Taking Over The Class

                              

       Starting the 16th of this month I took control of the class to begin teaching my three week lesson over The Odyssey. Leading up to the lesson the students were excited to have me take over the class asking a plethora of questions the following week. This gave me great encouragement that they would be as respectable as they had been the previous weeks with my CT. However, the first day of my teaching I found out this wood not be the case and had to re-establish control over the class. Students were quick to get off task, talking became a huge issue, and questions not relating to the assignment in an attempt to side track the lesson became abundant.
    
     During the first lesson once I realized I was starting to lose control of the classroom I stopped my lesson and started watching the clock. When I stopped this garnered a great deal of student attention with them asking me what I was doing. Once I told them I was waiting for them to quiet back down and focus with the intent of holding them after class for every second of my time they wasted class came quickly back on track for the rest of the day.  For the rest of the week this strategy helped to keep the class focused and on task. Also my CT suggested we start awarding achieve points for students being on task without excessive talking if they follow these simple rules they gain 10 additional points for the period.

    Coming into the lesson I had high expectations and was excited to have full control of the classroom for such and extended period of time. Knowing everyone has their own teaching style there have been many times when I have watched an instructor teach a lesson and think I would have really like it if such and such was done differently and this finally presented the opportunity for me to do just that. What I didn't realize was the struggle to come up with lesson that would keep the students engaged and excited one assignment that I thought would be most enjoyable (a short comic strip) bombed with most students who didn't wish to draw, while another assignment I thought they might not enjoy as much (writing a 1 page paper from a different character point of view) they loved and asked to be able to write more than 1 page.

   This has been a great experience seeing how difficult it can be to budget time, keep students engaged, and vary the lesson from day to day has been more challenging than I anticipated. I remember when I first started planning thinking how am I going to fill an hour and a half everyday without becoming mundane and now I wish classes were 2 hours long as time seems to go extremely quickly while teaching.


     So far I have received a great deal of positive feedback over my lessons with my CT offering comments after each class. Wednesday the Vice Principal came in while I was teaching and told me it seemed to be going really well when I was leaving the building and Friday there was a sub who said I appeared to be a natural teacher. With this constant encouragement it feels good to know that I am not completely bombing and letting my students down.
                                                   

Being On The Other Side of The Desk

                I can’t say enough how much I am enjoying being at me placement.  In past classes it always seemed a challenge to get the students to participate in discuss; however, with this class we often have to curtail the discussion to make sure there is time for everything planned. Since my last post the students have read Jack London’s To Build a Fire and Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game.

                With To Build a Fire we used the story to teach imagery and descriptive wording.  The students had to find 10 examples of imagery in the story and write why they thought each example was important. Next they had to find 5 words with a strong connotation and replace it with a word of their choosing. Finally they wrote a one page descriptive essay of a family member. We banned a number of plain words such as “tall, large, and skinny.” A number of students had trouble with this at first only thinking to put what one would find on a drivers license.  Though as other students started interjecting what they were putting everyone started to get the idea. One students description of her sister was harsh, yet received much laughter from her class mates with phrases such as “saying my sister looks like a beached whale would do an injustice to whales.” This assignment sparked into a lot of fun for the students thinking of how to paint an image rather than giving basic information.

                With the Most Dangerous Game we were able to teach different types of conflict. After the reading students were to define Man vs. Man, Man vs. Self, Man vs. Environment, and Man vs. Society then use a quote from the text to make support their claim. This was an especially interesting assignment for me as my CT found out she had 30 minutes to turn in a student review and left me to teach the assignment. After the students had finished their definitions and examples I led a discussion in which students shared what they had wrote and gave comparisons to each other. They seemed to struggle most with Man vs. Society , but after explaining how the society of the island was controlled by the antagonist and our protagonist struggle against it they started to get the concept. I was extremely pleased that the students still met expectations with me teaching just as if my CT had been and this gives me a great outlook for the rest of the semester with this class.

                I will start teaching a lesson over selected books from the Odyssey on the 16^th and planning for it has been rather interesting. With past lessons I have only had to plan for one day here I started planning it for a 2 week time frame and now have negotiated 3 weeks! I’ve learned that as educators there are many ideas we may wish to incorporate into a lesson; however, with time constraints this is not feasible. Trying to decide what to cut out and what to leave in has been a chore of patience every time I think I have exactly what I want I will look an hour later and start changing it again. With there being a state assessment of their essays at the end of the reading I feel a lot of pressure to make sure they really have the points reinforced to adequately write on the essay prompt. I’m more worried about how they will do than I have ever been for myself on a test as I feel their achievement will be a reflection on how well I conveyed the work.  

                Other than that I’m just trying to stay focused between class work, planning, and prestudent teaching I find  I will not be having much of a life this semester, yet everyday that I’m in the classroom reminds me that I’m fine with that. I really couldn't think of anything I would rather be doing and having a career that I love is worth any compromises I may have to make to get there.