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.