Student Teaching Week 5: A Powerful Week (Or Not)

Well, after a four-and-a-half day weekend, I was expecting a fairly easy start to this week, and boy was I wrong. The day started out with a blown transformer (one of three for the building) taking out the heat for the entire building, and most of its’ lights (including all of the lights in my classroom.)

Though well timed with our unit on electricity, a classroom blackout is not advised for aiding in the learning of young students. It is good for one thing, raising the bar for wild and crazy behavior. The day was filled with craziness, and by the end of it several students received at least an individual talking to, if not detention. One particular student seems bent on pushing my buttons… of which I am normally able to shed easily, but my intuition tells me I have to do whatever I can to help her learn respect for her teachers, or she won’t have a very good next six years. I have no clue how I am going to do that, but I know that for her own good, I can’t simply be impartial to her negativity and ill-respect.

The unit test on electricity is coming up soon, and though I think most nearly all of the students are ready for it, I am left wondering how I can make the exam itself a learning experience. I don’t doubt that I can make it one through writing high quality questions that fairly assess their knowledge, but my current policy on gaining lost points back (handing in rewrites of wrong questions) simply doesn’t cut it in my mind, as students merely copy off each other, and spend no more time on learning the material to gain their points back. I am still in search of alternatives, we’ll see how it works out.

This Monday I pick up teaching math as well. We will be working on fractions, percent and decimals. These are hard concepts, and I hope I can do the subjects justice with my very limited math background. We’ll see how it goes.

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