This week marks where my student teaching really begins. Today was the first day freshmen were in the school. They toured the place, got to know everything and were my first experience working with students. It was a half-day and was a very loosely defined operation. Because I only have one class with freshmen, I spent most of my day deeply involved in trying to finish the reading for the AP Literature and Composition class rather than actually interacting with students.
That part comes to-morrow. My first block in Journalism, followed by AP Lit., a bit of downtime and then my freshman English class. The last one has roughly twenty kids in it. Today also marked my first experience with the school's cafeteria, since we were provided with pizza today. A slice of pizza and a small container of fries proved to be alarmingly bad - I have become something of a connesuir of pizza (which is a funny way of saying I eat a large amount of frozen pizza, coupled with living within throwing distance of a decent pizza place), but this was some of the worst pizza I have had in memory. The fries were also both cold and soggy, ever a lovely combination.
My first class with freshmen was in many ways what I was expecting. The students were full of energy and very eager to talk. Because things are just getting started, they are very unfocused. There are a few class clowns but I imagine they will have calmed down significantly by the time I am actually solo-teaching them. I am really excited to be working on The Odyssey with them (I do love that story) and think that there's so much material there I can cover, even if it is a really toned down translation (they removed the sex, most of the gore and all of the extended Homeric similes. It's really the last that chafes me most.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
Meetings
So today was really book-ended by big meetings for me. My day began with the big district meeting. We had roughly 700 people I believe they said from across the district, who all went to the auditorium. Not knowing really anyone there, it was all quite overwhelming. I had also spent the morning feeling ill, so spending two hours in a tightly packed auditorium was not my ideal way to spend a day. I am fairly certain it was all nerves however, and I did my best to shake it off.
The majority of the time was spent listening to a student research project. While interesting, my feeling ill made it hard to sit still for the entire presentation. After getting out I did a smidge more curriculum work and then threw myself into some of my reading. I am trying to catch up on the students' summer reading, and finished Night yesterday. Today I began The Autobiography of Malcom X. As you might guess, these are not the typical sorts of books assigned for students (at least not in my experience!) so I've been enjoying the reading. Malcom X is a fascinating figure, and his presentation is unlike what I would have expected.
Over lunch, I realized why my car had been handling poorly the past few days. One of the tires was almost completely out of air! Out of the 30 PSI it was supposed to have, it was at less than 10. After a quick stop to the gas station to air the tires and then for fast food, I returned and resumed working.
After lunch I attended a meeting from a nearby school for the deaf. We would be having several deaf students attend the school this semester, including in one of my classes. I eagerly wrote down notes during the introductions and very informal discussion, and I got a chance to look at my first formal IEP (Individualized Education Plan).
School officially starts on Monday with the arrival of the freshmen, and then fully begins on Tuesday with all students. Between then and now I need to meet my girlfriend's family and see her again after three months apart, and read a lot of books.
What has left me really grateful and pleasantly surprised is how warm and welcoming everyone in the department has been. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but I tend to worry overmuch about meeting new people and making good impressions. Everyone I've spoken to absolutely could not be nicer, and I am getting a great feeling about the start of this school year. Mrs. N was also very reassuring to me today when I mentioned my nerves, and told me about when she had first started teaching.
I feel really genuinely excited (and still a little nervous) to meet the students on Monday, and cannot wait to see as everything begins coming together. My first week will be spent observing English classes and getting a feel for things, and at least some of the second week will be spent observing non-English classes so that I can see other teaching styles.
The majority of the time was spent listening to a student research project. While interesting, my feeling ill made it hard to sit still for the entire presentation. After getting out I did a smidge more curriculum work and then threw myself into some of my reading. I am trying to catch up on the students' summer reading, and finished Night yesterday. Today I began The Autobiography of Malcom X. As you might guess, these are not the typical sorts of books assigned for students (at least not in my experience!) so I've been enjoying the reading. Malcom X is a fascinating figure, and his presentation is unlike what I would have expected.
Over lunch, I realized why my car had been handling poorly the past few days. One of the tires was almost completely out of air! Out of the 30 PSI it was supposed to have, it was at less than 10. After a quick stop to the gas station to air the tires and then for fast food, I returned and resumed working.
After lunch I attended a meeting from a nearby school for the deaf. We would be having several deaf students attend the school this semester, including in one of my classes. I eagerly wrote down notes during the introductions and very informal discussion, and I got a chance to look at my first formal IEP (Individualized Education Plan).
