Week 10 finished

I am two-thirds of the way through apprentice teaching!

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

Fun Tarot Quiz

This was a fun Tarot quiz that my friend Suna had on her blog.

The Sun - Interesting. I am happy right now. Things have gone right since last summer, and I do feel like I have managed to overcome so very many obstacles in my life this year!

Strength - it's about inner strength. I have felt like I had to depend on my inner strength this year, for sure. It's paid off, with an opportunity for education that I made happen through sheer determination. And good grades, again through sheer will power.

High Priestess - knowledge. Good card for someone back in graduate school.

Empress - all about gestation. Good card for someone in apprentice teaching this semester!

Justice - regaining equilibrium. Yes, this is a good reminder for me that I need to find my equilibrium, not only for the semester, but in my new chosen career, and in my life. For a year, I have chosen to hibernate while I study, not work on my social or emotional life other than with my children. That will need to change soon.

Death - I hope this is my indication that I will rise again like a phoenix from the ashes. From change comes something better is what this card tells me.

Fool - my second chance? And maybe a warning to be careful.

Emperor - be bold. hmmm. A chance to practice more of my idea of what makes a good teacher?

Tower - rude awakening. Am I the rude awakening, or am I to receive a rude awakening?

I also thought it was interesting that my scores for Devil and Lovers was so low. No time in my life for impulse or falling in love. That would be true, in my mind, right now.

I have some things to think about ...

You scored as XIX: The Sun. This is the happiest card in the deck. It is full of joy and optimism, everything is right with the world. We are as innocent children playing in the fields without care. The Sun brings success, well-being and happiness in all spheres - material, emotional, spiritual -wherever our desires lay.When this card appears in a Tarot spread it indicates success, joy and happiness. Obstacles will be overcome, goals achieved.When badly aspected, it can indicate a stagnation through over-indulgence, too much of a good thing. XIX: The Sun 88% VIII - Strength 88% II - The High Priestess 81% III - The Empress 81% XI: Justice 75% XIII: Death 75% 0 - The Fool 63% IV - The Emperor 63% XVI: The Tower 63% I - Magician 50% X - Wheel of Fortune 44% XV: The Devil 13% VI: The Lovers 0% Which Major Arcana Tarot Card Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

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?

You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
~ Galileo Galilei

Day 9 - Plays and Persuasion

Today, the fifth grade had fun producing short little plays about groups of people who had to decide whether to be Patriots or Loyalists at the start of the Revolutionary War. It was interesting watching the light bulbs go off. Or not, in some cases.

They enjoyed making up the skits, I only provided them with a short vignette, and they wrote their own lines and acted them out for the rest of the class. I also asked them to answer questions as their characters. That was especially important for the groups who didn't bother to use the facts provided to justify their decisions.

The students took home an assignment, due Monday, to write a letter home (as in England) about their decision to be a Loyalist or Patriot. I gave them a grading rubric for persuasive essays. I can't wait to see what kind of job they do.

Today I picked up kalamata olives for the sixth grade on Monday. They're starting a unit on Ancient Greece, and I'm teaching the first day. I thought it would be fun to hook them in by offering a taste of a food that Greeks are famous for - olives. Kalamata olives are pretty skunky. I wonder how many of them will be brave enough to try the olive, let alone eat one?

On Thursday, I have my first observation. I'll be teaching the fifth grade, and will do a lesson on George Washington's amazing spy ring. I'm looking up ideas for writing in code ...

I'm enjoying bring ing history alive for the students!

Day 8 - Believing in Our Students

There are so many wonderful quotes about how students live up to our expectations. As teachers, we are adjured to believe in our students, give them the highest expectations, strive to integrate learning across the disciplines, differentiate lessons so that everyone will learn to their maximum potential.

And then you run smack into the wall of reality.

The question then becomes how do you make reality match the ideal? Is it even possible?

I hope I never become blase or pessimistic about that. I know far too many teachers who have become that way. I also know lots of amazing and wonderful teachers who are still positive, still enthusiastic, still changing the world one student at a time.

