#student-teaching

[ashtrophysics]

I am going crazy because my mentor-teacher plans her classes poorly and I have no idea how to organize an exam review for my students.

[teachingandtea]

Calling All Teachers!

What do you usually eat for breakfast to keep you satisfied until lunch time? I’m eating either a bowl of cereal or oatmeal and a piece of fruit, but without fail, I am hungry again around 9ish. I will be student-teaching this year and I won’t really have access to a fridge or something to keep snacks in the classroom. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! 

[classroom-catastrophe]

Anxiously awaiting my student teaching placement...

I’m supposed to find out the school, grade level, and teacher who I’ve been placed with for spring student teaching either today or tomorrow. The excitement and nerves are starting to really sink in. I selected 2nd and 4th grade as my two top preferences since those are the grades I haven’t yet had experience with (I worked with 1st graders last semester and 3rd graders this semester). However, now I’m nervous about getting 4th grade because I’m worried they will be too old for my liking.

Tomorrow is my second-to-last day of senior methods! I’ve been so fortunate to have such a helpful, friendly, and supportive mentor teacher as well as such sweet, loving students this semester for senior methods. This is such a bitter-sweet time for me, marking the end of senior methods and the start of student teaching. I can only hope that my placement for student teaching will be just as (if not more) beneficial to the development of my teaching/classroom management skills!

[marknoldy]

Top Five Mistakes of Student Teachers

Top Five Mistakes of Student Teachers

We need great teachers. There is a large teacher shortage. If you have decided to become a teacher, you have chosen a rewarding career paths. I have been in the ‘ed game’ for 15 ‘seasons.’ Lucky for me, I was fortunate enough to have been assigned to an excellent and very experienced cooperating teacher. Thanks Mr. Caroscio! He shared a core belief that content knowledge was thetop priority.…

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[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

The Day the Music Died

I've been having trouble with my first period class. All they do is say mean stuff to each other all the time. It's like, super racist stuff from one that just sets off the others, who spout back mean homophobic stuff at the first kid, and it's just this constant back and forth of attacking that takes up all the class time. Like, mostly just yelling back and forth, but also a lot of throwing stuff and one time one kid tackled another. I only have four students but it's out of control.

So I asked the teacher of record what to do, and she said she'd have a talk with them. She came into class the Monday following that bad week and kind of just let loose on the one kid who was instigating with the racist comments. To be fair, he's usually the one starting it and is consistently late to class, has been refusing to do work lately, etc. But the boys who are mean to him, well, I think that they make him feel uncomfortable from the outset by being initially homophobic (trans*phobic, too) from the moment he walks in the room. So yeah, he lashes out, and this manner of expression is inappropriate for the classroom, the not-doing-work stuff and always being late stuff, I mean, but still. This teacher was a little hostile.

So, she started to walk away. I defended the first kid, saying the other two needed to apologize as well, that they had also acted super inappropriately, so she dragged some apologies out of them and left. Now I'm sitting here in silence. The kids look shell shocked. No one will talk. They're super unresponsive. I'd rather them be lively and insulting each other and making me hate myself than sitting here silently and refusing to do any work and making me hate myself.

I'm thinking that maybe I shouldn't be doing a job that only makes me hate myself regardless of the situation.

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Dr. Bomer's Class

Dr. Bomer just said the best thing about the texts we've been reading. Louise Rosenblatt wrote these books: Literature as Exploration and The Reader, the Text, the Poem. They're both pretty good books about transactional theory of reading. 

He said that what she has to say it that words aren't anything on the page by themselves. They aren't anything until the reader brings something to the table to make them mean. This reminds me of what Dr. Harpold used to say about signifiers and signified, and how the reader connects those things (point de capiton). Rosenblatt says that the reader has enough, that the reader comes to the table with enough, to make those words mean.

Dr. Bomer, you kill me. That was awesome. I am slain.

---

I guess I'm taking my class notes here right now. I just brought up one of my students' trouble with miscueing when he's reading. "Illustrate a paint" vs. "Illustrate a point." Dr. Bomer explained this as a kind of miscue that indicates an over-reliance on grapho-phonic cueing, an over-reliance on the letters that he sees in front of him rather than a syntactic or semantic cueing system.

He also suggested that rather than argue with him about whether or not his interpretation (Illustrates the paint) had any meaning, I should have probably praised him for his ability to use graphophonic cues before starting to bring in syntactic and semantic cues. Too bad I already argued with that kid and made him feel bad about his note taking because I'm a monster.

[whatshouldwecallstudent-teaching]

Thoughts on My New Job

I just need to write things. I have a full time teaching job now. It's hard. I'm bad at it. My students are insane and out of control. They feel entitled to everything, weird things like good grades with no work, me bringing (free) snacks in class, that they should have my sunglasses - it's a bizarre mindset. Everything is my fault. If they're failing, it's my fault for failing them, not theirs that they didn't do any work in class for the last three weeks. "Miss why did you fail me." I hear that every day. Because you turned in a blank sheet of paper? I don't know?

I've only been working here a few weeks, but nothing is right at the moment. I'm all about crossing every finish line, but I just don't know if I can make this one. I think I hate teaching. Like, I think that I legitimately hate this job that I chose and spent all this money and the last two years of my life working toward. Oh god what have I done.

WHAT HAVE I DONE.

NO REALLY WHAT HAVE I DONE.