IT'S HERE! IT'S HERE!

            I have been putting this off because I have wanted to write about my complete experience in college, but it still has not sunk in yet.  I still cannot believe that I am a college graduate!  Who knew that I was going to make it to this point?  There were some moments where I did not think I was going to make it to the end, but I stuck with it and pushed on and now I am done and I just don’t feel it yet.  I think it is because I have been teaching for 18 weeks and not on campus.  I have been in the field and not at school and the shock just is not there.  Well, in this blog post, I want to hit on the four lessons that I was observed on throughout my student teaching.

            When I was first observed, it was my first day of teaching overall.  I was so nervous that day that I prepped all night before and all morning of.  My first lesson was an introduction to autobiographies and the characteristics autobiographies possess.  To start this whole lesson out, I had a video clip.  Of course, this video clip did not work for me!  But, I moved on and explained how this clip related to what we were talking about in class.  As I think back, I was very specific on my instruction and it was not at a level the 12^th grade class needed.  I could have moved through that lesson a lot faster, but I did not.  Looking at my entire time at my first placement, I could have moved a lot faster through everything.  I think my biggest challenge was the constant push back from the students.  It was exhausting.  Back to the lesson, I also gave the students guided notes.  Senior students do not need them no matter what level they are at.  This was a waste of time for me and I feel like it did not help the students in any way.  From then on, I made the students write down everything on his or her own.  I can see a major change from beginning to end now.

            In my second observation, I got a double hit.  I was observed by both my advisor and a school administrator.  Also, to add to my nerves, I had no idea it was going to happen.  Well, in this lesson, I related the plot elements to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  I showed the Lego version of the music video and then the students worked together throughout class to label the different parts of the movie with plot elements.  I thought this lesson went over really well.  But, the building administrator was not on the same page.  I was happy that I got the students engaged and wanting to do the project, but the administrator did not see the point of this.  I was crushed.  I was so happy and then my bubble was burst when I went in for my meeting!  I will never forget this meeting nor this lesson because of the good and the bad.  Reflecting on this lesson, I do not think I would change that much.  I thought it went over really well, and the students did too.  They actually learned a lot that day and that is why I am there…to help them learn!

            My third observation was in my second placement.  This lesson was on poetry.  Well, after realizing I was talking about the WRONG poet, I was so embarrassed.  I then went back through and corrected myself in every class.  This was the best lesson to learn for me because I am sure I will make that mistake again at some point in my career.  I thought the lesson went well, but I also realized that I suck at modeling.  I forgot that my students are not always on the same page as me.  Sometimes I think they are with me and they say they are, but they are not.  This modeling is something I still need to work on and I realize this.  Now, every single lesson I do, I think about times I can model and do!

            My last lesson was with drama.  I thought this unit would be the easiest to do for me, but I was wrong.  I found that because I have a strong theater background, I was expecting a lot from my students.  Most of them stepped up and stayed with me, but some did not.  Now, I am dealing with unruly parents because the students did not follow directions.  Talk about high stress levels.  Anyway, my lesson for my observation went well, but I found that my discussion was not deep nor did it connect to anything.  Sometimes, I struggle with in depth discussion leading.  It is great in my head, but does not come out as planned.  I am hoping that this is something that will come over time.  I think it will, but I do know that it needs work!

            Well, again, I am so happy that I have graduated!  I cannot believe how fast time has gone by.  It seems like yesterday I was sitting in the old CUB at orientation.  Now, it is all over and I need to find myself a big boy job!  I hope somewhere will find me as a valuable resource and a great addition to their team!  Well, I hope to keep adding to this blog as time goes on, but for right now, the blog goes on hold.  Once I start my first job, I will start this back up.  I hope that Dr. Shannon uses it as an example in her method classes! J  Last, I would like to thank my amazing advisor and mentor Dr. Shannon for everything she has done! Without her wonderful guidance, I would not be where I am today!  You have showed me some amazing techniques and I will never forget any of it!  Thank you so much!

AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!

