Lessons Learned

In teaching you cannot see the fruit of a day's work.  It is invisible and remains so, maybe for twenty years.  ~Jacques Barzun           

    Well, as last week came to a close, I could not be happier. It was a challenging week. My new students didn’t start getting the hang of the schedule and the rules of the classroom till Thursday. Both Thursday and Friday went well. They got to go outside for recess! Yes, they had been losing their recess privileges all week because of all the misbehaving. Taking away recess is a good incentive for them, but I’m not quite sure if it works in the long run. Children need to go outside and get all their energy out and run around for a bit. Then, I think it may be easier for them to sit still when they have gotten a chance to get everything out. It may be just me, but I feel that maybe taking away something else may work. For example, if that student were the line leader, they lose that privilege. Or if that student didn’t have any special jobs, you could sit them by themselves for a while (move their desk). 

For now, however, it seems like the recess thing works. 

              Anyways, my supervising instructor came last Tuesday to observe me and I was nervous out of my mind. I expected some butterflies but what I experienced was pure panic. The lesson started off very well. I engaged the students in the lesson. Then it started going downhill. I wasn’t able to find my sheet of paper that had my notes about the lesson. I had the lesson itself, but when I have to stop and look to see where I am and read the whole paper, it takes too much time. Some students did not understand the lesson at all, while other students thought it was easy and got bored doing more problems together. So, it’s safe to say, that lesson was a bust.

      Thursday and Friday’s lesson were great! They were excited about rounding and saying it was easy and fun and wanting more problems to do. Then came the test. Oh man.  They were so confident in themselves that they forgot to read the directions. Well as you can all imagine, the directions are probably the most important part of a test. They let you know when to round to the nearest ten and when to round to the nearest HUNDRED! However, lesson learned on my end; next time I will make sure they read the instructions… twice.

        This week will be different. I will teach both Math and Science (the afternoon lessons). We are also going on a field trip this week so I will not have to teach. I will, however, have to catch up on some Social Studies because it seems as though we haven’t been pressed to teach this so we only did a few lessons about the Constitution. Each week I take over a new subject. We shall see what the future brings! 

And yes, I am still excited :D

In other news, I have my ticket HOME (to Colorado) for Thanksgiving!! Oh how wonderful it will be back home where the trees change beautiful colors and I have to wear scarves and boots because the mountains will be white with snow.

This is the mountain in the summertime. 

My family I shall see at home! Katy, Tim, Mom, and Dad.