#5

My visit to Salem Hills High School was not as beneficial to my learning experience as I would have liked. There happened to be a guest speaker in Chris Andrews' class when I went today. While I got to learn a lot about Art Institute and careers that multimedia can take you into, I did not get to see Mr. Andrews teach his class.

Talking to him afterwards, however, was very enlightening. I learned that if you get the right people in the administration behind you, you can accomplish a lot more and have greater flexibility with what you want to teach. Administrators do not really know what to do with tech teachers, so they let them do their own thing.

Since Chris is new to teaching, it was interesting to see how he is adjusting to being a real teacher rather than a student teacher. It sounds like everyone will at some point have to go through an experimental phase when we are on our own to figure out what theories we can effectively work with in our own classroom.

I am interested to see what theories I will try and what will work in my future classroom.

#4

The idea Gong has of exponential learning is one that I love. It fascinates me. I like the theory of learning to teach. It honestly does change the way I learn when I have to be able to teach someone else how to do it afterwards. Teaching anything to someone else solidifies the knowledge in my own mind and makes it easier to explain each time after that. When I am truly interested in what I am learning, I go above and beyond the required assignments to explore on my own. I like to always do my best work and put all my effort into the learning I do, but I do my absolute best work when I love and am interested in the things I'm doing. When I see the purpose and the application to my assignments, I thrive. I love having enough direction to know where to take assignments, but the freedom to go as far as I can with the available time.

Knowing and understanding how my thinking and learning works, helps shape how I want to teach. I want to find the balance where students who need more direction have it, but those who understand can have the freedom to experiment and excel on the same assignment as others just learning. I want my classroom to have the flexibility for students to help each other before they come to me for help. I like that learning style.

#3

Visiting my first middle school was an enlightening experience. The teacher, Mr. Meeks, used a very involved teaching method. He did not sit and watch the students struggle when they got stuck. He gave a quick lecture to explain the project and the objectives of the project, and then let the kids go to work. The structure of his class was very exploration-guided. The students had to experiment to do their assignment and prepare for the building process of their project.

I like his method of a quick lecture followed by an activity. It helped get the kids focused on the right thing and gave them needed guidance, but allowed them the time to get the work done. However, this system left room for the students to be confused and have to guess some to figure out what the true purpose of the assignment was. The method leaned to a "experiment first, learn why later" attitude from the students. Many just played around until something worked for them. Some proceeded to try to figure out why it worked, and others just accepted that it worked. Trial and error.

Reflection 2

As I finished reading Wong, I learned the most about how to structure tests properly. I had always been curious how to do it in a way that is beneficial to the learning process as opposed to being a method of punishment. I learned how to match up test questions with objectives rather than simply facts or information. I like the idea of having tests that are not composed of rote memorization like so many of the tests I have taken over the years. I can now see why it was so much easier for teachers to make memorization tests, but I hope that I will find the energy as a teacher to make effective tests.

Classroom procedures was an interesting thing for me to think about so consciously. I remember classrooms where the teacher would walk in and say "Good Afternoon, 7th Period!" and the class would respond with "Good Afternoon Mrs. Beck!" With that teacher, I knew that as soon as I came in the door, the assignment for the day would be on the overhead projector and I should copy it down and get my notebook out. Having that simple stability helped get me focused before the instruction time began. I was ready to start when she finished taking role. Other classes, in contrast, were always chaotic and it was much harder for me to want to focus because I would just hope that the class would distract our teacher enough so we would not need to accomplish as much. Those classes were the ones where there was no structure to our time and we had to wait for our teacher to tell us what to do every minute of the period. When I teach, I'm not sure I'll have a "good morning" routine, but I plan to have some sort of procedure for starting class so I can make the most of every teaching minute I have.

Reflection 1

The reading I have done in The First Days of School has opened my eyes much more to the preparation that goes on before the teacher even begins teaching. I always assumed that good teachers were given that gift and bad teachers simply were not. I knew there were some skills to be learned, but I did not realize just how many things teachers think about that students only recognize subconsciously.

In high school, I did give teachers different levels of respect based on the way they dressed or the way they had us address them. I found that the teachers who dressed more on the casual side were much easier for me to approach and ask questions about class or life in general. However, those were also the teachers I found myself making more smart remarks to and tried to challenge their authority more. I think there is a balance to be reached between over-dressed without being approachable, and under-dressed without maintaining good authority. When I am a teacher, I want to be able to look professional without looking or acting stuffy.

Teachers, according to this book, need to be proficient in practicing positive expectations, have good classroom management skills, and have their lessons mastered. In remembering my own experiences with teachers, the teachers I have learned the most from had all of these skills. They made me believe that they believed in me and thought I could succeed, knew how to maintain control in the classroom without being harsh, and knew the material they were covering.

A perfect example of this, is my middle school math teacher who is the one who first inspired me to become a teacher. She talked to me after I finished taking a test and asked me if I had learned what she was teaching before. She told me that I took the test almost as fast as she did and scored very well on it. That let me know how much she thought I was capable of. She also had avery unique way of organizing her homework. She set up three different homework assignments based on skill level. Those who were struggling and just wanted to pass the clas could do the C homework assignment and expect to get C's on the tests. Those who had a better handle on things could do the B homework assignment and expect to get B's on the tests. Those who wanted to be challenged and wanted to ace the class could do the A homework assignment and expect to get A's on the test as long as all of the homework was understood. I do not remember her discipline technique, but she was always in charge of the classroom and always had everyone's attention. She was also very wee-rehearsed in the math she was teaching. She knew how to explain the same problem in at least three different ways if students were having trouble understanding her first explaination. She is the type of teacher I want to be.