     Well, here I am again.  This is my second to last post during student teaching.  First off, I CAN'T STAND HOW EXHAUSTED I AM!!!!! I am working non-stop from before the sun comes up until after the sun goes down, and there still are not enough hours in one day!  It seems like while I am at my placement in the middle school, there is not one second that I am not doing something or helping someone; and then I have to find "extra" time to do my work for student teaching.  I don't want to turn this post into a complaint session, but the shear amount of work that I do in one day is INSANE! So, yet again, this post is being posted late!  I want to kick myself every time I don't get something turned in on time!  I am not usually like this, but when I am grading 120 poetry exams along with 600 poems (5 from each student), I just end my day in a haze of not wanting to do ANYTHING!  There are nights that I come home and say to myself that I am just going to sit on the couch for five minutes to rest.  Well, that does not happen...I usually sit down and fall directly asleep from exhaustion!  If I only had my student teaching work OR my actual teaching work to do, I would be fine...but this is INSANE!  Anyway, let me talk now about my past observation.
     Well, where do I start?  Yet again, my advisor (Hey Dr. Shannon) always seems to catch me on a day that I do poorly in my performance.  I don't know if it is because of nerves or because the kids go crazy when someone new is there, but it has happened each time my advisor comes to see me.  One good thing though is that I evidently hide my fear and terror well.  I guess this is a good thing to be able to do...especially as a teacher.  Well, hopefully my next observation (which is tomorrow) goes well.  I am now into my theater unit and this is my specialty. 
     I am loving this placement thus far.  My students signed me up for the teacher vs. students basketball game that takes place tomorrow.  Well, I have never played basketball on a team before and I have only been able to practice one time this week for ten minutes because I have had grading and lesson planning to do!  AHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!! Well, I still have more grading and student teacher busy work...I mean helpful and enlightening work to do before I go to bed and get up at 5 tomorrow morning soooooooo, I am going to cut it off at this!  Until next time. :-)

Student Teaching Placement 1 Ending

Welp, it is that time again!  I just finished my first placement and today was the start of my second!  Wow, what a change that was.  Well, first off, I want to flat out say that I am late with this blog post; there was a good reason though!  I wanted to wait and do this blog post because I was waiting for my feedback from my first placement.  When I say feedback, I mean that I was observed by the dean of students at my first placement and I was waiting for her feedback on my performance there.  Well, now I kind of wish that I would not have waited.  My feedback was not so good, but I am going to take it with a grain of salt.  I am glad that it does not go on my permanent teaching record.  At first, when I read through the evaluation, I was in shock.  I did not understand why I was receiving these marks.  Then, after about an hour conversing with my evaluator, she explained to me why she put me in these categories.  When I left her office, I was crushed.  I felt as though everything I have been working for in college meant nothing!  I could not believe that someone, who had not had training in the common core nor in LFS, had the nerve to tell me that my teaching style, which follows common core and LFS to the T, was unsatisfactory.  When I went to talk to my co-op about this, my spirits were turned around.  She told me that I was doing everything exactly the way it was suppose to be done.  She said that the person doing my observation had never been trained in the items that she was evaluating me on.  Well, then the thought crossed my mind...what if I would have been an actual teacher in this school.  I would have probably lost my job, all because my evaluator was not appropriately trained!  That is a VERY scary thought!  Well, I am happy and pleased with how my first placement went.  I would not have traded that placement for any other one!  I learned so much and look forward to my next experience!

Student Teaching Observation #1

     One week ago from Monday, I had my first observation in the classroom.  It also just so happens that one week ago from Monday, I started teaching for the first time in a classroom full of real students.  WHAT A RUSH!  This first observation I had on the same day I started to teach had me freaked out of my mind.  I have never been so scared in my life...except for that one time I went to a haunted house :-P.  Anyways, in my current student teaching placement, I am working with 12th grade students in the low level classes.  When I say low level, my students are around the same age I am because of the amount of times the students have failed and most of my students (about 98% of them) over three different classes, are IEP and ELL students.  This experience was scary at first, but now, the students and I are starting to see eye to eye.  At first, the students were trying to see how much they could get away with.  I shut down a lot of bad habits to begin with.  Cell phones, not working, and cursing in the classroom are not a problem for me because I stopped those activities within the first few days of teaching.  Chatter is still difficult to handle, but they are getting better.

    Well, back to the observation; the whole point of this blog post.  My advisor came in to observe me on the first day of my teaching like I have already said.  So, I'm sure your wondering how it went.  In my mind, I was freaking out the entire time.  My activating strategy didn't work like it was suppose to, the students talked the entire lesson, the students didn't understand me at some points; I thought I was going to get a failing grade for my first observation.  After class, my advisor, cooperating teacher, and myself sat down to have our post teach meeting.  The first question asked of me "How did you think your lesson went?"  In the back of my mind, I was saying that I should tell them it went great and that I didn't see any problems at all.  I then decided to just be up front and honest about how it went.  I told them both EVERYTHING that went wrong with the lesson or the things I didn't like.  After I was done with my little speech, my advisor and co-op looked at me as though I was crazy.  My advisor then informed me that none of those things that happened were noticable because of the way I presented myself in the classroom.  Inside I was freaking out, but on the outside, that was not present.  They both also commended me on how smooth everything went. If something didn't work for me, I moved on or made up something on the spot to cover that blank space.  I had no down time in the class and that was my goal.

