that little star* in the margin: a blog about teaching

Teaching = Awesome!

2011-02-01T17:50:00.000-06:00

Today was my second day teaching my unit on Downriver. All of my students seemed to really enjoy it, and some of them even expressed that they really liked it so far. That made me so happy. They've responded really well to the activities I have planned, too. :) I'm really pleased they've had a positive response to the novel since I decided to change it from what my cooperating teacher normally teaches at this time.

Yesterday, they did a webquest as an introduction to the novel after we completed a short grammar activity. Today, I showed them some photos of the Grand Canyon and Storm King Mountain in Colorado. Then, I showed them a video of a couple of people rafting the Lava Falls rapid on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The raft flipped, so of course the kids loved it. I made up a character list sheet for them, so they could keep track of all the characters. I also made up a "river lingo" vocabulary sheet to help them with whitewater rafting/river terms they may not have been very familiar with. I'm SO glad I had these two resources for them, especially the character list. It was a huge help as we began reading today.

Looking forward to tomorrow! :)

Preparing for Teaching

2011-01-29T10:26:00.000-06:00

On Monday, I will begin teaching Downriver by Will Hobbs to my 7th and 8th grade classes.

I am so excited.

However, I still haven't seen a "normal" class since I began student teaching because they've been working on a cooperative project the whole time. I'm a little concerned because it's a reading intervention classroom. I'm not writing a full unit plan until I get a couple of days under my belt. That way, I can see how to pace my lessons. Since the program is a double dose of reading, we're not allowed to give any homework, so all of the reading has to be done in class. These kids are the ones who really struggle with reading, so I know it will be slow going. I just don't know how slow. My unit is supposed to be 5-7 days, but in this type of classroom environment, it looks like it will be more along the lines of 3 weeks. I'm okay with that, but I just hope my university supervisor will be, too.

I've already prepared my introductory material and some pre-reading activities. I think the kids will enjoy this book, and I hope I can get them really engaged in the reading. :)

Snow Days, Snow Daze

2011-01-26T09:56:00.000-06:00

Well, this is my third week of student teaching, and I still haven't gone to school for a full week due to snow. In fact, the number of snow days we've had almost equals the number of days I've actually gone to my first placement school. It's a little frustrating because I feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good experience, and it keeps pushing the project the kids are working on farther and farther behind, but today I'm kind of glad for it.

The kids have been working on PPT presentations and building hot air balloons since I began. Well, on Monday my cooperating teacher got VERY sick and had to leave early. She was out yesterday, which left me teaching the class with a sub (I'll explain more about that in a minute). Almost ALL of the kids finished their presentations yesterday, leaving me with nothing to do with them for today.

Actually, most of the kids finished their presentations early in the class period. My cooperating teacher had only left instructions for us to work on the PPTs. Luckily, I knew many of them would be finished, so I took the liberty of copying a few word ladder games and a few easy sudoku puzzles for them to work on afterwards. I'm glad today was a snow day, though, because I wasn't looking forward to having nothing to do with them today if my cooperating teacher didn't give me some ideas. I couldn't start anything new with them because the classes are still combined with the math classes.

So, my experience with the sub...I've heard many teachers grumble that they wished the student teachers could be the "sub" if they were ever absent. "It doesn't seem fair that we pay a sub to sit there while you do all the work," they say. This was true in my case. My sub was a nice girl, but she didn't help me at all. Not that I'm complaining - I actually liked getting to see how the kids worked for me without my cooperating teacher there. But, it made me inclined to agree with those teachers who complain. Student teachers should be compensated for their time when their cooperating teacher is absent since they are the ones doing the actual work. That's not the case, though, and some lady got paid $80 to sit and play sudoku all day. Oh well...that's the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose.

Student Teaching

2011-01-16T10:06:00.000-06:00

I began my student teaching endeavors this past Friday at Christiana Middle School. It was certainly an interesting experience, especially after a 4-day delayed start due to snow. I'm wondering how my classroom experience here will affect my overall student teaching experience, as I am teaching in a reading intervention/remediation program for struggling readers. It's not a "normal" classroom environment. Much of their time is spent on computers, following a program that has been tailored for their specific needs. My cooperating teacher (who, upon first meeting, seems absolutely wonderful) also had her doubts of the benefits of my placement there. She didn't feel like it was the best way for me to learn "how to teach".

Regardless, I'm looking forward to the experience. The classes are very small (7-12 students on average), and it will help me to think outside of the box when it comes to helping students who are struggling. I am beginning to plan for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry which is what I will begin teaching after the students are done with their balloon projects (a project coordinated with the math teacher). I'm excited, and I am sifting through information to go along with the novel that will be appropriate for this environment. If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear them!

The Intern.

2010-09-15T14:00:00.000-05:00

I'll be interning this semester and I'm excited to get in the classroom. I think it will be such a huge help going into next semester's student teaching with some experience under my belt. I will be at a high school in Murfreesboro working with a mentor teacher for the remainder of this semester. For the internship, I am required to keep a blog on wordpress and you can find it HERE. It will strictly be about my internship, and I may double post some of the information here on my regular blog. I'll be going for my first day on Monday morning, so stay tuned! :)

Diagrammaticality...huh?

