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.

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: