I'm feeling Much Much better following nearly an entire month at the appropriate thyroid dosage. It's amazing how much that helps. But I'm feeling upset with myself. I need some inspiration or something. I need an idea, or a hundred ideas. The school district I'm teaching in pretty much has their lessons already decided for the students, I just need to teach them, but I need to get over my feelings of anxiety surrounding my classroom performance. How do I do this? How do I connect my knowledge about art to what I know needs to happen in the classroom. Evidently it is expected that the students will have conversations about the subject. Part of what I'm doing requires me to demonstrate. I'm just not sure. How do I make that all happen? How do they talk to eachother, how do I walk in a classroom and make sure they don't spend all their time talking? How do I keep control over that? How do I know when time is up? I need to NOT waste their time, but I would love to have conversations with them. But how do I come up with questions for them? In this case I'm working with grade K-5 and I truly love working with all of these interesting age groups. I just don't know how to think up all the answers to the questions, or the questions I should ask either. I'm looking forward to getting into the classroom alone again in the coming weeks, so I'm not too worried about interrupting their regular teacher or "doing it wrong" - I just need to make some notes and jump in there right? Right????
Also this business about all the work it is going to be to even get a job. Bad local news about teachers being laid off... I mean, I have been planning all along to substitute teach but I would love a real job too. I am sitting here thinking of all the hard work I've been doing learning how to be a teacher, and daily I see more and more disheartening news, read more interesting but conflicting messages about how people see teachers, children, etc. I felt like I was getting closer and closer to the "end" and then I learned how much more work, how much more expense, how much more more more I would need to do just to get to be a teacher, then the stuff I would need to do in the first two years I'm a teacher, then the More stuff I'd need to do after those two years in order to continue being a teacher.
This is NOT like getting a regular job.
Where is my faith?
What happened to my blind faith?
Did it dwindle like my bank account?
2 comments:
You could use a method called Think-Pair-Share. If you are doing a demonstration, you could demonstrate. Then give them a couple minutes to think about how they will start their project. Then they pair with a buddy and take turns talking about what they will do for about a minute each or a minute total. Then you can call on students to share what their partner is doing or what they talked about together. Requires actual thought. Requires collaboration. Requires listening to partner. Requires participation. Get yourself a checklist of names to make sure you call on each child to speak each week. It is quite easy to leave someone to be quiet if they don't volunteer, but it is also part of your job to get participation from everyone.
I totally get what you mean by the participation from everyone thing. How can I make that work given my situation? Would Think-Pair-Share work more for the beginning of a unit?
Like for the kindergarteners radial symmetry sun unit, we have the first step, I have to talk about art featuring the sun, on a power point. So would that be the point where they could think pair share?
Demos are done in chunks because they can only handle part of the instructions at a time...
Everyone comes up to the front and I demonstrate how to trace around the circle template. Then they all go back to their seats, we pass out the circle templates, they each help their neighbor trace the circle. Then everyone comes back up to the front and I demonstrate choosing a shape to trace for the first four rays of the sun. Then they go back and do that too. They come back up, I demonstrate choosing and tracing the second set of four rays, they go back to their seats and do that. Then they come back up, I demonstrate drawing a set of two lines, curlies, zig zags, or curves for the third set of four rays. They go back and do that. The next week, they come up and I demo eyes, eyes looking to the left, the right, eyebrows, different nose styles, mouth styles, they go back and draw a face which hopefully does not have a triangle pumpkin nose.
Then they need to be taught how to trace their lines with sharpie marker.
Then later they need to be taught about warm colors yellow orange red. They are told to color the face yellow. They do that.
Yadda yadda yadda.
Each section of grade 3-5 has 45 minutes a week. K-2 are on a rotation with six sections. Each day, I see grades K-5, and that's like 700 students a week.
If I let each student in a class of 20 speak for one minute only, that's 25 minutes left to intro/demonstrate/work/clean up/do closure - five minutes is not enough for each of those.
I do love to have them turn to their neighbor and tell them what they know about any given subject... so to some degree I am creating a little bit of pair-share. Does participation from everyone count if everyone actually turns in a sun, a print, a Wild Thing, etc., and I do actually move around to every single student and spend a while either telling them they're awesome or helping them with a problem?
It's a miracle I actually know some kids' names, right?
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