjoying the way my practicum has been going.  I feel like I am starting to gain a stronger place in the classroom and building a better rapport with my students, but I also feel like they get a lot more rowdy when my CT is out of the room than they do while she’s in there.  At first, I felt like this was a failure on my part, but I feel like any major change in a classroom is going to cause a change such as that.  Even sometimes when I leave the room and it’s just the CT in there or when the principal/another member comes in to observe, the room just gets louder.

When I was teaching my unit, my CT was not there for the first couple of days because she had been planning a trip to Disneyworld.  I was a bit more lax the first day than I should have been but during the second day I was a bit more strict and “laid down the law” immediately.  This helped with the class so much more than I thought it would, but the second they saw a gap exposed in my “armor,” they took advantage of it.

I guess one of my greatest worries going into next semester is figuring out how to plan wisely when it comes to my lessons.  I have become so used to planning for periods that are a minimum of 60 minutes, so 45 minute class sessions are simply killer.  If I recall correctly, I heard that the district requires you to have an opening, work-time, and a closing (but that may just be science).  So, in order to give students a proper amount of opening and closing, which would, in my opinion, be at least 10 minutes apiece, the students will only have 25 minutes to do work, which seems like a bit too little for me.

The following site appears to be making the argument for longer class periods because this allows for more time in the day to be spent effectively teaching students: http://www.mathedpage.org/teaching/long.html.  I do think I would prefer a school that has longer class periods, even though I saw through some of the sources I checked that some teachers are arguing for shorter periods because they would like more plan time.  I guess I already feel like most of my planning should be done before the semester starts and that my plan time would be more of a grading/relaxation period.

Official Response #2 (belated I know)

First off, I need to establish that I had not realized that the second blog post was due...last month.  It somehow slipped my mind as I dealt with other classes and assignments.  To be perfectly honest, the semester had kind of blended together in such a way that it's hard for me to even remember precisely what was going on that far ago.

Something that has caused me a bit of frustration with this class is the way that so much time is taken up by items that are outside of the teacher's control.  Obviously, student disruptions can take up time, but that honestly is not too much of an issue in my current classroom.  The students are fairly on task, if a bit chatty from time to time and there have been very few problems throughout.

However, despite the student's behaviors, there are often other interruptions caused by the school itself (and I have noticed this "problem" with the other schools I have observed and worked at in my Co-Op.  Yesterday, due to a test that AVID students were having, we went from a class of about 22 students to one of 6 students.  While I understand that this is because it is an honors classroom that this many students are leaving for AVID, other events have taken their toll as well.  This upcoming Friday, there is another AVID event that is taking students out of class and there is also an orchestra, vocal, and band event.  Unless we miscounted the number of students, this is going to leave the class with only 4 students, and very little productive material can be covered with such a small percentage of the class, so it ends up becoming a filler day, or the other students end up with extra homework instead (which happens to be the case for this occasion).

Also, we spent about eight class days on the district writing assessment and another two days on Aimsweb.  Just between days like this and the other ones, that is at least two weeks of a 10 week class that the teacher does not have for her own instruction time.  I am not trying to bash the district writing assessment or anything like that.  I actually really liked the prompt itself, but I was surprised that that much time was taken away from teacher instruction/student activities.  I do find myself a bit curious about how much time should have been allotted.  My Cooperating Teacher seemed surprised that the class had taken that long.

Between all of these activities (and others that I'm sure come up), it seems like a lot of time is lost due to student extracurricular activities and other details that are out of the teacher's realm of control.  I understand that time management and asking the students to be accountable can make a huge difference on whether or not things continue to get done, but I find myself wondering how a teacher is able to make up this potential lost time.

On this webpage about classroom time management, some general tips are given on how to improve in-classroom time: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/article/time-management .  Although it is generally referring to elementary schools, it mentions that anywhere from 23%-40% of classroom time ends up unusable due to non-teaching duties and other activities such as breaks, recess, lunch, etc.  It seems like the best way to deal with these classroom duties that are "outside my control" is to use the time that I do have wisely when the time comes.