This week was not really much of a week! There were three snow days and I got only two days of teaching in. The two days that I did teach were great though! On Wednesday, I officially took over my English 9 class and created a charter with my students. I feel the lesson went well and I got some great feedback on my ability to manage the class which I really appreciated. I think my greatest struggle right now is improving my diction and eliminating filler words such as so, like, uhm, and uh. My students were very helpful in getting me to eliminate these words from my diction, clapping every time I said “so.” It really was a great strategy. It forced me to slow my speech and really think about what I was going to say next. I feel happy that slowly I am improving. I think what I really want to focus on now, along with still improving my diction, is slowing down, make appropriate adaptations for my ELL students so that they are also getting something from my lessons, and creating forms of assessment that are fair and appropriately assess the academic abilities of my students. Also, I feel that I really need to focus on setting concrete expectations in my classes and following through with them. For instance, although I created a charter with my classes, I did not think to create a penalty for late assignments or a classroom policy having to do with redoing assignments. If i say no phones, and students are pulling out their phones, what are the repercussions? These are some things I need to consider still. All in all, I am loving my classes and my students! I have built positive relationships with my students and I make sure my students know that I care about their success and well being.

My first week as a student teacher was interesting. I got to learn so much in just five days of  teaching in a classroom than I had learned as a student in the Bachelor of Education program. It was a difficult week, trying to break into teaching 30 students and not have them look at me with bored faces. It was tough. But invaluable. We talk about how students are so diverse in terms of their ethnicity, racial backgrounds, experiences etc. But students are diverse learners as well. The challenge is to provide these students with and education that is meaningful for them! I think this was my greatest struggle this week. How do I make students interested in a subject like government? Some students were perfectly fine learning about government. Some were really bored. And I don’t blame them for feeling that way! But, I WANT my students to find something interesting about government. Even if it is something small. My class is so wonderful. They are so good to me and cooperative and I highly appreciate them for it. I just want to be able to do something meaningful for them. I started the week off by creating a class contract and it went great! Students were involved and motivated to be a part of something that will affect them. I got to know my students and my students got to know a little bit about me! It was great. When I started teaching government, however, I realized that I was trying to pack too much in. I was going so fast, students were finding it hard to keep up. Even though I was trying to relate the unit to them, I feel as though my point was not coming across to them. I was overworking myself every night to try and make the next lesson better and more interesting. However, I feel that because I was trying to pack in so much at once, I was losing my students. I was stressing so much about being the perfect teacher, that I was doing everything that was working against that aspiration. One thing I learned in this week though is that there is no such thing as a perfect teacher. However, there is a such thing as a teacher that strives for excellence. Mistakes will be made but that’s where lessons are learned. I want to aspire to this. I want to take calculated risks, go through trial and error, make mistakes, and LEARN and do better. I just want the best for my students. My goal is to guide my students and focus on the BIGGER ideas instead of the little details. My goal is to find ways to engage my class and feel motivated to do well. I feel as though I have developed a good relationship with my students. My students know that I care about them. The goal is get the students interested and relating the content and the bigger ideas to themselves. If the students are enjoying the content, they will be able to learn it.