My First Teaching Experience

Today I taught in my field placement for the first time. My literacy lesson was from the Common Core Standard CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.1.1 Ask and answer questions about key details in a text. I read the book My Dog Never Says Please. It is about a girl who wishes she was a dog because her dog is never asked to have good manners. In the end she is allowed to sleep with the dog in the dog house and realizes it's not as fun as she thought it would be. I think overall I did a pretty good job considering how nervous I was. After reading the book, I asked the students questions about the specific manners that were mentioned in the book.

Overall this was a great experience. I was able to engage and connect with the children and the lesson went exactly as I wanted. Afterwards I had them to write a short story on which of the manners in the book was the most important and why. I hadn't predicted they they would all write about saying please (because it's the tile of the book). I think if i was actually going to use this lesson in the future, I would make a list on the board of the manners as they listed them for me after reading the book. This way they would actually be able to look on the board and choose a manner to write about. I did have a couple students write about other things and their writings were so cute. I loved it.

My cooperating teacher even commented that I was a natural and I had a natural connection with the children. I was very nervous and scared, but now I can't wait to teach my next lesson and become a real teacher in my own classroom.

I got an "F" in Grad School

That's right. I got an F on a major paper. In my mathematics K-2 class, we are required to write a paper on "What mathematical knowledge should an elementary school teacher have to be effective"? My teacher was very vague on what she expected because she wanted it all to come from our minds. This paper was so stressful, that some of the students decided to drop from full time students to part time students. That is not an option for me. I'm determined to finish this degree in one year. My paper was actually very good. It included aspects of the curriculum, classroom management, diversity of cultures, problem solving, and assessments. The problem is that I don't have much experience in APA style so I lost a ton of points on my paper. I also didn't proof read as well as I thought I had, so there were mistakes I should have caught. In the end, we basically had two weeks to find five good quality resources and write a 12 page paper on a subject we knew nothing about. It was very hard. I ended up with 13 out of 20 points, a 65%.

Even worse, this is the first of many papers that will go into our teacher profile for the schools accreditation criteria and our professional profile. So it was a pretty important paper. Good news is that I get two weeks to revise and turn it back in to earn back half of the points that I missed.  Needless to say, I can still make a B on the paper. I can say that I have learned my lesson. I will be going to the writing center to learn as much as I can about APA style and rewriting and revising this paper as much as possible. My teacher seems to be an expert on APA style, literally. She has published many books and articles. It's very intimidating. I was discouraged, but I've recovered and I'm back on track.

Thanks for listening to my rant. Grad school is a lot harder than I imagined.

My Mini Grad School Break Down

My Monday class in the class from hell. It's unorganized, experimental, and overall confusing. There are two teachers, in which one of them basically owns the whole education program and the other has no idea what she is doing. On the first day of class, my cohort was split up into two separate classes, which really sucked. Anyway, I realize that grad school is grad school, but this class is on its own level of hardness. This class is so horrible that we have to have a mini therapy session in our other classes about that class before we can start any other class. Our syllabus is basically a whole page per day of our reading assignments. We have to read a whole book and like five million articles each week. This week we had a midterm, which consisted of watching a video and relating it to 10 terms that we had studied in class. Sounds easy enough, but the terms were decided by the teacher and they had absolutely nothing to do with the video. Yes, I completed the assignment, Yes, I hated it, and Yes, I cried about. This was Sunday.

On Monday, I was so exhausted and worn out from finishing the 10 page midterm the night before, that I refused to attend her Monday class. There is no way I could have looked at her without yelling, "Do You Even Know What You're Doing?" The bad thing is, the first hour of our class is spent at a nearby community center where we tutor kids after school. I hated to let my assigned student down, but again, there is no way that I was in the mood to look at that school, so I didn't go. I didn't notify the teacher, I didn't tell any of my classmates, I just didn't go. I went home and prepared for my Tuesday class, Mathematics. I regret letting my student down and I will make it up to her, but I do not regret taking a day off for me to recuperate from my mini grad school break down. I'm better now and although I will never catch up in that class, I feel better knowing that all of my classmates are also behind on reading every single book we are assigned to read each week.

Thank you listening to my rant on how grad school sucks.

Critical Explorations and Field Experience

This week has been amazing. In my Cultural Contexts class we are tutoring students in an after school program while also involving them in a critical exploration project. A critical exploration project allows the student to focus on something they would like to know or learn more about. My child is absolutely fabulous and has chosen the topic of pandas. We are trying to find out how the giant panda and the red panda are different and related. This week I taught her about animal classification and we classified each of the animals see compare and contrast them. It was an amazing experience and I can't wait to continue with her next week.

I also got my field experience school and teacher assignment. I couldn't have asked for a better placement. My teacher is the most creative, enthusiastic, organized, and loving teacher I have ever met. She has her room 100% organized with everything in a box, labelled, decorated, and in its correct place. She sings songs to her children so that they can remember the rules as well as their lessons. She encouraged them to do their best, think for themselves, and not to give up. I absolutely love her, and I've only visited her classroom twice.

Our fist meeting consisted of an introduction, while during our second meeting I observed her math instruction and interviewed her afterwards. Her mini math less was a continuing lesson on subtraction. The kids learned about "Linus the Minus" and they all loved it. She later admitted that she found this on pinterest last year, but not one kid has had trouble with subtraction since implementing "Linus the minus".

I also found "Gus the plus" on pinterest, if you interested. After the mini lesson the kids went around in stations to solve difference subtraction problems.Another amazing thing that I noticed was what she used for dry erase boards. Each student had their own vhs cassette box. One side was red for math and the other side had lined paper for literacy. They were labelled with their number and they carried their markers and erasers inside the box it was a genius idea. The photo below is the cassette box that she used, I couldn't find a photo of one decorated and prepared but you get the idea. Overall a great week, despite the fact that I have a 10 page midterm due on Monday. Yikes!!!!