Student teaching, week one.

So, I'm student teaching full time now, and I have free reign of the class for 3 periods a day.

It's kicking my ass. I'm not very good at classroom management, time management, discipline, lesson planning, formative assessment, thinking on the fly, and flexibility. Which is kind of the point, apparently. My cooperating teacher and I had a talk about how I did today, and she told me that if there were any red flags, I wouldn't be there. That being said, we both agreed that I have a lot of areas to improve on, but that's to be expected from a student teacher in his first week.

That doesn't mean I don't feel awful about not being able to teach these kids as well as I'd like, but at least I know the main three issues- I need to manage time better, learn how to discipline kids, and watch the kids more. All of these will happen with time. And then I hope I can keep up the energy and passion I have now (or at least before this week began) for my students. Although to be honest, this is the end of the honeymoon period. They know me well enough to start testing my limits, and I think I've been failing by them by not disciplining them, and part of that has been my lack of knowledge on the school disciplinary policies. I have since got them, so now I have that tool. Hopefully it will help.

One of the high points in the day was that several students came in to eat lunch in my room, wanting to hang out with me. So, I taught them about time dilation. It's one of the things that got me really into physics, and I learned it around their age. I hope I can spark the same passion in them.

Anyway, I watched Salman Khan's TED talk last night. I think the bricks and mortar school using the Khan Academy for math is awesome, but I'm curious to see how they do the other subjects.



That's all for now.

-P.