new teacher pressures - part 2 (of 3)
So. Many. Questions.
On top of questioning whether or not I should even be a teacher (Part 1), I have a million and one questions concerning the curriculum and pedagogy of the job.
Round 1 of questions reached its capacity after the first semester of teaching. I spent most of my Christmas break pondering the following:
As for the second set of questions, I have some ideas. I will deliberately incorporate three more aspects into each Unit Packet. They are as follow: literacy (actual reading but it doesn't have to be a JACS article; poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc), and writing (quick-writes, summaries, something - ANYTHING), media literacy (where students must glean information from a source that IS NOT ME; YouTube videos, group activities, experiments, self-guided instruction, etc. and they are then held responsible for that information without me explaining it later). Ideally the things students are reading, writing about, and learning from are interesting to them. Which brings me to another dilemma...
I have heard it so many times: If you want your students to be interested, make the material relevant to their lives.
I am here to tell you - THAT IS NOT EASY!
We study drinks and airbags and bobas (frozen yogurt topping) and celebrity breakups and fireworks and anime and plane crashes and we use legos and fire and computer simulations and we burn cheetos and turn pennies into 'gold' and I tell you - THEY DON'T CARE!
One of my coworker says:
"Never work harder than your students. If you do, they will become dependent on you and fail to become independent learners. You will do them a disservice."
Maybe that's part of it. They don't care because I care for them. Maybe I work too hard for them (instead of with them). I am constantly asking for missing work, tracking down students who miss class, and faithfully respond to parents who do not seem to appreciate anything I do. I spend hours trying to make class more interesting. Maybe I need to make students more responsible for their education and let them decide what is interesting. Though the problem still remains that they don't care. Not even enough to via for class activities or to run their own experiments.
Some of them care of course. But the ones who I am trying to reach the most, they don't care. They say they hate being at school. That they hate studying and hate math and hate their life and just want to go home.
On top of questioning whether or not I should even be a teacher (Part 1), I have a million and one questions concerning the curriculum and pedagogy of the job.
Round 1 of questions reached its capacity after the first semester of teaching. I spent most of my Christmas break pondering the following:
- How do I get students to take more responsibility for themselves, their actions, and the actions of those around them?
- How can I get students to keep up with papers? (I do not, nor do they, have the luxury of classroom computers, so the papers stay.)
- How can I manage the material and instruction that absent students miss? How do I put the responsibility of absences on them?
- How can I minimize the endless printing and wasted paper?
- How can I more effectively distribute and collect papers?
- How can I help students who miss entire units of instruction?
- How can I differentiate between learning abilities? Can handouts be structured to accommodate?
- How can I give students an overview of our unit?
- How can I encourage students to self-evaluate their understanding of key concepts?
- How can I help students to take organized and meaningful notes? Or let's be real - any kind of notes!
- How can I help students to be organized?
- How can I put the responsibility for missing papers and work on the students instead of it being my job to always give them another copy? What about when I made 20 extra copies but no one is keeping up with their work and so then I am out of copies and it becomes 'my fault' they don't have one because I didn't print enough extras?
- How can the solutions to the questions above also decrease the amount of classroom disruptions caused by addressing the above quandaries?
Now I now there are more questions to ask than just 'how,' but since I was needing actions, how was a good choice.
Alright. So those got me through Christmas break. Which was rather productive as I did create a method that addressed a majority of the issues. Unit Packets! Unfortunately, 'packets' is a dirty word in education as it implies a void-of-teacher approach where students are handed large stacks of worksheets and left to their own demise. So I had to call them Unit Resources at my school. But really, they are simply well formed, student centered with teacher present, Unit Packets. As in the name, students get a new packet at the beginning of each unit (which usually lasts about a week). There is a cover page with a statement summary of the unit, the learning targets (also called 'I can ' statements), example problems, vocabulary, a section for models, formulas, or diagrams, and lastly, a box with important dates. I print enough copies for each student, myself, my co-teacher, and two extras incase someone observes my classroom. That's it. No extras. Students are not given additional copies. If a student is absent, they simply pick up the new packet, or if we are still in the same unit, they did not miss any handouts. The packets took a while to make in the beginning, but they are simple to use and papers are only exchanged once a week. And now that they are made, I only need to take a couple of minutes to update them for next year. Simple, simple. And, it solved or minimized most of the problems above. "Yay!" I thought. I have solved all of my problems. I thought.
