Creating a Unit Plan, and failure

Graduate School is starting to catch up with me, I'm constantly doing something, but I told myself I'm not going to be THAT person that always complains about how horrible their live is and how much life as a grad student is. Between an assignment for Foundations of Education and Education Psych, it's been a long week, something I can only imagine will be every week when I'm dealing with students, grading papers, working school events, and holding school hours.

I've been doing a lot of reading this weekend about how to teach students with disabilities and students that are failing in a subject when I read up on an uncoming documentary on HBO that premieres this Tuesday at 7:30. I Can't Do This But I CAN Do That deals with family of students that have learning disabilities and how their family can help them overcome these issues.

Keeping Motivation High

It is vital for American Educators to be able to keep student motivation high in their classrooms, but enivitably there will always be students that are less than interested in your course, or in school in general. How do we as teachers get these students to respond to our teaching? How do we show them that education has facets in all of our lives regardless of what career path we take?

This is the question that we will need to ask ourselves as future educators? How do we make our students WANT to learn, want to value their education?

For me I know that I need to collaborate my lesson plans and units with something that my students can relate you. I know that History is generally thought of to be a "boring" subject and connecting in importance of knowing about the past with the future is vitally important to our development as a nation and as a single American people.

The article posted below gives ideas and case studies for the application of real word projects into interdisciplinary education. Examples like working with service learning, analyzing natural disasters and their effects, and the use of all 4 major subjects to show how interconnected education can be is something I will strive for was a teacher.

http://publications.sreb.org/2010/10V04w_BestPractices_Blending_Instruction.pdf

Teaching Global Issues in American Schools

My Girlfriend's mother is a former educator that now works for a non-profit think tank in Atlanta working on the integration of technical education in High Schools, specifically taking the students that want vocational education and showing them the advantages of getting at least an Associate's degree in the field for the benefits of advancement. She recently sent me a nice book about the working with vocational students and helping push them into higher educational work and the challenges they face.

How do you get a student to go from wanting to be an auto mechanic to thinking that American history would be important for the rest of their lives? The answer was dealing with students individually and letting them explore their own niches in the subject, in this example, exploring the relationship between American and foreign automakers and the unique situations that helped the American car industry.

Here is a link to the authors blog as well as the book: http://blog.esrnational.org/bid/29183/Introducing-Getting-Classroom-Management-RIGHT

What makes a good teacher?

A couple thoughts on what it takes to be a good teacher:

Determination

Persistence

Flexibility

Creativity

Content Knowledge

Stamina

Head-Strongness

Fairness

Positive

Patience

Organized

I think of all these I need some patience. I feel like I will expect my future students to be as well versed and as quick to grasp concepts as when I teach them and I will need to be able to be patient and know that this is their first time going over the material.

Secondly, I feel like I need to have the determination to get through an entire school year. It is a long time to be dealing with the same students for 9 months and I know there will be some mornings that I will dread having to get out of bed at 6am to get off to class. I know that I want to do this, I want to make this happen, I want to teach. I just want to get out there and do it.

Thoughts on Discipline

Whenever I think about this I remember what happened to me back in Elementary School:

I believe it was 4th or 5th grade, and one think about myself back then, I was really, really, really messy. It was beyond anything that you could possibly imagine, one of those with papers hanging out from one of those hinged desks and the occasional smell of something down in the bottom that either I forgot about or just didn't care about. Looking back, it was disgusting, and I think that my teacher started to be annoyed by it.

She proceeded to make me sit out from recess everyday until my desk was in order, it took about 3 days for me to actually fight through my youthful revolt and do it, and then about a week later I needed to sit in again, and then probably once a week for the entire semester. Sure, I hated it. I resented my teacher for making me do all this work and keep me away from my friends. Back then I thought it was crazy. However, what it did do is got me to keep my desk clean, and I applied that to the rest of my life, to cleaning my room, to keeping papers and notes organized. It really did change the way that I was, and caused changed that I'm still huge into organization and being cleanly.

Even though a teacher has to discipline their students, just like my elementary teacher had to do, it it is something that is done for a reason and I think as future teachers we need to realize that how he treat our students is important for now they eventually develop into adults. Discipline isn't such a horrible thing, it can have lasting impressions on students if used the right way.

Classroom Management

This is what I dread:

I walk into a classroom and it is chaos, students are out of their seats, desks have all been turned around, and the class takes my entrance as little more than a blimp on their radar. I don't know what to do, I freeze, the students see this and jump in like a lion coming in for the kill. I walk out after the first day questioning my life choices and come back thinking about why the heck I thought this was a good idea.

Now, calming my fears, I get to learn about how to manage a classroom, how to keep my classroom both from erupting in anarchy but also how to create a positive place for students to learn where they actually want to come to class, and don't begin to dread me as "Mr. Lunger" with a boring tone and general apathy.

I found that there are ways to teach where even Social Studies doesn't become the sort of lecture and "Death by Powerpoint" that will be effective at the secondary level. Allowing students to guide their own education, to see what they are interested in and learn it themselves by their own free will is important. If a student can think in their mind that they came up with this conclusion all by themselves, that they learned a topic without the teacher telling them the answers, then they will gain the confidence that helps all of their classwork, not just my class. Those are the kind of things that help foster a life long love of learning and is really why I want to go into teaching.

As I had said before I took an education class while I was here as an Undergrad, along with that I had to sign up for the Florida Education Association and have been getting sent copies of "NEA Today" which is a newsletter/magazine for educators and aspiring educators. I never really took a huge interest in what they have to say until this last one got forwarded from back home and I took an interest in the website and some information about the issues that are affecting educators today. I took particular notice of this article about issues facing the new school year

http://neatoday.org/2010/09/13/top-eight-challenges-teachers-face-this-school-year/

Involving Parents in the Classroom

This entire section brought back great memories for me from when I was an Orientation Leader here at FSU in 2008. I know what parents of incoming freshman students are like, I remember helicopter parents, literally hovering over their students, not allowing them to breath. Not allowing them to get literally get outside of arms reach without bringing them back in. I know that despite the common idea that parents generally don't care about their child's education, but I feel like they just aren't given the opportunity to either get involved feel like public schools don't give them an opportunity.

I know that as a teacher I need to do my best to encourage parents to be involved in their students education, to ask how classes are going at the dinner table, giving them assistance with projects, making sure that they get up for classes in the morning, making sure that they are getting to bed, having a good meal every morning and every night.

I know that most families are either single parents or two-income, both parents working full time. The time of stay at home parents are over and it would be both ineffective and inappropriate for me to expect parents to have free time and availibility during the school year. Working would mean that I need to find ways to get parents involved in times and availibilty and working to get parents to know me as a teacher, and for them to know what their student is doing.