It's hard to believe that so much time has gone by! I am loving every second of it, too much work and all. And at the same time, I am sooooo relieved to see that I only have five more weeks of writing extremely detailed lesson plans and keeping up with night classes all while being as perfect a teacher as I can.
My house is a wreck; my children are barely hanging on while not receiving enough attention from Mom; and I am taking oodles of vitamins, hoping not to wear myself out completely due to lack of sleep. I think after May 11th, I will sleep for a week straight through!
I had a semi-sad experience this week. The fifth grade just finished studying the US Constitution. Ok, not the most interesting thing in the world, I admit. Especially for a bunch of 11 year-olds. So I tried my best to bring them interesting ways to make government studies alive for them, and went out of my way to really help them understand. And then gave a test, straight out of the textbook, because it was a short unit and I was concentrating on getting two more units up and running. And they did so poorly on the test.
I should say, they did as normal for the test. The B students got B's. The A students got A's. The C students got C's. It was eye-opening; despite my best work, some children are ready to learn, others aren't.
Thank goodness the same day I also was able to introduce a new project to the students - a fourteen day journaling experience to help them understand Lewis and Clark and the Westward Expansion of the United States. The journaling project was used by my cooperating teacher in previous years, I took to the project and designed my own spin, since I didn't know how she implemented it in previous years. It was good to hear some of the students say, "Wow, this will be a fun project!" and a needed reinforcement that I do indeed have good ideas; I can make a difference as a teacher.
The other gem for my week was the understanding that some of the alternative projects that I designed did help some students. The sixth grade did a presentation on Greek Mythology, and some of the students pulled up their normal grade when given a chance for an alternative assessment. Seeing children blossom when allowed the chance to learn and teach in a way that is better for them than traditional schoolwork is truly rewarding.
The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate "apparently ordinary" people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.
~ K. Patricia Cross
