Student Teaching

It was a really great week.  I took over full-time teaching.  I'm teaching Romeo and Juliet and I am so proud of the student persevering through Shakespeare's tough language.  They have been engaged in their learning. This week was full of discussions, close reading and annotating.  I also incorporate creative of creative opportunities for the students.  One creative project that students participated in was a blackout poem.  This is where they isolate and manipulate words in order to create a poem of thier own.  The same passage from Romeo and Juliet was given to each student.  The students were required to follow set parameters and it was interesting how different each poem was depending on the theme and approach that the student took.  It was a week full of reading, writing and a lot of discussion.  Standard 6 - Reading, Writing and Oral Communicati...

This week was another week of observation and then hopping in for a few lessons here and there.  I will begin full-time teaching starting the Monday after our spring break, which is April 1.  I've been soaking in all of my cooperating teacher, Leslie's teaching strategies and picking up on her vernacular so when it does come time for me to teach, I'll be prepared and try my best to model some of her strategies.  SHe has provided me with many resources and ideas in order to begin lesson planning.  I'm grateful for that!  We had a situation with a student this week.  I was grading one of his assignments that had been turned in and noticed that he had drawn a gun on his paper.  I notified my cooperating teacher immediately over the weekend and then we followed the action plan and appropriate steps in order to report the situation first thing on Monday.  Unfortunately, this student was suspended for two days and th...

It's go time.  Round Two! Second stop, Willowbrook High School.  I started my new placement on Tuesday where I'll be teaching four periods of Freshman HOnors English.  My cooperating teacher, Leslie is fantastic!  I feel blessed to have been paired up with her.  I'll have roughly 120 students that have diverse cultural backgrounds.  I'll be teaching  Romeo and Juliet starting next week.  This week was a week filled with getting to know my way around, introduce myself to the students and settling in and getting acquainted with the classroom.  Leslie and I went over the classroom expectations along with background information about the students and any additional information she thought I needed in order for me to be a successful teacher.  Hainvg had my student teaching experience at Barrington Hgh School, will help with transferring skills over to my new placement.  This week was observation, ...

" How Lucky I Am To Have Something That Makes Saying Goodbye So Hard." ~Winnie The Pooh It's hard to believe that I completed nine  weeks at Barrington High School. I've learned a great deal from my cooperating teacher, Alan and even more from my students.  I was blessed to have the most respectful students in all five periods.  I'll never forget these students and what a profound impact they had on me.  I thanked all of them for the positive  experience and left them with words of encouragement . I was blown away by my first and second period sophomores.  They presented me with the most beautiful gift.  During first period, one of my students rolled in a piano (a piano!) and played Bach and then took requests.  I requested Coldplay and the student played "Fix You" by heart!  I was fighting back the tears.  Then, during second period, some of my students played Bach on the violin and cello.  I...

When the world is dark we need to dig deep in order to find profound acts of kindness buried in despair.   It was an emotional week as we wrapped up our Unit 4, War and Global Conflict. We completed Unit 4 by watching God on Trial. The film takes place in the Auschwitz concentration camp where inmates await their inevitable deaths. A group of Jews decided to put God on trial in their barrack. As a group, they determine that God is the one guilty for their suffering. It was a dark week, but as a class we had some great discussions that tied back to the book of Night .  My cooperating teacher and I focused on leading the discussions in a co-teaching manner when it came to the depth and heaviness of the topic.  Within the darkness and madness of cruel treatment of one another, we were able to pull out acts of kindness between inmates along with finding tragic ironies.  Religion was a big topic of discussion within the class and we had to make sure we...

"Human suffering anywhere concerns men and women everywhere." ~ Elie Wiesel This was my final week teaching  Night by Wiesel.  I believe, as a class, we handled the heavy topic of the Holocaust and the indifference within respectfully and focused on the essential question of why humans add grief to grief and aggravate human suffering with cruel treatment of one another.  By taking this approach, we were able to explore and identify how abandonment and betrayal are prevalent in various father and son relationships throughout the memoir and identify ways in which inmates turn on each other.  As a class, we had meaningful discussions and examined the harsh reality of what happened in the Holocaust.  Our beliefs were challenged as a class, but we handled everything in stride.  Standard 4 - Learning Environment is a good fit here.  I had to make sure the student's emotional well-being was a consideration by being attentive to feelings and thoughts about ...