The Continued

Unfortunately I ran out of time to complete all quotes and life-examples as I "taught into the bell," as the teacher put it, to finish up the most challenging ones. My feedback was mainly a positive one, with just a tip to not give that level of difficulty material to the students. In fact it was positive enough for her to even ask me to...

Teach another lesson the next day. Taking this as a good sign, although I didn't have much time to plan a cool activity like the day before, I finished Paradise Lost. In a nutshell this lesson was not very engaging. I sat in the front of the classroom and read the rest of the portion of the epic we were reading and helped translate the language and why it was relevant. Classic fire and brimstone style: which is so not me. I could tell the students were completely bored out of their minds and in another world, where Paradise Lost and I were not invited. Note taken.

Third period rolled around, my mind still reviewing the morning's lessons, and my teacher asked me to run the rehearsal in her third period Intro to Theatre class. Since I have some experience teaching Theatre and teaching lessons off the cuff as I go along, this did not require me to sit down and plan over text like, Paradise Lost. Instead I sat and watched them perform a scene they have been working on for a couple weeks, stopping them when I saw something that could be stronger. In the art, this is called directing. In Education this could be considered scaffolding or teaching mini lessons. Regardless the portion of the class period went pretty smoothly and when my teacher came back into the Theater she took back over.

Theatre is my stronger subject. It's something I have studied intensively for a lot longer than I have intensively studied English. Of course, this does not mean that I want it to stay that way. So I'm learning and taking notes as I go. For example, instead of giving the lesson lecture style, I could have had the students read the poem together and then talk about it. I could have scaffolded the class by showing them how I read the text, then had them read it together, and then had them read it individually. I should have related it to how this information is important for them to know. I could have done a mini-leson on how to take notes as they are reading. I could have passed out guided notes for students that preferred visual guides. Last Tuesday I taught a lesson on Rime of the Ancient Mariner in a similar style. I had a Prezi set up, and an audio reading of the ballad. We would stop the reading to talk about important Romantic characteristics and what the ballad was saying, but its only a variation of how I taught my second lesson on Paradise Lost. I am teaching another lesson on Mary Shelley on Thursday so I will be sure to incorporate some of these notes with my next lesson. Until/before then!

The Big Day

So you know when you have that big day planned out? You've been planning, Pintresting for days, planning, searching for that right dress, planning, practicing in front of the mirror, researching, reading, theorizing...wait what did you think I was talking about?

...

Oh, no sweetie. I'm talking about teaching your first lesson! Mine was yesterday. Kind of.

So I guess you could count the one time last semester my teacher got me up and in front of the classroom to teach what a thesis is. Buuut it was a disaster, including the electricity going down in the whole school, not knowing what KTIP lesson plan even looked like, not preparing for the technology I was going to use, getting one of the examples of a thesis wrong myself, and the fact that I had no idea this was actually a review, for the students instead of their first time working with it. So I don't count that time. In fact, I don't even like to speak about it.

Last week my teacher mentioned that I could teach a lesson on Tuesday about ten characteristics of epic poetry and have students find examples of them in Paradise Lost. Stoked. I went home, studied the text, met with my professor, brainstormed some good ideas, filled out my KTIP chart, and was ready to go. Despite my last ordeal being such a disast--oh wait, we're not talking about that--I was not nervous, even excited to get in front of the classroom. So what the lesson had to be pushed back a day? The class was finishing up some writing work (which I also have to write about at some point) on Tuesday. A key part of teaching is being flexible. So there I was Wednesday morning ready to go.

Let's be real. Unless someone reads epics for fun or just loves Puritan culture, Paradise Lost is not the juiciest piece of literature to read. At the end of the day though you gotta do what you gotta do. So here is a catalogue of the events that happened.
The bell rang.

Announcements came on.
Class began.

The lesson started with a bell ringer (written on the board & explained) to refresh the students' memory of what the ten characteristics of epics were. Four minutes in the students were finishing up their answers so I asked them to start sharing what they came up with. Unsurprisingly for a class of unenthusiastic seniors at 8:00 in the morning the list was slim. However with some prompting and hints they were able to recall the whole list. Some even named additional characteristics they hadn't been asked to memorize. I then split them into groups of four to work on guided notes. The purpose of the notes was to have the students find examples of the characteristics from the text and then identify a real life example of the characteristic. I gave an example and sent them to work.

