Student Teaching Journal

I’m almost done with my first full week at the high school. I’m getting more comfortable, I think… I’m coming out of my shell a little bit. Especially at the middle school. I had an epiphany yesterday and realized that the age of middle schoolers is fairly universal. Allow me to explain. I’ve always– since middle school– felt like people from other schools look older than people at my school. I have no idea why that is. But whenever I saw people from other schools, I’d go, “What? They’re sophomores in high school? They look 20!” I’m not sure if it’s because the people from my school just look younger to me because I’ve known them all since they were younger, but… That’s how it’s always been with me. So when I’m teaching high schoolers, I feel like I’m teaching my peers (and that’s always harder) because to me, they look the same age as the people I’m going to college with. Agh. Anyway, this is how I had my epiphany. I was playing games with the middle schoolers yesterday that I used to play with the middle school kids during my internship 5 years ago, and they loved the games just as much. Middle schoolers are middle schoolers… and I’m a lot older than them.

That probably didn’t make any sense. But now that I’ve established that I am, in fact, older than my students, I feel a lot less awkward. I’ve also been trying to dress a lot differently than they would dress, just to sort of set me apart. My height sure as heck isn’t going to set me apart from them.

One thing I don’t really like– and I know this comes with secondary territory– is how I’m not really addressed so much as an authority. My little kids were always so excited to see me because I was a big important grown-up, and they would always exclaim, “Hi Miss S!” whenever they saw me. I think I’ve been addressed by name a total of three times in the past week, and it’s only when my attention is needed. No one says hi to me.

I played a game with my middle schoolers yesterday where each kid chose 4 lifesavers out of a box, and depending on the colors they got, they had to write 4 different facts on a piece of paper. I gave them a different topic for each color of candy. Some of my favorite responses– interesting, funny, sad, and just plain weird:

A reason you joined chorus:

• I joined chorus because I have nothing to do in school, I don’t want to be in computers, and my mom didn’t want me to join band.
• I joined chorus because I’ve never joined and wanted to try something new.

Something positive about someone in this class:

• I have to people people.

Something about your family:

• My grandpa just died from a heart attack.
• My mom lives in Louisiana and my dad lives downstate.

Something you do when you’re not at school:

• Snowboard! Shh! It’s kinda a secret…

They each got to share at least one of their things with the class, too. I’m really glad I did that activity. We all know each other a little better now, and it gave us a way to sort of connect.

As far as the high school goes… It’s SO much different from my high school choir program. These kids learned 4 songs in the past 2 days. They’re such fast learners. But we do sightreading every day, which I’m sure helps, and all of the kids in select choir have to be in one of two hours of regular chorus, too, so the strong kids from select choir really help everyone else out. I can’t even fathom how much time I’ll have to work on interpretation and expression with these songs. It’s going to be crazy.

The musical is one big mess right now. Two weeks from today, we’ll be in the middle of a performance… unless it falls apart or unless we cut so much of it that it’s done by 8:30. AB and I were just supposed to be doing the music, but starting yesterday, we’re jumping in on finishing casting the show and doing blocking and running things. The kids were coming up to us yesterday begging for us to rehearse with them because their director is doing, well, nothing.

I’m warming up to this. It’s okay. As of right now, I don’t like it as much as my first assignment, and a big part of that is because of my relationship with AB. He hasn’t made any effort to get to know me on a personal level. He knows where I’m from and that’s about it. I’ve mentioned Brenton several times and he never remembers who that is. He doesn’t know I’m minoring in math, so I’d feel really weird just asking him out of nowhere if he’d be cool with me observing a math teacher every once in a while. He just doesn’t ask me about anything, and if I try saying something, he doesn’t really listen. But… he’s a great teacher and I’m already learning a lot about how to run rehearsals and stuff. So… I’m not complaining too much.

Does anybody read this? I babble so much… If not, it’s good reflection time for me.

TOMORROW IS FRIDAY!

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I’m having a hard time getting used to this switch. I had a good day of teaching today, but there’s so much DRAMA at the secondary level right now. The band director said that the negative moods that all of the music faculty have right now usually don’t get to that point until March and that I just picked a rough semester to student teach there. I guess it’s a good thing to see all of this, but I’m definitely learning a lot about what doesn’t work. I am learning what does work too, but… the other stuff takes precedence when everyone’s stressing out. I haven’t gotten to bed at my bedtime once this week, and I seriously get pissed off at myself when I let that happen. Agh. I’ll try to be in bed by 10 and that’s the best I can do for tonight. Can’t turn back time.

