Week 15

    This week of student teaching was my last week of full time teaching during student teaching. We had Monday off for Easter break so it was a shorter week. Though this week wasn't as crazy as last week (because of the MAP testing), it was still a week filled with a number of different events and themes happening. On Tuesday we had Earth Day, meaning that a number of our activities were based around Earth Day and conservation overall. We were able to fill some pots and plant some flowers as a class and the students really enjoyed learning more about plants and about how planting works. I was very surprised at how little many of the students knew about gardening and really outdoor skills at all. I think that in an area such as this, outdoor skills are something of a forgotten art, mainly because many students no longer need these skills in their lives.
    My teaching this week went well overall. I think that sometimes when I am teaching it is easy to get caught up in the students' misbehaviors and to just constantly be reprimanding students or discipling them, because often some days there are just a lot of behaviors. But constantly reprimanding students is not fun for me or the students and not a good use of time either, so that is something that I feel that I must be careful about in my teaching. It is important to make sure that I am keeping a fair record with students, but also praising them throughout the day, making sure that they know that I am proud of their success and hopefully helping them achieve success in their lives as well. I think that it is more difficult to be positive all of the time with students, mainly because often positive reinforcement seems to reap less results overall in behavior than negative behavior management may. But, I believe strongly that positively encouraging and working with students is so much more powerful than negatively working with them. Also, it seems that often the culture in schools is to be negative with students, to yell at them, and to reprimand them often. That seems to be what many teachers rely on, but I strongly believe that positively working with student will work well much better for everyone involved.
    On Friday, we had Grandparent's Day at school. Many of the teachers at my school were dreading this day and I was not sure why, but I realized why once the day happened. The day was quite chaotic. Grandparents were walking around the school all day and the school was packed with students and grandparents alike. Transitions were very difficult to make happen as the hallways were so full and there were so many people around in the school. It was enjoyable to see some of the students so proud of showing their grandparents our school and our class and I enjoyed meeting all of them. But whenever routine goes out the window, often so does students' focus and behavior in the classroom. Because of this, it was more difficult to help students focus on the events of the day, but overall it was still a different day which can be fun to work through as well and learn about another aspect in the lives of teachers.