Okay, alright, so this week was a complete and utter roller coaster ride. I wasn't feeling well on Tuesday morning, so I spent the day mostly grouchy. Let me tell you something...NOT good for student teaching. Especially not for a student teacher who has decided (without cause) that it is solely her job to make all of the students behave throughout the morning. What a job that turned out to be. Looking back on the difference between this Tuesday and this Thursday, I already feel as though I have come miles. I spent most of the day on Tuesday and the better part of the day on Wednesday totally discombobulated, trying to make all of the students be quiet and listen. When is the real learning going to start if they can't keep still and let the teacher show them the learning? I have come to learn that it is happening all around me, even if I can't focus enough to see it. I am realizing that I am NOT the teacher. The teacher is a very lovely lady with several years of expereience under her belt, and I can't possibly expect myself to move at the languid pace that comes so effortlessly to her. I have resolved to spend the rest of my time sitting back a bit more and watching her.

I have to confess...fourth grade doesn't do it for me. I know that it is a different pace from the one I expect to maintain. Something about children confuses me. I can't wrap my brain around what it is like to be a child outside of my own experience as one. Due to my horrible long-term memory, I can't remember what it was like. I do remember that my own experience as a fourth grader is extremely different from the one that these kids are having. It was all desks in rows, seatwork all the time, homework and music class. At my school, in the fourth grade we were already switching classes to go to different teachers for different subjects. These kids are together all day long with the same teacher (with the occasional choir time or art class). Because of this, I think the kids tend to get a little more restless. However, students like this go all the time. They have the chance to really build on something without the bell interrupting. I am jealous of that sometimes, although I really think that I did well within the structured environment.

This week we started off with the gifted and talented teacher coming in to help the kids on a project. They were building a new and improved peanut butter sandwich. All of the kids brought in their special ingredients, built their sandwiches for evaluation of others. Of course, there were a lot of peanut butter and various kinds of candy sandwiches. The most unusual (and I must say, rather gross because I was the ONLY one brave enough to try) was a peanut butter, blueberry yogurt, BBQ sauce, and sprinkles sandwich. Yucky. The kids really seemed to get into it...when it was building the sandwich and tasting one anothers. The hard part came when they had to write evaluations of the sandwiches and turn them in. Here's an instance where play was great until it was interrupted by the work that had to be done. I even had someone come up and ask me "Do you know the origin of the sandwich?" I told him that I would look it, and he should too, and then the next week, we could compare our findings. (If anyone is interested, click here or here to find out what I discovered).

The rest of my time there was spent cleaning up and getting the kids ready to go out and play at recess and lunch.

Wednesday was another grouchy day (again-I don't recommend trying to deal with fourth graders with an Attitude (capital A).) The kids seemed to have super ants-in-their-pants and pretty much ran wild the whole day through. Because of this, I didn't really take a lot of notes or really even pay attention to what might have been happening. Later that night, at my meeting with my colleagues and my advisor, I had a bit of a nervous breakdown from all of the stress that I was inflicting on myself. He assured me that I had to step back and watch more to see what was going on. How could I recognize play and see how the teacher ran with it if I was constantly here and there shushing and trying to stop various misbehaviors. In a later email, he advised me to take that time to get to know my students as people. So Thursday was my first real attempt to do this.

Here's what I learned...(nicknames will be forth to protect the innocent)

Bug boy (as he will be called from here on out--by his own request) loves all things insecty and Star Wars related. He wants to know if I were a droid, what kind of droid would I be and who is my favorite character. I told him that I loved Anakin in episode three because he is way cool, even when he's becoming evil. He likes R2 and Chewy. He spends most of his free time either daydreaming or reading about insects.

DramaQueen: is obsessed with my drama career. She wants to know all the plays I've been in and she and her friends wrote a play of their own to discuss some of the migration themes that they are learning about. She is so far the most like me as a child.

Wicked: She will be henceforth called this not because she is badly behaved, much to the opposite, actually, but because she is currently reading the Gregory MacGuire title of the same name. Now, if you haven't read it, that book is HARD. It took me, super reader, who can read three novels in one day, a month to read it. It is complex and political and a lot of things. The fact that one of these fourth graders is reading it might be the most impressive thing I've seen so far. I haven't had a chance to discuss it with her, but I'm waiting for the opportunity.

More will come on the little people. Thursday was very peaceful for me when I wasn't trying to be the queen of the quiet classroom. I felt a lot of responsibility and stress lift from my shoulders, and I got to watch and learn more. Hopefully next week will be even better. MissTeacher and I are going to plan our little drama, which we will start planning on Wednesday. I'll keep you all updated from week-to-week to let you know how it is going. Thanks for reading, and feel free to comment at will :) Feedback is always appreciated.

