Blog #1

Since I have been in the College of Education I have taken all of the classes that are required except ESOL 3, Linking Literacy and Integrating the Exceptional Student into the Classroom.  Those classes I am taking this semester.  After this semester I will be done with all of my classes and I will only have to take my final internship!

 From all of the classes that I have taken in the College of Education I had two classes that have impacted me the most.  The first one is my classroom management and level one internship.   These classes where set up differently than normal.  They were joined together and co taught with the same two teachers.  We were also paired with the special education majors and their two teachers in both classes so we would be able to learn how to co teach.  I was able to experience co teaching from this experience and also learn more about special education than other people taking the class do.   I also really learned a lot from my teaching writing class.  We are able to work with a group of elementary school students and come up with a script and movie to film with the kids about math.  This gave me the experience of working with students while having deadlines, managing the group, and having fun at the same time. 

I have been lucky in the past couple of years; I have been able to have a lot of experiences with children.  When I came to college I got a job at a child development center.  I have been working with children from the ages of three to six for the past four years.  During two of the summers there I was able to take over a classroom of three year olds and become the lead teacher for the whole summers.  We were able to work on writing names, letters and numbers, and developing motor skills.  Then, for one of the summers I was able to be a lead summer camp teachers for five and six years olds going into Kindergarten.  I have also been tutoring students in the fourth and fifth grade in math for the past year.   From the experiences that I have had I have been able to be exposed to teaching many different age groups the past couple of years.  

Teach at the child development center has impacted me the most.  This is where I work for eight or ten hour days, so I am able to see how it is to be a teacher and manage a classroom.  It has showed me that you need to be prepared and even have extra things to do and that being organized can help a lot.  I have learned that as a teacher I have to stay on task or things will not get done during the day.

In this internship I expect to keep on learning how to better manage a classroom, I think that this is going to be one of the hardest things when I am a teacher so I want to learn as many strategies as I can now.  I will be keeping an eye out for different teaching techniques that I have not seen before.   This way I will be able to remember then for when I have my own classroom, I will be able to see if they work in the classroom that I have.   I hope that I have a supervising teacher that is very helpful and that will let me be hands on with the students, my fear is that I have a teacher and that will not let me be active in the classroom.  One other thing that I fear is that when I get up to teach some of the students will not listen and they will be disrespectful.  I think that if I have good classroom management I will be fine.

What I want in my classroom.

What I do not want in my classroom.

From all of the teachers that I have had in my life, a lot of my science teachers stick out as being good teachers.  They were the teachers that always had us doing something.  They were either demonstrating things or letting us make something or doing things to demonstrate what we were learning.  They were also always willing to listen to questions that the students had and made sure that they explained it in different ways so the students could understand what was being talked about.  They were the classes that we learned about the stars, made rockets, boats and egg car.  These teachers seemed to be happy teachers that were willing to help.

The mediocre teacher tells.  The good teacher explains.  The superior teacher demonstrates.  The great teacher inspires. 

 ~William Arthur Ward