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2nd week update

This week has been pretty good at the school. I have been interacting with students more both helping to answer questions and enforcing rules. The class with the most questions was Earth Science unfortunately because I will not be actually teaching that class later in the semester. There were two major times that I had to ask students to behave. One, a student returned from the restroom and my mentor teacher had stepped out and this student went to a friend instead of his chair, so I told him to go to his seat. The other example was when two guys were gradually getting louder and then horsing around and I walked up to them and asked them to sit down and explained that they were being very loud and distracting other students. They sat. I spent all of Tuesday and Wednesday grading all of the Biology homework that they had turned in from the first week of school. I spent today grading Earth Science.

Today the students did their first lab activity with microscopes. It went well and I did help some students. There really weren’t any behavior problems today. I think it was because they were engaged in what they were doing instead of doing worksheets. I was glad to see this and I think that I will be trying to use a lot of student-centered activities to both teach them and keep them from acting out.

I introduced my mentor teacher to You Tube. In the past she did not use it to find videos and animations that could be used in class. She seems excited about the possibilities of integrating more visual aids into her teaching.

On Tuesday my college supervisor came for a quick visit after school. He basically went over the expectations again and talked about how he will be observing about every two weeks and that my mentor teaching will be evaluating me about every three weeks. What I liked best about his visit was that included in the paper he gave me were both the suggested schedule for integrating me into teaching the class and the evaluation forms that will be used during observations. The fact that I actually met him and saw some papers make me more excited about when I finally get to take over the class. I am still looking forward to the first session of my seminar class next Tuesday. I am curious to hear about the experiences of the other student teachers.

I am very excited for Jeremy’s visit next weekend. I miss him a lot and it will be very nice to actually talk face to face and spend some time together. What stinks is that after this visit is that we won’t see each other again until Thanksgiving… ☹
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