Miss Kliora's Student Teaching Adventures

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....

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 th...

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...

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 fir...