School officially starts on Monday with the arrival of the freshmen, and then fully begins on Tuesday with all students. Between then and now I need to meet my girlfriend's family and see her again after three months apart, and read a lot of books.
What has left me really grateful and pleasantly surprised is how warm and welcoming everyone in the department has been. I don't mean to sound pessimistic, but I tend to worry overmuch about meeting new people and making good impressions. Everyone I've spoken to absolutely could not be nicer, and I am getting a great feeling about the start of this school year. Mrs. N was also very reassuring to me today when I mentioned my nerves, and told me about when she had first started teaching.
I feel really genuinely excited (and still a little nervous) to meet the students on Monday, and cannot wait to see as everything begins coming together. My first week will be spent observing English classes and getting a feel for things, and at least some of the second week will be spent observing non-English classes so that I can see other teaching styles.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
On AP courses and split attention
Today was my second day, and much of it was spent in preparation. I now have an ID badge, my parking pass and a general sense of what I'll be teaching. I am trying to get a headstart now on what I want my solo-taught sections to look like, but my sense of readiness varies for each class:
Freshman Mid-Level: Here I feel in my element. We are talking about The Odyssey, a book I am very familiar with. On top of that, we're using a new translation I'm not familiar with but am rapidly finding stuff to talk about concerning. I already have three ideas for written assignments, a general outline of how I'd like to tackle the books and an almost page long list of what I want students to get from The Odyssey.
Advanced Placement Literature and Composition: Ah, but here's the rub. During my own schooling I had never taken any AP courses, and so I'm a bit unfamiliar with the whole process. It seems that the course centers around a final AP test, but at the same time I need to actually teach the literature in fullness and completeness as well. This test is something very new for me and I'm not sure how to address everything I might need to on it. I think I need to focus on skills rather than content, and I have been assured by Mrs. N that I should aim to deal with the students like it's a college classroom. It gets a bit more complex here, because as I mentioned I will be teaching my favorite book, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Despite having taken two courses which featured this book, I don't know what to say about it. There's so much there that I could easily make an entire course on the book, so how can I choose the most important parts, the most significant things in the sum total of a novel I've gone back to and discovered new things with each reading? Finding the most important parts is really a struggle for me, and I am trying to isolate individual moments that stand out in my mind, and try to structure activities and discussions around those.
Journalism: I have done very little for this class, both because I am unfamiliar with the subject and because I haven't gotten a course outline for where things are happening yet. I feel least comfortable here, but the subjects I will be solo teaching are definitely within my area of knowledge and interest. I just need to find out when that will be.
Today was also our initial training on PowerSchool, an education based software to input grades, manage attendance and do most everything else. From everything I've heard, the program has fascinating potential, but it seems we're just using the barest of features so far. I think we'll need to push to try more with it - there's no sense in using something so powerful and with so many features if we're never going to try them out.
On one tangentially related piece of personal news, I've discovered that I really need to eat a filling lunch. My plan for the day had been to eat a small snack and then eat once I got home. I earned myself an extremely painful splitting headache which made it impossible to concentrate for the last two hours of my day. I scarfed down food and then slept once I got home and I felt markedly better, but those last two hours were impossible. I don't think I can get myself to the point where I can just snack and eat later - I wouldn't have been able to teach in that shape.
I've also discovered tonight that writing a blog post, even a short one like this, can be a real pain in the butt when you're splitting your attention. During the course of this short and really simple writing, I had four people talking to me over Instant Message conversation, two technical computer problems, three opened tabs and one briefly watched YouTube video. Even the fairly mundane act of writing about what I did today (which in and of itself isn't too much) was almost impossible with everything else demanding my attention. This also calls into question the fact I'm just plain bad at multitasking.
Freshman Mid-Level: Here I feel in my element. We are talking about The Odyssey, a book I am very familiar with. On top of that, we're using a new translation I'm not familiar with but am rapidly finding stuff to talk about concerning. I already have three ideas for written assignments, a general outline of how I'd like to tackle the books and an almost page long list of what I want students to get from The Odyssey.
Advanced Placement Literature and Composition: Ah, but here's the rub. During my own schooling I had never taken any AP courses, and so I'm a bit unfamiliar with the whole process. It seems that the course centers around a final AP test, but at the same time I need to actually teach the literature in fullness and completeness as well. This test is something very new for me and I'm not sure how to address everything I might need to on it. I think I need to focus on skills rather than content, and I have been assured by Mrs. N that I should aim to deal with the students like it's a college classroom. It gets a bit more complex here, because as I mentioned I will be teaching my favorite book, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Despite having taken two courses which featured this book, I don't know what to say about it. There's so much there that I could easily make an entire course on the book, so how can I choose the most important parts, the most significant things in the sum total of a novel I've gone back to and discovered new things with each reading? Finding the most important parts is really a struggle for me, and I am trying to isolate individual moments that stand out in my mind, and try to structure activities and discussions around those.
