It's so true. It takes up so much of my time.
I have a student teacher this semester. I was very excited about this at first, but as time has gone on, I have started struggling with this pretty massively.
It's really hard to watch someone else teach students that I have been working with for about seven months. Different teachers have different ways of going about things. Trust me, I completely get that. It's the same as students having different needs. I try to be understanding and find the good in everything.
But my student teacher's way of going about things gives me a headache.
He's very much about teaching Literature (yes, capital "L"). He is really smart and philosophical and enjoys the content he is teaching (read: he was a legit Lit major, unlike myself, which means that he has read every thing ever written and enjoys the really hard things most, whereas I got away with reading mostly just the things I enjoyed).
The unfortunate part of this is that it doesn't really work for 9th graders. I don't teach Literature; I teach reading. I would love for my students to see the relationship between what happens to Jem Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird and Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience (poems). In reality, I don't understand Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience...because they are seriously god awful boring. And if I, who love reading most of the time, think they are boring, then please take a moment and think about how a 9th grade boy might feel about them.
I also think that he had no idea how much outside-of-the-classroom work goes into teaching. Here's my schedule this week: I had a meeting today that took up 1/2 of my planning period and then another from 3 pm til 4:30; tomorrow I am giving the 10th grade writing test during my entire planning period; Wednesday I have two parent teacher conferences that will take up all of my planning period again; and on Friday, I have another parent teacher conference during 1/2 of my planning period. That means that Thursday is the only day this week that I will have a full planning period. There's also things like taking attendance and sending weekly numbers in, making copies and transparencies, faculty meetings, remembering which students get modifications, and grading papers, not to mention the very babysitter and mother like things that teachers have to step in and do.
His level of professionalism leaves something to be desired as well. He wore the same outfit for the first three weeks or so, and it didn't seem to have been put together with the idea of a career in mind. We had a conversation about dressing professionally, and what I'm getting from him now is the same outfit every day, but it's at least a button up shirt.
Also, my student teacher lacks classroom management skills. This is the part that really gives me a headache. He is constantly yelling over students instead of having them be quiet. He lets them be all over the room and yell at each other and talk while he is talking. I'm not saying they always have to be in seats and not talking; far be it from me to say my classes are perfectly managed. I'm a big believer in balance, and I always try to have a good balance of quiet sitting time and talkative moving time. Honestly, I'm afraid of taking the classes back because they're going to be ridiculous, and it's likely that I will be writing a lot of referrals and driving myself crazy trying to reteach them how to sit down and be quiet when they need to do so.
He is doing some good things. I think that new teachers have such an "innocent" view of what students can and cannot do and also will or will not do and are therefore more willing to try things that may end up crashing and burning. They're often the kind of things that I just mentioned, like some of William Blake's most intensely boring poems. Those kinds of things work occasionally and make the students have to think and work harder than normal. My student teacher is really willing to try things that I would normally say are WAY over the students heads. And yes, they fail miserably sometimes, but he has had some good successes, especially in the Honors class.
He is also good at connecting with the students. They really like him, though I'm unsure the reason for that and am not entirely convinced that it's a good reason.
I am kind of wondering if my headache is coming because I rather miss teaching my own classes...
'Literature' is indeed boring and mind numbing. We were talking about how schools need to modern up their reading lists and let kids read something that is a little more contemporary and interesting rather than dry dull stuff from 100's of years ago that have nothing to do with life as kids know it today. You'd get a lot more of them actually enjoying reading instead of feeling like they are being tortured.
ReplyDeleteI try to do a really good job of updating the things we do. Unfortunately, there are some things we just can't avoid. The best way to teach an epic is to teach The Odyssey, but I tend to pair it with some newer things, like Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter...Into the Wild, The Princess Bride, A Wrinkle in Time... Same thing with plays; but again I pair older stuff with newer stuff.
ReplyDeleteWe also do a lot of Self-Selected Reading so that they get to pick, which I find that the kids really appreciate.
My student teacher just really wants to teach Literature and seems to have forgotten that I mostly just teach reading. It's really frustrating and hard to watch.