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.