Just when I thought student teaching at Bales couldn't get any crazier, it did. Monday was, by far, the hardest day of student teaching yet. Going to school on Monday, I was not in a very good mood and teaching when you do not feel very happy is tough. As I mentioned in my last post, I am now sharing a classroom with Mrs. Bjorklund. We did not really get to organize much since she left early on that Friday which means that the classroom was total chaos on Monday. Plus, I finally took over the homeroom on Monday and the kids normally just socialize during that time. However, I really want to do other things with them during homeroom, but is going to be a bit of a process to get them to adjust to how I think homeroom should run. Needless to say, homeroom on Monday did not go according to plan.
Since homeroom was a bit of a disaster, this then carried over into first hour. It is difficult to expect the students not act crazy when the classroom feels crazy and the teacher feels crazy. However, I still had things I needed to teach and stuff we needed to accomplish, but it was next to impossible to get anything done. Basically, by the end of the first hour I was beyond frustrated and in a completely awful mood. Thankfully, I was able to go have a nice cry in Jodi's office and she helped a lot. During the afternoon class, it started out really rough and I yelled at them; I really am not much of a yeller, but I had absolutely zero patience and did not know what else to do. Thankfully, Jodi came a little bit into class and helped me straighten things out. We had a talk with them (including me apologizing for being a in a bad mood and yelling at them/being part of the problem) and I genuinely believe they felt bad.
I was telling Katie about my day after school and she said something that made me feel a bit better. I was telling her how I knew part of the students' bad behavior was my fault and part of it was their fault. She told me that it takes some teachers years to realize that their attitude and behavior can be part of the problem with the students. It seemed really natural to me to realize that since I was in a bad mood, I was affecting the students. It always makes me feel better when I seem to be doing and realizing things that teachers who are far more experienced cannot seem to grasp.
The next day things were much better. However, it is a little bit frustrating that they seemed to lose a lot of their personality after getting in trouble. Another teacher told me that she often finds you can let them behave inappropriately and keep the personality or you can get them to behave but lose personality. Jodi seems to think that their personality will come back with a little bit of time and I think I agree with her. By the end of the week, they were still behaving well (with the exception of Thursday when they had a sub, but more on that in a minute) and we were able to have a bit of fun too.
On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday I spent nearly all of my time that I was not teaching in the main office helping to prepare for the state audit of ELD (English Language Development). There are a lot of different requirements for students who have not tested proficient in English and there is a ton of paperwork that goes along with it. So, I went through a lot of student files checking to make sure they had their paperwork completed and in the correct folder. It was a pretty tedious and boring project, but, again I was glad I could help. The state visited on Thursday when I was gone and we will not know if we passed or failed until later.
On Thursday, I went to training for Language! (or LangBang as we have nicknamed it), which is a core replacement program. We are soon going to be implementing this in our school for our ELD, special ed, and fall far below (failing the state test) students who need really need extra help with reading, writing, and language. The program actually seems pretty good and could be really effective for these students. It not really something I think I would like teaching because it is sooooo scripted, but if it helps my students, then I am for it.
As I mentioned above, my students had a sub on Thursday since I was gone (Mrs. Bjorkland too). I was worried about leaving them because I knew they probably were not going to behave well for the sub and there were some things I really wanted to teach on Thursday that the sub would not be able to do. Honestly, it is much easier to just teach than prepare for a sub; I feel like I lost a whole day of important instruction. The sub did leave a bad report and on Friday I had to have another discussion with my students. I am worried they are going to start hating me, but they know that their behavior for the sub was truly unacceptable.
There are only two more weeks until the end of the quarter, beginning of fall break, and my much anticipated (week long) return to Cornell. Also, this is my last week living with Katie; I am going to move on Saturday to stay with Julia (a 1st and 2nd ELD teacher at my school) for the rest of my time. She lives in Phoenix so it will be nice to live a bit closer to things like Target and Starbucks.
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