"You used us!"

So Friday was my last day teaching for the semester and so my CT and I kind of co-taught third period because we were trying to make the switch a little more gradual. When the kids realized that this meant this was my last day teaching them, they were a little sad (third period was the class that I really enjoyed and, evidently, really enjoyed me). They were very confused and possibly a little angry with me. They all wanted to know what grade I got in my class for teaching them and why I couldn't just keep teaching them until they got out of school. One of my students even went so far as to say "So Ms. Lewis, you USED us?" It makes me feel good that they actually enjoyed me being their teacher; I just hope they actually learned something. It also makes me a little sad that I do have to leave them because even though they really knew how to drive me crazy, and this goes for all three of my classes, I have really enjoyed my time with them and will truly miss them. I think their should be a day in methods that teaches you to not get attached to your students because there are 90 of them and they will change every semester if you teach high school. I know that my last day with them will be sad and exciting at the same time. They have been fun and this has been a wonderful experience but I am very excited to begin the next step towards being a full-time teacher and getting a group of students that are actually mine.

Long week

So this week is dragging on forever. I think it's the rain. The kids are sluggish (except third period because they are just special), I'm exhausted (but I sleep at least 8 hours a night) and I feel like today should have been Thursday. I even tried teaching a song yesterday to keep them awake, but even that couldn't light any fires inside them. And when they are tired and sluggish I become tired and sluggish. It's just not very much fun to be a teacher when it rains. :(

I look like a teacher!

So today I learned something that I can hopefully transfer to my classes: if you end the day (or the class period) on a good note, it can make everything that went wrong that day seem so trivial. I got to school this morning and the first thing I heard was that because our students didn't do well on their test, we needed to do more drill practice. Now for me, this is a disaster. I hate drills. They hate drills. And when we do drills, no one actually does the work until we go over the answers. But I am now supposed to include more of them so I will; it won't be all drills, but we will do them. This was during my first period planning while I was trying to get ready to start a new unit.

Then came second period. I am still waiting for my bad day with them because other than a few small attention-seeking behaviors, they are my good class. However, I did have to take an iPod today during our vocab introduction lesson. But everything went smoothly and we finished the lesson.

Then we had lunch. Today was a Smart Lunch day and I had one student come in who is currently failing the course, but decided that yesterday's test was going to be the last thing he fails in this class and that he will come to every Smart Lunch we hold until the end of the semester. (He did a great job participating in class today and even wrote three whole sentences using new vocabulary at the end of class!)

After lunch comes third period. They are my fun class. They don't want to do classwork, but they love to participate. They dislike writing, but LOVE to talk. About shoes, basketball games, colleges, anything and everything - in English. Now occasionally they will speak in Spanish and if I ask them to they really do try. But I am constantly reminding the entire class to get back on track with me. But overall, they were pretty well-behaved today.

And then we had fourth period. This is my trouble class. They are tired. I am tired. All of us have had a long day. They want to sleep and I want to teach and these to ideas don't mesh well. So today I told them, as nicely as I could, "Guys, if you want to sleep and leave to go to the restroom and talk to your friends while I am teaching, that's fine with me as long as you don't disrupt class. But just know that if you don't pay attention while I am teaching on a regular basis, I will not reteach it to you during Smart Lunch. However, if you pay attention and participate in class everyday, I will help you as much as I possibly can." And about 15 minutes after that, the assistant principal whose office is next door popped in to observe for a few minutes. It made me nervous because I thought he might have heard me say they could sleep in class. :/ But that's not why he came.

After school we had the curriculum fair. I was kind of nervous going into it because I was afraid I wouldn't know what to say if a parent came up and asked me questions about Spanish. But I listened to my CT handle one parent conversation and when we got crowded I just started repeating what I had heard her say. I shook hands, I passed out papers, and I answered questions - it was actually a little fun. After it was over, the same assistant principal came up to me and said "I just wanted to let you know..." (now this is when my heart sank because I thought I was in trouble) "... if I did not know you and know that you were here in the capacity you are, I never would have guessed." He told me that I acted like a staff member and I fit in really well and he thought I needed to know that. I am almost positive I turned bright red and my smile probably went from ear to ear. I was so thrilled. And now all of the things I thought went wrong and stressed me out seem like nothing. I got a compliment from an assistant principal, and it's only my third week teaching classes. :D

Today was a good day and I will go to bed happy and arrive at school tomorrow excited, refreshed, and ready to go.

