"Hi, what's your favorite color?"

Today marks my second day teaching a middle school class. I have to say, I'm really surprised at how much I like it! As I have mentioned before, I really admire the way that my CT interacts with her students and uses humor with them. Today she decided that instead of being annoyed at the ringing of the classroom phone (which often interrupts her lessons) she would use humor. She asked the kids how Buddy the elf answers the phone (from the movie Elf) and proceeded to answer the phone by saying "Hi, what's your favorite color?" The students LOVED this! She told them that she would answer the phone this way until Christmas and gave them permission to answer the phone in a similar fashion. In one quick silly statement, she was able to turn an annoyance into something funny. I suspect that the person on the other end of the phone was taken aback, but it's good to be taken aback every now and then. It's instances like this where I really feel like her students love that she shows them her "human side". 

The first day my TP and I taught went really well, but I felt like the students were hesitant to open up to us and volunteer answers. It was a TOTALLY different story today! The students walked in and they were all very excited because it was snowing outside. I promised them that if we got through our lesson, I would give them time at the end to talk about the snow (this actually worked and they got on task!!). I was taken aback by how welcomed I felt by the students today. They were all eager to share their work, answers, or thoughts. We chose to start off our lesson with an activity called Two Truths and a Lie, where each student comes up with three statements about themselves, two of them are truths and one is lie. We modeled this for the students and much like how they like seeing the "human side" to our CT, they loved hearing three statements about us and our personal lives, even if one of them was a lie. We used this activity to start to introduce the students to unreliable narrators. We asked the students how they knew which statement was a lie and they responded with "you were talking fast" or "it took you a while to come up with it" or they mentioned our body language! These kids totally understood that these were techniques that might be used when someone is being untrustworthy or suspicious. This was an activity that they could not get enough of! Almost every student wanted to volunteer to read their three statements! The only problem that arose from this was that I learned the importance of quickly reading what a student wrote before they share it with the class! One student chose to tell the class that he USED to like to torture frogs and butterflies (if I had looked over his shoulder as he was writing his statements or asked to read them before  he got in front of the class, this could have been avoided). Live and learn. 

We started reading The Tell Tale Heart and asked the students about whether they felt that they could trust the narrator of the story. A majority of the class felt that this narrator could not be trusted, because he was suspicious and stated that he was "mad". There was only one student who felt that the narrator could be trusted, because he was "honest". We will work some more on the unreliability of the narrator tomorrow, and we will see if this student changes his mind. 

The main thing that stuck out to me today was the atmosphere of the classroom. The students came in happy and eager to learn. This made our lesson so much easier and more fun to teach. Students were engaged, followed directions, and weren't afraid to ask questions! They didn't even want to talk about the snow at the end of the class, instead they wanted to keep doing the Two Truths and a Lie activity! The best part about this is that they related the techniques used in this activity (pacing, body language, word choice, etc.) to determining if the narrator was someone who could be trusted to tell the truth and tell the story honestly.

I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!

Teaching Middle School: A Pre-Teaching Entry

I would like to start this blog post off by saying I'm nervous to teach the middle school class that my TP and I have been observing for the past couple weeks. I am nervous that the students won't respond well to us, as we have not formed any bonds with them (except for a couple students who we have seen in classes other than the one we are teaching). Our first two lessons require a lot of student participation and if they don't accept us or respond well to us, then are they still going to participate? We'll find out. 

I am nervous about executing wait time (one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher!) but I'm excited for another opportunity to practice (after all, practice makes perfect!). I think that this time, I am more aware of the fact that I need to work on my execution of wait time, so hopefully this awareness is the first step to becoming good at it! 

One of the things that I am NOT nervous about, however, is our lessons. My TP and I have planned some really good lessons that we think will captivate the attention of the students as well as help them use their prior knowledge to build upon the knowledge that they will learn! We are teaching them Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell Tale Heart" and relating this story to building suspense and knowledge of unreliable narrators. Planning this was a little hard for my TP and I, simply because our background knowledge of suspense and unreliable narrators was from texts that the students would not have read or media that was not age appropriate for the grade level we were teaching (for example: Holden Caulfield or the shower scene from Psycho). 

