Placement refelction

            At the end of the two placements for practicum, all I can think is that I cannot wait to student teach and to eventually have my own classroom. Being in the teaching role has never quite felt like a role to me, it has always felt like me. If I am scared of anything, it is probably taking the restrictions and guidelines that an administration and school department gives me and making it what I feel is necessary to teach the students. Overall, I’d have to say what excites me the most is that in the fall, I will get to meet a large group of wonderful high school students that I will spend an entire semester with. The worst part about the practicum placements was that they are not long enough and when the students start to get attached and really open up to you in their room, you have to leave. Luckily this is not the case in student teaching where I will really have the chance to get to know my students. This is definitely the most exciting part.

            To look at teaching two days and the differences. The second day of teaching is always completely different from the first. The first day of taking over a class, the students are not sure what to expect and they hold themselves back a little bit more or are more outspoken and forceful, trying to feel out what they are able to get away with. On the second day, students definitely fall more into their own paths and will let their sillier or more outgoing sides go. They see that while instructing their class, you will not bit their heads off.

            I am curious to find out where I will be placed and with whom. I know I can get along with almost anyone, but I really want to be placed with a teacher I completely click with and can show me a lot of really cool things. I have heard some horror stories, and that in itself is really scary to me when I think about my student teaching. But all in all I’m thinking positive, and I have not had any disastrous experiences yet.

High School Week 3

Week 3 at the high school was pretty awesome. The classes that Jess and I get to see are amazing and the students are absolutely wonderful. On Monday, we got the chance to bring in our own poetry prompts and have the creative writing class split into two groups and we each got to write with them. The prompt that I brought in asked students to write a poem about something that they do not know how to do. The students had fun exploring this, and one student even wrote a funny poem about not knowing how to be polite. I was able to get everybody to share in my group, even two students that my cooperating teacher has said never speak and have high anxiety about speaking. And here they were sharing their words with an almost complete stranger!

 This week, we were also able to run the journal activity for the class that we are going to be teaching next week. It was a ton of fun taking control of this class and seeing how responsive they would be to us. I think we are going to have a lot of fun. We saw some real brainy answers from these intelligent students that I see will be teaching me as much as I teach them. You can probably tell my excitement from reading this.

Jess and I also got the chance to share narratives we had written about instances in our lives. This is something my cooperating teacher calls an occasion paper. At the end of every quarter, every student is asked to write an occasion paper and share it in front of class. If they type it up and share it, it is an automatic A. This allows students to tell funny stories and hear their own writing being read, allowing them to notice mistakes. This activity was a lot of fun and I think I want to use this in my own classroom.

I’m basically super excited to be teaching this week. Jess and I have written some solid lessons that we hope can be fun for these students but also “rigorous.” It seems like we are on the same page with a lot of things and we have an excellent team dynamic that can shine in a classroom. The only worry I have is that we will run out of time. We have a lot that we want to do as we are introducing a book to them and we want to make sure we have enough time for our activities. I think that we will be fine though.

High School Week 2

When it comes to classroom roles and unspoken rules, the high school I am placed at is incredibly different from the middle school. In mostly all of the high school classrooms I am in, the students immediately sit down and begin to work on the journal question or prompt that is on the board. These are normally funny and interesting, allowing for the students to get their brain motors moving. One of the journal prompts even had students comparing and contrasting “Little House on the Prairie” with “The Walking Dead”. After they would discuss the prompt. This is polar opposite from the middle school classroom I was in where students would come in noisy and take a while to settle down when the teacher instructed to. Then they would go into teacher directed instruction instead of student led discussion on the prompt.

From what I have seen, it seems like academics are valued more than sociability in the high school as opposed to the middle school. There is also a general understanding in the classroom that no matter what is said during classroom discussion, no one’s answers will be judged. There is also an understanding that if you make a point on anything, the teacher will then ask students to elaborate on what they said for deeper understanding. This is very different from the middle school as I saw many students making fun of others if there statements were not very clear. The sharing environment in the middle school was more tense because of this, and students were less open to sharing their ideas.

I am curious to what the cause is for these two worlds to be so different. The middle school was more diverse than the high school and there is a big age difference between seventh graders and 11^th graders, but could the difference also be caused by the differences in the instructor. I wonder if the middle school classroom had a journal to do quickly would students be more willing to share and settle in quicker, or would the students still lack the respect to not laugh at classmates’ misguided answers or statements in response to questions.

I think it would be interesting to see what would happen in the high school classroom if the teacher got rid of journal entries upon entrance. I’m curious if the way students come in and settle quickly would deteriorate without the prompt. I definitely plan on using journal prompts in my classroom so students can settle in right away.