Exhaustion

So today felt especially long. We had homeroom for twenty-five minutes first thing today. And then we had planning. And then came second period. And then lunch. And then third period. And by the time fourth period came around I was so thankful that I haven't started full-time teaching yet. The students had been dragging all day (half of them trying to sleep through class). The students who weren't half asleep were trying to throw crayons and other pieces of paper all over the classroom. If I had had to teach fourth period today, I don't think there would have been much Spanish spoken at all. Other than that, everything went well.

The students started making books today that will be donated to a local child development agency and most of them really enjoyed knowing that their Spanish could be useful to real people.

I may also just be tired because I have been trying to create a unit plan for the next unit which is coming closer and closer and I am just a little stressed because I don't know which days we will be giving quizzes for the unit so I don't really know what to include in my daily lesson plans. Oh well. I plan to get to bed early tonight and worry tomorrow. :)

Week 1

So I picked up my first class this week, second period Spanish 2. The kids have been behaving pretty well for me so far, no real issues to deal with. Funny enough, the first day teaching went really, really well, whereas the second day had a melting point before the students and I got on the same page.

The first day was a 5-stepped-vocabulary day. It seemed to me that the kids really did learn a lot on that first day and they somewhat enjoyed the lesson. (Either that or they thought I was crazy, pero a mi, no me importa as long as they learn). We learned all the vocabulary from the new chapter dealing with self preparation and then the students used the vocabulary in a circumlocution activity.

Then came day 2: a PACE lesson on reflexive verbs. Here is where we butted heads quite a bit. The students are used to getting grammar lessons in English and I wasn't going to speak English. I started asking questions for the co-construct phase and thinking back on it, if I had been in their seats, I wouldn't have known the answers to my questions either. I had also created a prezi on reflexive verbs which had all the right information (key word all as in WAYYYYY too much). The kids felt overloaded and just got lost. But then after we finished the paragraph of very non-concrete information on the first slide and moved to seeing the rules applied, I actually heard some students saying "OHHH!!! I get it!" as the light bulb went off for them. Thankfully my University Supervisor was there that day, and along with help from my CT, we revised my lesson plan and I retaught it fourth period, completely doing away with the prezi.

Now maybe I'm one of those people who has to see both extremes before I can get it right because for some reason, even after watching my CT teach the lesson and trying to combine hers and mine, I just completely skipped explaining how to use reflexive verbs at all. I tried to just show the students without providing any guidelines whatsoever. But at least now I have a pretty good idea of what will cause information overload and what is just not enough to work with.

So after seeing how lost the kids were due to a lack of guidelines, I kind of just put my lesson plan down and explained it to the kids as if they were learning it for the first time in language that was slower and clearer (hey! That's exactly what they are and exactly what I should have done the first time. I don't know why I didn't understand that to begin with). I wrote an example on the board and explained it, moving the pronoun to the front or leaving in the back on the end of the pronoun depending on what the situation was. Then the kids came up to the front and practiced with it. Some of the kids actually left smiling and saying they were surprised they actually understood something in Spanish (which made me feel really good). However, there were a few kids who still didn't understand, so I will have to work on finding a way to reach those kids.

Oh my God that's Wednesday...

So I've been working on planning my first lessons for about two weeks now and I have finally finalized what I want to do on the first day of my teaching, also the first day of a unit. I went over it with my CT and we are both ready for me to take over my first class on Wednesday, which, I realized Friday, is only two school days away. I think I'm ready because it won't be the first time I've stood in front of these same students and tried to teach them something but I think I'm actually starting to get butterflies because I know the exact day and time that I will begin standing in front of these kids all day everyday and teaching for the next 5+ weeks.

Just try and figure it out FIRST!!!

So last night was Meet the Teacher night and it went really well. We didn't have many parents come out but the ones who did really did seem genuinely interested in what we were going to be doing this semester and excited about the fact that their child would have two Spanish teachers this semester. We explained our expectations for the students to their parents and that the students would be held accountable for the time and effort (or lack thereof) that they put into the class and the parents seemed to agree with that expectation.