    Overall, I am pleased with the way that my observation went.  Since then, I have had two other observations.  The first one was by my co-op and it went really well.  The second one was by the dean of students here at my high school.  The interesting thing about this is that I am getting observed on the new process.  This observation is a long process, so over the next couple of weeks, this observation will take place.  I will update ya'll in my next post.  Until then, stay calm and teach!

Reflections

            And here I am…at the mid-way point in my senior year of college.  Today was the last day of classes and next week is finals.  I cannot believe how fast time has gone by.  Anyways, with this milestone reached, it is now time to prep for what is to come!  STUDENT TEACHING!!!!!  Well, first I want to reflect on my methods course, and then I want to talk about my student teaching placements.

            Methods, well, was actually a lot of fun!  I truly did learn a lot from this class.  Granted, if I would have received one more R in that class, I would have probably exploded in pure anguish and defeat!  I do know though that without Dr. Shannon pushing all of us so hard, we would not be as prepped for teaching as we are.  Let’s see…through methods, I wrote an entire unit, worked on LFS items, learned about common core, did more observations, and numerous other things.  I now have these items to use when I am a teacher.  Methods was so helpful, but I don’t know if anything can prep someone for student teaching.

            Student teaching is something that I have been looking forward to ever since I was a freshman in college.  This is the step right before you become a teacher!  All of the work we have done up to this point has been the theory.  Now it is time to put that theory to work.  We started this year by doing, yet again, observation hours.  I had the pleasure of going to East Penn High School and Central Dauphin Middle School.  I had great placements at both of those schools and learned a lot working with my cooperating teachers.  For student teaching, I will be returning to Central Dauphin Middle School with my seventh graders and for my high school, I will be going to Central Dauphin East High School to work with senior students.  I am really looking forward to both of these placements and hope they will be fun.  I think that these two placements fit me really well, but it still does not calm my nerves any.

            Like I said, I have been super excited to start my student teaching BUT now that it is here, I am excited and SCARED!  I hope the students will appreciate my teaching style and I hope that my coop teachers can help me to their fullest!  I think it is going to be fine, and I plan on keeping up this blog (if I can and have time) during my student teaching.  I am signing off for now to go study for final exams…because now I get to give them instead of take them after this point! AHH!!!

The Teaching of Grammar

The end of the semester is always a really busy time!  It has been really hectic in my life and I know that when I become a teacher, things are not going to slow down any.  I know it has been awhile since I have posted last.  Last time, I talked about teaching writing.  Well, this time, I want to focus on teaching grammar.  This area is always difficult to teach and is different for every level of teaching.  We talk all the time in our Methods class about how we would teach certain things in English.  Well, I think that grammar is a hard thing to even think about teaching.  Some teachers in the field now are afraid to teach grammar and they do it by one thing.  They open up the textbook the school has decided to use and he or she does exactly what the book says.

 Now, that is ONE way of teaching grammar, BUT is it the best way for the students to learn?  I would say no.  Some students might learn really well this way, but reading from the textbook and teaching what the book says and only what the book says is not right.  The teacher is there to ENRICH the students’ learning.  Enriching student learning also does not mean give them a worksheet.  Sure, worksheets have their place in any classroom, but not every single time you teach something.  I have been out in the field observing student learning for four years now and it is amazing that every single teacher I have observed or worked with has a different way of teaching.

As a student in the education field, I am required to do so many hours in a high school classroom setting and so many hours in a middle school setting.  Both of these settings, like I expected, were totally different.  While in my high school settings, I have seen five different teachers.  Every single teacher is different and every single teacher I observed taught grammar.  I have yet to see someone teach grammar the way I am planning on teaching (which I will get to at the end of the post :-P).  I have one specific instance that I would like to speak to though.  While I was in a tenth grade honors classroom, the teacher I was observing was stressed out.  Going into the observation, I knew the teacher was stressed because he or she was re-teaching grammar elements that should have been taught the year prior.  Now, as I was sitting in this classroom, I was thinking about these tenth grade students.  The teacher was standing in front of the class using the SMART board.  His or her notes were in size ten font in a word document.  He or she would teach a little bit, and then ask questions about what was just taught.  The students were unable to take notes and were lost about what the teacher was teaching.  As the teacher was asking questions, he or she was also getting really frustrated with the students.  It finally got to the point where the teacher shut down, passed out worksheets (15 to be exact) and told the students to complete them.  I was in shock!  I could not believe what was going on in front of me.  Then the teacher came back to me and asked me if what she was doing was so complicated to understand.  To be honest, I DID NOT EVEN UNDERSTAND WHAT SHE WAS TALKING ABOUT!  I know grammar and would consider myself acceptable at grammar, but I had no clue what she was trying to teach them.  I felt so bad for those students and I do not want my students to feel that way too.

