Student Teaching

Following along.


Post all of your activities in your journal. All of the times and what reason was given to you for being assigned there.


Joe(I think you are doing a marvelous thing)Nation

Joe, I don't want to get my principal in trouble, so I keep fudgy notes on where I am during whole-class teaching. But, I do make cryptic notes alongside of my personal journal.

Well k, when you did substitute teaching before, did you have to sign something at the end of the day to say you'd done a day's work? Or maybe you got a print-out to verify that you'd worked & that you were entitled to pay? Whatever is the usual thing should apply....
You know, IF you can comfortably fit in a bit of substitute teaching, ASSUMING you're being paid for it, this might be a big help to your meagre finances. Only if this suits you, of course! But if you are doing unacknowledged substitute teaching without pay, then that is quite reprehensible on the part of your principal. You really need to know what's what straight away, before this goes on for too long. This could sour what sounds a very positive experience for you in every other respect. I'd really hate that to happen to you.

MsO, I submitted a time sheet each week. If I worked, I got paid for the day (full pay for partial days due to early dismissal of students). I don't submit hourly. I am not on the payroll. (sorry to be clipped, very tired).

Curriculum night was interesting - more to come.

Hmmmmm .....

Well, you know what I think, k. I won't go on & on about it.

I appreciate your chiming in, though! It was specifically addressed at the seminar tonight. We should not be subbing. In emergencies......oooookkkkaaaaay-ish.

Haven't been asked to sub again.

Have gotten 6 professional/recertification credits. I'm not even certified yet and I wonder if I'll be able to use them once I am. Certainly I will be able to use them on my resume! The credits came from a professional day on Monday. I took two courses on ELLs (English Language Learners) and one on Geography (all fabulous and helpful). There was an international lunch and two musical acts- a Chinese group and a West (I think) African musician. AND I got to see some old friends at the school I started at last year. Made some connections for my brother (getting a masters in teaching visually impaired students).

I've been friendly still with the cute gym teacher, though today was awkward. He started to say hi, so I said hi back, but he finished his hi with an address to a youngster sitting near me. Oops. Shrug.

I made a math unit review (pre-test) which I will be going over with a small group while being observed by my seminar leader - on Friday. I have minor edits to do on the lesson plan for that observation. I don't have time to worry about all the other work for the seminar - it'll come one step at a time.

My Supervising Practitioner (the 4th grade teacher I am working with SP) thinks I'm doing very well and need to stop being hard on myself. She is over-worked and I am trying to make things easier for her. We've started doing reading assessments on our students. I am finding that this is where my hearing problems will negatively affect my teaching skills. Not easy to hear a kid read a text out loud while surrounded by 17 other kids doing "QUIET" work.

On that note. All the issues with improper behavior have begun to be resolved. A parent came in to express concern about her daughter not performing as she should. I was a little chagrined at the mother's tact (very rigid), but as Ms D says, better to have a parent who is that vigilant than one who is totally uninvolved. The friendly girls are on probation, the new girl had a seat change and a stern warning.

We are initiating TRTs (Teacher Resource Team) on two students. The new girl and one boy we both feel has slipped through some crack somewhere. One or both will end up with an IEP (Individualized Education Plan - a legal document of classroom accommodation). Another students' IEP will be reassessed in November and I'll be in on that.

We are regrouping the classroom and it is working. Ms D is a maestro.

Phew! Have you been busy!

Well done!

<pats k on back>

This all sounds so great! And I'm really glad that you found such a good teacher to work with. That was really a major sour note in my educational experience. My teacher was NICE, and very skilled, but she'd never had a student teacher before and didn't know what she was doing. I'd never BEEN a student teacher before and didn't really realize until way down the line that what she was doing -- handing over the class to me and saying good luck -- wasn't quite kosher. She didn't really mentor me at all, just took off and let me flail. And flail I did! I did learn a lot that way, to be sure, but I felt really isolated.

Littlek--

My eyesight has always been marginal. When I was working with elementary school students in a Free School setting, I asked that the kids make a special effort to print/write clearly.

Most of them--whether they made an effort or not--were enlightened to find out that grownups--teaching grownups--had problems.

I liked the above rant so much that most of it made up my weekly journal entry - passed in to the seminar teacher. Didn't include the cute gym teacher part.

MsO - yep busy! And still happy (if tired).

Soz - I am her first student teacher. She is just built to be a great mentor. She's professionally mentoring two new teachers (one new to the school, one new to teaching) also this fall. She has a 11 month old baby who doesn't sleep through the night and lacks adequate sleep. AND, she will be working on an after school program for kids too. The woman is insane. I am trying to help. She calls me her co-teacher.

