STCBlogPosts

  I taught the same lesson to the other class this week; the one that Dr. Spanke was sitting in on. He had a lot of notes but I think I’m doing well, overall. The main critique he had of me (and something I know I do often that I need to work on) is that I advance through lessons rather fast. My lesson last week was supposed to go for 45 minutes and I only went for 35. Added some things to the lesson for this week in hopes that I would have more things for students to do and learn so I could shoot for 45 minutes and it still ended up being only 35. I think this happened because I had already taught the lesson so I breezed through it and students may have lost out. I added elements to this lesson such as more definitions and a different approach to analysis, some helpful Shakespeare vocabulary they might encounter often while working through Hamlet, a potential practice assessment students can do while reading, and quotes we use in the modern day that students might not have known h...

I taught my first official lesson on Friday. I started with what my mentor teacher deemed as the more difficult class, simply because they don’t engage as much as the other class. It went amazingly well! Students were actually engaged and I am far less stressed now after the lesson is over than I was going into it. Students are about to be reading Hamlet. Most, if not all, students have experience reading Shakespeare, but I still did a lesson about reading Shakespeare and understanding Old/Middle English (much of Shakespeare is written in an odd transition period between the two). I gave them a brief history and incorporated a lot of things that they might understand from the modern day that hadn’t necessarily changed for other languages. For example, English is, in part, Germanic, and we used to have words spelt with a ‘v’ instead of a ‘u’ and vice versa (the letters were almost interchangeable). I discussed how something similar happens in German where words with a ‘w’ are pronounced...

Classroom management was a bit of an issue this week. Classroom management is always somewhat tricky, particularly on white days, and with certain students in particular. These are actually the same students I mentioned in a previous IFO that keep each other in check. However, this week, they seem to be becoming restless and have become more instigating than mediating. On purple days, classroom management was still a moderate issue but not as much as during white days. I might attribute this to the semester quickly coming to a close. Students also started a movie this week; a movie that, admittedly, is old by students standards and boring and difficult to understand because it’s Shakespeare. Some students were understandably annoyed with the movie, but others were utilizing the movie to complete the packet they had been working on for the unit, and were becoming frustrated with their classmates. I used this opportunity to test out different methods of classroom management. At first, I ...

I think I’m feeling better than I was the first week. I am still rather anxious about what my mentor teachers will be expecting of me once I am in a classroom. I am also worried about the state of my mental health, as my bipolar disorder is on the upswing and I have been having issues filtering myself despite taking many precautions to avoid this. I am worried about how I will be able to react to students because of this. Even though I pride myself on my transparency, I am worried about how I will approach this issue in class. I am also worried about the structure of this course. I am having difficulty following along in class and understanding assignments thoroughly. Much of our instruction seems vague and confusing at times and I find myself frequently asking my peers for help identifying tasks only to find that they are having trouble as well.

So far, I am terrified. I took EDJH a year and a half ago I think? COVID was still a very large concern, we wore masks to all the classes, were only able to attend/conduct class for two to three days a week instead of five, and we weren’t able to go into schools. I don’t know what I thought this class was going to be, but I wish I had either taken it at a different time or hadn’t had to have had so much time spread out between this course and that one. I am terrified of going into schools for practicum and, to be honest, I have no idea what to expect because I don’t have any previous experience. I suppose that’s all I have to say/think about for now.