Journalism: I have done very little for this class, both because I am unfamiliar with the subject and because I haven't gotten a course outline for where things are happening yet. I feel least comfortable here, but the subjects I will be solo teaching are definitely within my area of knowledge and interest. I just need to find out when that will be.
Today was also our initial training on PowerSchool, an education based software to input grades, manage attendance and do most everything else. From everything I've heard, the program has fascinating potential, but it seems we're just using the barest of features so far. I think we'll need to push to try more with it - there's no sense in using something so powerful and with so many features if we're never going to try them out.
On one tangentially related piece of personal news, I've discovered that I really need to eat a filling lunch. My plan for the day had been to eat a small snack and then eat once I got home. I earned myself an extremely painful splitting headache which made it impossible to concentrate for the last two hours of my day. I scarfed down food and then slept once I got home and I felt markedly better, but those last two hours were impossible. I don't think I can get myself to the point where I can just snack and eat later - I wouldn't have been able to teach in that shape.
I've also discovered tonight that writing a blog post, even a short one like this, can be a real pain in the butt when you're splitting your attention. During the course of this short and really simple writing, I had four people talking to me over Instant Message conversation, two technical computer problems, three opened tabs and one briefly watched YouTube video. Even the fairly mundane act of writing about what I did today (which in and of itself isn't too much) was almost impossible with everything else demanding my attention. This also calls into question the fact I'm just plain bad at multitasking.
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Reflecting and beginning
So my great problem with electronic media, particularly blogs in general, is that because of how easy it has become to post, many people will post anything. All too often they are writing about "I'm sorry for not writing more," or "I wish I had more to say."
I too often feel that way, and so my response has been to not get a blog. I find them too easy to either forget about or to reach such a minutia level of navel-gazing that it is no longer really helpful to anyone but the writer. At which point, why not create a private journal? I digress however, as you can no doubt see I am actively doing a blog right now, so I must have something more worthy to say than the hypocritical statement "blogs are silly yet I'm doing one anyway."
I am a graduate student, currently working on teaching licensure in Vermont and a Masters of Education degree. I have begun my student teaching and so now am required to create a reflective journal. Now this, I thought, is something worth actually blogging about. Creating a system where I could keep an active record, I can share my thoughts and also make communication between myself, my teachers and my professors much easier. Now there might seem to be some inherent problems with that - after all, if I want to say mean-nasty-terrible-awful things about my professors or school or program or anyone, then I'll either censure myself or simply not say them. However, I think that I go through life self-censoring far too often. And so in this regard, I'm going to try and keep things honest, open and while I may say something critiquing, it won't be the type of mean-nasty-etc. thing that could get me into trouble.
And so yesterday I began my grand voyage into the heart of academia. It began with a faculty meeting where I learned the most maddening fact ever. Not only is "sex-ting," still a craze amongst students (and unlikely to end anytime soon, unfortunately) but if a teacher should open the phone after taking it from a student, they are in possession of child pornography. (For those not in the know, sex-ting is when you use a phone's camera to take inappropriate pictures and then send them out over the phone. Discreet and more than a little creepy, it is apparently becoming a huge problem in schools due to the proliferation of cell phones and well, hormones.)
...wait, what? Looking at a student's cellphone, which they have been misusing, immediately makes you the pervert and the danger to the school system? The very thought of this boggles my mind.
I then attended my department meeting with my cooperating teacher. I am going to strive to not use names overmuch (certainly not without permission) in this blog, and so I'll mostly be using job titles and the sort.
This is unfortunately complicated by the fact that I have two cooperating teachers. And so, having now removed any specific traces of where I am teaching, I will cleverly refer to them as Mrs. N and Mrs. C. I remain ever astounded by my own cleverness.
...anyways. Mrs. N and I will be working on two courses, each about 84 minutes long (If I'm remembering right). We will first be doing AP Literature and Composition and then Journalism. I'm feeling good about the first, particularly because we've elected to work on my all-time favorite book: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I could go on and on about that book for months, so I don't doubt that I'll have plenty of material there. Journalism has left me a bit more uncertain, since it's a subject I'd never taken. However, Mrs. N suggested I help the students work with new media, and I also wanted to add a piece on media literacy and awareness (two topics I feel very strongly about). So things are definitely looking stronger there.