More details later.

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I miss my little kids…

My last day of school last week was so sad! I got to school and put some pumpkin chocolate chip cookies in the teacher’s lounge with a thank you to the faculty and staff and I saw a cake in there that said, “Best Wishes Emily.” I guessed it was from JA, but I wasn’t positive. I went into the classroom and put JA’s chocolate chip banana bread on her desk and saw a gigantic gift bag on my desk. That was from JA; She got me a book of “Puff the Magic Dragon” and two Wee Sing CDs and books. The 5th grade morning helpers had written this on the board:

Such sweethearts…

Then JA took me to the break room to show me the cake, so it was from her. She’s so nice… I was so lucky to get my placement with her.

The day was pretty blah. I didn’t feel well… Still sick. One of the 5th grade classes made thank you cards for me in class and gave them to me in music. They were SO cute. A lot of them drew pictures of me wearing ridiculous outfits, and one drew a picture of the classroom with the good kids’ names on the board in green and the bad kids’ names in red with about six checks next to each one. They were all just too cute for me to handle.

I didn’t have to teach until the afternoon, but once I finally did have to teach, my speaking voice was barely there and my singing voice was completely gone, so I was lucky just to make it through my lessons. Mrs. Hazel came to observe me for my third 2nd grade class when my voice was 90% gone, the overhead bulb went out, and the kids were the rowdiest I’d dealt with all year. She had mostly positive comments, though, on my ability to improvise and following JA’s behavior system. So all in all, it was okay.

Leaving school on Friday was very weird. After the kids left, I didn’t have to make sure everything was ready for Monday and I didn’t have to work on any plans. Come 3:35, I was bored, said goodbye to JA, and left for a relaxing weekend of no lesson plans. Very strange.

As for being at the high school with AB now, eh… I’m not sure. The past two days haven’t given me a good impression. It is the first two days, though, and– not that I have a choice– I’ll give it a chance. I always thought I’d prefer secondary anyway, so I’m sure it will turn out to be fine. It’s the week after a concert, though, and yesterday 15% of the students were out sick and today 23% were. So… we did nothing both days.

For starters, I had to wake up at 5:30 and be out the door by 6:30 to be at school by 7:00 for a 7:15 class. In the first two classes, we ate donuts and watched a 10 minute video of the high school performance at the Pops Concert. After that, we did nothing. 2nd hour was a little more eventful. We practiced “Simple Gifts” with the Select Choir kids and I jumped in on conducting while AB played piano.

We’ve got this big 2 1/2 hour gap in the middle of the day, in which I was super bored and ate lunch by myself because AB always disappears and doesn’t invite me to go where he’s going. Then for the afternoon at the middle school, AB had the kids do busy work by filling in rhythms and note names on a random sight reading page and he played a mini-game with them reviewing note names. It all just seemed like “What can I do to fill this time?” to me, but… like I said, first day. I’ll give it a chance.

I had to stick around for the school board meeting (some of the kids from Select Choir were singing at it) at 6:30, so I just did a lot of nothing in between school and then. We did have pizza with the kids beforehand, so that was sort of nice. AND I got to conduct them while AB played the piano, so that was super exciting for my first day. Then I stayed for the board meeting because I need to log civic engagement hours for Superior Edge. I got home at 8:30 and was in bed by 10.

Today wasn’t a 14 hour day like yesterday, but it seemed just as long. As if yesterday wasn’t uneventful enough, we did about half as much today. I sat and was bored with nothing to do. And that is the summary of my day today.

The good news, though, is that because of the flu we don’t have school until Monday. So here’s my hope: On Monday, everyone will come in well rested and ready to work and AB will have awesome lessons planned and I won’t be bored. Hoping, hoping, hoping. I’m just so used to always being on my toes in the fast-paced elementary school and now I just feel like I could just sleep all day and not miss anything. Enough with the negative attitude, though. I’m going to enjoy these five days and start with a brand new attitude on Monday and start learning a whole bunch.