2010-09-02T09:06:00.001-05:00

So, I'm taking a course on the use of modern grammar and, after the first day, I can tell it's going to be fairly intense. I've already had to read a lot about the history of grammar and ideas about linguistics, etc. Mostly drab stuff, right? Right. However, I did come across a bit of information in one of the essays presented in the book Language Alive in the Classroom. This particular essay was written by Edwin Battistella. In it, he comments on an issue that I have heard raised on more than one occasion, and that is the relevance of grammar. He writes:

The fact that students are anxious about grammar suggests that they will be attentive to the question of grammatical correctness, and there is a fairly extensive body of literature on how and whether grammar should be taught. Turning students' concerns about grammar into a teachable moment has some risks, of course: it is easy to be misunderstood in a classroom, and when students are told that traditional grammar is inadequate and that no varieties of language are linguistically right or wrong, they may hear that grammar does not matter.

Grammar does not matter. Have you heard this proclamation lately? It's absurd. Grammar is not a full, firm set of rules that constitute a language. That's the misconception we're seeing today. Grammar is descriptive of a language. Just as language grows and changes, so should the grammar describing it. Of course, there ARE rules. Without them, language could very well run rampant and it would all be foreign, but I think people approach grammar in the wrong way. Grammar should comment on the appropriateness of the use of language in different settings, not dictate an absolute right and absolute wrong.

But those are just my thoughts.

Congressional Candidate on Education

2010-08-02T17:51:00.000-05:00

I have recently been plagued by terrible television commercials for Diane Black and Lou Ann Zelenik. After being annoyed by them for about the thousandth time, I decided to read up on the two.

This, which is written out twice exactly the same, from Lou Ann Zelenik's website:

I support merit pay for good teachers, classroom discipline, parental involvement and reject social promotion through rewriting of our school text books, with an agenda.

What? Think about that sentence for a moment.

I'll leave you with that to simmer.

A Note About Standardized Testing

2010-07-28T10:35:00.000-05:00

...it stinks.

But we all knew that, right? We've all been on the test taker side of this topic. And now, as I am making the transition to the other side of this equation, I'm beginning to realize that it's worse on this side. I'd rather take a test any day than have to rely on the results of my students' test scores to keep my job. It doesn't matter how good of a teacher you are because some kids are just terrible test takers. Students are unreliable when it comes to testing. Sometimes, it's a bad day. Sometimes, it's just a bad test. "Teaching to the test" - a phrase I never heard until I went to a public high school. This notion is what I am least looking forward to in my own classroom. What can you do, though? Especially with these new Race to the Top funds that TN has been granted - it's even more important that students perform well on these tests. You have to teach what is going to be tested, otherwise you're putting your job in jeopardy.

In an ideal world, I'd have control over what's being taught in my own classroom.

Website Atrocities.

2010-07-26T10:35:00.000-05:00

I just finished a class called "Microcomputers in the K-12 Educational Setting." A bit antiquated, huh? Well, that was the tone for the entire class. Basically, our professor had us build an entire website using Microsoft Word (gag). Now, I'm no html professional, but I've used Dreamweaver and other such html editing software and, after you get the hang of it, it's lightyears better than Word. Ok, so I realize that not everyone has access to Dreamweaver or something similar (::cough:: even though there are plenty of free html editors out there), so I guess that's why Word was the program of choice. BUT, to force us to use Word is ludicrous. I had to keep everything really basic, because trying to do anything more was entirely too frustrating.

Needless to say...I'm glad the class is over.

Revitalization!

2010-07-22T16:04:00.001-05:00

I'm reinventing my blog to chronicle my life as an aspiring teacher. I am currently in the middle of my master's program at MTSU in Murfreesboro, TN. The degree program is Curriculum & Instruction for Secondary Education and it's part of the initial licensure track. So far, it's a bunch of BS. I have learned TWO things that can be applied to a career in teaching.

1.) How to make a lesson plan.
2.) How to make a good test.

After 8 classes, 2 of them have taught me 1 piece of useful information each.

"Educational reform" is a myth. A joke. TN has heralded a "better teacher education program" for its universities. As a product of one of these programs, I can safely say that I am sorely unprepared to enter the classroom as a teaching professional. I say this now because next semester will be my last before student teaching and all I lack are two education courses. The other three courses I will be taking are English classes (fun!) to meet the requirements for a secondary English endorsement on my license. I hope my student teaching semester will give me a hefty dose of pertinent information to take with me to my own classroom because my professors sure haven't done anything to prepare me. How do you expect aspiring teachers to learn how to teach when you are incapable of doing so? It doesn't make any sense that I am supposed to be learning how to teach from those who cannot teach.

Also, the field of education has the most acronyms I have ever seen. Professors throw them out there like the whole world has been hanging on to every tidbit of information trickled down from the educational head honchos. NCLB, IDEA, IEP, INTASC, NEA, GLE, SPI, CATs, HOTs...and these are just a few. I've spent a good amount of time Googling things these past two semesters because my professors don't care to explain anything.

I'm crossing my fingers that I turn out okay after all this.