I scanned the Notes to Myself sheet…

My hopes are…
Thank god I actually did feel comfortable in front of the class after about a week. I was remembering what an unanimated person I was during my Methods lessons before starting to teach my class in January. I even think my students learned a little bit from me through the course of me teachign them. I don’t know if they got anything besides facts and histories, but it’s only been four months.

My fears are…
My fears almost turned out to come true a couple of times. Once or twice I found myself behind or in a crunch, but I don’t think it showed in the classroom. There were even a couple of times (especially in the beginning) that I felt almost as if I wasn’t ready. The very beginning of my Renaissance unit would be a good example. I had to use my own material, and had absolutely no clue what to do even though I had created a complete unit on the Renaissance in Methods.

The beliefs about student teaching and learning that I want to remember are…
I did have fun, mostly when I was in class. I’ve been very lucky to have had such a great class with whom I can have a sense of humor. Plus, I didn’t have too many discipline problems.

I totally forgot, constantly all the time that mistakes are _OK_. I had to forcibly remind myself on several occasions in order to _relax_ and get stuff done.

To close it all, I am still learning on my last day of student teaching. I think this was the first time in my life that I could _feel_ myself learning over an extended period of time. Normally you go through a learning experience, and realize at the end that you have learned more. Sometimes it felt like someone was trying to squeeze the information at a constant rate through my ears.

I’m glad it’s over.

Monday we had our last student teaching seminar. Like the other two, it was pretty informative. First we were in our certification groups to present our portfolios. We all evaluated eachother’s and gave each person their sheet at the end to look at. Most everyone commented on the organization of mine. It took me a while and it’s nice and neat. The only problem is that I have to completely redo the table of contentses if I add anything (which I will after seeing everyone elses).

After that we did mock interviews. First I must say that I thought they would be interviewing everyone. There were about 50 of us in the room, and each interview (one question) took about 7 minutes. That’s 350 minutes, what?! It turns out they were only going to do as many as they could in an hour or so.

Needless to say, it was very informative. I’m not as nervous at the thought of the interview process anymore (even though I won’t do it for another year).

I had the closest thing to a behavior problem yesterday in class. While my students were doing deskwork they decided to start teacher bashing. One student said, “So-and-so is dumb.” I told her that that was unacceptible in my class. Her objection was that other teachers let her say such things, and she discusses things like that with her friends. I told her that disrespecting other teachers (and anyone for that matter) was unacceptible in my class, and that she could talk like that when with her friends. “Fine, I will.” For goodness sake I can’t believe teachers let their students talk bad about other teachers.

This reminds me of another thing. I had a student say that all French people are thoughtless, and used the word “pissed” on a test. Pissed doesn’t bother me, it just doesn’t belong on a test. I couldn’t believe the student would generalize, stereotype, and insult a particular nationality on a test! This is a student who is normally very intelligent, and I thought would know better.

I’ll describe the class a little. There are 13(12) students in the class (one is almost always out on disciplinary issues). They have varying degrees of ability, but the problem is that they either have very little knowledge of the world around them, or they choose not to share it. Ithink the latter is true for at least a couple of them. On a good day you can get a couple of them to answer questions.

You’ll see now why I felt today (Fri. 4/15) as a minor success. This was the third time I’ve formally taught this class, and I managed to get some participation out of some of them. It could have something to do with the day of the week (Friday) and the beautiful weather, but don’t take this small victory away from me.

I started the lesson with the question, “Why do people fight war?” I think it helped them to have me start off with something easy. I continued to prompt answers in a discussion about arms races and balance of power in order to introduce the causes of WWI. We’ll see when they take their quiz on Monday if they understood it.

Later in the class they did some maps with labelling and coloring the two sides of WWI. They hated it and wanted to give up because the answers weren’t given to them right away. They had to find them. I hope stuff like that will help them to learn to *think* and figure stuff out for themselves. It seems that too often the answers are given to them, probably for the sake of expediency.

Monday or Tuesday I’m giving them another easier map to color the different sides so they can focus more on what’s there rather than having to use critical thinking skills.

I should probably go through and re-evaluate all of those things that I learned early on in student teaching, that I may be forgetting now towards the end. It’s become especially easy to forget considering I’m doing a lot more work with it now, what with teaching with all of my own material in two classes this next week.

Now that I have a better hang on creating lessons, I need to work on making them more interesting. That’s a difficult thing to do. I need to find more ways to relate the material to my students. I need to find more interactive things for them to do. I need to find ways to get them out of their seats so they don’t get glued to them and fall asleep. I need to find ways to get my students to ask questions, rather than listening for answers.

These are some of the things that I’ve been trying to work on while planning for this week, and the next.

Tomorrow we’re doing something that I hope my students will be interested in. I call the lesson “The Real Columbus”. We’ll talk about what they’re taught about Christopher Columbus, as well as the real story of things that are left out. Hopefully towards the end I will have my students worked up about how they feel with regards to celebrating Columbus Day. They will be writing an essay that night stating their opinion and supporting it. If I can get them a little excited about it, it will be easier for them to write it.

We’ll see how it goes.

It turns out that a little under half the class wasn’t able to finish it in that amount of time. I don’t know if it wasn’t clear enough how much time they would have, but I truly hope not. I made sure to tell them exactly what they needed to have done by the end of each block, and how much time they would have to do it.

I know for sure that they all could have finished in that amount of time if they had pushed it, but that’s not really what I want. I think I could have given them slightly less to write for their projects. That seems to be what took the most time.