I walked around the class helping students as they needed it. Mainly this consisted of helping them find real life examples of the text, which seemed to be very challenging for the students and even the clinical teacher had problems with. I feel like my advice helped a lot of students, although occasionally I left a thoughtful face behind to brainstorm ideas. The goal was for students to remember these characteristics and see how they can be applicable to real life, but in hindsight it was perhaps a little two challenging for them to put that in perspective.

Towards the end of class everyone shared their notes and quotes. Unfortunately I ran out of time to complete all quotes and life-examples as I "taught into the bell," as the teacher put it, to finish up the most challenging ones. My feedback was mainly a positive one, with just a tip to not give that level of difficulty material to the students. In fact it was positive enough for her to even ask me to...
be continued...

Moving On

From my several week hiatus of sharing some information and notes I have observed from school, I thought I would start with my most recent visit: this morning. I suppose what I gathered from today's experience was dealing with the population of teenagers. So skip the part of the morning where I woke up late, couldn't find the right shoes, and had to get my car jump started because my battery was dead. I came in to the classroom in the middle of the senior English class taking their final on MacBeth. The final was in depth, and large, a fact the entire class made vocal to the same old tune of the teenage whine. Although this may seem harsh to the general class, my teacher later told me they simply do not know how to take finals. Four years ago, as a general student myself, I would have resented this type of teacher, but hindsight is 20/20. I wish I had teachers that slammed me with in depth exams that made me show thorough knowledge of literature we had read. Not only would it have prepared me for exams in college, it would have made me remember literature better. Let's face it. Not every student wants to go on to college. There is still a lot to be learned from literature about life and the world.

Senior seminar was canceled, in planning I began looking at Frankenstein because they are moving on to a Romantic unit in a few weeks. I found out that these students still do portfolios, although I'm not sure to what level, so next week will be geared toward writing. Then they move on to a Puritan unit, before finishing off the semester with Romanticism. I have hope that I will get to teach a lesson with the Puritan unit so to the "Loss of Paradise," I turn to for that!

I watched a beginning Theatre class rehearse a parody of "Maceth." As my profile states I am a part time Theatre teacher to small children, some of whom also come to the acting school with no theatre experience. Thus I made sure to be as supportive as possible, although I could not help but also note the same un-enthusiasm as the first class. As a whole, the students did not want to be there.

I also wanted to comment on the restricted AP class. The assignment was for the students to find a scholarly article backing up a theory that Shakespeare was actually someone else from the Elizabethan time (like Francis Bacon, Edward De Vere,& Christopher Marlowe). They went to the computer lab, I got my iPad ready to help research, and Ebscohost was down. It could have been the rain. It could be the stress. But the class seemed to be ruined. Some students were panicking, a few students tried search engines, but for the most part they gave up. Then, of course, it was picture day and so that took some time away from their research too.

I know, I know. This is what school is sometimes. But the pressure to make every moment in school as productive as possible towards the higher goal of giving the gift of education has been ground in me the past three years can really change a person. I watched my teacher supervisor's reaction. She stayed calm, down to earth, and just rolled with the punches. Sure, her classes had a less-than-enthusiastic students, but she always stayed focused on moving forward. On top of that the students never backlashed when she tried to help each student, kept the play going, even when student broke character to go take a picture, and she told them to stop whining about their assignments. My lesson for today was to accept the times when the other million things that happen at school happen to accept, and move on.

That Inconvenient Thing Called...

Life. Because I believe in consistent blogging and writing I thought I should layout my excuses of why I have not updated since my first day in the school. I had gone another day to observe, only to take a week off because the school had fall break. I came back after that for a couple days to work in the school and then the teacher was absent from the school on a field trip. Then I got my wisdom teeth taken out and had dry sockets that kept me home (when trust me I would have had rather been at school and pain-free). Throw in another day the seniors were testing and I have really only been to school less than a handful of time since the beginning. But I have some interesting observations and applied learning from my clinical work. Lots of ideas. Lots to look forward to!

First Day & the Bible

Thursday was my first day in the school. Already I can already tell that my experience at this school is going to be very educational. I sat back of the room, and in the discussions, and front row of the theater to watch what the classes were all about. I recognized a lot of the criteria that must be taught in accordance of the common core standards, like what we are discussing in class. Next time I plan on bringing a copy of the standards next time, as well as some tools in reading MacBeth, which is what two of the classes are looking at. Although I will not be teaching in the AP class, I still have started collecting ideas on criteria and lessons of AP Literature that the teacher is using. Thursday students were supposed to bring Bibles to class to draw literary devices out of historical sources. Besides a Bible literacy class in high school I have never seen a teacher use a Bible to teach Literature, and it was a great resource. 

