Miss Kliora's Student Teaching Adventures

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Week 13

- April 15, 2018

My student teaching experience is almost at a close. It's crazy to think about how far I've come since that first day in Indonesia a while back. I still have 2 1/2 more weeks left, and I want to make them count. It's taken a while, but this is the first week where I've felt better about my place in the classroom. Here and there, I'll still have days where I'm anxious about teaching my lessons and seeing my students, but it's gotten better. Not only do my students respect my authority, but I've been able to grow my relationships with them as a teacher. My goals for this past week were to make sure students have their books out on their desks, facilitate rather than lead the discussion, and set clear expectations. The first day, I was able to clearly set my expectations about leaving books out on the desks, and they complied. It was definitely much easier to see which students have been diligently doing the readings and which students haven'

Week 12

- April 08, 2018

Although I had spring break a couple of weeks back, I still feel like I could use another break. Full-time teaching is in full swing, and it is a very exhausting and challenging. There's some classes where I feel good about my teaching and other times where I feel like I have failed them. This past week was a bit of a struggle for me mentally, because I had the realization of the overwhelming work I had to get done before I go to bed each night. Sometimes, this means that I go to bed much later than usual so I can get all of the work done. Also, while I've already read the novel that I'm teaching my junior classes, The Catcher in the Rye , I have to keep up with the readings as they are reading it. For instance, on Monday, they have a quiz on Chapters 10-12, so this weekend, I read over those chapters again to prepare myself. Overall, the week was fine, but I am having trouble keeping up with the crazy schedule and a group of unmotivated students. It's been a bl

Week 11

- March 25, 2018

This past week has truly been a whirlwind, and now I get to reward myself with a relaxing spring break away from all the stresses of school and edTPA! Week 4 in high school has been especially significant for two reasons: 1) I SUBMITTED MY EDTPA, and 2) It was my first real week of full time teaching! The edTPA has been haunting me since January, and months later, it's so refreshing to see all of that hard work, time, and effort come full circle. Of course, I won't find out my score until later, but it's the biggest relief to just be done and focus more on student teaching and preparing my unit plan for The Catcher in the Rye. Then, actually, one of my goals this week was to start teaching without my cooperating teacher in the classroom. On Tuesday, I felt a little bit thrown off when my cooperating teacher told me, "You know what? Why don't you take class today?" I felt unprepared and tired, but I know that it was something I needed. I ended up teac

Week 10

- March 18, 2018

Three weeks of student teaching in high school down! It's been quite the adventure of figuring out how to adapt my teaching for my juniors and seniors and how to get them motivated in class. This week has been a mix of really fantastic moments and moments where I felt like I couldn't handle the pressure of teaching this age group. Overall, it was a good learning and teaching week for me, so here are some highlights as well as where I am in meeting my goals. My first goal was to learn more about Robert Frost poetry for my lessons this past week. I was excited to teach about poetry, but I didn't know too much about Frost at all besides the fact that he was a poet. In talking to one of my cooperating teachers, she told me something valuable: "We all have to start from somewhere. I started by watching and learning from others." In that moment, I realized that I didn't need to be intimidated by content that I'm still learning (even most of the content

Week 9

- March 11, 2018

Well, I did it. I survived 2 weeks of high school. For some reason, I feel like the days are longer in high school, even though there's only 8 periods a day compared to Jakarta's 10 periods a day. So far, teaching in high school actually isn't as bad as I originally thought. It's still completely out of my comfort zone; I'll typically have high days and low days, but I haven't run away screaming yet. Last week, I made some goals for this week, and here is where I am in meeting these goals. My first goal was to learn all of the students names. Having 90+ students compared to 60 students is a big increase, and I've only managed to successfully memorize maybe 60% of the names. I think the biggest issue for me is that there's some classes where the students just don't talk. What I've learned is that I learn names best through seeing my students' personalities. With the way that the class is structured, it's more difficult to see in

Week 8: Back to High School

- March 04, 2018

Now, I'm back in the United States, and I'm very thankful that the transition back has not been too difficult. This week, I started my second student teaching placement, and for the very first time, I'm in a high school. Not only am I in high school, but I'm going from working with 6th graders to working with 11th and 12th grade. It's actually pretty terrifying. I know in my heart that I want to be a middle school teacher, but I know that this experience will be extremely good for me. My goals coming into this week were to get to know the school, the students, and the content so that I can get a general overview of what life at this high school would be like. Based on my first week, I'd say that I have a idea of this environment. My first day was absolutely crazy. Overall, that day was fine, but I was already coming in with expectations of myself that I was not ready to teach the content or students who are 4-5 years younger than me. The first class I

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