Another problem I found with this project is that a little under half the students didn’t understand the directions fully by the halfway point today. I think I was clear enough in the directions about how much they needed to write, and I specifically made mention of it when I went over the direction sheet. I think the problem lies in students not paying any attention to me, or the direction sheet. Not all of my students were unclear, but enough to be annoying.

My cooperating teacher has what she calls a theory. She says that if you have students write out the directions themselves, then perhaps they’re more likely to remember and pay attention to it. The only problem I have with this is that I like to make absolutely sure all the students have the directions in the words that I want. Some students may not write them down, or not transcribe everything correctly. Plus, I think they’re more likely to save a white worksheet than a piece of white lined paper with written directions.

I’ve thought of a possible solution to this, a compromise if you will. When I was trying to think of what I could to to improve this, my mind wandered over to the fill in the blank notes that me and my cooperating teacher sometimes do. What if I did a fill in the blank instruction sheet? It would seem silly to the students, but would be to their benefit. I could hand them direction sheets with missing *important* components of the directions. I would make it clear that they need to pay attention and get all of the blanks or they won’t have all the requirements, therefore get a bad grade. We would go over the directions (perhaps with a *completed* overhead of the directions) and the students would fill in what they need.

I have no clue if this would work, but it’s an idea. I don’t think I’ll have occasion to use it in the near future, but I’m going to keep it in mind. I just don’t understand how students can be unclear of what they’re doing with an explicit direction sheet and me explaining everything in the beginning as well.

I know they thought the video was a little boring, although I think they would take a boring video over none (just count how many times they ask if we’re “watching a video today?”).

They *did* seem to like the power point though, and my cooperating teacher agrees. I created different slides with Renaissance and Medieval art side by side, and we made comparisons between the two. I focused on things like religious vs. secular, realism, proportion, perspective, etc. They were all participating with my questions and analyzing the pieces, and I was quite pleased.

I think there are a few things that I would add if I were to do this again in the future. I want to talk a little bit more about perspective, and perhaps show a few more slides that really show the difference. I think I might have been able to show a couple of slides for each topic as well. Also, I should put in little fact slides before or after each thing that I show that displays what I talk about in writing. For example, after I demonstrate the differences in proportion between the two styles, I could create a slide with a bulleted list reiterating what I just said.

I think perhaps I should have done more slides about specific Renaissance artists as well. I probably could have done that instead of showing the film now that I think about it. They would have been more interested, and I think seeing the paintings would have had more meaning for them.

The hard part for me is that I can’t see them in my mind. I don’t really clearly know what a transition is specifically. In general I understand the concept, and why it helps.
I think what might help me would be to see someone not so great at transitions teaching. Then I might actually see the students that you lose when you don’t make that smooth.

I’m probably analysing it a little too much. I think I probably understand it better than I think I do. Phew, that doesn’t really make sense. I just need to think about them more often than I do. I had forgotten for a while about transitions altogether.

Planning a review game for class takes more thought than you would think. Today I learned a few things from my failures in the game I planned. It wasn’t a complete failure, because I think it did help them. I just think that they weren’t as engaged as I would like, and some of them were distracted.

The number one thing that I don’t think I will ever forget: Points points point. For goodness sake how could I have forgotten that the fun of playing review games was the thought of winning? I forgot to score points, and brushed it aside when they realized part way through. I’m sure that contributed to some of their *complacency* (yesterday’s word of the day).

The second thing I learned was actually from my second block class review game. I didn’t plan this game, but helped do it in class. When I did my game I had a problem with only a few students in each group giving answers to a question. The solution I saw in second block was to ask a specific student a question. If he/she gets that correct the team gets 3 points. If he/she needs to defer to the team to answer they get 2 points. If they can’t answer, or get it wrong the other team can answer for 1 point. What a great idea!

I didn’t completely botch up the game though. I decided well before hand that I would organize the groups myself, so that I could put strong students with weak students. I wanted balanced teams, as well as for the weak students to hopefully learn a little from their fellow teammates.

My cooperating teacher asked me today if I thought the students were ready for tomorrow’s test. I honestly wish I could have told her a sure yes or no. Well, I don’t wish I could have told her no, but my answer was very wishy washy. I think that I feel a little more confident in how they will do on tomorrow’s test (with the exception of a few) than I did earlier, but we shall see how that fares tomorrow.

In the end we aren’t going to count the quizzes, but I think it served as a good eye opener for a lot of them. We have a test in two days, and they don’t really know their stuff. I think for some of them that will help to get them to study for their test on Friday. I have a strong feeling for a couple of them that may will discourage them to not even bother.

I have one student in particular in one of my classes who just doesn’t want to do anything, and I worry that he thinks it’s because he can’t so why bother. It shall be interesting to see if I can get him to start putting in effort.

On a good note, we did a fun simulation yesterday. My cooperating teacher wanted to show the students what it was like for the Chinese during the imperial exams in the Ming Dynasty, so she created a scenario where they went through their own similar imperial exam.

It was based on a lesson she found online for a young adult book called The Examination. The book is about a young Chinese boy and his brother’s voyage for the older brother to take the imperial examination. It’s a great way to learn more about Chinese culture at that time, and I’ve been reading bits and pieces of it.

I think the students enjoyed the simulation, and I think they have some idea of what we’re trying to portray for them. If a person fails (and they all will on theirs) the exam they can retake it in three years (which will be Thursday for them). They had a very broad question, “What is the meaning of life?”, and they had to write a four line poem. The part that I thought was amusing was that they had to write in cursive, and penmanship counts. They aren’t actually being graded on it, but hopefully that will give them some idea as to how difficult the exam was, and the conditions the exam takers were put under.