The Wake Up Call

There are aspects of teaching that I need work on. Classroom awareness, differentiation of instruction, management of classroom time are just a few. There are some aspects that I believe I do considerably well compared to even the most experienced teachers. Critical thinking, Socratic questioning and guided discovery lessons are the big ones.

But this past we was a wake up call that deeply wounded my teaching self efficacy. What do you do when the students don't take you seriously? Obviously the answer is to establish your authority at the beginning and be consistent. The problem arises in both my situation and when you didn't effectively do that at the beginning. So now you are left with a classroom full of students that don't have any respect for your authority or your teaching.

As I said in a previously post, my coop was out all week and I was left to teach all 5 classes all week. I went into this week with a positive outlook due to probably my most successful lesson to date last Friday. That quickly changed on Tuesday when I found out that the students in every single class seemed to believe that because their "real" teacher wasn't there they had free reign over the classroom. The bad part about it was that they were right. I was completely unprepared for these challenges and was never able to get a footing. I couldn't keep their attention for more than a few minutes at a time. There were some students that were completely uncontrollable.

Let me be clear that nothing crazy happened. The classroom wasn't nearly as bad as some of the classrooms I have observed but a significant amount of time was dedicated to something other than instruction. When I tried different types of intervention the most effective yielded only temporary moments where I held the classes attention. I think what my coop said when I called him really makes sense. I was telling him about my difficulties and he said that my hammer was him. Without him around, I was left with very little to control the classes. I am not familiar with disciplinary procedures nor to I think I could use them effectively. I don't have the reputation or the "look" that some effective teachers seem to possess. The reputation that I have is that I am new or green which in many cases can be identified as a push over or easily manipulated. I have no plan for handling this until I can have my own classroom with my own rules that I can enforce from the beginning.

Here is an example:
Everyday day this student would stand in the doorway and look at or interact with people in the hallway. This would be before the bell would ring and would continue after the class has begun. Usually, I am inundated with questions or permission slips for the first few minutes. My coop says that I need to get more assertive at the beginning of the period and get people in their seats. So this student would stand in the doorway, doing whatever he was doing and would not respond to my demands that he take his seat. He never tried anything like that while my coop was here but this student seems to notice that he was able to act differently with me and he was absolutely right. Now, I could have threatened him with something like a loss of points of a write up. In both of those cases I have absolutely no clue. My coop has ultimate control over the grades and I am working within his point system and I think the discipline process is not only futile but ultimately counter productive with most students.

I don't know. Maybe I could have or should have tried a more authoritative approach but he truth is that I am uncomfortable with that system. It's complicated and rife with paperwork and process. I made many mistakes this week and set myself back in all of the classes. For the first time, I feel anxious about what I have identified as my calling. I have seen so much success and have learned and developed so much that this week was that much harder. I have an intense feeling of emptiness where there was once passion and enthusiasm. I believe it is temporary but it makes me wonder if teaching can be what I want it to be or if I am just living in a dreamworld.

The Substitutes

About two weeks ago my coop was out for a Thursday and Friday. I was my first time without him at least in the building so it was an exciting time for me. Because of liability issues there needs to be a teacher of record for each class and since I am not a teacher, there needed to be a substitute. It was an easy job for whomever it was going to be considering that I was the one doing all the teaching.

I met her after the "homeroom" period and she seemed like she was going to be fine. This is after she screwed up and forgot to escort the seniors to their assembly. It was just a miscommunication on someone's part that didn't result in anything bad accept the seniors were a little bit late.

The kicker was when during my first period algebra class when her cell phone went off. Now, things happen and we all forget to turn our cell phones off from time to time. So after a bit of chastisement from the students I thought it was going to be fine. Then.....THEN she answered the phone and had a not-so-quiet conversation for about...6 minutes. If THAT wasn't bad enough, she then proceeded to make another call. I don't think I have even experience something that rude in a movie theater. I had no idea how to respond and for about 5 seconds I was so flabbergasted that I think I just stood in front of the classroom with a blank stare on my face. The worst part of this experience which may be more sad than bad was that she was a classroom teacher for over thirty years in this same school. What in the world was she thinking?

Once again, this week, my coop was out for a surgery and there was another sub assigned to my classroom. She ended up being OK. Her intentions were good and she tried to help wherever she could. But my first impression of her was, to say the least, not very positive. During the first day she was here during the first period she did something completely inexplicable. I was doing a simple lesson on solving polynomial equations. On my first example when I got to the step where you have to set each factor to zero and then solve to find the root I was reviewing the Factor Theorem which says that in a factor x - r, r is a solution to the polynomial.

