Teacher Tales

Goodness gracious! Hard to believe its already Friday again! :) I'm still not entirely sure I know where the entire month of February disappeared to... These past couple weeks I've been running the English 10 classes with my unit on Night and planning my Frankenstein unit for Honors 10 that begins next week already! Today (thankfully) four of my six classes will be taking vocabulary quizzes which will take up about half the period. That means I get a tad bit of a break, which is definitely welcome!

I've come to understand why colleges have a spring break in March- it's SO necessary!! After President's Day break, we don't have another vacation until Easter at the end of April! :/ I know it will be a long haul for me, and even longer for the students. Hopefully we can truck through it together.

With my mind going in a million different directions all the time, I realize that many of my "happy" moments get lost in the shuffle of the day. From now on, I plan to try and write myself little notes in my planner so I don't forget them all! For example, the other day in English 10 I was helping a student with a question and she asked if I was going to be teaching here next year. I would love that! I haven't really told many people at my placement about my job in Egypt, so I didn't know what to say.

Though I was anxious at the beginning of the Night unit about my students taking to the book, they've surprised me! Most of them are reading ahead and asking me extra questions because they're actually interested! We're just finishing up the book today, and then they have a scantron sheet test on Tuesday and a short essay test (open book) on Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday next week we'll be watching an Oprah interview with Elie Wiesel as sort of a break for my students' brains :) They've been working so hard, and I feel so blessed to watch their progression over the past month.

When it comes to teacher planning, I feel like there is a HUGE learning curve!! None of my university classes have adequately prepared me for the reality of teaching all day, everyday. So much of the abstract planning we did before never actually saw a classroom, which is a huge disadvantage. Thank goodness I have my cooperating teachers to help me!!! Creating units from scratch is immeasurably difficult, but I know it is still worthwhile. Having these materials created means that the next time I teach these units, I won't have to start over! I'm looking forward to those days :)

I've been working my buns off trying to plan Frankenstein for my Honors 10 students. If I'm being completely honest, they intimidate me! They're much smarter than I am, and definitely smarter than I was in 10th grade! Wowzers! I want to make sure that I'm challenging them, but still supporting them if they need it. That means my lessons need to be interactive and engaging, which is much more difficult than it sounds. I've come to realize that the types of lessons I've practiced planning are vastly different than what I actually do in the field. Not every lesson has a hook, instruction, practice, and closure as I've been led to believe. Lesson frequently span over a couple of days and build on each other, as opposed to beginning and ending in just one day. I'm excited to dive into Frankenstein at the end of next week!! It actually works out perfectly, because my unit on Night is ending just as Frankenstein is beginning which means I won't have too much overlap when it comes to creating new materials.

Looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow, and catching up on some much-needed cleaning and organizing this weekend! :)