Finally, I have only one class with Mrs. C, where I will be working with freshmen. After looking over the schedule, I hesitantly asked if I could solo-teach The Odyssey. To backtrack for a moment, I was a half-step away from becoming a Classics student in college, save for the fact I knew I couldn't apply that beyond, well, college. However I love the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey and the latter is the source of the best paper I've ever written (my thesis not withstanding). So when Mrs. C gave a happy laugh and told me she hates The Odyssey and would be happy if I taught it, I couldn't have been more thrilled.
And of course then needed to find out how anyone could hate The Odyssey.
So presently, I am trying to catch up with the books I haven't yet read, refresh my brain on the books I have, prepare to meet the freshmen on Monday and begin tying together curriculums and lesson plans and ideas about these books such that they can really catch people.
I've got six years of theory, three months to go and a positive outlook. So, let's see what I can do.
I too often feel that way, and so my response has been to not get a blog. I find them too easy to either forget about or to reach such a minutia level of navel-gazing that it is no longer really helpful to anyone but the writer. At which point, why not create a private journal? I digress however, as you can no doubt see I am actively doing a blog right now, so I must have something more worthy to say than the hypocritical statement "blogs are silly yet I'm doing one anyway."
I am a graduate student, currently working on teaching licensure in Vermont and a Masters of Education degree. I have begun my student teaching and so now am required to create a reflective journal. Now this, I thought, is something worth actually blogging about. Creating a system where I could keep an active record, I can share my thoughts and also make communication between myself, my teachers and my professors much easier. Now there might seem to be some inherent problems with that - after all, if I want to say mean-nasty-terrible-awful things about my professors or school or program or anyone, then I'll either censure myself or simply not say them. However, I think that I go through life self-censoring far too often. And so in this regard, I'm going to try and keep things honest, open and while I may say something critiquing, it won't be the type of mean-nasty-etc. thing that could get me into trouble.
And so yesterday I began my grand voyage into the heart of academia. It began with a faculty meeting where I learned the most maddening fact ever. Not only is "sex-ting," still a craze amongst students (and unlikely to end anytime soon, unfortunately) but if a teacher should open the phone after taking it from a student, they are in possession of child pornography. (For those not in the know, sex-ting is when you use a phone's camera to take inappropriate pictures and then send them out over the phone. Discreet and more than a little creepy, it is apparently becoming a huge problem in schools due to the proliferation of cell phones and well, hormones.)
...wait, what? Looking at a student's cellphone, which they have been misusing, immediately makes you the pervert and the danger to the school system? The very thought of this boggles my mind.
I then attended my department meeting with my cooperating teacher. I am going to strive to not use names overmuch (certainly not without permission) in this blog, and so I'll mostly be using job titles and the sort.
This is unfortunately complicated by the fact that I have two cooperating teachers. And so, having now removed any specific traces of where I am teaching, I will cleverly refer to them as Mrs. N and Mrs. C. I remain ever astounded by my own cleverness.
...anyways. Mrs. N and I will be working on two courses, each about 84 minutes long (If I'm remembering right). We will first be doing AP Literature and Composition and then Journalism. I'm feeling good about the first, particularly because we've elected to work on my all-time favorite book: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I could go on and on about that book for months, so I don't doubt that I'll have plenty of material there. Journalism has left me a bit more uncertain, since it's a subject I'd never taken. However, Mrs. N suggested I help the students work with new media, and I also wanted to add a piece on media literacy and awareness (two topics I feel very strongly about). So things are definitely looking stronger there.
Finally, I have only one class with Mrs. C, where I will be working with freshmen. After looking over the schedule, I hesitantly asked if I could solo-teach The Odyssey. To backtrack for a moment, I was a half-step away from becoming a Classics student in college, save for the fact I knew I couldn't apply that beyond, well, college. However I love the stories of The Iliad and The Odyssey and the latter is the source of the best paper I've ever written (my thesis not withstanding). So when Mrs. C gave a happy laugh and told me she hates The Odyssey and would be happy if I taught it, I couldn't have been more thrilled.
And of course then needed to find out how anyone could hate The Odyssey.
So presently, I am trying to catch up with the books I haven't yet read, refresh my brain on the books I have, prepare to meet the freshmen on Monday and begin tying together curriculums and lesson plans and ideas about these books such that they can really catch people.
I've got six years of theory, three months to go and a positive outlook. So, let's see what I can do.
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