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I’m feeling kind of weird about this last week at the elementary school. I came home today with nothing but my binder in my bag… No teacher’s editions textbooks or CDs… I feel like I’m just doing fluffy stuff with the kids this week. It’s probably because we’re doing Halloween stuff, but I feel kind of like it has to do with the fact that it’s my last week here. I’m trying to wrap my head around the fact that next week, I’ll be with bratty high schoolers, and it’s just not working. I signed up for this split assignment gig just to make sure I got some experience at the elementary level, but it turns out that I love it. And as much as I complain about all of the lesson plans, I’m a super organized person and I love having my folders and tabs for each grade level with numbered lesson plans and color coded everything. I’m sure I could carry that over to the high school, but people keep telling me, “You’re going to see both sides of things!” meaning that AB just kind of rolls with the punches. Ahhhhhhh, switching gears is going to be hard. I’m not going to be doing anything worthwhile next semester, as far as I can tell. I wish I could have done an extended split assignment… 16 weeks at each level. I wonder if I should bring that option up to anybody for the future.

Anyway… One of my favorite moments of student teaching thus far happened yesterday. I was singing “Hurry, Little Pony,” with the first graders which ends like this: “Pony, pony, you are great!” Then I said, “You are great, first graders! I’m so proud of your singing!” to which about five of them replied, “No, Miss S, YOU are great!” Oh, that made me feel so warm and fuzzy.

I went to the first “Fiddler” rehearsal last night… not as cool as I expected it to be. I’ve never seen a less organized rehearsal. The whole cast was there for two hours and was given no sort of agenda or anything. “Open your scripts; let’s start at the beginning.” They walked through things, were not given blocking, were cut about every three words to listen to a note on interpretation, and where they were when 7:40 rolled around was where they stopped. No review of what they did or anything. I decided last night that I will be helping with the music aspect of the show… I would LOVE to help with the acting and blocking and interpretation, but I don’t think I’ll be given that authority. So AB and I will make the music sound great and the choreography look shiny, and there end my duties.

I’m exhausted. I only have one lesson plan to do for tomorrow, so I’m going to do that and do dishes, and then I’m either going to go to the jazz band concert or go to sleep. Regardless, I’ll be in bed by 9. Mm, can’t wait.

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I realized today that I probably need to work some more on the noise level in my classes. I kept waking up last night with a burning sore throat, and therefore I couldn’t raise my voice above my normal talking voice today. I keep telling people, “It was a rough day, because I couldn’t raise my voice so I felt like I had no control over my students.” That’s a bad sign! I shouldn’t need to raise my voice all of the time in order to have control over my classes. Hmm… time to rethink things.

I think this is the third time I’ve been sick so far in my student teaching.

• Dear Immune System,
• Please make use of this time being sick by building up antibodies to all of these little kid germs. Thanks.
• Sincerely, Emily

I started working on “Fiddler on the Roof” at the high school yesterday. The high school kids accepted me right away… There was no, “Who are you and what are you doing here?” Right away, they listened to me and respected me. A foretaste of the weeks to come? Maybe? Wishful thinking, probably. I am very excited to be working with high school drama, though. I love “Fiddler,” and it will be super interesting to see how a different high school does it.

I did a fun lesson with my first graders yesterday. I introduced the four types of voices that we can use: singing, shouting, whispering, and speaking. We reviewed all of the songs they’ve learned so far this year and some of them already used more than one voice, but for some of them, I switched things up. “For this verse, listen to what I do and follow along! ::insert speaking version of ‘Skip to My Lou’ here:: What voice was I using?” Then a student would come up to the board and put a check mark under ’speaking.’ It was very interactive and it included a review of everything they’ve done so far. I thought it was a killer lesson. JA didn’t say anything other than that the pictures I drew on the board for each voice were cute… But I thought it was a winner!

My lessons today went well, but everything was just such a strain on my throat and I felt like there was a constant battle between the students and me as to whose turn it was to talk. Agh… so tiring. The funny story of the day, though, was when a student in my last 2nd grade class had a terrible bloody nose. I looked back and his nose was just dripping blood into his book. I ran over and put a pile of kleenex on top of the book and told him to go to the bathroom. He mumbled that his mom works in the office, so I had him go there. Well, silly me… I didn’t open the door for him or anything. So here we have this bloody door knob… Gross. I called the office to tell them I sent the student down and to have them send someone down to clean up. Before anyone got there to clean up, though, JA came back in the room. When she opened the door, all of the students screamed, “Ewwww!” She had no idea why and was telling them to be quiet. She was quite unpleasantly surprised when I told her there was blood on the doorknob and she had blood on her hands. Oh, it was quite the fiasco. Good story, though.

I don’t have to do any plans for tomorrow! I’m a fan of this “weening down” thing. So… I’m going to see my boyfriend in “ACTletes” tonight. I am prepared to laugh hysterically. And I need that!