Well now it's summer break and I have a new list of questions:
Alright. So those got me through Christmas break. Which was rather productive as I did create a method that addressed a majority of the issues. Unit Packets! Unfortunately, 'packets' is a dirty word in education as it implies a void-of-teacher approach where students are handed large stacks of worksheets and left to their own demise. So I had to call them Unit Resources at my school. But really, they are simply well formed, student centered with teacher present, Unit Packets. As in the name, students get a new packet at the beginning of each unit (which usually lasts about a week). There is a cover page with a statement summary of the unit, the learning targets (also called 'I can ' statements), example problems, vocabulary, a section for models, formulas, or diagrams, and lastly, a box with important dates. I print enough copies for each student, myself, my co-teacher, and two extras incase someone observes my classroom. That's it. No extras. Students are not given additional copies. If a student is absent, they simply pick up the new packet, or if we are still in the same unit, they did not miss any handouts. The packets took a while to make in the beginning, but they are simple to use and papers are only exchanged once a week. And now that they are made, I only need to take a couple of minutes to update them for next year. Simple, simple. And, it solved or minimized most of the problems above. "Yay!" I thought. I have solved all of my problems. I thought.
Well now it's summer break and I have a new list of questions:
- How can I manage the students flowing in and out of the classroom? Why do they always have bathroom emergencies EVERY DAY?!!?!?!!? Do they hate my class?? Or do they just not care?
- How can I get students to read?
- How can I get students to take responsibility for what they are learning?
- How can I get students to learn via each other and alternate resources that ARE NOT ME!?!
- How can I get students to write?
- How can I get students to care about our subject matter?
Also, I teach the special education students. If a student has a 504, IEP, or ESL accommodations, they are in my class. If they are on an IEP diploma, if they have behavior problems, or if they are seniors who still haven't passed Algebra 1, they are in my class. Why we are making all of theses students take chemistry, I do not know but will probably rant about in another post. As for this post:
The special education students bring their own set of struggles to the classroom which leaves with a long list of summer contemplations.
The special education students bring their own set of struggles to the classroom which leaves with a long list of summer contemplations.
- Should I hold the SpEd students to the same standards I hold the regular education students (who share the classroom)?\
- Should I give the SpEd students equal opportunities in the classroom? Or course I don't give them less, but is in justified to give them more? How much more? My classroom is a heterogeneous mixture of SpEd and Regular Ed, so how I do I differentiate opportunities without students noticing or without it being perceived as unfair?
- How do expectations differ for SpEd students? I have high expectations for them. How high should they be? I am encouraged to pass SpEd students who have a 68 in the class. Is that acceptable? Maybe it is, but I don't let them know that? Maybe the perceived expectation and the actual are different?
- 'Differentiation' and 'individualized instruction' gets thrown around constantly. Can I really treat my students differently? Giving them different assessments based on their capabilities? Is that fair?
As for the second set of questions, I have some ideas. I will deliberately incorporate three more aspects into each Unit Packet. They are as follow: literacy (actual reading but it doesn't have to be a JACS article; poetry, fiction, nonfiction, etc), and writing (quick-writes, summaries, something - ANYTHING), media literacy (where students must glean information from a source that IS NOT ME; YouTube videos, group activities, experiments, self-guided instruction, etc. and they are then held responsible for that information without me explaining it later). Ideally the things students are reading, writing about, and learning from are interesting to them. Which brings me to another dilemma...
I have heard it so many times: If you want your students to be interested, make the material relevant to their lives.
I am here to tell you - THAT IS NOT EASY!
We study drinks and airbags and bobas (frozen yogurt topping) and celebrity breakups and fireworks and anime and plane crashes and we use legos and fire and computer simulations and we burn cheetos and turn pennies into 'gold' and I tell you - THEY DON'T CARE!
One of my coworker says:
"Never work harder than your students. If you do, they will become dependent on you and fail to become independent learners. You will do them a disservice."
Maybe that's part of it. They don't care because I care for them. Maybe I work too hard for them (instead of with them). I am constantly asking for missing work, tracking down students who miss class, and faithfully respond to parents who do not seem to appreciate anything I do. I spend hours trying to make class more interesting. Maybe I need to make students more responsible for their education and let them decide what is interesting. Though the problem still remains that they don't care. Not even enough to via for class activities or to run their own experiments.
Some of them care of course. But the ones who I am trying to reach the most, they don't care. They say they hate being at school. That they hate studying and hate math and hate their life and just want to go home.
- How do I help them?
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