Out of the high school setting, I got to teach middle school students proper noun and pronoun usage.  I had so much fun planning and executing my lessons that my time with them seemed to fly by.  So, you are probably asking yourself, what does he do with grammar lessons.  Well, I have fun!  I teach the base concept to the students, so proper noun usage for example, and then have an activity or something fun for the students to get into.  I also try to relate it to pop culture and ideas from today’s society.  In the middle school class, I did a “painting” activity with my students to help them with nouns.  Now, it wasn’t real paint of course, it was highlight strips.  They had to come to the board and highlight a word.  Then I would ask the students questions about the word.  The students had a lot of fun with it and the teacher still contacts me asking me for ideas.

I hope that what I have here makes sense.  I have noticed that my blogging and some of my writings kind of go into stream of consciousness like Holden C in Catcher in the Rye.  I try not to do that, but I think it is the right thing to do for blog posts.  So, if you have any questions, feel free to ask.  I would love to answer them!

Teaching Writing and the Tenets

This week, I want to focus on teaching writing.  For this week, I want to look at two different books that have information pertaining to this and I want to talk about my experiences these past couple of weeks.  I have a lot of information pertaining to this topic, so I will try to hit on the important information. J

            First, I want to look at Peter Smagorinsky’s view on student writing.  In his book Teaching English by Design, he has an entire section devoted to student writing.  In the beginning of this section, he talks about many different types of student writing; extended definitions, literary analysis, argumentations, research reports, portfolios, journals, and many many more.  It would take a very long time to go through all of them.  I want to look at a few that I have used or I found interesting.  First, I want to look at journals. 

Journals are a key in my classroom environment.  When I am teaching, I think personal reflection is important.  Also, just writing out what you are feeling that day or to get something off of your chest is important.  Any time a student is writing, that is a step in the “write” direction. J (You see what I did there) Writing is, in my opinion, one of the most important skills a student can learn.  Everything in life revolves around writing.  Personal reflection is something easy to do, does not take long, and is something that can be done every single day.  It also builds student writing without them even known.  A huge step from journaling is the all “important” research paper.

Growing up and going through high school, the research paper was the “most important writing piece you will do”.  I disagree.  I think that it is important, but not the most important writing piece.  The research writing piece is important because it teaches students how to research a topic or an issue, how to appropriately cite or give credit to a person, and again work on writing skills.  One of the biggest things that Smagorinsky thinks, and I agree with, that you should not just grade a paper or writing piece and then move on.  It should be handed in and then the student should be given at least another chance to redo the work; to fix the mistakes that he or she made.  Beside Smagorinsky is Gallagher. 

Kelly Gallagher has had a huge influence on me as a teacher.  I have read two of his books so far and hope to continue reading his work.  In Gallagher’s work Teaching Adolescent Writers, he has a list of “ten tenets of teaching editing skills”.  These are 1) determine editing needs and address them as they arise 2) teach less to the whole class; teach more in conferences 3) instead of using grammar books, make them 4) keep the focus narrow 5) teach the big eight (dealing with commas, fragments, intervening phrases, irregular verbs, and so on) 6) don’t drown the paper in corrections 7) whole-class peer editing is an ineffective strategy 8) make students track their spelling demons 9) discussion vs. written comments and 10) Occasional failing of at not constantly following these tenets is allowed.  Through reading all of Gallagher’s tenets, I have decided to come up with my own tenets.  I am focusing on writing in general and not just editing.  So… my ten tenets are as follow.

1)      Model with my students.  I think it is important to do the work right alongside the students (even if you do not like to do the project).

2)      To go with that last comment, do writing projects that are enjoyable to both you and the students. 

3)      Give at least two chances for the students to achieve greatness.  Do not let their grades be a once and done thing.

4)      Give ample time for students to write in the classroom environment.

5)      Give many many many examples of good AND bad writing.  In the classroom, I have seen good writing, but not examples of bad.

6)      Unlike Gallagher, I want to use peer editing.  I think it is a good tool, but they need the scaffolding to do it correctly.

7)      I agree with the grammar book idea.  Do NOT give the students the stuff right out of a book, come up with it yourself.

8)      Written comments are good, but don’t go overboard. 

9)      Conference with students about their writing.

10)   Get the parents involved in the student’s writing as well.

All of these are important to me, but I am sure they will change over time.  Well, I have rambled long enough.  I will call it quits for now.  Look for another post soon about my observations!

 

(Side note: it won't let me add pictures this week. :-( I am very upset about this!  Hopefully next week it works!)