Back to Teaching....Student Teaching Week 12

Sorry to disappoint those who were looking forward to a blog post last week! I decided to take a break but have no fear, I'm back! I attended SLLC (State Legislative Leadership Conference) with the students Sunday through Tuesday. Then I was at Penn State where we then went to Baltimore to explore urban agriculture.

Monday through Thursday were normal
Friday was an Act 80 Day

Things I Learned

• be flexible with everything you do
• make sure you secure times where students can come down and have enough time to make up a test if they need to
• IT IS OKAY IF YOU MESS UP. IT IS (NOT) OKAY IF THEY FAIL A TEST. This may be an "out on the limb" statement but...at one point in time during student teaching maybe in a teachers first year (even the veteran/"up on a pedestal" teachers) probably had almost all students fail a test or at least had to reteach material. It happens. You are still learning, there is "room" for you to mess up. Just correct it!
• Again, breathe.....it will be okay. You will get through it. Remember the why (when the students actually get it).

Advice Wanted

• How do you deal with going back and reteaching concepts? What if you thought they got it/they showed they got it before but then on the test they didn't? Specifically, I had almost 2 full days of instruction on calculating how many pounds of N, P, and K were in a 50 pound bag of fertilizer and a lot of them still didn't get it. How would you handle something like that?
• I found it a bit weird coming back after a week off. It was hard for me to get back into the groove of teaching. What advice do you have for getting back into teaching, especially coming back to a full load? (obviously that's what it would be like in a job in the future)

Wait, was this a normal week? Student Teaching Week 10

Monday-normal
Tuesday-normal
Wednesday-normal, activity period
Thursday-Area Speaking Contest
Friday-normal

It was a full week of classes for the students at last! For me, not quite! All 5 days were normal school days but on Thursday, I attended Area Speaking with our Parliamentary Procedure team and a couple of speakers.

Teaching Responsibilities

• This was my last week teaching Ag 4 (it was a forestry unit). I gave them a small test on Friday and they made me cry while grading them. At the end of the test, I asked them "Is there anything that you know about forestry that I did not ask. Do you have any other questions?" Almost all of the students (only 6 total), said something to the effect of "you were a great teacher," or "thank you for teaching us." They all gave some sort of encouraging note to answer that question. I had only been with them for about 10 days so all of that was super meaningful to me.
• Ag 1 and 2 went pretty smoothly this week. We had to find other parts of the plumbing square project to work on while waiting for some parts to come in but they had plenty of other things to do that everything worked out well.

Area Speaking

• I'm helping to coach our Parli Pro team. They got 2nd at the Area Contest. They were practicing well but when it came to contest time, they happened to go over time. It is something that we will have to perfect in the coming weeks before regionals. They also made a few simple mistakes.
• Our senior prepared speaker got 2nd! Our Creed speaker did not advance to regionals but held her own. With all of these contests, its practice makes perfect! The one thing that our speakers can improve on is the questions; we have not been adamant about asking them questions after their speeches.

Advice Wanted

• How do I keep things from getting mundane? I'm not exactly in a rut but I feel as if I am just going through the motions everyday.

The Cedar Crest Roller Coaster....Student Teaching Week 9

(travelandleisure.com)

Monday-2 hour delay, I was visiting cohort member Victoria
Tuesday-"normal"
Wednesday-"normal" activity period schedule
Thursday-"normal" banquet day!
Friday-"normal" banquet clean up day!


I went home last weekend and then traveled to watch my cohort member teach her classes at Penns Manor High School. She did a great job! The rest of the week went pretty smoothly. Nothing too exceptional happened (besides the banquet). I am super excited to see where week 10 takes me this coming week! It's hard to believe that my student teaching experience is almost 2/3 of the way over.

Banquet Happenings

• around 230 members and guests were present
• many sponsors, school board members and administrators were there
• got numerous high praises of how exceptional the students are and how great the banquet was

Things I Learned

• No matter how hard it may seem, keep going. The amount of effort that gets put in before an event determines how great (or not great in some cases) the event may be. Banquet was great and that was all because of the hard work everyone put in way before March 7th!
• Diamonds are NOT made under pressure. As a college student, that is a popular belief but that is not the case when dealing with hundreds of people and high school students. Planning WAY ahead of time is what made this years banquet "the best one yet." While it may have seemed like there was some last minute planning happening, most things had been done way before.

BECOV Progress

• Variability stayed the same. I did run into a few small issues of going back to Power Point but I used questioning effectively and still had other activities mixed in. Every Ag 1 student made their own landscape design on Tuesday, we had fruits and vegetables as a snack on Thursday and watched the banquet slideshow video on Friday along with briefly talking about floriculture and analyzing a flower arrangement that I made.
• The students really seemed to enjoy making the landscape designs (and of course the eating) so I think that I am going to try to incorporate more drawing (and maybe eating)!

Advice Wanted

• Just the usual how to keep improving variability!
• I think I started to struggle with business like behavior with the officers so any advice on that would be great!

We're Halfway There!!! Student Teaching Week 8

(Picture Source: Wikipedia)

"Woah, we're halfway there...!" were the lyrics from Bon Jovi's "Livin' On A Prayer" that stuck out to me this week. Mainly because Wednesday marked the exact halfway point of my student teaching experience. It has been a truly amazing experience that's taught me so many things. We will see where this last half takes me!

Monday-normal

Tuesday-normal

Wednesday-activity period but normal

Thursday-normal

Friday-2 hour delay

An almost normal week. Until we got to Friday. All was good (for the most part) until Thursday night into Friday morning. Then we had snow. Yay! Depending on who you talk to, it might be yay. To me, not really but hey it ended up fine.

Things I Learned

• to just roll with it! Without Mr. Haussener, it could have been a disaster. But I think it went perfectly fine. No injuries, no problems with the logistics of the program. We focused on getting the daily essentials done (which is taking care of the rabbits and chickens, watering the hanging baskets in the greenhouse, etc.) With that, I almost got a full week of teaching in for once!!
• students will take advantage of you without their "real" teacher there. Super talkative and disrespectful. How do I take care of it (besides talking to them about it at the time)? Give them a pop quiz the next day; what do they do? Complain about it but complete it anyway. So far, the quizzes look good so I don't know what they were complaining about.

BECOV Progress

• I definitely continued improving on variability
• I need to continue improving on clarity and enforcement of directions
• I believe my enthusiasm drifted to the wayside this week because I was trying to get through remembering all of the things we needed to do to make the program run well

Advice Wanted

• How do I incorporate hands on activities into subject areas that I don't know much about? (forestry for example)
• Also, looking forward to some other units I'm teaching (like biotechnology and animal science genetics for example)...what is the "beginning" of those units? I need to start at the very basics but where exactly is that?