When the Going Gets Tougher, I WILL Be Ready!

If Education 250 hasn’t taught me anything else, it has taught me that nothing about the teaching profession is easy. As I continue to battle my plethora of homework, I am constantly reminded of how I only think this is hard. I am currently prone to complaining about how I am doing all I can and still not getting decent sleep. Looking forward makes me realize that I, quite frankly, need to get used to it. While this semester is taxing and all of these projects are stressful, actually being in the field is so much harder.

Teachers are not just teachers. They wear many hats that require them to be, among other things, disciplinaries and caretakers. This has been a large part of my class’s conversations this week as we have discussed effective lesson planning, classroom climate and diversity. Once one becomes a teacher, he or she is no longer solely focused on planning the information that must be covered the next day. They must now consider the different needs and learning styles of each student and shape the lesson to best compliment everyone. Teachers must be sensitive to the social situations that occur inside and outside of their classroom so that they can provide a classroom environment that promotes comfortability, acceptance and growth.

Recognizing students’ needs and finding ways to meet them are mandated directly by NCTCS Standards 2 and 4. Not only are these things we should want to do but they are guidelines that we, as educators, are required to meet. As I look forward to my desired special education classroom, these two components will be crucial to my building of a cohesive classroom environment. I will have to be prepared for all kinds of diversity. This fact is nothing new to me. From my experiences with volunteering in these classrooms in the past, I have seen not only the varying mental/emotional capabilities but have found many differences in home life, social status, attitude and background as well. This classroom, more so than my standard math classrooms, will be an extremely difficult challenge in balancing diversity and understanding. As I realize how prepared I will need to be, I am refreshed by the fact that Education 250 is helping me grow so that I will be ready!

Preparedness is Key

              With the quick passing of fall break, I have come to fully recognize how ridiculously difficult my schedule is. I feel as if I come to this blog each Wednesday wanting to complain about how much harder that particular week has been than the last. Each week has provided its fair share of late nights in the library, coffee reliance and growing to-do lists. I went into the break with the mindset that regardless of how long that list had gotten, I was going to get at least seven hours of sleep each night. While that goal was met with flying colors, I spent the majority of my waking hours doing assigned readings, math problems and stressing over all that I wouldn’t be able to start until I got back to school today. I wish I could say that this stress could be reduced by prioritizing and working ahead. Sadly, being a student athlete and a double major, I am doing all that I can to finish the work load on time.

              Today’s class began with discussion on the importance of our blog posts and maintaining them in a timely fashion. On the board was the entire class’s blog tracker with spots highlighted from where something was incomplete or missing. At this point, I realized that although I had completed last week’s blog a few hours before the deadline, I had forgotten to attach the link to the tracker. While not adding the link is not as big of a deal as not doing it altogether, seeing the yellow block in my section of the spreadsheet sent me into panic mode. By this point, I had also already worried myself to death over my “four” year plan and many probability theory assignments. This incident sent me over the edge as I lost sight of the bigger picture and went into a small downward spiral.

              However, this led into a much greater conversation about how we as teachers must always be on top of our game. Our principals and supervisors are going to expect lots from us. Although they may be empathetic, excuses of how tough our life currently is aren’t going to cut it. Even after long, hard weeks, we will be expected to continue our high performance at all times and respond appropriately. This preparedness also crosses over into the classroom and how we must perform in front of our students.

We spent the majority of the class period talking about how to be well rounded in our lesson planning. While we are already familiar with the form of the 6-point lesson plan and have been working to apply it to our content areas, today’s discussion focused on the importance of assessment within the plan. The class quickly identified that diagnostic testing should be done first, formative assessment within the lesson and summative assessment at the end. Dr. Parker and Dr. Clark introduced the idea that lesson planning should not be completed from top to bottom, straight through the six steps. Instead, planning assessment locations should be done prior to structuring the last five points.

