All posts tagged: student teacher

Residual Trauma

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It’s hard to describe to someone who has never taught in a public school the burdens of working so closely with students who have faced trauma. The heavy weight of knowing a student’s story and trying to balance that with the burdens of teaching can take a toll that is rarely discussed. Today, that toll was written all over the face my of my student teacher. I’m not really sure why I thought to write this down, but I think it’s important to remember that we are not immune to the residual effects of our students’ lives. Today I spent quite a portion of my first hour checking in with students who I don’t see on a regular basis and reminding them that we are testing on Tuesday. This made me feel more like a used car salesman than anything else. I had to try to convince them that they should come in on a day when most of the school doesn’t have to attend. I hate that this was my idea. But at the same …

What’s working. What’s impractical

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Today was a solid reminder of how teaching is 99% assessment. I am constantly assessing something, especially the situation I find myself. I have now tried several ideas in the math class for getting students to settle down into a routine. The problem is that I have yet to set a routine. Having CM gone in the middle of creating materials has been a challenge for me. I’m looking at these materials and trying to figure out what to do with them now. Tomorrow I’m supposed to meet with the long term sub to plan for the next unit. He seems very capable and competent, so I have high hopes for what we can accomplish together. In fact, he impressed me with his work ethic and flexibility today as he moved between the groups of students and helped out with problem solving and negotiation of meaning. Deep down, this shouldn’t impress me as much as it is. However, we need more teachers who are willing to do the extra work. When I see a teacher this dedicated, …

Repeating Lessons

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I’m not sure how long it will take me to finally learn this, but I really need to stop running lessons that are untested. I say this almost every time I tell a new teacher about my biggest mistakes, but I keep on making it. Sure, I could say that today was officially not my fault due to the student teacher having the lesson plan that needed to be modified. But again, it was my call. Yet, I can’t help the sense of relief (relief is not the proper nomenclature for the feeling I get, but it’s the first word that popped into my head) whenever I walk away with a better plan for next time. As I am trying to improve my thinking to be more positive, I’m going to start with what went well. My classroom management skills are definitely getting better with every encounter I have. More and more I am practicing the use of holding firm to a solid set of class rules that are enforced without compromising flexibility. By this, I mean that my …

Observing Teachers

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Today was an interesting day. I learned a lot about performing observations and now understand some of the dilemma administrators go through when observing teachers. My student teacher asked me to observe for certain behaviors today, so she can improve her practice. I have never done this before. As such, I decided to do what all of my observers have ever done and take running notes on anything that happened in class, specifically things that she said and did. It wasn’t until I was taking notes that I began to catch the subtle faults in the notetaking process that make it near impossible to truly retain accuracy. The first problem I noticed was that my brain immediately began to make assumptions, both good and bad, based on one or two classroom phenomenon. For example, I wrote that she was doing a great job at ignoring the smaller side conversations and keeping the class moving. Shortly after I took that note, she stopped ignoring them and began to focus on them. This is obviously my fault as I …

Swimming

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The old saying that you don’t know something unless you can teach it is an accurate proverb for just about anything in life. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing that would contradict this. Today, this adage taught me more than I had considered at the beginning of the day. After yesterday’s faulty lesson, I considered today’s lesson plan at length and made sure that I was leading the way. I didn’t want to put my student teacher in that unprepared position again. At its core, the concept stuck with me that I was not only teaching my class but the teacher candidate as well. I realized that one of my critical tasks in being a host teacher is to guide my student teacher into teaching through modeling and feedback. In my experience, I have seen this piece of student teaching disappear completely as student teachers are expected to take on the role of a classroom teacher with as much experience in a short amount of time. However, I remember my own experiences student teaching …

Student Teaching

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When I decided to take on a student teacher, I never expected to face the kinds challenges that I am currently faced with. I guess I never considered the human side of teaching when volunteering to host another human in my room. Today was a hard day for her. Hell, today was a hard day for many of us. For some reason the students were loud, fidgety, and oblivious to adults in the room. This is where I learned the most. For starters, I should definitely do a better job of planning with my student teacher. We walked in without much of a plan today. Okay, let me take that a step back. We definitely had a plan. However, that plan was neither practiced or rehearsed in any way. Therefore, I declare the plan to be half-assed. That’s on me. This seems to be the trap that us teachers fall into when planning with each other. We think that we can just tell someone to do something or take something over without realizing the consequences of such an …

Teamwork Tuesday

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Today was a great day. In fact, it was one of those where I really wasn’t sure where the day was going to end up when I first arrived at work. Things were a bit hectic this morning as I am still overcoming illness and catching up from being gone for two days while at training. In Econ I jumped right in. I think this helped quite a bit for my self esteem and generally getting the day started on the right foot. It also helped that prior to this, my student teacher and I worked at some lessons for not only today but also for the coming weeks. This made me feel very productive. Lesson to be learned here: collaboration is key. We are far more effective as teachers and human beings in general when we work together. In the sheltered math course we spent a great deal of time working one on one with students to help them through identifying the slope and y-intercept to writing the equation of a line. This has been very difficult …