Just for fun, here is a list (no particular order) of my favorite student teaching moments so far:
1. Learning to be more assertive and a little more "tough." I'll always be a touchy-feely person but I am learning how have high expectations for students as well as myself.
2. Today I ran into a student outside of class. Her reaction? Jumping up in down with a short and high pitched squeal. How cool is that?
3. Celebrating Abraham Lincoln's birthday and talking about journalism in the 1880s and today.
4. My first faculty meeting. Call me crazy but I actually enjoyed it. It's neat to see the entire staff together.
5. I went to lunch with the theater teachers and we had a blast. It was nice to get out of the room and talk to other teachers. Not that my own teacher isn't great of course!
6. SSR: Sustained silent reading. At CHS, students get 30 minutes on Thursday and Friday during first period to read novels. I love it for two reasons. Books become a topic of discussion. Teachers also participate (or they should). It is a nice break while still benefiting students.
7. I love seeing my students on a daily basis. It is so neat to be in their lives consistently. While I did a lot of popcorn teaching in college, student teaching is a whole new world of continuous instruction and continuous demands.
That is all for now. But I am sure I am missing 100 other things I love. :)
Hang in there, student teachers. We are halfway done!
Fantastic menagerie of things there; we had SSR as part of Monday study halls in high school, but it didn't go over too well. It started my freshman spring semester and ended my senior fall semester. Thus, we were the only class that had some form of it every year. A student campaign to get rid of it actually had shirts that read: "SSR: One Letter Away from Communism."
ReplyDeleteHaving it first period makes a little more sense and I notice you said "novels"--does that mean reading comic books or textbooks (fine under our system) were not allowed? Our teachers were also required to do SSR--and though I didn't have her, I'm almost certain my well-liked chemistry teacher was reading her horse breeding magazines. That really is an irrelevant point but I just thought I'd share.
Keep on rocking, Jincy! You're making a difference (or a sum or a product or a quotient; the possibilities are endless, really). :)
--Mike