Amy’s HS Block Blog

For my last lesson, I was asked to have my students learn from text. This was a pretty challenging task, as the class is algebra and text just isn’t the main method people use to learn math. Nonetheless, with a visit to three different libraries and an hours-long search of internet materials, I managed to locate an acceptable (not great, but it’d do) text. I made the copies, created a reading guide that grabbed the main points, added admit and exit slips and my lesson was made.

Teaching the lesson went fairly well. I plain forgot to model answering the first question for the whole class, but ended up doing it for several students individually at their desks anyway. One student wasn’t really keeping up with the reading guide and just sort of stared at his paper the whole time; I assisted him in an attempt to keep him on task but he only seemed to work when I was nearby or looking at him. (He seemed really tired.) Another student who just about never does work for my cooperating teacher at all did do a bit for my lesson, which was good. A couple of the students really struggled with the reading task at hand; I emphasized that they did NOT need to read the whole article (about 3 pages total, with moderately large print) as long as they were able to find the answers to the questions on the reading guide. My real problem seems a little ironic, looking back: it was the two students who read quickly, found the answers to the reading guide without issue, and were left with nothing to do while the rest of the class was still working. I gave them the exit slips to fill a bit of the time, as the class as a whole clearly wasn’t going to get to do them. Those didn’t help much, though, and there were several minutes at the end where one student sat just waiting with nothing to occupy him. But even then, there were students who still hadn’t even started on the six math problems at the end of the lesson when I had to pass the torch to my cooperating teacher so they could do a folder check and start the math game his class plays from time to time.

This seems like a pretty easy problem to fix, in hindsight. I’d forgotten to look at how varied my students’ abilities are when I was putting my lesson together. Some really struggle with reading while others have no problem.  Maybe I should have either noticed that already, or expected the variance in a resource math class, but I guess I just didn’t think of it.

In the future, I’ll remember to adjust my assignments (especially the in-class ones, where time is such a factor) to my students’ abilities. Some are always going to be more advanced than others, and I need to expect and plan for that.

Recently, we’ve been learning about different types of questions and ways that we can use questioning in our teaching. I particularly liked an idea in one of the handouts: teachers need not have the answers to all of students’ questions right away. The teacher can let the student know that they will research the answer to the question and come back with an answer. This shows the student that the teacher is still learning, too.

I really liked this idea of modeling how we learn and discover new things. This also connects, in my mind, to self-directed learning: if a student is wondering about something, it’s great for that student to know that s/he can go and find that answer. In the case of the particular question that the teacher didn’t know, yes, that student will probably wait to find out the answer directly from the teacher. But I think it plants the idea that we can all continue learning and growing independently, and it feels like a critical point for me as a teacher to get across: knowledge acquisition does not end when a person graduates!

In the future, I hope to be able to keep all this in mind. It’s okay not to know the answers, but it’s not okay to disregard my own ignorance when I have a chance to model this part of the learning process for my students.

My cooperating teacher has been sick the past couple of weeks. He was present Monday, though, so I went to his class. We had three students at first (normal head count is at least five). A few minutes after the bell, another student knocked on the door. The teacher advised me to check his pass before allowing him to enter. I checked it, it was legitimate, so he came inside. However, I failed to notice his earbuds. The teacher spotted them right away, though, and immediately told the student that he needed to walk back to the doorway, put the headphones away, and then he could join the class. The student wasn’t having it — and the teacher wasn’t having his “okay, whatever” response. Teacher kicked student out. Student proclaimed he didn’t need this class anyway. Teacher scribbled off a discipline form of some kind and had me walk it to the office. Apparently while I was gone, an assistant principal returned with the student, saying the music had been put away and asking if the student would be allowed to return to class. The teacher said no, he will not learn correct behavior if he never experiences the consequences. He added while he was telling me this that especially with students with cognitive issues, consequences need to be swift so that the student will connect his behavior with that immediate consequence, so that he can learn from the experience.

This whole scenario felt a little jarring to me. Normally my cooperating teacher is quite easygoing and flexible. But I think I understand why he acted the way he did. a) He’s sick. He feels awful. As he put it: “I don’t need this today.” b) This student chronically misbehaves, when he bothers coming to class at all. We catch him pretty frequently sticking an earbud in one ear when he thinks we aren’t looking, playing with his phone and sending text messages, and not doing his work even when he doesn’t seem to be attending to any other tasks. Plus, c) I think the teacher felt a bit disrespected, both by the student’s behavior in the past and the blatant walking-into-class-with-earbuds-on that directly caused his dismissal from class.