Noddy - True! I had taken that tact early on - kids will need to accommodate m disability and I'll accommodate theirs. There's nothing wrong with kids learning to speak clearly. And my hearing isn't THAT bad.


ONE UNIT

I've got my unit planned. It'll be on the 4th grade standard, The Regions of North America. I will start by projecting an outline of North America onto a large piece of paper mounted on the wall. The kids will take turns tracing the outline. They will OWN it. Next we find a way to differentiate the regions (maybe with colored pencil - lightly).

Then we can draw in physical features. Next we can do cities (demography) with relative size (protractor-circles - math). We could add many social studies data sets onto the map.

Science will involve studying plants and animals of different regions and how they adapt to their climate and terrain (fur color or texture, scales, gills, housing, feeding, community, leaf type, plant habit, root systems, etc). I already have that lesson pretty much written.

Language Arts can be any number of writing projects - will tailor to curriculum (may be on narrative writing then). Possibly poetry.

Math - distances between cities. Cities connected by lengths of string. Will need to use division (and possibly basic info on ratios) to figure out distance scale. String will have labels hanging or taped to it "Boston to Seattle, #### miles). Maybe try for areas of states - TX is #### square miles and MA is ### square miles. Students measure as best they can and then we check the facts to see how they did.

Sometimes it's hard to go from the student of many years ago, to the teacher. I had to disclose bad behavior to the teacher. The teacher told the parents. One student involved cried uncontrollably for many minutes. I feel like I ratted her out. I feel like I made her cry. Yuck.

Littlek, that must've been hard, but I guess it goes with the territory. I have a friend who's a teacher and he's had to face the same sort of challenges.

He works with high school kids, and one of his students recently came to him to talk about a poor grade she'd received from him. She was a cute, popular student, and tried to use her "cute girl" routine on him! I guess she thought if she just smiled and looked cute, he'd cute her a break.

As my friend said, "she found out that didn't work with me." No doubt, he felt like the bad guy too.

But hopefully, your students will learn something from these experiences.

Littlek--




Do you identify with kids in trouble?

Stray cat - they gave me the cold shoulder this morning, but had come around by later in the afternoon. Then they tried to be overly chummy and I had to stop them.

Noddy, I do identify with them a little. But, I wasn't that kind of trouble until I was much older. They're 9 going on 16. A 4th grade (maybe a 5 grade) girl stuffed three packages of toilet paper and some paper towels into the toilet after lunch. The bathroom flooded. One girl came in muttering "I hate school" over and over and over again. She wrote it on the herself, she wrote it on the bathroom board. She lingers in the hallway flirting with boys and hanging with friends. She leaves the classroom without telling anyone (against policy). She refuses to do writing and reading (though we know she can do it because sometimes she slips and shows us). I am totally bewildered about how to handle this kind of behavior. Thank god I'm student teaching and not head teaching. The policy with her and a couple other kids is to ignore them unless someone is being unsafe.

Aacccck! (thinking troubled girl... not that I have any ideas re appropriate response.).

You and me alike, Osso. Though I'm learning on my feet.

Littlek--

Those are two severely troubled girls.

Even as a Second in Command you have your hands full.

How is the Emergency Substitute situation going?

I did a little more subbing today, but I didn't mind as it was a) all fourth grade, b) technology content, and c) whole class instruction. 2 hours of good stuff, 40 minutes with the class I work in anyway.

I lead a letter-writing exercise with 'my' class today as well. It didn't go so well. I was modeling the writing of a letter (it's a book report in disguise). I was writing on the white board as they gave me ideas and wrote down the text we came up with. The class was a whole lot less responsive to me-as-teacher than to they are to Ms. D. But, that's fairly normal. So, they give me an event from the story to add to the letter. I work it into a sentence. I try to vary the structure so it's not all "The story is....." or "He did ......" So, I'd be writing these sentences that got sort of out of control. At this point, I'd normally go back and self-correct my own writing, but 18 kids were writing every word down and I just couldn't ask them to erase so we could start the sentence over. With modeling, you are supposed to make mistakes and correct them so that the kids can see the process. But, I couldn't do it that way during this activity. Very frustrating.

Yeah, it would be difficult enough to write something off the cuff like that in front of a class, without having to edit it as you go along.

Would it be possible to do the story, make the corrections as you go along, then give the kids a few minutes at the end of class to jot down the finished product? Or is that just not practical with the time limitations?