When I first heard this, it threw me completely through a loop. As I initially wrote my lesson on function transformations, I attacked it head on with the mindset that I needed to do it straight through. For this reason, I found myself struggling to find different ways to assess what the students were learning without drilling them with the same kinds of problems over and over. Keeping Dr. Clark and Dr. Parker’s method in mind, I can now see how planning what they must know for their summative assessment and breaking that down into different sections for formative assessment would have aided my overall planning process. If you plan spots for assessment of the different parts of a concept, it will make it much easier to prepare where the teacher needs to do some prompting as well as what method of assessment would best fit the content. Having the end result in mind is highly influential to preparing the right questions to ask when you are in front of the class.

As Stephanie reflected on today’s activity, being in front of a classroom can lead to feeling as if the students are in charge of the teacher rather than vice versa. Especially in the high school setting, this can be extremely dangerous. If at any point we show that we are not ready to handle a situation at hand, high schoolers will sense this and may manipulate the entire setting to where none of the lesson goes as planned. This is where a teacher’s ability to fulfill NCTCS Standard I becomes crucial. Not only must the teacher create activities throughout their lesson to keep the students engaged and facilitate learning, but they must also have back-up plans ready for when the class period does not follow the cookie cutter structure of their 6-point lesson plan. They must demonstrate both their knowledge of the content as well as how to approach it from various angles.

Do I Really Want to Teach High School Math?

It finally happened this week! We went to observe high school classrooms! I can honestly say that I have never been so excited to enter a room filled with freshmen as I was when we first arrived on Monday. This excitement was accompanied by nervousness. I wasn’t sure what age I would be observing, and it was stressful to think that they could potentially be just two years younger than me. Even though there is a sizeable maturity gap (experience wise) between college sophomores and high school seniors, it was scary to think that I would be in a room with students that are basically my peers. Therefore, when I received my freshmen Foundations of Math I room assignment, both my nerves decreased and my enthusiasm heightened.

However, my clinical experience didn’t go as smoothly as I had imagined. I constantly found myself taking notes on things I wanted to make sure did not occur in my future classroom. Before the students came back from lunch, my group and I had a few minutes to get to know our clinical educator. She was thrilled to find that I was pursuing math education but was also very hesitant about my plan to stay in North Carolina. While I am used to others having negative feelings towards teaching math, it was extremely disheartening to witness the same attitude from someone in the profession. From this point, I knew it was going to be a rough hour long observation.

When the students arrived back from lunch, I recognized almost automatically how loud and disrespectful they were based on the forceful tone my clinical educator had to use. She maintained a high volume for the entire class period and asked her questions in such a way that demanded immediate, monotone responses from the rest of the class. As some as the students asked questions during her guided practice, she became frustrated quickly by all of the other happenings and gave blunt answers that provided no depth for understanding. This frustrated me to end because finding meaning in the processes of what you’re learning is important, especially in math.

As Foundations of Math I students, I imagine these were students that had no affection towards math. This in turn made attitudes overwhelmingly strong from the get-go. I observed many sassy eye rolls and a lot of mumbling under breath as the students clearly did not want to be doing the problems assigned. This was my clinical educator’s third class of the day and I could tell she was mentally drained from trying to facilitate learning from “life expert” freshmen all morning long. For this reason, she had no hesitation to telling them to use their calculator to distribute simple fractions across parentheses [y+2=¾(x-8)] as well as threatening to have them write formulas for slope-intercept form and point-slope form 25 times each if they did not have them memorized by tomorrow’s class.

While I found it extremely hard to sit through this class, it did provoke a great deal of thought about how I will manage situations and students like this. How would I arrange the desks/students at them to break up cliquey attitudes while still condoning an enjoyable environment? What parts of this lesson could I turn into a game or activity that got the students up and moving around? What would I use to ensure organization of notes and problems while not making the notebooks a stressful mandate? How could I truly assess my students without just calling on them randomly to recite the next step we were to take in that problem? Although I did not find the perfect answer to any of these questions or have an epiphany about my philosophy of math education during this class, this experience did allow me to better see what is in store a few short years down the road. This not so picturesque opportunity helped me realize that even though secondary education isn’t a walk in the park, it is exactly where I want to be.