Week Seven: MHS Sports

MHS has an amazing sporting department. Many of my students play sports ranging from soccer to lacrosse and to football. One of my students even has a full ride scholarship to WVU with football. So nevertheless there was a variety of reasons for me to go to some of MHS’s sporting events. The first one I went to was a girls soccer game  because my girls had been asking me to come and watch them since I played (aka sat on the bench) soccer in high school.  

I did know that I had a lot of football players in my classes because they are always wearing their jerseys or leaving class early to go to the games. But it was really interesting to go and see just how different MHS’s games are compared to my high school’s football games. The pregame at MHS revolves around the lead majorettes and not the actual full band, which is very surprising for me coming from a huge band school as well. It was nice to see all of my students that were in the band as well though. I also enjoyed seeing what positions my students played on the football field, I think by seeing my students in this different setting it allows me to get to know them better as a full rounded person instead of just someone in my classroom. 

It was really nice to see just how many of my girls actually were on the team! I knew almost all of them and I didn’t even know that they were in soccer. It was nice to see them in a setting outside of the classroom as well especially since it is a sport that I can actually follow.

Week Six: Time Management

          One of my biggest problems with teaching is my time management. I always end up under planning and having to come up with activities on the spot because a lot of my classes can’t handle free time or they get out of control. It is really hard to know how much to prepare for class. One day the students will work really slowly and the next they are done in a blink of an eye, where the students work at such different rates on different days I am never sure how much to prepare for the days lesson.

          I reach the dilemma of over preparing and having some of my classes falling behind the others or under preparing and then I am not filling up my class with valuable teaching information to help the students learn. Yes students need free time some days but when the classes can’t handle the free time and get extremely out of hand when you allow them to talk it is vitally important to have the necessary teaching material and I am still trying to find the balance. I am always learning and trying to adapt to new things. My mentor teacher is always nice and helps me out and we come up with essays for the students to write to help me gauge their writing for my research or we give them activities that can help boost their grade. Even though this is busy work some students need the easy assignments to help bring up their test grades, even the best students can be bad test takers.

Time management is a work in progress for me…  

http://thorntoncenter.net/time-management-workshop 

Week Five: Historical Approaches to Literature

History and English go together like peanut butter and jelly. Before most of my units I always take the time to go through and introduce the students to the historical context. How can you teach Beowulf without first going over the Anglo- Saxon time period and discussing Oral traditions and how books were written by monks to describe the major contraindications between the Christian and pagan aspects in the book.

How can you teach Shakespeare without going over the Renaissance, The plays of that century and Shakespeare himself??? You really can’t is the answer. These older books are hard enough to read for the students and if you give them the background knowledge and if you really help them understand the time period, it helps students to not get confused when they are reading.

One of the questions I wonder when teaching the historical context is whether or not I should front-load the material or spread it out while reading. I find it easier to front load the historical material that way the students are well prepared for what they are going to be reading and then while reading you can take time doing the storyline activities with the students. But is this boring for students? Or does it really help them? It is something that I inquire about and when I am a full time teacher I would love to experiment with the timing of the historical context to see what works better. J

Week Four: A Trip to the Principal's Office...

          My mentor teacher and I had started experiencing problems with one of our 12^th grade honors English students. It started with him being defiant about his hat; my mentor teacher only has a few rules in her classroom and taking off your hat when you walk in is one of them. This student would refuse to take off his hat and when he did he would always end up putting it back on in the middle of class again; causing many problems because if one student gets to wear their hat then the other’s will voice their opinions about wanting to wear their hats.

          Later into the school year more problems began to arise. My mentor teacher allows all students to go to the bathroom, but we have a one at a time out process. One day when I was teaching a quick lesson on Old English to the seniors the students just raised his hand and asked to go to the bathroom in the middle of my presentation. The rudeness was overwhelming to me, but I let him go. The student also stood up while I was teaching one day and just walked straight out the door to the bathroom…then when a line had built up of students waiting to go to the bathroom the student continued to throw a fit that he had to go to the bathroom and was verbally mouthing my mentor teacher and me. We would have let him go to the bathroom right away if he would have just stated that it was an emergency but instead he mouthed and copped an attitude and treated us with great disrespect.

          So my mentor teacher decided to deploy a preventative measure because he definitely wasn’t listening to us. We had the student called to the principal’s office and we all talked to him about how he needs to pay us with respect and we also learned about his body building competitions that cause him to drink gallons of water a day. The principal stressed that a smart young student like him needed to set an example and be respectful. Though it was an extreme measure taking him to the principal’s office it really worked and opened up communication between the student and us. We talked to the student’s mother as well and she said that she didn’t know him to be disrespectful and that it won’t happen again. We also learned that the body building can affect his mood a lot so now we are more understanding of his situation. All it takes is a little communication. 

http://dawnstephensbooks.com/from-the-principals-office-school-security/