I then see her get up and approach me. She politely asks for the chalk and then goes on to teach for about 10 minutes while I was just standing there like an idiot. A student told me afterward that the look on my face was priceless. I don't know which look I was giving but I remember thinking that I wanted to tackle her. The funny thing is what she ended up teaching. She showed them that if you set the factors equal to zero and then solve for the variable you would end up with the root. Not only had we been doing this very same method for a few chapters but I was about to show the same thing while comparing the connection between this and the Factor Theorem.

I don't know. Maybe I looked like I needed help. At least she was trying to do something conducive to teaching as opposed to the crazy cell phone lady.

Those who can DO. Those who can't......

TEACH.
Boy do I hate that expression.

I agree that teaching is easy. Certification is a piece of cake. PRAXIS exams are a joke. Graduate school for education is comparable to taking 5 steps without tripping. When you actually get in the classroom, all you really need to do is read from the text book and copy examples on the board. All the work is done for you. While students complete their dittos, you can sit at your desk and browse the newspaper. Oh yeah, you also get summers off....SWEET! This must be why teachers are paid slightly more than professional lawn growth observers.

Teaching well, on the other hand, is just a bit more difficult. Here are some of the things a good teacher needs to do to be successful.

Create authentic teacher/student and student/student dialogue.
Develop creative and meaningful lessons.
Relate content to students' prior knowledge and experience.
Foster a positive learning community based on trust.
Constantly improve on classroom instructional techniques.
Maintain structured but light classroom atmosphere.
Discipline without creating conflict.
Teach to everyone without teaching to the middle.
Challenge the high achieving students.
Help the low achieving students.
Motivate the unmotivated.
Inspire the uninspired.
Intrigue the unintrigued.

The Less High Falutin
Assign appropriate classwork.
Assign appropriate homework.
Grade classwork.
Grade homework.
Create effective tests.
Grade tests.
Assign big creative projects.
Spend lots of time grading big creative projects.
Calm class down when they get loud.
Wake class up when they fall asleep.
Correct students without yelling or being negative.
Keeping from getting frustrated because of behavior.
Keeping from getting frustrated because of lack of ability level.
Keeping from getting frustrated because of lack of effort.
Take roll.
Complete weird roll sheet.
Looking out for misbehavior while I'm delivering the lesson.
Looking out for confusion while I'm delivering the lesson.
Think about the delivery of the lesson while I'm giving it.
Improving on my delivery of the lesson.
Improvise.
Answer questions.
Ask questions.
Respond positively.
Answer the door.
Answer the phone.
Make copies.
Check calculators after every period.
etcetera.

These are a few of the things good teachers do constantly to ensure their success and the success of the students. This is by for the most challenging thing I have ever done in my life. The fact that I am successful at it makes me believe that I have truly found my calling.

For those of you out there that think anyone with a half a brain can teach, I hope you are in the minority because the less emphasis our society places on education and the struggles teachers endure, the more we are facing a danger of this country being marginalized by the success of some developing nations.

Evaluation #2

Lesson plan is detailed and well written. Assessment is aligned with objectives.

Calculators are used during entire lesson.

No behavior management problems. Students worked throughout the class period.

Make sure you wait until you have students attention before you give directions.

I'm not sure why this happened. It seems obvious that you shouldn't give directions to a group that isn't paying attention but I tried to anyway. I guess I was thinking that the directions would get their attention but that is definitely a bad way to get attention.

Started with quick pre-class work which was reviewed.

Randomly placed students in groups to complete worksheet. Students given quiz at the end and told groups their grade would be the average of the group.

I don't really like random groups but strategically placing students in groups is a lot of work which I am not yet prepared to do. I think it is important that I get better at the more fundamental aspects of teaching before I try to develop the more intermediate ideas.

Moved around classroom and worked with different group, answering questions.

Questions on worksheet are open ended and students need to use critical thinking skills to respond.

The worksheet was what I call guided discovery. The questions lead the students to develop the concepts of the lesson. In this case the concepts were properties of logarithmic functions. No group was able to independently derive the general form of any of the properties. I had to walk each group through the process of how to go from data to patterns to relationship to general formula. On one hand, it is disappointing that the students weren't able to see it but on the other, this is exactly what I mean when Italk about modeling critical thinking. I believe that if this activity is done enough then the students will eventually learn how to do this independently.

Good interaction between students in groups.

Most students were actively engaged and stayed on task during the entire class period.

Able to informally assess student understanding of concepts.

Would have been helpful to go over directions of quiz together - before they started. May have wanted to review worksheet with class and then given quiz.

The problem was that there just wasn't enough time for this activity to really sink in. I took the advice of some who said that my first activity was loaded with concepts and I cut down to the fundamental concepts. These students' critical reasoning ability is so under developed that they couldn't be adequately guided through these concepts during a full class period even when they were working at a phenomenal level.

(A) excellent B good C satisfactory D fair F poor