Time Flies...

So, with two weeks left in our placements, I figured I'd share some good news. For the first few weeks of my placement, my co-op was very resistant to my ideas and even the idea of having a student teacher. Yes, she signed up for it, but she admits that she had no idea what she was signing on for. For a while, my lesson ideas were shut down or ignored because they were different than the simple "read the book, answer the questions" lesson. Needless to say, I was greeted with a bit of a cold welcome.

However, lately, I have seen a huge change in the dynamic of the classroom. I think that my co-op is realizing that I can be a helpful tool in her classroom even when I am not teaching. My students are writing a research paper, so my co-op is working on the step-by-step grading. While she does that, I can answer questions and guide the students through the writing process. It's been a really exciting experience because I feel like my co-op trusts me with that responsibility whereas before, I think that she was afraid to lose control.

For the first 2 months of my placement, I kept thinking, "Wow, if this is how student teaching is going to be, I'm not sure that this is going to work out." Now I know that my co-op is becoming more open to my teaching ideas, and she seems to be excited to try my lessons. I feel so much better and just wanted to share my excitement with all of you.

Exciting

I'm excited to see that I am contributing something to my classroom. My co-op told me the other day that he really thinks my presence in the room is working out because it has helped him to be rejuvenated about teaching. There are things that he has wanted to do or used to do and just hasn't gotten around to fulfilling for his class. However, he said that I have helped him to get some of those things started in his class. For instance, we now have a stocked in-class library that the students can use for pleasure reading. They can also (with approval) use the library books for their upcoming research project. I also suggested that we have the students do freewrites a couple times a week to get the students more comfortable with writing creatively. My co-op suggested that we use it as a lead-in to a short story unit later in the Spring semester, that way the students see that it is going somewhere. We also asked the students how we could improve the freewrite experience and they gave us a ton of ideas for prompts or inspiration for their writing. It was exciting to see something that I suggested become a major part of the classroom. I mentioned it to my co-op during 2nd period and we started it the same day because he was that excited about it.

Anyone else have exciting ways that they are contributing?

Reflection on 'American Teacher'

Hey gang, so last Tuesday before the break I went to the screening of American Teacher at the downtown campus. This was an opportunity to pre-view and comment on the film that is the "other-side" of 'Waiting For Superman.' It was made by the same people and had some big names attached to it. I was really pumped about this, because 'Waiting For Suprman' really was not fair to us. Unfortunately, this film was obviously made by the same people, and they obviously still do not get it. The entire movie was about money. Basically they expressed that we work a lot and may not get compensated fairly for all that work, uhhhhh duh. Then they showed 4 actual teachers lives, none of whom i thought were exceptionally amazing teachers, and all of whom represented a very small sect of teachers. For instance the Harvard undgrad/Columbia Masters grad who is an elementry teacher and thinks she should be paid a fortune because she went to an Ivy League school. Or the Texas HS teacher who earns $54,000 a year works at a Home Depot 7 days a week all year round and somehow is still in debt up to his ears. Finally the San Fran teacher who they painted to be the greatest of them all who left teaching because he could make double the salary at his familys real estate business, and later said "even if I could make this kind of money teaching I wouldn't go back because the stress level is too high."

What I have to say about all this, is screw the people who made that movie, screw the teachers in that movie and screw anyone who has to watch that movie just to understand that we work hard. You know I worry about a lot of things. I worry about finding a job, I worry that my resume isn't up to par, I worry kids won't like me and I worry that someday I'm gonna pour everything I have into a kid and it won't be enough; that he/she will still fall through the cracks. What I don't worry about, is my salary. Because in the small amount of time I've been in the classroom, I haven't been paid a dime. And being in that classroom makes my life a hell of alot more stressful and I feel liek this is the busiest semester of my life and that I'm constantly burning the candle at both ends. That being said, this is the BEST semester I've ever had, hands down. I love every second that I'm in that classroom and I have already seen the potential we have to make a difference, and when I think about doing that for the rest of my life I cannot wait to get it started.

I'm not an idiot, yes I would love the opportunity to get paid more, and I think we deserve to be paid more. I'm all for teacher evaluations that determine pay or anything else that will compensate GOOD teachers for the work they do. But I can also tell you that my family survived on far less than what that Texas teacher is making. And I can tell you that waking up everyday to go to a job you hate is miserable. So I thank God that I don't have to do that. We're all going to be great teachers and there is no doubt in my mind that we will be richly rewarded, it just may not be monetarily. And if those teachers in the video want to quit over money, then good riddance, cuz you weren't doing it for the reasons anyway.