However, I find it to be extremely interesting that the biggest thought in my head by the end of fourth period was "Just try and figure it out on your own FIRST!!!!" The students were writing a script for a flip camera project and I was really excited in 2nd period by how into it the students were. They were really trying to make it interesting/funny/correct. They really wanted to use Spanish. (This was one of the first times I have seen these students excited about Spanish.) But my excitement was short-lived because I quickly became a walking English-Spanish dictionary in a classroom where the students were speaking completely in English to write their Spanish scripts. At first I was just telling them how to say things, then I started making them say "Como se dice _____?", and by the end of fourth period, when I was asked how to say things, all I could think to say was "tenemos diccionarios aqui." I was not irritated at all by the fact that they wanted to know how to say something, but rather by the fact that they did not even attempt at any sort of Spanish version of a question or to look in one of the 20 dictionaries lined up on a shelf in the classroom. How ironic that we had just discussed that very same idea (that they must put forth effort) with their parents the night before. I feel like there are a few posters of "non-negotiables" that must be made and a whole lot of ignoring questions in order to force students to put forth the effort instead of asking for everything to be fed to them on a silver platter...

A Little of the Old and a Little of the New.

So all week I've been enjoying getting to know the new students in our classes and figuring out which students will be the class clowns and which ones are "reservados." One good thing about this week is that the Para Empezar chapter focuses on describing oneself and others, so it has been great for me in getting to know the students. I have somewhat missed some of the students from last semester because I could always count on them to pull me out of a hole when an activity wasn't going as planned and to get the rest of the class engaged in what I was doing. However, I have been seeing them around school (mostly in the other Spanish 2 classes I've observed) and they tell me they miss me and want me to switch and work in their class. (They have no idea the smile that puts on my heart. :) One of the old students even told me he was going to come see me after school on Wednesdays when we stay for tutoring so he could get help with Geometry and Spanish at the same time since I am pretty good with math. 


This week I have also seen that I have an advantage as a young teacher with high schoolers that some older teachers don't have - the students think they connect and can relate better to me. Today I had one student (one who really struggled in Spanish 1) and their friend (who is a student in my Spanish 2 class) pop in to talk to me during B lunch today, a time when we are not even holding smart lunch. They just wanted to say hi, but they ended up staying for the whole period and I talked to them about college and how they really needed to work on their attitudes (because they can be very rude) even if they didn't necessarily agree with or like the teacher; the teacher is still the teacher and should be respected. I talked to them about finding tutors if they needed to get tutors for their classes and not being afraid to ask for help. I also explained to them that they shouldn't waste their time in high school classes doing nothing, especially if they want to go to college, because they know they have to be there anyways. 


Seeing these familiar faces and finding out that I have already impacted these students by just providing them with an ear for listening and giving them advice on bettering their future really made struggling through the first activities I led (completely in the Target Language) seem worth it. Most of the students in my classes are not used to classes being taught completely in the Target Language and they think they are going to break me into using English, but I just keep telling myself that if I let myself speak English this early, I will speak almost no Spanish at the end. So for now, when I lead activities, I feel slightly Italian from all the hand gestures and speaking with my body language that I do. I do need to work on allowing the students to translate for those who are struggling to understand me - I let them do that a lot of the time, however, I usually comment on how whatever they said was not Spanish and the fact that "Yo no hablo ingles" so in "la clase de espanol no hablamos ingles." (They just think I'm trying to be funny.) 


I am so excited about working with all of these students this semester and hopefully watching them grow in their ability to speak Spanish. I feel like I might be putting a little too much of my heart into this and the success of these students, but what kind of teacher would I be if I didn't care too much? Something the principal (whom I really like and look up to) did at our staff meeting Monday really stayed with me. He was talking about how teachers should really try to connect with and relate to the students in order to improve the environment of the school and then he closed the meeting with the following quote, which really sums up my thoughts for the week: 

"Risk more than others think is safe,

Care more than others think is wise,

Dream more than others think is practical,

Expect more than others think is possible."

-Claude Bissell

The Night Before the First Day of Class

So tomorrow is the day that I will meet the first three groups of students that I will ever teach. These students are the ones who will take me on my journey towards becoming the teacher I want to be. I feel almost the same as the night before I started my first day of classes in college, only now I feel like a professional. I am so glad that my CT and I accomplished everything on our to-do list over the last three workdays (other than finding all the textbooks we need in order to have enough books to distribute to the students). All of our first day letters and expectations are copied and ready to pass out. The warm-up and homework assignments are written on the board. And finally we have a completed lesson plan and all the materials needed ready to go for our first class during second period tomorrow. I am really excited about this journey and although I realize it will not always be rainbows and butterflies, I have a feeling that it will be an interesting and memorable ride. :)