We want the students to go home on Friday of this week, having read "The Tell Tale Heart" and understanding it on a deeper level of "an old guy was killed because a guy didn't like his eye". It is through the instruction on building suspense and an introduction to an unreliable narrator that we plan to get to this deeper level of comprehension. Wish me luck!

Frazzled.

On Tuesday, I saw something that shocked me: a teacher who was visibly frazzled! This is somewhat of an urban legend to me. I’ve heard about teachers being overwhelmed and acting frazzled, but I’ve never seen it. It does exist! Teachers are not emotionless robots who are immune to daily stresses. At our practicum site, our CT was visibly frazzled from the minute we walked into the classroom on Tuesday. She was frustrated because she was supposed to teach a mandated literacy lesson from a program that she did not like. This was a scripted lesson that she felt did not teach the students in the way that they best learn. She was frustrated because on top of having to plan and prepare for this, she is scrambling to make up for all the missed days of school (due to the weather or holidays). It was really nice to see that even an experienced teacher can become slightly overwhelmed. 

Now, like a true pro, our CT did not let the fact that she was frazzled take away from her classes or her lessons. She put on her “teacher face” and taught her students as she normally would have. If she had not personally told us that she is not a fan of the literacy program that is being adopted by the school, we never would have known she felt that way. It was awesome to see that even experienced teachers can become overwhelmed, but that this does not affect their lessons, the show must go on!

            I felt like it was good to see that even an experience teacher gets frazzled, because I know as both a student and a future educator that it is not realistic to be completely calm and in control at all times.

            One of the things that stuck out to me from our observations this week was how much I admire the relationship that our CT has with her students. Her students know when to settle down, focus, and be serious, and in turn, she knows when it is okay to joke with them. She uses humor a lot in her classroom, but not in a “corny joke” kind of way. She uses humor to motivate her students, to inspire them to do their work or answer a question. Her relationship with her students may stem from the fact that she has the same students for two years, but I like to think it is more of her personality. She constantly uses positive motivation and praises the students, but not so much that it does not seem sincere. 

Things That Are Specific to Middle School

            Today marks the end of my first week in a middle school practicum placement and I have survived! I’ll admit that I was absolutely terrified to enter a middle school. My middle school years are not something that I look back fondly on and I don’t have much experience being in a middle school classroom. These students are foreign to me, they are so short and so different from the high schoolers that I am used to observing. But like I said, I survived, and I have a better outlook on middle school.

            There are a couple things that I noticed and classified in a Specific to Middle School list in my head. This list was started with the fact that the CT told my TP and I that her students were ALWAYS leaving their belongings lying around the classroom. As she said this, she picked up a stray sweatshirt and placed it in a pile with a huge green binder that was waiting for someone to claim it. Apparently this happens quite frequently in middle school that belongings are left behind. I also noticed that a majority of the students were writing in pencil. In my observations at many high schools as well as in my college classes, pen seems to be the preferred writing utensil. The students in middle school also do a lot more “self-policing” than in high school. By this I mean, students are more willing to enforce the rules to their peers or make sure that their peers are doing what they are supposed to be doing. For example, in the class that I observed, one student was being gently teased by a classmate, and a third party classmate shouted “don’t undermined his confidence, he has feelings too!” This made me smile, because it was nice to see students being kind to one another. My TP and I also noticed that at this age, cell phones are not an issue. It is actually uncommon to go into a high school class and not see one cellular device, but in middle school, this seems to be the norm. The final thing on my list was that I noticed that students do not need a bell to signal their dismissal from class, they wait for the teacher to do it. This may be because the school I am observing in does not have bells, but I’d like to think that the students are just polite enough to wait for the teacher to finish her thought and tell  them that it is okay to pack up to leave.