*I'm sorry to get all preachy and serious on you but I had to get that out

home stretch

My co-op and I have been discussing lesson plans for the final three weeks of my time in the classroom before Christmas break.  He has been very supportive of my ideas and is excited to see me present lessons of my own. All of our classes have started reading A Christmas Carol and this unit will take them straight through to Christmas.  For my first lesson, I have decided to have the students participate in a role playing exercise, similar to our Shakespeare activity in Teaching English, in which students manipulate the actions of other students while sections of dialogue are read aloud.  Tomorrow, I aim to do this with the Scrooge/Marley's ghost dialogue as a way of student's showing their interpretation of Scrooge's terror during this section.  Another initial lesson/reading activity I want to try this week involves students isolating sentences,  phrases, and paragraphs they find value or importance in, and then discussing why students chose the text they did.  This will help students stay focused on the text during classroom readings.  The majority of the novel is read together as a class because of the difficulty of the prose for seventh graders, and students often tend to dismiss the text because someone else is reading.  I'm trying to find ways to keep student's focused on the text and follow along while someone else is reading.  My co-op has suggested that I teach my lessons for the first half of the day and then he'll teach my lessons to the second set of classes, allowing me to observe the changes and alterations he makes to my instruction.  I'm not sure how I feel about this yet, but I think it will be helpful and encourage me to continually improve my lessons.

Absences & Due Dates

My co-op usually follows the structure of introducing a text/theme, assigning independent reading and a worksheet to go along with the reading for her 4th block, "tech" section of English 11, which means students are handing in written work almost everyday. There are a lot of students in this class, probably around 30, and students are frequently absent or in other areas of the school, the resource room or learning support class, during class time. Because of the number of students missing class on a given day, the due dates for the assignments and worksheets are very flexible.

My co-op has a bin where she puts the worksheets for each day so that students know what they missed, but the students still come up to her and ask her to help them figure out what they missed and when it is due. I feel very overwhelmed by this process; I don't know how she stays on top of who missed what and what they need to make-up. Also, because she has flexible due dates for assignments, it means a huge amount of grading work for her at the end of the semester when students realize they need to turn in their work in order to pass. I completely understand why she has flexible due dates with the amount of absences and other things interfering with class work, but I also know that this system is not organized in a way that I feel I can manage in the Spring.

What do your co-ops do? How do they handle make-up work for absent students? What if the students miss an activity in class that they need to do/see in order to complete an assignment? Does your co-op have strict due dates? How frequently are your students receiving feedback (grades or otherwise) on their work?

"Keep Your Head Up"

One of my co-op's biggest pet peeves is when students fall asleep or put their heads down in class. It seems like a sign of disrespect and laziness and she's not alone in taking offense to this act. I never put much thought into the issue until today. It's such a shame that most of them time we fail to put thought into things unless they have some direct impact on us, but such is life. So anyway, what I'm trying to say is...

I haven't gotten a lot of sleep lately. By that I mean, I haven't been able to sleep in days. I wake up every 5 minutes, roll over, groan at the time, close my eyes and pray that this time I'll be able to sleep until morning. I don't think I've gotten more than 2 solid hours of sleep a night, for a number of reasons, and it's draining me. I find myself in conversations, completely listening and trying to digest the information, but unable to recall what happened. I find myself zoning out. Even now as I write this, I can barely focus.

For the first time, I am beginning to understand why these students keep their heads down. They're not being intentionally disrespectful. How can we expect them to learn about themes, imagery, big ideas, and characterization when even keeping their eyes open is a struggle? For whatever reason, these kids aren't getting enough sleep and it's wearing on their academic life. I feel like, at some point, we've all had those days where we know no matter how hard we try nothing is going to get done. We get tired, we get frustrated, and we check out. It's normal. It's natural.

I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this (probably because in the last week I've gotten the same amount of sleep most people get in a night) but I just wanted to throw it out there that there are so many factors that go into classroom behavior. It's not always disrespect.

Sorry that was so incredibly awful. To be honest, I knew I had to write a post yet this week, and in the half-awake state I'm in, this was the best I could offer.

Time Management in the Classroom

A frequent conversation I have with my co-op is the idea of not having enough time in a period to complete what we want to do. I often get caught up in the mindset that English is the only thing my students need to know, and they should spend all day with me, however, I'm quickly brought back to reality and realize that all of the other subjects are probably thinking the same thing. So, no matter how much I wish, or complain, or get frustrated about it, there's still only 40 minutes in a class period, and I have to do with it what I can. However, sometimes I feel like all of the great stuff we learn in class could never be possible in a classroom when there is only 40 minutes. For example, it would be great to do a free write with my students for 5-10 minutes everyday, but at the end of the week, that's 1/5 of the class time that week that could have been used for something else. Even when planning my unit, I felt like I had to leave out so much stuff, because there is only so much time within the year that I have. I could probably talk about about this for a very long time, but I'm sure you all understand. So I guess my real question for you all is how are you handling time management in your classroom? How much more do you think you could accomplish if you had more time? What kinds of things would you love to do in your classroom, but you don't have the time for?