BirdSalad: Time Flies When You Are Having Fun!

Well, so much for my resolve to post every day of student teaching. I made two weeks, then skipped two weeks! How did that happen?

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am loving the work. I am hating the amount of work! No, scratch that. I am actually loving the amount of work; it's fun, I lose myself in it. And that's the problem, I haven't learned balance yet. I have to figure out how to write a lesson plan and get the work done for a lesson without it taking six hours for a 45 minute lesson. I need to learn how to do this fast, because I'm sinking in a mass of out-of-control paperwork, on top of the dust bunnies floating around the house.

This week I started to get a handle on the paperwork. I have half built a binder to organize all the lesson plans I'm writing. Now all I have to do is get the backlog all hole-punched and organized in the binder. I have another folder with pockets to hold the week's worth of lessons, to carry back and forth every day. I'm carrying my data key back and forth regularly now, and only once this week forgot to copy the files I need onto the key, mostly because it was my fifth night in a row up past midnight (and a 5:30 am waking time) and the old brain wasn't working so well any more.

Yesterday I had my second observation. It was another good evaluation. I'm grateful for that, but not really surprised. I've been working with children for many years now, and I know I'm decent at the job. I'm putting in time at school so that everyone else can recognize my gifts with an official piece of paper. And learning a LOT in the process, not to belittle my education. The education has been incredible, and I'm loving that part of it.

I asked my field supervisor to pay special attention to my questioning technique yesterday. The lesson was a normal lesson from the text book. We were finishing up the last text book lesson on Greece (not finishing the unit, we have two more weeks to go, with lessons that I have already created or will finish creating this weekend.) Part of why I want to be a teacher, and part of why I chose Social Studies for my middle school specialization, is because I have always loved history and social studies. That's why I had enough credits, because I took history courses as electives, along with sociology, psychology, and a host of other social studies courses beyond the required economics courses for my business degree.

So now that I am teaching Social Studies this year, I'm improving my ability to get children to think all those higher level thinking skills. And I want to be the best I can be. To me, that's the highest purpose to being a teacher - to get children to think, to encourage them to question authority. And I want honest feedback on how I can be better than I already am.

The feedback I did receive was on how to improve the look of my lesson plan. That will help me while I'm searching for a job. I'm disappointed at how little feedback I got for concrete suggestions on how to improve my ability to hold a group discussion. I got one suggestion to change the seating around. That would help, it's true, but my cooperating teacher has to agree to that. And she's not sure there is enough space in the class to do that.

I got one very specific suggestion to tie the wonders of the ancient world into modern wonders, which I applied to the last lesson. That was a good reminder, to always be thinking of how to tie history to present day. Even though most of my lesson was aimed at how relevant history is to us today, it didn't hurt to have that reminder.

Well, maybe there's just not much feedback to give for a lesson that is a typical lesson for a public school classroom. I'm wondering, when I'm actually in a classroom, if I will use shared reading like my cooperating teacher does, or if I'll try a different technique to help the children get through the book. Shared reading really helps in many ways. It improves literacy, gives children practice in reading together. It helps the less able readers to hear someone else reading aloud to them while they follow along. I even think it builds confidence, to hear others struggling with difficult foreign words just like them.

The chapters or units are short, four to five 45 minute lessons, unless I spend too much time on discussion. And the teacher takes the children well beyond what the book teaches. She's very creative, gives them lots of different ways to learn the same information. I like that, and happily join her in thinking of new creative ways to remember history. And yet I feel like I need to take it one step further. I'm struggling with how to bring history alive for those students in the same way it is for me.

I am grateful that I am not hampered by NCLB requirements that stifle children and teachers alike. I can concentrate on bringing history alive, and if I improve reading and writing and evaluation skills at the same time, all the better for my students. What I really want to do is create students who are alive and thinking. And that means going the extra mile for them.

So I'm back to the question of the week, or maybe semester, for me. How do I put enough into a lesson, and still keep my family and life intact and not kill myself with overwork?