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Why haven’t I written in a week? Because almost every day this week, I stayed at school until 6:00, came home and wanted to do nothing for about an hour, and then worked on lesson plans until I went to bed past my bedtime. Good Lord, how exhausting. Today, I slept in, did nothing for a while, planned some stuff for church tomorrow, and then slept some more. Teaching is SO tiring!

It was my full time week at the elementary school, though, and it went really well. It’s hard to think back a week and figure out what was worth reflecting on. There wasn’t anything major that sticks out.

My lesson with kindergarten this week was about beat, and I read them a story called “Buzz and Ollie’s Steady Beat Adventure.” After reading it seven times, I was waking up in the middle of the night with it running through my head.

I had two ECDD classes, which went surprisingly wonderful. I didn’t teach them any new songs, but we sang a lot of songs they already knew, I read them a book called “Fresh Fall Leaves,” and then played a recording of a song called “Orange and Yellow and Red,” to which they waved color scarves around in the air and had them “fall from the trees” at the end. My goal was to get them to wave the scarves slowly with the music instead of wildly around everywhere. JA thought I should try to get them to raise their scarves in the air when their color was mentioned in the song. I didn’t even try to get that far… I was worried about how Allison and Daisy would do with me teaching since I usually sit with them and work one on one, but they did really well.

Oh, before I forget… I realized on Thursday night that I haven’t been saving some of my lesson plans on my computer. I have them all printed out, but when I write a new one, I go to the last one from that grade level and revise it. With some of them, I’ve been saving over the previous one instead of saving a new one. Shoot. Oh well… If I REALLY like one, I can just retype it.

1st grade concepts of the week were high and low and “beats and bears,” where all of the songs were about bears and stressed beat. I did a super cute song with them called “Helicopter Pilot” on the high and low day which they LOVED. JA said she might start doing that one. I hope that she can get some ideas from my lessons, because she’s admitted that after 27 years, she gets herself in a rut sometimes. I was actually very pleased with both of my 1st grade lessons this week.

My first 2nd grade lesson of the week took a lot of prep. It was about a song called “The Little Train of the Caipira” and it had a listening map that went along with it, but I had to listen to the song about six times to figure out where everything fit with the listening map and then I had to figure out how to break it down to get the students to hear everything. It was tough to prepare, but turned out well. Yesterday, I did a lesson about rain with them. It covered beat and rests… We did some instructional stuff out of the book and then we created a rainstorm with body percussion, which was really cool. At least I thought it was… not sure about them.

I’m done with 3rd grade now! JA is taking them back next week. We learned “O, Susanna” and “Camptown Races,” both by Stephen Foster, whom I described as “the Michael Jackson of the 1800s.” I tried expressing that his music was popular back then by playing songs by Hannah Montana, going backwards to the Backstreet Boys, going back to Cat Stevens, and then playing Stephen Foster. Note to self: Never play Hannah Montana in a music room with boys in it again. The boys went CRAZY. Yelling, covering their ears, throwing theirselves on the floor… Wow. It took me four lessons to realize that maybe the 5th time, I should just mention the name Hannah Montana, not play her song, and then skip to the BSB music. They still went whacky when they heard her name, but I at least saved a little bit of chaos. The other 3rd grade lesson of the week went super well. We covered four ways you can tell a story: words, pictures, music, and movement. They really got it… because I demonstrated all four and had them get up and pantomime a song with me. It was good.

4th grade: Nothing extraordinary. Taught “The Rattlin’ Bog” and did some listening exercises. I made visuals for “The Rattlin’ Bog” to help them (and me) get the words straight, and made paper bag puppets to show a conversation between a violin and clarinet in a Mozart concerto. Then we read a short Mozart bio and filled out a timeline of impressive events in Mozart’s life. After they filled in the ages on Mozart’s timeline, they filled in things that they did at those ages. I thought it was a good activity, and they liked it, but it wasn’t anything amazing.

In 5th grade, we learned “Erie Canal” and then they did a group activity where they split up into groups of four to learn a melody on the xylophone. Out of three classes, there was only one group who really got it. It kind of failed. I think I’d use that sort of lesson again, but with a lot of modifications. I don’t think it was a total waste of their time, because they had to try to work together, but some groups just didn’t get it. Oh well!

Tonight, I’m going to one of the high school’s choir concerts to get my mind in the high school mode since I’m switching placements in two weeks. The little kids are growing on me so much, and I am on them, too, that switching is going to be very hard. At least I’m staying in the same district.

I have to wash dishes! My roommate’s been gone all week and I told her the apartment would be clean when she got back. Aggggh. Clean today, lesson plans tomorrow.

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