Well, it's my second week of student teaching. For those of you who don't know, I'm in the teacher training master's program at Ohio State University (sorry, forgot the "The"). In order to get my degree and the certificate to teach K-12 drama, I must complete 100 hours both this quarter and next quarter. This quarter I'm in a fourth grade class at Indianola Elementary with MissTeacher. Yesterday was my third day in the classroom. I had two days last week, which were basically spent learning the kids’ names (I’m so close!) and getting used to the routines of the classroom.

Things I am noticing about the classroom…well, I’m noticing that fourth graders are a lot less mature than I expected them to be, yet a lot more mature sometimes. I tend to think of them as just really short people, and sometimes that’s the case, but sometimes it’s not. They all seem to be incapable of sitting quietly all at once. There’s always SOMEONE that is acting up and needing to be shushed. To be honest, I’m not quite sure yet how to measure what the kids are learning. It seems like they never have enough time to finish assignments, and I’m never quite sure why some assignments are considered okay when they clearly don’t include everything that was asked for. I have no idea what to expect, because it’s been a LONG time since I worked with fourth graders or was in the fourth grade. I’m unsure of how to bring this up with MissTeacher, as she’s been teaching for longer than I’ve even been alive. I am wondering how to question things I don’t understand without feeling like I’m disagreeing with her or questioning her methods (even if that’s exactly what I might be doing).

One thing I am noticing about the classroom is that discipline seems to be lacking. I feel like there’s never a moment in the class where everyone is paying attention and all are focused on the various lessons. It doesn’t help that it always seems to take longer than expected to do anything. I feel like I’m not noticing a lot of consistency in the punishments or reinforcements. Actually, I’m not noticing much reaction to misbehavior at all. I try to remind students to be quiet and pay attention, and I try to move the students who are always talking away from one another, but I’m not quite sure yet what my role is, and where the boundaries are for me. I have noticed some of my efforts making a difference in the students’ behaviors, but I am not sure that it is lasting. I must remind myself that I will need much more time and much more practice before any of this will come effortlessly to me. I’m just a beginner. A newbie to teaching and learning.

My goals for the quarter, aside from learning everything I possibly can, are to come at each new day as a new challenge and try and keep everything fresh and exciting. I’d like to incorporate some of the ideas that I am having and some of the things that I am learning in my classes throughout the quarter. I would also like to see some more organization in this particular classroom and do everything in my power to help with that. I am, by nature, an extremely organized person. Hopefully that will come in handy throughout this experience. Hopefully, after a few more days, I’ll have some new ideas for how drama will be incorporated into this classroom.

I am already noticing that kids are much more apt to play than adults. The only time that they have been all engaged completely in the classroom is when MissTeacher brought out her puppet Hilda. He’s a tree frog. She talked to the kids as Hilda, talking to him as MissTeacher and letting the kids talk to him as well. They asked him questions, and were all very engaged in what was happening. I’m not quite sure what the kids were learning during this time, but I am positive that it was a use of drama in the classroom. I am starting to notice what that is, but I am still unclear of how it is effective in this class. Hopefully I will see more as the time goes on. Maybe that’s something that we can discuss in our class. I would also like to talk about and learn about what happens in the students’ play during free time. I have seen glimpses of stuff while the boys are playing cards in the corner (not playing cards, Yu-Gi-o cards or something). Some of the girls also got together and wrote a small play incorporating some of the concepts from the “Migration to the Fourth Grade” that is happening in the classroom. The students are learning about what we can learn from geese migration. For example, when a goose is hurt, two geese fly down out of formation and stay with it until it is healed or dies. The lessons there would be about helping our fellow man. Hopefully after some more instruction in 644 and 777 this quarter, I’ll be able to wrap my brain around it more and developed a more trained eye for it, to recognize when it’s authentic and when it can be directed for learning.

I’m also getting nervous about my own lack of knowledge. I was trying to teach a child how to subtract when one of the bottom digits is larger than the one about it, like, 20-7. I couldn’t explain how to make the two a one and the zero a ten, or why that is done. I finally had to ask MissTeacher over to help. What happens when I have to teach students something that I don’t have a complete understanding of? I guess I’ll be able to answer these questions after more experience and more learning. Again, I am still a newbie. Hopefully all of these things will come with time. At least, that’s what I’m hoping for.

Well, more adventures the next post. I will be starting a regular schedule this week and will be going to my own classes as well. Soon my posts will be able to be more focused, as I gain practice and knowledge. Be back then!