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.
