Weekly Post #1

This has been a pretty fun week.  I'm in my classroom Mondays and Fridays for the full day.  It's kind of interesting to see how the mentality of the students (and teachers) changes throughout the week.  Last Monday was their first day back from Spring break and everyone was struggling to get back into the swing of the schedule.  The students were talking quite a lot and my cooperating teacher had a difficult time getting them to focus.  He seemed a bit frazzled by the time we got to 3rd period so he asked me to step in and lead the lesson - same one that had been taught previous two periods.  It was just getting the students to read out of their book and then begin some review questions.  Fairly easy to get everything accomplished in twenty minutes so the students had about half and hour to answer their questions.  I think my highlight this week was just being able to teach a different class.  The group here was a 7th grade Washington State History class and I was able to add some anecdotes about growing up on the westside and how the weather differs from this part of the state.

Having my cooperating teacher ask me to step in was great, but I definitely see what it is like when the teacher is having to stretch a little bit to make the period fill with instruction.  The last 10 minutes of my 'lesson' were hard to get the students to focus on a larger project they should be doing because most of them had finished with their review and wanted to talk about break with their friends.

I feel like students coming back from break do not want to read straight out of their book first thing.  I think I will try to have a 'transition' lesson so the students can focus on learning again, but not have to go straight back into the grind of the normal routine. 

No real conflicts happened last week, although I was put in charge of a 'leadership' class that had a sick teacher.  I got a Krispy Kreme donut out of it because the actual teacher had to leave on a personal issue.  All they really did was collect the recycle from the classrooms throughout the school and then sort it out.  It was pretty easy.

That was last week, this upcoming week will be a bit different for me as I won't be there Friday b/c I'm going on a long weekend.  I'm not worried about my hours as there will be plenty of time to get them all in.