My First Week Teaching

After spending time actually teaching students during the class periods, the days have been going by much quicker, and I am only teaching ten minutes in each class so far!!

On an average day I have between four to six class periods in a day. Each week I see nineteen different classes. Each class has between 20 and 25 students in it! That is a lot of students, but it is an atmosphere that is new to me. I have gone back and forth deciding whether I like it. The biggest component with give and take is teaching the same three lessons during the whole week (because I see three different grades within my classes). A huge benefit is being able to alter the lesson if something did not go well, or if you just want to try something different with the same content. A down side is not being able to remember what you have and have not discussed by the end of the week because you have taught it so many times. I am sure I will get more used to it!

Overall, so far, I really love teaching here! It is definitely a challenge, especially with the younger grades because they do not understand as much of what I am saying, but it is not too big of a challenge where it becomes frustrating. I keep thinking over the upcoming weeks how much these students are going to learn just by hearing me simply talk to them. If we would of had a first language Spanish teacher come be our teacher for two months, I probably would have remember more to this day. I am very excited for my students, and the students in other classes that my classmates are teaching with, to have this opportunity.

There are so many little things that I am learning from teaching already that effect how I am reaching out to my students. For an example, on Monday, I was teaching my 6th graders new unit vocabulary words; and 'shoes' was one of the words. We were talking about different words for different types of shoes, because there are truly so many of them. Tennis shoes is a term that none of them were familiar with, even the teacher. They simply call them sneakers or running shoes, which we might use as well and I have heard of those terms, but it was interesting that they had not even herd of the term tennis shoe. Something else that I have been able to practice from working with the younger grades is how explain the expected directions is so many ways while also using cues or modeling. This will be a huge skill I will be able to use and take home with me, especially if I plan on working with younger students.

Next week I start teaching for half of each class period, so I am excited to see what more immersion time into teaching the students will bring. I am sure that I will continue to learn new things each day even leading up to when I leave.