Today I spent time reviewing the IEPs (Individual Learning Plans) of students in the fifth and sixth grade classes. I'm still learning names - remembering names might be the bane of my teaching career. 120+ names is a LOT to learn, when you've never met any of them before! I think I have faces to go with all those names; we'll see tomorrow, as I check against the seating charts.

I'm impressed with how my CT has decided to accommodate the students with IEPs. I've learned some good stuff. I've realized I still have a long way to go. I am more determined than ever to include some special ed classes in my electives for my degree. It's important stuff, differentiated learning, and not so easy to know what to do.

Teachers, at least the good ones who care, are pretty amazing people.

Many instructional arrangements seem "contrived," but there is nothing wrong with that. It is the teacher's function to contrive conditions under which students learn. It has always been the task of formal education to set up behavior which would prove useful or enjoyable later in a student's life.
~ B.F. Skinner

Day 7

Taught today. Did a lesson on Paul Revere and his midnight ride, and Sybil Ludington and her midnight ride. Did you know there was a sixteen year old girl who did the same thing? I didn't, until I started planning this lesson.

This lesson was delivered to me by my CT, and I just added the frills, so it wasn't too much work. I read the Longfellow poem, they read the Ludington poem plus an abridged version of the Revere poem, then completed a Venn Diagram comparing the two.

My CT liked how I pulled some higher level thinking skills out of them. She told me not to get discouraged when they didn't answer, that they weren't used to it.

I told her that's why I went into teaching. To get kids to think.

It was a good day.

The aim of education should be to teach us rather how to think, than what to think -- rather to improve our minds, so as to enable us to think for ourselves, than to load the memory with thoughts of other men.
~ Bill Beattie

Day 6

Today was a quieter day. I only observed, except that my CT and I decided that in order to learn the names of the children as well as possible in the class that will be taught during the time my field supervisor (FS) observes me, I should lead the class for that lesson. Since it was a lesson out of the text book, mostly guided reading and some discussion, I watched Linda teach it once, then I taught the second class. Talk about tap dancing!!!

eek. It went well. Thank goodness I have experience working with children and can think quickly on my feet. My CT even commented that I asked some interesting questions that really made them think, and she was stealing my ideas. That was a nice an unexpected compliment. CT did the intro, and handled the worksheet portion of it, so I only taught about half the class, but it was nice to know that first, she trusted me to do do it well enough, and second, that I can do it well enough that I could easily sub for one of these classes, just in case.

Technically, as an apprentice teacher, we aren't allowed to sub. But because I have my sub certification, I'm legal to sub, and the principal asked me to get the cert approved by that county (different than the one I live in, so another county Board of Ed has to stamp it) so that I could be allowed in the classroom. And the professors who are guiding us through this experience kind of went, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, if the principal asks you to sub while you are student teaching, it means they trust your work, so say yes, because it will help with getting a job when you are finished.

So, I now feel confident that I could handle at least the fifth grade class very well if necessary. That was a big confidence booster.

What was even more amazing is that I only had three hours of sleep last night. I was up quite late getting things ready for this week, plus writing a letter to the principal of the school where my children are attending, because upsetting things are happening to my middle daughter again.

I'm so tired of my poor sweet girl, who is so good (beyond my comprehension) in class, getting punished along with everyone else for the transgressions of a few. This time, they are being randomly assigned to seats at lunch because a few boys wouldn't stop having food fights. So my poor girl was stuck two days in a row with no other girl at her table, and she's quiet and shy. She sobbed and sobbed tonight, because she had such a lousy day.

I love the idea, or maybe the ideal of this school. My oldest daughter was lucky enough to have a wonderful amazing experience there. My youngest daughter is doing ok, too. I'm not happy about some slipping in her skills last year, but that's water under the bridge, and she has a wonderful teacher this year! I hope. Seems to be so, and I'm eager to see what her new progress report says, and hear about the results of her midyear assessments.

But my poor middle daughter is just in an untenable situation this year. The teacher is not at fault. She's doing the best she can without support and with a challenging class that is just overwhelming. I am struggling with horrible guilt that I am not being a good parent to my poor daughter right now. I'm thinking long and hard about what to do to help her. And waiting to hear what the principal says.

