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.

Genre Reflection 1

Genre Reflection

What time shall bring?

Orange, black, and white fills me with delight,
Filling their vessels my resolute task.
Some of them fight my goal with all their might,
Yet for others all I need is ask.

Learning things they do not teach in college,
Facing the challenge, continuing forth,
Attempting sharing part of my knowledge,
Willing yet for me to know my real worth.

Where will I be when the time comes next year?

Living to learn anxiety and fear?

Heat of the moment

“Mister Thom’p’son, how would you react
If someone were here with ill-will to enact?
Would you do what’s right, protect us from harm?
Do your civic duty and buy the farm?”

Of course my answer is: “I would be true
And risk my mortality for you few.
What the actual answer, how would I know
What could ever happen to time’s flow.

Then would I realize what I could do,
Yet I hope I could be chivalrous too.

Also, to counter Mr. Rotramel's photos, here's a cat that is so much more full of awesome than all of his: 

Official Response One

Any and all names used for this post are pseudonyms and used only for the purpose of this blog.  The pseudonyms will alternate, so no student or person will be tied to the same pseudonym for more than one post.

So far my practicum experience has been fairly solid and I feel like this semester is going to be a great experience.  One challenge I am having so far is that my class…is too well behaved.  I know this seems like a silly challenge, but it is the complete opposite of most of my other placement experiences.  My teacher is great with classroom management, but since the class is an Honor’s English class, the students come there to learn.  I am not going to say they never get off-task, but the teacher did such an excellent job with precautionary actions that she does not have to be a reactive classroom manager.  I still get enough of a chance to observe a veteran teacher work with students who like to test boundaries in my Cooperative Education position, so this allows me to pay more attention to students without those distracting factors.

My Cooperating Teacher, referred to from this point on as Ms. Teller, has been extremely helpful and given a lot of great advice for my future as a teacher.  There are times when I still feel like an outlier in the classroom, but we are working me into being more involved in the classroom with different activities. Ms. Teller has informed me our major goal for this particular class is to make sure I am ready to completely take over it either before or when the student teaching semester begins.  Even though these are minor activities, I have already started taking attendance for the class I am observing and I am also entering grades for all of her classes, which I really appreciate because it is allowing me to become more familiar with names and faces on her other class rosters.

One of Ms. Teller’s other classes has two transfer students (who I will refer to as Ben and Jerry) from a different school where I currently work as a Cooperative Education student.  I foresee some minor challenges with these students when I take over the class next semester due to my own role change.  Previously they had known me as roughly the equivalent of a teacher’s assistant/Para, but when next semester comes, I will be a student teacher and I wonder if that will cause some confusion/friction with the teacher-student relationship I will have with Ben and Jerry.  I feel like Ms. Teller is going to support me as well as she can to help avoid any potential challenges with these two students (or any others), but it is still something I am going to keep in mind.  While I am unable to find any information on my specific problem (even if it may be imagined), I am going to try to follow the usual tips like these: http://www.teachingvillage.org/2011/11/14/10-tips-for-a-great-first-impression-with-students-by-brad-patterson/ when I start getting to know my new classrooms.  I feel like one of the most important things I can do is start “dressing the part” of a teacher.  I have already started dressing up better than I had in my placements in previous years.  I wear a dress shirt, slacks, and a tie.  I still do not to wear dress shoes, mostly because I’ll be stuck in them for roughly 30 hours a week and tennis shoes just work better for bouncing back and forth between three different schools.  I am doing my best to start looking and acting “the part” of a teacher.

      I ended up receiving “the teacher look” the other day when I ran into two of my students at a local mall.  All of you know what look I’m talking about.  It’s the look you would give a teacher that in one glance said “Wait a second; you aren’t supposed to exist outside of that big brick building.”  The student even yelled out to me and I walked over and chatted with them for a short while, but it felt so silly to be on the other side of “the teacher look.”  This is just one of the first times I’ve realized that I am finally becoming a greater presence in the classroom and I find this extremely exciting.  My students also saw me in shorts and this may be the first step to complete anarchy in the classroom, so I guess I should never take a step into that outside world during the light of day.  Someone please save me from myself.