Weel 6

This week I had a blast teaching. This must be the magic point where I start to feel really comfortable with my students. I was a little apprehensive of teaching the senior accounting class, but it has turned out to be a lot of fun. Even though the students like to get a little chatty, they also contribute to the class and stay focused. I appreciate their effort in class since I am putting so much effort into preparing. It makes my time spent feel worthwhile.

I also had another personal victory this week. I mentioned in another post that I had a conflict with a student. She was very upset about me covering her keys while she was typing, and her behavior was way out of line! I happen to be very amused this week because, despite her best efforts, she is enjoying class. She has three friends in the class who had all decided I am was so lame, but we have been doing some pretty fun activities lately and they are loving it. Hate it when that happens. ;)

This week I would have changed some aspects of the accounting lesson I did today. I decided to experiment with using PowerPoint to review a large problem we were doing in class. The problem was far to long to do from scratch so I used some print screens of the teacher key. I didn't showed the students one journal entry at a time, but the entire line was exposed at once. This is not the typical way I do this, and I felt it wasn't effective. Students were writing instead of thinking all the parts through. I had cleared my PowerPoint with my co-op before I presented it, and we decided to experiment and see how it went. Turns out for this long problem I would rather use a good old fashioned transparency. Luckily there is always Monday and we will finish the in-class problem that way.

Week 5

This week was full of challenges! First off my co-operating teacher was away for two days. Also, this week was PSSA testing. With those two elements combined my two classes were difficult to manage at times. I had one particular incident with a female student that tested me. I had just told the student I would be covering her keys with a white paper. She knew she would have to put her hands under the keys as I had explained earlier in the class. The student threw a huge fit and had a horrible attitude through the rest of the class period. I also think I caught her calling me a bad name to her friend! Needless to say I was furious! I didn't allow the student to see how mad I was and I announced at the end of class that she would be staying after the bell rang. After class I told her how unacceptable her behavior was and that I would not allow it in my class (that’s the short version).

My other keyboarding class was hard to control as well. Looking back on the situations I feel that I handled them pretty well. I think it is easy to get discouraged on days your students are not behaving, but I had to remind myself of the many factors influencing their behavior.

Toward the end of the week the students began to behave much better. I used positive reinforcement to reward the classes with a fun assignment for their improved behavior. I took one of my classes a few days to earn the assignment, but in the end they did.

What I would change about the week would be starting my accounting lesson planning earlier. My new class I will be picking up is accounting and planning the first lesson was difficult for me. Looking back I realize the lesson wasn’t hard at all. It just takes time to get used to the material and how to extract the important concepts from the book. I turned in my lessons on time, but I fell I would have been less stressed out if I would have started the planning sooner. Besides that my week was enjoyable even if it did test my patients!

Week 4 :)

This week was fun for me. I enjoyed interacting with my students a lot. I am feeling a lot more comfortable with all of them, and I think the students are all getting used to me. I have had to "lay down the law" once or twice, but the students seem to respect me now as their teacher. It has also been fun to branch out and add fun details to my lessons. I am only teaching keyboarding right now so the first week was a little dull. This week however I was able to come up with some activities to engage the students a little more.

I gave my first test this week and it was amazing to me to see the answers some students put down. Our test was online in Moodle and I felt it wasn't overly difficult and that we had reviewed for it thuroughly. Most students did well but many of them missed some very simple things we covered several times. I supose I wouldn't necessarily change my test, but I think one of my classes needs more review than the other. This is something I will consider before giving out another test!