Today I did not go to the school because there were no senior classes and thus no classes to work with. Although I can only guess what will be going on in the class on Thursday since I'm not there every day, I am looking forward to going back!

Composition in Schools

This semester I am in an Intro to Composition Studies course. Composition. Before the semester started I wrote this class off as yet another writing intensive course where I would have to write numerous papers about __________. I was very wrong. Five weeks into the semester I am knees deep in studying the subject of composition.

Do you know how you walk by something every day? Perhaps it is a flag pole. Maybe an empty building. Or a bench. You have probably walked by it hundreds of times. Your eyes see these items. You could be able to tell someone, "Meet me by the flag pole," Or, "Turn right after you pass the building." But then one day you stop and really look at it. The post on the top of the flag pole. What that empty building used to be. Who the bench is in memory of. All of the sudden the little details that make up these things that you have seen countless times becomes brand new and produces the question, "Why have I not noticed this before?" That is my reaction when it comes to teaching the subject of composition. 'Sure,' I have thought before, 'Of course I will teach students how to write synthetic pieces, on demands, and how to write essays.' But this course has really opened my eyes to the responsibility to teach writing.

When I was in high school I did a fair share of writing. Science papers, on demands, AP prompts, book reviews, etc. But my senior year I took a college course of introductory writing (different than my composition course). All of the sudden rewording the same sentence for a couple of papers became creating a piece of work that flows fluently from sentence to sentence, introducing new ideas to connect a larger theme, adding stylistic choices such as freeing yourself from traditional grammar rules, and choosing what is relevant when writing. These skills I learned in that class carried me all throughout my first couple years of college. Why had that not been taught this sooner? Why was I still being taught when to use who vs whom just a year before? The difference between the two years were eons away. Perhaps since the common core standards have been implemented this is no longer a problem, but this semester has already been insightful and has me motivated to teach real composition skills. NO MORE INTRODUCTORY, 3 PARAGRAPH, CONCLUSION ESSAY!

I have become aware of the problems of mechanical grading. Painting a student's paper with red ink, fixing grammatical errors when the true problem of the paper is the content. Sure a student might write "uncertainity" instead of "uncertainty," but as a teacher I should be more concerned about what the student is referring to instead of the misspelling. I now see that students should be aware that (wait for it...) there is more than just prompted writing out there! I am learning about that different styles of writing should be taught, instead of just essay after essay. How to prevent students from writing like a textbook: exposing more reading to them than textbooks. Methods of the ways students produce writing. Today I just read the essay, "Shaping at the Point of Utterance" by James Britton that argues writing in the moment is a valuable method of writing. One of his ideas on how to overcome writers block is to speak ideas out loud--the perfect reason to do small group writing discussions. This class so far has been eye opening on something that I have assumed I will be teaching (writing) but did not really give much thought to it.

Moving forward to applying this information is exciting to me, especially since I am getting ready to dive into working in the schools feet first. Can't wait to compare what the teacher does in the classroom with the ideas we discuss in my composition class and how they coincide. And how I will teach this semester.

The Fun Begins

As education in general does, the education program at the University is evolving and changing. Five years ago students went to class for three years and then student taught, occasionally going to observe in the schools. Then the state required education students to observe in the schools two hundred hours before student teaching. Then observations turned into "applied learning," which now has turned into a "clinical model." Because this transformation has happened in the course of the three and a half years I have been in college, the whip lash of all the changes has finally smacked the Education office here in the face. A year ago I would have already been a third done with my observation/applied learning/clinical hours but it was just last week that I was assigned to the school and teacher I will be spending eighty hours with this semester. Talk about a kid in a candy store. I had the initial email that I was going to send her written out by the end of class. Today was the day we sat and introduced ourselves.

I will be working in a school that I did not graduate from but is from my hometown. The school is an Independent school and is somewhat different than all the public schools I have worked in. She is an English and Theatre teacher, just as I am aspiring to be. In fact we are both doing different versions of the same show with her theatre department and the acting school I work at. During her planning we sat down and talked about what is expected of me, what her class schedule is, etc. This semester it looks like I will be working with a general senior English class, an ACT seminar, an AP Literature class, and an Intro to Theatre class. To say that I am looking forward to working in this school and going through some of the things that I am learning in class is an understatement. I return on Thursday so I will keep the readers updated.