I think I learned a lesson about assertiveness here. In many cases, we as teachers need to be assertive or our students aren’t going to learn, and that may be applicable to more than classroom management alone…

I’ve been working with the students in my class on a one-to-one basis quite a bit lately. Usually what happens is my cooperating teacher works from the overhead, going over problems the students want to see demonstrated, while I walk around the classroom and help with more individual concerns — mostly things with which the other students don’t seem to have an issue. I think, at this point, I’ve helped all the students in my class in this manner on at least one occasion.

It seems to me that the students have become more comfortable talking to me and asking me questions. I’m happy with that, no doubt there. However, I’m not sure if it’s directly from having to ask me a question while the cooperating teacher is busy and learning in the process that I don’t bite, or if it’s a more general effect of my regular, pacing presence (I do so much walking in there!) and they’re just used to me being there. The level of trust the students have with me did seem to go up a bit overall after I taught my first lesson. For as much as I feel like I know right now, it could be something completely unrelated.

So for now, as a novice teacher, I have to say if it works, so be it, and I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until I find it’s not working or find something that works better…

I’m happy to report that the student who previously eschewed talking to me was fairly participatory during my lesson on Wednesday. He said he had a sore throat, so he was speaking very quietly, but he answered my questions more than once (and they weren’t even directly only at him). They had a test after my lesson, which was a less than optimal situation for my first lesson in front of the class, but I worked within my time limitations. This student was done early, so he was allowed to use one of the classroom computers. At one point he started practically jumping up and down in his seat and excitedly stage-whispering “Mister! Mister!” He was trying to get the attention of my cooperating teacher, who was assisting another student on something test-related, so I came over. (Hey, if nothing else, if he refuses to talk to me then it quiets him down during the test, right? Hah.) He showed me two Pokemon games that are apparently coming out on Nintendo DS (I think?) sometime soon, about which he was quite pleased.

This all gives me a generic “good feeling” about working with this student, and I hope I’ll be able to keep him communicating with me in the future.

Once upon a time, in a resource math classroom not at all far away, there was a student who could not bring himself to speak to me. My cooperating teacher warned me, on my very first day in his classroom, that I would need to give this student time, that I would need to “grow on” him. So I haven’t taken it personally; I’ve just tried to be patient and give him his space. During our second (maybe third?) class period together, I was walking around talking to each student briefly just to make sure I had each of their names correct. I spoke to this student on that occasion and he curled up into a ball in his desk. The cooperating teacher got him to answer my question, but generally speaking, he ignores my presence completely.

That changed last week, if only for a brief moment. He read something aloud, to no one in particular, but was reading a word incorrectly, a word that was critical to getting the assignment right. (This was a worksheet that had math problems that would lead to solving a word problem.) I happened to be standing pretty close to his desk, so I glanced at his paper and asked him if the word he’d said was the right one. He examined his paper more closely and then read aloud the correct word. (And then he went back to ignoring me completely, if I recall.)

Nonetheless, it does feel like progress, even if it’s tiny. I’m not familiar with this student’s situation, so it’s particularly difficult to work around a problem I am legally not allowed to have identified for me, but I feel like my patience and willingness to respect his space may have paid off a little.

In the future, I hope to remember and apply this lesson. Sometimes, the best thing I can do may be to back off.

This semester I’m working in a resource algebra class. Most days, there are six students. Their math abilities are varied; obviously they are all “behind” in some sense but some students have more difficulty with the assignment than others. What I’ve noted recently is the teacher’s ability to quickly adapt his lessons to meet the individual needs of his students. Monday, he handed out a packet of seatwork to his students. They needed to do all the problems on the fronts and backs of four pages, and show their work. But! If the student could show him that he or she is capable of doing this work, then that student was exempted from having to complete that page and could spend more time on skills that were still developing.

I thought this was brilliant! By individualizing the work the students do while they are in class, he is able to tailor lessons to their needs and not waste their time on things they know when there’s more critical work they need to do. Not only that, he’s able to do it on the fly, which probably works a lot better overall than planning in advance for six different lessons and trying to orchestrate them during a single class period.

I will definitely keep this experience in mind when I’m teaching. Especially in special education, it’s critical not to waste time when the students have so many other things they could be learning and necessary skills they could be practicing. I think this shows foresight — the teacher is looking at the “big picture.”

I walked around to three or four different classrooms before I even found a teacher who was in the room and staying there for the period! I realize special ed teachers have a lot of obligations outside the classroom, but I have to wonder about the difficulties of teaching a class that is likely already having problems in the subject area when added to having a teacher who isn’t there. I finally settled down in the classroom of my cooperating teacher, who we at least knew to be present today. He was teaching/reviewing the distributive property with that class. He made many “aside” comments to me as he went through the lesson, noting his usually sparing use of sarcasm and his hall pass allowance for his students, among other things. I’m having trouble thinking of a lot to say about that experience this morning but I’m back in that class after lunch and many more times this semester so I’m sure I’ll make up for it by the time this is all over…