FINAL BLOG POST!

Six years from now your dream will be within your reach. You will cross the stage as the first person in your family to attend college. Your mom won't be there, but your friends, classmates, teachers, and family will be. In six years you will have met countless people who have kindled what started as a small spark of interest. Every person you encounter, every assignment you complete, every obstacle you face will contribute to your growth as a teacher, examples both good and bad.
In the years before student teaching, you won't take all of your literature assignments terribly seriously. You should. How your professors interact with students, teach and discuss the literature, and format their classes will be so important to you when you teach poetry or Hamlet. You will struggle with what types of questions to ask that align with the curriculum. Pay attention to the creative assignments especially. Your students won't tell you, but they crave creative expression. These assignments will bring out the potential in students they didn't know they had, and they thank you for it.
You will seek the help and advice of your advisors, which is good. They are your biggest cheerleaders. You will wish you had them all along. During your first year at WSU you will make a choice that will impact the rest of your career as a student and your future employment. You will never be able to emphasize enough that your time as an intern earned you your first teaching job. You will grow tired of doing the same things every day for two years, but eventually you learn that this experience is unique and you can make it your own. The teachers you work with will give you materials, advice, and feedback on your performance; they will let you teach their class as many times as you want, all before your senior year. You will wish that every education student took this opportunity, and you will wish that you had the chance to tell everyone how important it is.
You won't realize how incredible WSU's school of education is until you get over the fact that you transferred schools. You won't realize that they are the only school in the area who requires a field placement for four semesters in a row. You won't realize what advantages this will give you.
During your last year of school, you will need a break, you will dread having to take a class, and you will get tired of being a student. The best thing you will have is this class. You will find that your experiences will be much different from those of your classmates. You will find that you will all have very different relationships with your CTs. Best of all, you will find support, camaraderie, and advice that will push you to pass your certification, push you to go to class, and push you to, in all things, do your best. You won't find competition. Your instructors will see your frustration and exhaustion, but they won't bog you down with homework. Everything will be more than manageable.
You won't realize the amount of modeling your own teachers do for you until you've completed the education program. You won't quite realize how to apply the plethora of information you have learned  until you begin student teaching, but it will come. Despite all of the literature classes you take, you won't feel prepared to teach it. You will use your notes, other people's notes, blogs, and anything else you can get your hands on to help you struggle through your first literature unit because you won't quite understand how you should be teaching. No one will ever instruct you directly; you will have to learn from observation from people who never went to school for education.
You will wish there was a class that taught grammar and you will wonder why you take six credit hours of Linguistics instead. You will wish creative writing classes were required because you will be afraid to assign your students something you yourself have never tried (Helpful Tip: Try EVERYTHING yourself before your give it to your students; if you can't do it, chances are they can't either). You won't get grammar and writing instructor instruction until you are student teaching.
You will learn to take advantage of all the programs and services WSU has to offer. You should do every mock interview, every resume workshop, and every interview day that you can. You won't be able to do everything, but try.
 Your teachers will set you up to succeed. Their efforts won't go unnoticed (although as a teacher yourself you may often think they do). You will use every calendar, syllabus, and assignment sheet that they give you, and you probably won't thank them for everything you use, but you will appreciate it.
You won't think that you can finish the semester, but you will.
You will need to meet friends lots of times at Mort's for half price martinis.
You will need to eat junk food once in a while to make yourself feel better.
But you will be okay.

Lesson Planning and Design: Things Fall Apart...and then come back together

I'm really excited about this new development in my teaching career, and in my excitement I can't wait to share!

A few weeks ago, I expressed my concern about the cohesiveness of my unit plans. I felt like I was teaching the material, but that the fluency of the activities, literature, and plans was absent.
My thoughts ranged from the following:
I'm an incompetent teacher.
Well, you're busy right now, so maybe it will get better when things slow down...but things never slow down!!!!!
This building has too many interruptions, but all buildings have interruptions so get used to it.

It was definitely not an inner monologue I benefited from.

Here's what I've learned:

I'm not an incompetent teacher, but this stuff takes practice. I didn't learn this overnight, I didn't perfect it within the first month, and I certainly haven't perfected it now. But I cannot express to you the lifted weight of relief I feel now that I know it can be fixed.

The more material you as a teacher understand, have covered as a class, and have personally taught and planned helps significantly when planning a new unit. It is incredibly difficult to start from scratch with every, single, mother-loving lesson I plan. However, I was able to have my students use what we learned earlier in the semester to further their understanding and exploration of the text we started two months later. I found myself saying [during Hunger Games], Remember 'denotation' and 'connotation?' Good, what are they? And what is the denotative meaning of 'Happy?' What is the emotional connotation of the word from the phrase 'Happy Hunger Games?' Is it really happy? Good. Now THAT'S called irony. Irony is what we will be looking for throughout the novel, and you will need to know denotation and connotation for the words, phrases, and ideas explored in verbal irony.
    They understood.
    We did an activity.
    Amazing.