I think that working in a different school just brought home to me how radically different they are. The dream of the charter school is awesome. It worked for eldest daughter. The reality is that it's not working for middle daughter. So I have to figure out what to do to help her.

I will take comfort from the following quote, for a little while longer while I ponder what our alternatives are.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
~ John Powell

Day 5 - First lesson

On Friday, I taught my first lesson, to three classes. It was fun; the kids were great, and we all had a good time.

I like the school where I am apprentice teaching. The teachers are all nice, the kids are respectful and well-behaved, and still enjoy learning. This is a fun age, 10-12 year olds. They still like school, aren't quite blase yet - you don't have to work quite as hard to have fun with them!

The lesson was on the New England states. Because it was my first formal lesson my cooperating teacher (CT) picked out the lesson, and explained what she wanted me to do. Technically, I was only supposed to observe for the first week, so I am glad that I was given a chance to just jump right in, even though I was nervous a little.

Growing up in the northeast, learning to swim was always a challenge, because the warm water season is very short. I've never been one to slowly and torturously wade into cold water, I usually just take the plunge and get it all over with at once. It felt a little like that, just dove right into the class and got my first lesson over and done with. Now I can relax the tiniest bit and have more fun!

So I did a little intro discussion, to both draw out the students' prior knowledge and help me understand what they knew and didn't know. They'd already studied the colonies, so knew a lot about the states we would look at for the lesson, didn't know as much about the Revolutionary War period.

I found a fun state maze book, with really hard mazes! Pulled two out - Massachusetts, because they would get lots of info about Massachusetts in the video, and Maine, because the maze looked fun. They watched the video, we talked about some vocabulary, and then they worked on the maze while I walked around with the solution book, in case anyone thought they solved it. I think only about 3 or 4 students solved it during class, out of the almost 60 in all three classes, so I am truly a mean soul to give them such a difficult maze! They laughed a lot while calling me cruel and evil.
:-)

I'm glad to have the first one finished. I'm looking forward to the next two, because I am putting much more of myself and my own ideas into the next lessons. I'm pulling in my own experiences as a communication skills instructor, a DRE, a mom, and my ancient old theater background from high school and college and young adult years.

Practice is the best of all instructors.
~ Publilius Syrus

Day 4

I'm having fun. My cooperative teacher, Linda, is very flexible, as am I, so we're enjoying my being able to see an opportunity in class, ask her if she wants me to add to the discussion, her saying yes, and me being able to work with all the classes for short periods.

Today, the 5th grade had a mini lesson on political cartoons. They used a couple cartoons in the text book, one from the Revolution (what they're currently studying) and one from current politics. Linda commented that there would be lots of political cartoons out this week because the President talked, and I asked if she wanted me to look for some. She agreed, reminding me to make sure they were safe, and I took 10 minutes to bring some current political cartoons up about Bush's State of the Union address.

The kids had a blast, I led the discussion from the online cartoons, because Linda is less comfortable interpreting political cartoons, and the entire class had some good laughs!

Today I'm putting together a smart board interactive presentation on labeling New England states. The tech teacher loaded up my laptop with the software, handed me a user guide, and I'm set to go. Nothing I like more than a new tech toy!

I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to learn new classroom technology techniques! My field advisory recommended I also become intimately familiar with Powerpoint, which I haven't used often and don't know very well. He likes powerpoint, wants to see me use it for lessons. By the time I have a chance to take the "Technology in the Classroom" course at FDU, I should be able to teach it!

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.
~ Aristotle

Day 3

Today I taught my first partial lesson.

Listen to how lucky I was ... I found a school and a class where they are learning world religions as well as world history & geography. And this week was the start of Ancient China. On Tuesday, the sixth graders learned about Confucius and Taoism, so I volunteered to bring in some additional information about both. That's fun, for me!

So I got to have a nice discussion about yin-yang, The Way, Tai Chi, and why Confucius' words still apply to us today. Can't imagine a more fun way to teach!

On Friday, I'm teaching a geography lesson to the fifth graders. It won't be as much fun, so I'm working on making it more interesting! I found a book of state mazes ... that's a start.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
~ Confucius