One more week under the belt.

Having completed my first week of CPII was both energizing and exhausting. Between observations, being observed, one day of getting to school at 6:45 in the morning and not leaving until after open house at 7:45, a few late nights of planning along with all of the other incidentals of teaching I am exhausted. On the other hand, having one class of completely compliant and eager learners, another class full of energetic and excitable freshmen and  a 5th period class that my C.T. may be the squirreliest class he has ever had all adds up to three really cool classes.

My first observation was in my U.S. government class. While the lesson was not perfect it went really well all in all. At my old company we had a saying, if you really want to impress a customer, make a mistake and blow their mind with how well you recover. I know it sounds odd but it is true. While I did not make a mistake in my lesson, there was a portion of the lesson that was beyond some of my students. When I realized this, I made a slight change to what they were doing that allowed those students to fully access the material. I did not think much of this adjustment, it just seemed to make sense to me. However, it did not go unnoticed by my U.S. and she thought it was a great adjustment. She also really liked the use of PollEv.com as discussion generator. More importantly than that, the students love it and buy into it. The use of PollEv.com and Socrative.com have both a lot to energize the classes. I really recommend the use of them.

My challenge this week and likely for the rest of the semester will be my 5th period geography class. Oh my! To be fairly blunt, many students in this class have very little sense of what respect is. They have little respect for themselves, no respect for classmates and a few of them have an equally small amount of respect for me or my C.T. Some of these students are so defiant, you can ask them to sit down/ return to their seat and they will look you in the eye, smile and act like you did not say a word. Or tell you that they will sit down in a minute. Needless to say this is not something my C.T. or I will tolerate and we address it outside. Yet it does not change the attitude. I have taken the approach of just trying to lift them up when I have my discussions with them I am also using one of the techniques from the Cooperative Disciple approach outlined by Linda Albert. In particular, the Target-Stop-Do. In this approach, you target the student by name, tell him/her to stop "ABC" and do "XYZ". I have seen some improvement with a few students but I have a long way to go. While, I suppose I could let this particular class get me down; I see it as a great opportunity to learn how to get these students back in the groove. Not to mention, although some of these students are often disrespectful, when you talk to them one on one, you can see that they are for the most part really good kids that just need some help learning boundaries and don't need anymore negative inputs in their lives.