Week 13

    This week of student teaching was my second week of full-time teaching. I would say that overall the entire week was a success, but there were definitely bumps along the road as well. At the beginning of the week I had a job interview which was my first real job interview, it went well, and it was exciting to have a real interview and have a school actually interested in me. So overall that was a very exciting event that took place besides my teaching. My teaching went well this week too. I was able to teach about area and perimeter for most of the week in math, do a large amount of science experiments in science, and teach the kids about poetry. This all led up to Friday where we had three assessments in different subjects for the students. The assessments did not go well overall. The social studies assessment was open book so the students that did poorly on that assessment really just have themselves to blame, considering all of the answers were in just a few pages, but most students did well on that assessment. We also had a math and a poetry assessment. The poetry assessment was a very big deal in our class and we had been telling the kids for two weeks to study, had given them a review guide, and had reviewed with the students exactly what they would need to know for the assessment the day before. Yet, many of them still failed or go D's on this assessment. That was very difficult for me as I had taught the entire poetry unit to them. My teacher assured me that I taught it well and that she would not have taught it differently, it was just a matter of the students not studying for the assessment. But even after hearing this, it was still tough for me to see my students fail in this large assessment. Many of the students also did poorly on the math assessment on Friday. I had only reviewed with them these concepts so my teacher and I shared the blame a bit on this, but we still felt as if the students should have done better, just judging by how much time we spent going over concepts and teaching these concepts in what I thought were interesting and engaging ways. So overall Friday was a rough day, because of the pretty poor results from the assessments that our students took part in.
    I think that something difficult for me in this process was just the fact that in my experiences thus far I have never had students really do poorly after learning something that I had taught. I know that it is something that must happen at certain points in a teacher's career, but it was still very difficult to handle. Teaching after finding these scores was also difficult. I knew that I needed to stay upbeat and excited but that was very hard after seeing those discouraging results and knowing that the students could have done much better, but also that I could have likely taught in a different way so that they would have learned more effectively and remembered more of the information overall. Because of this I think that I really went through some new experiences this week related to finding out some new things about the hardships of teachers and maybe one of the more difficult times that teacher's go through, when their students do not do well. We sent the scores home and asked the students to study over the weekend and we will be re-testing them on Monday and Tuesday to hopefully better scores. The plan is to average out the two scores so that hopefully we can get a idea of what they really know  and how well they know the material overall.