Backwards design really does work.  For real. Tell everyone. As a new teacher, I am pretty unfamiliar with the standards. I haven't taught this level of students before, so I don't have any idea about what things need to be covered unless I look at and study the standards (which I also recommend doing). I HAD to address the standards in EVERY lesson. Objectives HAVE to tie to the standards. And backwards design is a HUGE help. I found that my lessons needed a greater purpose outside of finish this book. What types of skills were being assessed? How could the lessons build upon one another? How could they be used in later lessons outside the unit? Backwards design; problem solved.

It has been a nice feeling to see not only a unit come together nicely, but to see the usefulness in the practice, experience, and education I have had the last few years.
My note to you is this: Don't get discouraged. Continue practicing (always). Hard work really does payoff. And as a word of advice to all future student teachers, take what your professors ask you to do seriously. Pay attention not only to the material they give you, but to the methods they use. Notice how your literature professors present their material and get you to analyze text. Start observing how the teachers who teach you interact with every aspect of their job.
Someday soon you will find it useful.

#LessonPlanningProbs

As I conclude my second month of student teaching, I wish I could say I felt better about what I'm doing with my classes. I am planning and teaching lessons for the senior college prep classes, and our unit uses The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. I wanted to do something relevant and useful for my students; and since Pausch's book is based on a lecture he gave at Carnegie Mellon, it was appropriate to plan this unit around oratorical skills and communication.

My plan seemed pretty solid at first. I introduced the book, the author, and the culminating project (a graduation speech for the students to give in class). I gave the students clear objectives, and I explained that participation and grades for the unit would be rooted in oral communication or discussion. It was my hope that through "authentic discussion" (Randy Bomer), my students would be able to discuss the literature, find the themes, discuss the connection between their lives and the theme, and pose and respond to questions in a student-led atmosphere. I diligently studied and sought to improve each discussion by seeking out resources, and our discussions did improve. The students are now respectful toward one another, compliment each other, politely agree or disagree, and ask deep questions that require critical thinking. The format for discussion stays the same: students fill out two worksheets per week (one response journal and one discussion form), the requirements stay the same. But the discussion skills improve. I must say, I'm impressed (and grateful that it worked).

All the while, I have included workshops for pre-writing, drafting, and revision for their final graduation speech, but students were mostly expected to complete outside of class.

These successes are not the problem.

I had all these other ideas I wanted to incorporate into the lesson. But I forgot about them, or I didn't figure out how to fit them in until after it was appropriate. I had all these ideas about what to include in revision and writing workshops, but we ran out of time. I wanted to compare and contrast good and bad speeches, and discuss what qualities they as an audience value.  All of these supplemental ideas supported the unit and culminating project, and they would have scaffolded perfectly into the unit. But the time has passed, and I'm afraid that their writing will have suffered because I didn't do these activities before they wrote and turned in their speeches.

I have discovered other ways to incorporate the ideas this time, but it doesn't fit together because the larger project came before the supplemental activities. I know that I can use this if I ever teach this again, but the damage has already been done.

How am I ever supposed to REALLY teach them something if I can't get all of my thoughts and ideas onto paper and into a cohesively scaffolded unit? And although I plan my unit using backwards design and I fill out daily lesson plans, why do I feel like I'm not FEELING this unit piece together? Like I've left something out? Like they don't understand the point (even though we have talked about it)? Am I just projecting my insecurities onto my lessons, or do my students feel like I haven't prepared them as well?

Everything you wanted to know about student teaching *but were afraid to ask

Good things are going to happen. But
it's not going to be a piece of cake.
You will have to work for it. You are
going to get sick within the first month of student teaching despite how diligently
you take vitamin c,
sanitize your students' desks, your desk, and the door knob...Maybe
the germs came from their papers...
And if you think having
a sick day is the same as having time off,
guess again. Time is the only thing you need that you can't use your tuition refund to buy.
What part you didn't use to pay for your PRAXIS tests anyway.
The KPTP deadline is fast approaching, and you just
picked up a couple more shifts at work because you
miscalculated your monthly budget.
But there is potential for good news. All of the
stress from work, school, and certification requirements could just help you
lose the weight from the food people brought the week of
your mom's funeral.
And the few, random springtime-like days in mid-January will give you a cure to
last just long enough
to cure your winter blues
until spring break.
You will also agree to be a bridesmaid in
your best friend's wedding.
And in your excitement, you completely forgot that means
going to bridal fairs, planning showers and parties, and buying a dress.
You will be worried that
despite all the hard work you've done
the past five years
you still won't get a job offer.
But your days in that life are numbered,
and when you come out of it you will have
a degree, your pride, great friends, and the
fond memories of a feverish semester that you owned.

Poem modeled after Ellen Bass's poem "Relax."
http://www.ellenbass.com/books/like-a-beggar/relax/