Today I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a morning in an elementary school classroom. My roommate, Sarah, teaches 6th grade in Orem. I woke up early this morning (7:21 to be exact) to get ready. Sarah and I left our apartment around 8 and headed up to her school. While I was there, I helped her pass out some tests and hang up some of the children's artwork on the wall.
As the students began to come in, you could tell that it had been a long weekend. They were very chatty and weren't super keen on doing exactly what they should have been doing. Some of the students noticed that I was in there, and asked me who I was. They asked if I was a student teacher, and I told them that I was Miss Kidd's roommate. As I interacted with them a little bit, I realized that you really have to be careful about what you say, especially at that age.
One thing that I thought was really neat though happened before class started. There were three or four girls that had come in, and one of them had a book that she was showing the other girls. I guess this girl had gotten one of her stories published through some website, and was showing her book off. The other girls loved it, and thought it was so cool. The girl who had written the story was talking about how cool writing was. Another girl said "Writing is boring," but was then told otherwise by first girl. That was just a small example to me of how important it is for children to see their writing published and complete that writing process.
While I pondered on everything I had learned within the first 10 minutes of observing, Sarah put me to work. I started off by helping one boy correct his test, and explaining how percentages worked. He didn't understand it on the test, but as I began to explain it, it started to make sense to him. It just made me really grateful for my math class that I am currently in, and for the things that I am learning. I am glad that I am learning to understand why things work, so that when I go to explain them, I will have a better knowledge to base my teaching off of.
After their morning work, Sarah introduced me to the class as Miss Williams. I liked that. I was sitting at the back of the class, and she asked me to come up to the front of the class and introduce myself. As I was walking up, I heard one of the boys say something like "She looks nervous," or something. That was kind of a shock for me. I was a little nervous, yes, but I didn't think that I was showing it. It made me realize that as a teacher, I can't allow myself to appear nervous or scared. If children can sense emotion like that, they will seize those opportunities to act out and be disruptive and disrespectful.
Soon afterwards, she had the kids start working on writing mysteries (they were on their rough drafts). I walked around and helped out the students. I had a few students ask me how they should start their story. Rather than telling them exactly how to do it, I had them tell me what their story was about, and gave them suggestions on how a good story could start out (for example, you could describe the setting first or talk about how your mystery comes to be). One girl I talked to started off by telling me, "I am obsessed with Twilight! Basically my story is going to be the same as the books!" She went on to tell me how she loved Jacob and how she hated Team Edward. It was really funny.
Once their writing time was up, they began doing some reading. Sarah had me help out with this as well. She had the students come back one at a time to me and read a page aloud from whatever book they had decided to read. It was really interesting to hear the different reading abilities (at least out loud) of some of the students. Some could read out loud better than others. One of the students was complaining the whole time about everything, but one thing that stuck out in my mind was this student saying "I used to love reading but now I hate it now that I have to do all this stuff for it!" It just made me think of how important it is that children just have time to read with no strings attached to it. But then the problem comes with trying to figure out how to fit that time into everything else you need to get done, because there is just so much to do.
Soon Sarah began teaching math. I actually learned something I didn't know from this lesson. They were learning about positive and negative integers and absolute value. The real definition of absolute value is the distance away from zero. For example, the number 4 is 4 away from zero, so its absolute value is 4. -57 is 57 away from zero, so its absolute value is 57. As I thought about this, I realized a couple of things. One was that they are doing more than I did in 6th grade. I don't remember learning about absolute value until I was in 7th grade in Pre-Algebra. The other thing was that I was taught what it was incorrectly. I just learned to turn a number that was negative but had absolute value signs around it to a positive number. Nothing too complicated, but I didn't realize why it worked.
It was really good to observe Sarah and just how she taught. After the kids left for lunch, Sarah went and talked to someone that had come in to observe her. They talked about what went well and what she could do better. I learned so much just by listening to them talk about her lesson. Afterwards, I talked to Sarah about things just a little bit. She apologized that her class was out of control, and she asked me if I was scared. I'm probably not as scared as I should be.
Once I was done there, I went to the library, where my dance class was meeting. Today was our day to teach in the schools. My group met me there, and we finalized our lesson plan about Native Americans. We had split our lesson plan up into 5 sections and I was teaching the last section. The rest of my group had to leave early, so I was left at the end with 11 crazy 5th graders. It was really good though. I think just watching Sarah's class helped me learn a few pointers on management and everything. When I took over, the class was still pretty wild, but I just spoke softer. If you speak softly, the students will have to be quieter to hear the instructions. I divided them up into 3 groups and gave them the responsibility to come up with a dance they could show to the rest of the class. They ended up doing more acting then actual dancing. If we would have had more time, I think that I would've been able to help them come up with something that was more of a dance.
Despite all of the craziness that I witnessed today, I still want to be a teacher. It was so satisfying to watch the students when they actually succeeded and did well. I think I can do this, even though I know it will be so challenging. I can't wait to be a teacher.
