7th to 7

No comments at all on the last blog post?  I either posted this story before or I caught all of you on a bad day I guess.  Anyway, I moved from 7th grade the other day to two different 2nd grade classes, and I do mean different in more ways than the obvious.  Yesterday was generally a good day.  I unfortunately had no break for specials like PE or music, but even without I didn’t have much to complain about.  There was an hour at the end of the day for computer lab and research, but though another ran that class I still had to be there.  They were researching dinosaurs.  Their entire day (well, almost) was actually based on this topic, from books to read for silent reading to centers work to the research at the end of the day.  This topic is an early speller’s nightmare by the way, with all those crazy names.  I think I can spell some of the more common ones like T-Rex, er- I mean tyrannasaurus rex and pterodactyl.  Those of course have come with practice.  Let me just take a quick look at Wikipedia for some of the more unusual ones…  Okay, just looking at one single classification of dinosaurs I found names like archaeornithomimus, anserimimus, struthiomimus, ornithomimus, pelecanimimus, shenzhousaurus, and harpymimus.  Yech- see what I mean?

So again that day went well.  A few students had to flip cards (oops, I mean “pull tickets” – small details like what things are called is of utmost importance to these concrete thinkers) but they were pretty well behaved.  I wish I could say the same about today’s class- some of them were all over the walls (figuratively).  I would often have to repeat myself when I told someone to just sit down.  Very chatty too.  They did not seem to know how to do work with no talking.  This is the sort of class I had when student teaching.  The teacher also didn’t leave directions for her behavior plan so I had to try to figure out how the one they had, one I was not familiar with, worked.  They tried to tell me, but they couldn’t agree on the details.  I did mention doing things just right did I not?  I had one boy who would just complain how I would do it.  Needless to say I will not be using this plan if and when I have my own classroom someday.

This class also had no break, but there was a shorter lunch and less “off” (someone else in charge) time.  In fact, the only time I had outside the classroom besides lunch was fifteen minutes to check out books in the LMC- they didn’t even get recess outside of lunch.  It wasn’t in the plans, but even if it was they would have lost it.  Needless to say between these two things the day felt quite longer than yesterday.  Does this tell me I am not able to do it?  Not at all.  I think I need to come up with my own behavior plan next time rather than conform to the cooperating teacher’s plan if I don’t like it.  That was probably also a mistake- trying to conform with how she ran things, automatically taking a follower (read: teaching assistant) role.  Not good when I’m supposed to be training to be a leader.  So, should I go back if the college agrees to give me another chance?

Derek