I’d love to get to teaching, but…
September 24th, 2009 | Filed under: preservice, teachingI’m finishing up my third week of student teaching and we have yet to start studying literature thanks to an intense schedule of standardized tests, writing and reading assessments, and orientations for freshmen.
We’re in the throes of the Stanford 10 test right now and the entire next week is shot. We may have time for teaching toward the end of each block, depending on how quickly students complete the test sections, but nothing guaranteed. My cooperating teacher and I have had one day of uninterrupted teaching since school started on Sept. 8.
Maybe this is typical, but I’m really blown away by what the freshmen are having to go through in their English classes at the beginning of the year. Here are just a few of the things:
– First day of school housekeeping
– Freshman orientation
– Writing assessment
– Reading assessment (on laptops, which included a lot of set up and clean up time)
– Library media center orientation
– Stanford 10 testing
I was warned that everything that kids have to get done happens in English class because everyone has to take English, but seriously?
When I tell people I’m an English teacher, some like to make the annoyingly broad comment “Good! Cuz kid’s can’t read and write worth a hoot these days,” or something similar. Next time I hear that I might joke it’s because we don’t actually get to teach English half the time.
This isn’t to say I haven’t been learning a tremendous amount in the first few weeks of my internship – mainly classroom management. I have a few students that are going to be a challenge for me, management-wise, and I’m still trying to figure out how to deal with them.
I’m also struggling with how to assert myself within the dynamic of cooperating teacher / student teacher. The longer we spend with me in an assisting role, which is all I can really do in these weeks of testing, the longer it will take students to see me as THE teacher.
So that’s why I haven’t had much to update. I did have a great conversation with my journalism students today about the media and whether it reflects what we the people care about, or rather if we care about issues because the media covers it in such a way that makes us care about it. I was so excited by their excitement during the discussion that I let the time get away from me, though. I was quite embarrassed when my cooperating teacher came back to the class to find I hadn’t moved very far through the chapter. Oops! Pacing is something I’ll need to work on.
I’m still researching options for putting the student newspaper online. If you have any ideas, please share! We’re obviously on a limited (maybe nonexistant?) budget for this. So far I’ve looked at HighSchoolJournalism.org(free!), SchoolNewspapersOnline.com(so expensive!), and WordPress.
I also set up a wiki for the journalism students. To start, we’re just using the discussion forum as a place for students to read and respond to news articles, but I’m hoping to do more with it soon.
Tags: journalism, student_newspaper, student_teaching, testing, time, wiki 3 Comments »
We use WP Mu for papers. Free but requires set-up energy, know-how. Think regular WP.com would work fine. Here’s our midddle school (http://discovery.caryacademy.org/the-chronicle) and upper school (http://discovery.caryacademy.org/the-campitor) papers. Still beta.
Mary, you’re describing the exact situation that happens at every school. It might not be standardized tests, but it’s something. And one of the unwritten rules of teaching? No one is going to remember to tell you about these things ahead of time in your first year, so make notes of what’s happening or remember to ask questions about tests, school pictures, pep rallies, course selection, and assemblies. It’s not that people are trying to hide these interruptions, really. It’s that they either 1) forget you weren’t here last year and didn’t know or 2) forget that the decision to pull kids impacts you if you have planned in advance.
In our school, English gets hit for school photos in the fall (11th grade only), PSAT prep in the fall (9-11), college applications meetings with counselors (12th), and yearly scheduling meetings with counselors in the spring (9-11). PE gets hit with 9th and 10th photos and Social Studies gets to do the career planning/pre-scheduling meetings (9-11). To their credit, the administration does try to spread the love. However, we seldom get much advance notice that the love is coming. Aftter 4 years, I know when to start asking questions about specific dates, but it was a frustrating first couple of years.
(FYI, I came over from the Ning–I figured you’d rather get comments on your actual blog 😉 )
Chris,
That’s a good idea. Once I get to teaching on my own, I’m going to try and stay ahead of all of these things. But I know that part of teaching is just rolling with the punches. I need to get used to that!
And sorry it took me so long to get this comment posted. WP didn’t e-mail me when you sent it so I didn’t realize it was there.
– MW