teaching

I forgot to post yesterday, so I am going to combine it into one. First off, I had my microteaching experience today which I was quite nervous for. I don't know why it feels so different standing up in front of your peers and teaching than standing up in front of children and teaching, but it does. I know it is good experience for this upcoming year though, and even though I hate watching videos of myself, I know that that will be beneficial as well, since have to do this for our assessment later on in the year. Might as well start practicing now, right?

I also wanted to comment on the reading we had by Carol Dweck. I thought the reading was so insightful. I had never considered the way that we compliment children might actually be detrimental and sending a completely different message than the one we had intended. We have to be very careful in how we speak to our students and make sure that we are praising their hard work and effort and not just the final grade.

microteaching lessons

Congrats to the two groups that did their microteaching lessons today. I thought both groups did a really good job and have set the bar kind of high for the rest of us! I especially enjoyed how both groups got us up and moving around and doing fun activities. It will be interesting to see what all of the different groups come up with and to hopefully take some of these ideas with us into the classroom next year.

abuse and neglect

Somewhat of a hard class today. Talking about how to deal with issues of abuse or even suspicions of abuse is heavy stuff. I hope to never have to bring anything to the attention of a councilor or CPS. You always want to give parents the benefit of the doubt because it is hard to imagine that parents would abuse their children in any way, but the sad truth is that it does happen. Hopefully, if this is ever the case, I can be an adult that my students feel they can trust and come to for help and support.

including physical activites in the classroom

I loved the relay race we did today! It was so nice to get to go outside, especially on such a beautiful day. It is nice to get curriculum ideas that can work, or be slightly modified to work, for any grade level too. Kids are so active and we hardly give them any chance for physical activity in school anymore. I felt really good after this short activity outside and I can imagine how even just getting outside or moving around for a few minutes could improve the attention level of our students.

Food Journal

I have to admit, I am kind of excited about keeping a food/activity journal for our health class. After last quarter, in which I ate horribly and exercised maybe once a week, I decided that I needed to do better this quarter. I already had in mind that I wanted to eat better and exercise at least 3 times a week. I think this journal will help me to keep on track with these goals as well better inform me of my eating habits. Exercise (with the exception of last quarter) has never been as hard for me, but nutrition is something I often struggle with. I am such a picky eater that the typical healthy diet is hard for me. That doesn't mean that I can't eat healthy though. I just have to find the healthy foods that I do like, and stick with those. So we will see how I do in a few weeks...........

Knowledge is Infinite

I thought it appropriate to end my blogging for this quarter with a positive post. It seems like there are so many obstacles and challenges  to becoming a good teacher but Ayer's chapter on liberating the curriculum reminded me of why I wanted to teach.  I am glad that I am more aware of these challenges for when I go into the classroom next fall, but at the same time I still need to remeber all the good things about teaching as well. I love how Ayers points out that knowledge is infinite. We can never know everything about everything. Even if we study and learn our whole entire lives we will never come close to knowing everything. What an awesome and humbling concept! This gives us endless possibilities for educational opportunities, not only for our students, but for ourselves as well.

So how do we decide what to teach? Knowledge may be infinite, but our students have to learn something. They have to be prepared to go out into the real world after their education is complete, so we need to determine what is the “important” knowledge and teach those things to our students. Right? Yes and no. I think we can all agree that the basic subjects that we teach are important and necessary; however, how we teach can and should be always changing. We can teach to a textbook and worksheets and tests. We can give examples of problems that most students will not be able to relate to in real life and force them to learn facts and figures we deem to be important. Or, we can let our students decide for themselves what they find most important, and let them pursue those things through classroom activities and projects that we guide. To some, this may seem a scary concept. For me it is exciting! It means that my classroom will never be the same from year to year and I will get to learn new things right alongside my students.

A Teacher's Awesome Power

As we often times seem to focus on how powerless we are as teachers, I thought it interesting to read Raywid's article on the power that we do have. The power that we possess to teach in such a way as to encourage and support our students or the power we have to discourage and alienate our students until they feel as if they can't stand school anymore. “We know that people of any age may reject learning from and individual they dislike. It is also the case that they may reject learning from an individual they perceive to dislike them. One of the most frequent explanations dropouts give for having left school is non-caring teachers” (Raywid, p. 81). That last statement stunned me when I read it. Most children drop out of school because they feel that their teachers don’t care about them. They have not made an effort to become emotionally invested in their lives, so why should they continue going? It is truly humbling to know that we, as teachers, have that kind of power. It is also a little scary. We need to recognize this power and take responsibility for it.

I liked how Raywind pointed out that because we have this awesome power to influence our students education, we also then have certain obligations to them as well. We have obligations to each and every student. This includes the ones who disrupt the class, the ones who talk back, and the ones who just don’t seem that interested. We have an obligation to try and establish a relationship with them. To find out what is really going on that makes this student act out or that student disrupt the class. Many articles that we have read have pointed out that when other things are going on in a students’ life, the last thing that they are thinking about is education and learning. I think that we also assume that because they are young and not as “experienced” at life as we are that their problems must be small and that when they “grow up” they will learn about some real hardships in life. This isn’t the case however. Many young people today are going through some extremely painful and hard situations that we may never know about unless we ask. Not only should we ask, but we have an obligation to do so. Even if the student brushes aside our attempts to try and understand, we must keep trying. This is not to say that we should badger our students until they tell us, but we should continually let them know that we are there for them and that we care.

As standards and assessments are given more weight and we start to feel the pressure from principles and administrators to teach as certain way, we must always remember that our students come first. Even if we are stuck in a job where we have to teach to a certain curriculum, and we are bored to tears, we still have a responsibility to our students. It doesn’t matter if you have a strict curriculum to follow or if you have the freedom to come up with your own lesson plans, creating that relationship with each and every one of your students has to happen or it won’t matter how you are teaching. We have an awesome amount of power in shaping our students lives. Let’s make sure we are taking responsibility for that.

Disciplining our students

When our group lead the class discussion on classroom inclusion and community, I chose to focus on the articles in our "Rethinking Classrooms...." text about discipline.  As I am writing my final paper I am drawn once again to the ways in which we discipline our students. Discipline is one of many challenges we will face as teachers. How do we choose to discipline our students when they misbehave? We are responsible for creating a safe environment for all of our students, but what happens when a particular student or students refuse to follow our rules? I think that we would like to believe that all we have to do is say in our strictest voice that we will not tolerate such behavior and our students will fall in line, but what happens when they don't?

I read a different article on discipline by Linda Christensen who dealt with this type of situation one year. She says in it, "I've often said, "I just don't tolerate that kind of behavior". But this year, it was like saying, "I don't tolerate ants". I have ants in my kitchen. I can spray chemicals on them and saturate the air with poison and "not tolerate" them, or I can find another solution that doesn't harm my family or pets in the process."

So how are we going to discipline our students? Are we going to "spray" them and saturate our classroom with "poison" or can we think of better solutions? In this particular article Christensen learned that by helping her students achieve academic success, she could change their negative behaviors. Obvioulsy every student will be different though and different strategies will need to be used in different situations. If anybody has any comments or stories they would like to share on effective discipline, please share.