This Teacher's Life

Hopefully all of you reading this are enjoying your practicum week-- I am realizing that my time in the classroom is the best time of my week. I think its interesting that when I thought that "Practicum Week" was going to be really stressful because of the hours spent in my school, it is more stressful because of the things going on outside of school.
There are still just as many demands from outside forces and I think that as a teacher, hopefully there will be a more steady schedule.
I really liked seeing my school on a Monday-- there are more procedural aspects of my homeroom, like seeing how jobs are assigned and different "Monday Tasks." I asked my teacher at lunch duty today if she could notice a difference in behavior between Thanksgiving and winter break. Her perspective was that at Lafayette there wouldn't be as much acting out as there is excitement. Her past experience in PG county was that students would act out because they did not want to spend time at home. I realized that there are a lot of students who (as much as they resist and dread school) enjoy the stability and predictability of the school expectations.
Language arts in my class has been overtaken by social studies. Students are asked to respond to "diary entries"for our unit on Westward Expansion and there are not very many writing techniques or scaffolding modeled.
My class has recently started using Cornell Notes to read the textbook, but many students read and define the key terms and don't comprehend the lessons and chapters they are reading and taking notes on.
I know my teacher (like so many) is pressed for time because of holidays and special events. Tomorrow my class is visiting the middle school to shadow students for next year. I find it interesting because I know of at least 3 students who are planning on going to private school for 6th grade. My teacher is interested to see the different expectations and hopes to shadow a teacher in reading (to get a feel for expectations). I am interested to hear her perspective as well as to see a different environment than Lafayette.

Holiday Parties and Language Arts

I think the downfall of teaching will be the afterthought of holiday parties. Because we didn't have school on Tuesday, I went to my practicum on Wednesday which also happened to be Halloween. The morning was close to business as usual, but the afternoon was madness.

My teacher decided before school even started that our class was going to be distracted-- they were surprisingly on task. This predetermined idea that they would be distracted naturally led our class to get distracted, playing right into the "lesson" my teacher wanted to do. Upon arrival, my teacher asked me to compile a list of halloween words that we were going to have a fun spelling test with. I did a google search of halloween spelling tests. My class would be bored with the typical words like "witch" and "ghost," but I included them anyways. My teacher was going to pick the ones she wanted and continue from there.

My teacher divided the teams to boys v. girls (bats vs. ghouls) and we played reverse hangman. The students were not allowed to write the words, but they had to spell it out-loud correctly without help on their first try in order for it to be counted. Some words included harvest, vampire, werewolf, creative and jack o' lantern. I included Ichabod Crane as my own personal challenge because of the folk tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Most of the students have not heard of the story, and neither team spelled it correctly. One girl in my class came up to me afterwards and knew the story and was also able to spell his name. I decided that I wanted to see if i could find a version of the story to read to connect where that name came from to halloween and our class.

I went to the school library and found a copy of a book that had The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in it. After the parade, I started to read. According to my teacher, half the class was not interested, the other was. I was cut off quickly by parents trying to plan the afternoon party, and my idea of learning something in the midst of the halloween party was gone.

I think that with more planning, the morning could have had a relevant halloween theme and not have been lost to non-instruction. Especially with stories and history. Language arts and social studies are so easy to connect with traditions and relatable materials. I was so stressed out being in the presence of chaos without any plan. I don't know if it is easier to just let the parents "supervise" the afternoon, but I know that I was wanting to have some kind of organization in the afternoon. I think students could learn that even things they really enjoy for the non-academic purposes can be related back to academics in a way that doesn't take much effort.

Not Teaching to the Test, but Teaching about Tests...

The PIA. I standards based assessment that should measure how a class is progressing. My teacher and I have been analyzing the data for our results which we not great. Interestingly, we believe that most of the students have a better understanding than the low scores they received. After discussing with them about how/why this happened, they said they found the test confusing. The questions were not clear and the passages were too long. In terms of writing, almost no students did the constructed response correctly because they used different language than we were teaching.
My teacher decided that our class needs to learn techniques to respond to questions based on a passage-- so we are teaching them the UNRAAVEL technique. We are not only teaching them the specific information on the test, we are teaching them how to take a test. I don't know how I feel about actually going through short passages when we should be learning material, but it might help my students tackle difficult or tricky questions.
The parts of UNRAAVEL are: Underline the title, Now predict the passage, Run through and number paragraphs, Are you reading the questions?, Are the important words circled?, Venture (read) through the passage, Eliminate andy obviously wrong answers, Let the questions be answered.

UnJournal

In my Practicum classroom, my teacher kept talking about the student's "UnJournals." My first thought was that it was thought that journaling had a negative connotation-- confused by why they would call it that, I asked my teacher. UnJournaling is the idea of writing creatively in a non personal way. An example is "Describe in one paragraph someone who looks bored. Do not use any form of the word yawned, sighed, or stared." After watching the students come up with creative stories, it was easier for the class as a whole to find a common ground. Each student had a very different story, but there was noting that would make one students abilities personal from another. I don't know how I think about this now, but U like using it in some form in a classroom. Lots of the prompts are silly like "Write a story about a girl named Dot. Do not use andy letters with dots (i or j)." I think that it forces students to think about their writing in a more critical AND creative way. So frequently, students get lost in their own stories. Careful planning in a creative exercise like this could be really helpful for both the teacher to examine but also the student to be independently creative.

First Post: If I Saw a Dog in School

Looking at Language arts in my classroom, I want my students to start writing! I have one student in particular that is really talented creatively. She wrote a poem as a response to a writing prompt that was really creative. The prompt asked how students would respond if they saw a dog walking through the halls of their school— They had to use 4 types of sentences. It is interesting to observe the students who are on the “highest” “reading level” because they are the students who are not going above and beyond the 5th grade expectation, they are the students who are doing exactly what they are told, correctly. I want to know how to challenge students and really expect them to challenge themselves instead of just doing work that they know will get completed marks.

My cooperating teacher really wants all of the students to connect with what they are writing— I want to help them self-start their writing and know that they can actually write their ideas down in a way that they will feel good about their work. I worked with several students to complete this prompt by asking thinking questions like “do you think it would be funny? would you be afraid? who would you tell? what would you do first?” One student changed his interpretation of the story to he saw a god drive to school. He thought it was hilarious. That sense of creative ownership is something I want to include in my classroom too!