Miss Kliora's Student Teaching Adventures

14 weeks down, 1 and a half more to go.  As I'm finishing up my student teaching experience, I'm realizing how much I've grown since I taught my first lesson my sophomore year, and even thinking about my first student teaching lesson in Indonesia.  I've grown so much, particularly with teaching my highschoolers.  This week has been a really great blessing.  As rough as the experience and planning has been, the Lord has been faithful, and His joy is my strength. My goals for this week were to use various strategies for discussion and finish The Catcher in the Rye.  Part of the education program goals that I am working on here is practicing excellent teaching by trying to get my students to use their critical thinking skills.  For my first goal, I thought I did a pretty fair job of incorporating different discussion techniques.  It truly is an interesting kind of situation, because I can incorporate so many different types of discussion due to their age group and hi

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'

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